CitriniPocalypse, Dot Com Lore, Gene-Edited Polo Horses | Alap Shah, Will Brown, Michelle Lee, Mike Annunziata

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:18) - CitriniPocalypse (18:37) - The Durability of Institutional Inertia (30:26) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (44:01) - The Dot Com Boom (01:00:21) - Polo's Gene-Edited Horse Clones (01:11:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:29:24) - Alap Shah, co-founder and former CEO of Sentieo, an AI-powered financial research platform, discusses the transformative impact of AI on white-collar employment, highlighting a significant decline in information sector jobs since 2022. He emphasizes the potential for AI to further disrupt the labor market, particularly as corporate adoption accelerates, and underscores the need for proactive measures to address these challenges. (02:00:11) - Will Brown, Research Lead at Prime Intellect, discusses the company's recent release of a training platform designed to simplify reinforcement learning (RL) on open-source models, enabling users to focus on environment design and task specification without hardware concerns. He highlights the platform's accessibility, allowing users to train models effectively by converting existing data into training recipes, and notes the positive reception from the community. Additionally, Brown touches on the evolving landscape of AI, emphasizing the importance of customization and the potential of open-source models to achieve state-of-the-art performance in specialized tasks. (02:23:31) - Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, a company developing physical AI scientists to automate laboratory experiments and accelerate drug discovery. In the conversation, she discusses her background in chemical engineering and robotics, the development of intelligent robots capable of autonomously conducting experiments, and Medra's recent $52 million Series A funding to build one of the largest autonomous labs in the United States. (02:30:59) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:37:36) - Mike Annunziata, Founder and Managing Partner at Also Capital, has a background in venture capital and entrepreneurship, including co-founding Farther Farms and serving as a board member at Varda Space Industries. In the conversation, he discusses his non-traditional path into venture capital, emphasizing the importance of investing in founders who are magnets for top-tier talent and have a clear, pragmatic vision. He also highlights the significance of having fun while playing to win, and announces the launch of Also Capital's second fund, totaling $50 million. (03:00:07) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, February 23rd, 2026. We are live from TVPN, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, say both these use corporate cards, they'll pay, counting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Let's go. Massive sell off in the markets, thanks to friend of the show, Sitrini. We have someone from Sitrini coming on the show in just a little bit. Lots of crazy reaction, really broke through with something that, you know, is framed as sort of, you know, fan fiction, low probability, and it's, it's always interesting when someone posts something, they're like, I think there's a 10% chance that this happens, so it's worth talking about. And I'm like, well, like, what's the 90% scenario? No one's

• 0:45John Coogan?

  getting any clicks for the 90% scenario? And it gets completely ripped out.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  It's not that exciting.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, and throwing out something like, oh, yeah, like, you know, 10% chance that this crazy thing happens, that doesn't, that, people don't react to it like it's a 10% scenario, or whatever percentage you put on it. 20% chance, 30% P Doom, they only take away from what you said.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Wall Street says, it's over.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, immediately. And it's the same thing with, with all of the, all of the AI Lab CEOs, when pressed, they'll be like, well, I do think that there's a 10% chance that humanity dies, or something like that. And, and that, the headline is predicting humanity dies.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Like, you only, like, as soon as you say, like, something crazy happens, with, no matter how low the percentage is, like, that's what you're going to be known for forever. So be careful out there with those predictions. But...

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Sunday, yesterday.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Did this say Sunday?

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Doing a lot of...

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was yesterday, around 11.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Really took it off, yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Doing family stuff, don't really have a bunch of time to, like, sit down and read something. And the entire day, I'm just seeing people quoting it, being like, this is the best essay that I have ever read. So many people that I think are generally pretty smart. And then by the time I actually, after the kids bedtime last night, by the time I actually sat down and started reading it, it was, every, almost every paragraph I was experiencing... Some element of Gellman's amnesia where like you have like three sentences that are like maybe somewhat coherent and then like a statement that feels like so wrong.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, I think a lot of people obviously called out the um.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  The DoorDash thing.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  The DoorDash comment, which there's so many businesses that you could have chosen in in DoorDash's place, but it didn't matter. DoorDash is down.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Six point eight percent today.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Citrini sell off is here. Citrini.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Despite tracking to close to a billion. Isn't it a billion monthly orders?

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Something insane.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Um, my experience with it was you had mentioned to me that like, oh, it's the current thing. And I was pretty offline. And then by the time I I actually started refreshing the timeline, I was like, oh, I'm like clearly like stuck on some search feature because I'm only seeing Citrini posts and like posts reacting to it and reacting to the reaction. And it had done a full news cycle, both a backlash and then a backlash to the backlash and take him's getting in there fighting and people are posting rebuttals. And someone posted a fully AI generated, just like turn it up another notch version, which is hilarious. He's like, if that wasn't extreme enough, I got something even more extreme for you.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Uh, people were having a lot of fun with it. Uh, Sunday is for the posters, I guess. People are having fun. Um, what uh, what what should we read through of the actual Citrini article? Because it is sort of long and we do have someone from Citrini coming on the show. Um, so so we can maybe go through some of the reactions. I mean, the the futures were red last night. The market is down broadly.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's interesting. A lot of people were saying, guys, there's no way that futures are red just because of this Citrini essay that is.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, science fiction.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  And then it turns out Bloomberg this morning came out and actually. stated that

• 4:10John Coogan?

  reported it.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  that it's the Citroni sell off.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but I mean, there were also the tariff things that the tariff news was sort of digested on Friday, Saturday. So there was totally like that could be possible. There's a lot of other stuff going on. Joe Weisenthal is supposed to hear the Citroni sell off. The the quote from the terminal software payment stocks slide after Citroni post on AI risk, DoorDash and American Express led declines in software and payment stocks on Monday. And we were debating like, you know, PayPal had gotten beat up and there was a question about like, what is the what is the strategy going forward? PayPal has always been an interesting situation because like, absolutely goaded founding team, but they're all disinterested in jumping back in and turning it around.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have Max with a firm.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  who over a long enough time horizon will probably compete.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  In every.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's hard because even even if you went back, how do you build a position? How do you get control of that company? But it does seem like there's some value there. There's some stickiness and it'll be interesting to see, does it go private? Does the new management come in? I mean, they already have some new management. So I'm not exactly sure where it goes, but it feels like the the payment rail thing will be sticky for a while. Young Macro had a take quote tweeting Citroni, good and interesting piece, but a necessary caveat is that it's essentially a hypothetical conditioned on severe institutional failure rather than some sort of macro inevitability. As the piece itself notes, one of its two failure modes, liquidity stress and capital impairment includes a liquidity component

• 5:49John Coogan?

  that the Fed can address quickly with liquidity facilities and asset purchases, repo lines, quality of easing, as seen in recent episodes of banking stress. Losses from impaired assets won't disappear, but can in principle be moved where the broadest shoulders are. It's an odd situation because you're seeing all of this capital evaporate from the public tech markets. But the labs aren't public yet, so they can't fully absorb it like they sort of can, but it's much more opaque and it's not like most, the average investor can't just read this piece and be like, okay, I, I believe it. I am worried about software stocks, so I'm going to rotate into a basket of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. They don't have that option yet. They might by the end of the year.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  You can buy Nvidia, you can buy Google. There's plenty of ways.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally. Just look at Leopold Oshinpred's allocations and copy trade that, I suppose. Plenty in this hypothetical economy, much more than before, he says. There will be plenty of broad shoulders. Couldn't they just tax Anthropic into paying all your pensions in this hypothetical scenario? This would be done through regulatory or fiscal mechanism. The second failure mode, an aggregate demand shortfall for massive unemployment, can be addressed through fiscal policy, transfers, wage subsidies, et cetera. The piece argues that this may be constrained by falling tax revenues, but in a deflationary, low inflation environment, the treasury can run large deficits and the Fed can buy as much of that debt as it needs to, leaving aside that we'd expect the tax structure to change. The political

• 7:22John Coogan?

  process is unlikely to be as meaningful as a bottleneck, as the piece claims, as the hypothetical fiscal hawks pointing to unsustainable deficits would not have much of a point, given the economy in this hypothetical will have much higher potential output. Also, that obviously wouldn't pull well. The first principle's intuition obviously tells you something is awry when we're told that people will want at least as many real things as before and the economy will have the means to produce more real things than before, but the people won't be getting the amount of real things that they want or need. This is because that typically requires major policy slash institutional frictions or delay in translating capacity into purchasing power. If you suddenly have two loaves of bread in your house instead

• 8:07John Coogan?

  of one in your house and you weren't starving with one, you probably shouldn't starve when there's two, but if by some hypothetical, through the complexity of the novel two breadloaf production process, you suddenly get tangled and can no longer access the cupboard, then it's quite possible you will, you will starve. I thought that was a good take. It is interesting how this moved the markets way more than AI 2027?

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Like it's sort of the same piece and it has a lot of the same sort of extrapolations based on AI progress, a lot of same.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  But like AI twenty twenty seven, probably like the the the market reaction was like, invest more in the labs.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  At the time, because it was kind of aimed for more more of a west coast audience in general.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I just mean like.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Let me, let me.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  If you had taken AI twenty twenty seven and you had just asked like, I own this basket of public company stocks, what should I be doing? And AI twenty twenty seven is your backbone, you would probably sell a lot like you're selling right now. Like the AI twenty twenty seven situational awareness PDFs, like those are the Leopold Ashenbrenner philosophy that is now being reflected in the market, but you know, he didn't go long any of these stocks anyway. Oh, sorry, really quickly.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  I wonder how much that is just because of like, who is actually writing it? Like the.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  People are like, you know, very San Francisco coded, like vaguely EA, maybe GPS people, where this is like, okay, they're like a financial research firm.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  And and and. And it's written with a financial audience in mind and it speaks in that language. So it's been somewhat translated. Interesting that it took almost a year for it to be translated in this way. But then, yes, it it's it's interesting for a couple of reasons because it didn't. This was not the takeaway and I I remember in the Vanity Fair piece, I had some funny quote in there being like, like, like the market should be moving off of like what what happens on the Door Cash podcast. And it seems sort of silly, but I think that we are now like seeing the downstream, you know, ramifications of that.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Jordy.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  I did think it'd be helpful to kind of.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Please.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Provide a summary summary of the essay. I think the original essay, it feels like they use quite a lot of AI to write it. I'm going to use AI to summarize it.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  For you.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  So anyway, so this scenario. You should have got to this at the beginning, but by late 2025, agentic AI tools become vastly better at coding and complex tasks. Obviously, that was, yeah, it's historical. Yeah, it's Firms found they could use AI to replicate work normally done by humans, radically cutting labor costs. Productivity looks great on paper. GDP and productivity metrics soared because AI output counted in the official numbers, but most of that value didn't translate into real consumer spending. So like, businesses are spending money, but they're spending it on data centers and that is not, as opposed to labor, where if you give somebody money, they'll buy a house, they'll do home improvement, they'll buy cars, they'll put their kids in school. Consumption. Consumption, right? So they're calling this ghost GDP, economic output that doesn't

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  actually circulate in the real economy. And then they identify an emerging negative feedback loop, which is companies lay off white collar workers and reinvest savings into more AI. Displaced workers have less spending power, consumer demand weakens, especially for discretionary goods. Companies facing weaker demand invest it even more in AI to maintain margins, and this creates a negative feedback loop with no natural break. The next step is market and credit stress. So they talk about private credit having lent to a bunch of these different SaaS companies that are now being threatened. Defaults climbing as the sort of like

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  perceived recurring revenue ends up not being fully recurring. And next, intermediation and friction collapses. There's a whole segment talking about how like, a lot of value capture in the world is actually just humans like, not wanting to deal with frictions. It's like, not switching car insurance, even though you know you're paying more than you should, it's just kind of a hassle. But if you could have an AI agent go and do that, then maybe you do that more often and that pulls out some potential earnings from the system. The other thing they talk about is like, all these different tech hubs and how many like, prime mortgages there are that might not be so prime if there's a layoff and somebody

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  ends up having to switch, you know, switch career paths or something like that. So generally talking about unemployment surging, consumer spending collapsing, severe drawdown in the stock market, and then even our sort of normal economic indicators hiding this sort of overall weakness. And anyways, takeaway.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  AI being great and powerful that may not equal all the markets ripping, but

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Well, two different things, market ripping,

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Individual, individual company, individual companies.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  And median income.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Like they're two, they're, they're three wildly different things. You can see asset prices rise massively based on future promise of GDP growth. If it's guaranteed that GDP growth is going to happen 10 years from now, the market will price that in today. And then if all of that GDP growth goes to one person, you're not going to see median incomes rise. You're not going to see like broad prosperity in America.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Um, I have more on that, but let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  So really quickly, yeah, I'm sorry.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Worth maybe noting like the kind of companies they call out in this, in the piece by name. So poor, uh, all these companies, let's check in with ServiceNow, which is, which is one of the companies that was most heavily yep down for almost four and a half percent today. Uh, so they talk about a bunch of the SaaS tools. They call out Monday.com, Asana, Zapier. Zapier is kind of funny because in some ways like it was just like work automation before work automation was even that cool.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  I was using, uh, using Zapier

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  10 years ago. It does feel like they're kind of in a, in a decent position, given that like they're already their core business is like help people automate different workflows. Um, but and then DoorDash, we already talked about that. Uh, Mastercard and Visa, they talk about, uh, suffering, uh, revenue pressure, um, because an AI agent would just opt for stable coins, which feels like again, something that many people on the show have come on and, and made the case for why agents will leverage, uh, stable coins or prefer stable coins seems, uh, seems like a possibility, but, uh, unlikely that that will just, you know, all payment volume will shift over there, uh, overnight.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then Amex, uh, Amex, they called out specifically because of, uh, their consumer base being, uh, just generally weakened by labor displacement. Um, and then a bunch of others, travel booking, insurance, real estate, tax. Et cetera. Travel booking, I thought was funny because most travel agents like don't actually take fees from the consumer. They take fees from the, uh, from the side of the like hotel, the airline, whatever. And so the idea that, uh, you'll just immediately get, uh, like every AI agent or every individual will just immediately, uh, they, I, I didn't

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  fully process that one. Um, and anyways, back to you. I, I did think that John Lober, I wanted to go through his piece.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Because I thought he had one of the better rebuttals.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I thought that was good. I, I, I think the, the, the thing that just keeps sticking out to me is like, uh, and I was debating with Sagar and Jedy about this as well. Like, uh, he, he, he was telling me like AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, no, AI is actually doing very little for the economy right now. It's doing a lot for the markets. It's doing a lot for the future, but like in terms of the actual economic impact of AI, it's very low. And we just know that because you add up the actual AI revenues from the AI labs and you're talking about like 30, 40 billion dollars. And okay, maybe there's like a 5X multiple on that. And so you're generating

• 16:35John Coogan?

  $200 billion of GDP on top of those tokens. But like, that's just not that much in the grand scheme of the actual America's GDP. And so there's this disconnect between like the market, which is pricing future GDP, future cash flows, future value creation. Then you have what is actually driving GDP today. And then you have like the, the actual workforce and what, what Americans do. And so there's this, there's this odd disconnect. And I keep coming back to the Tyler Cowen, like slow takeoff, uh, philosophy around like what's actually holding up the American economy? It's like healthcare jobs. And there's a lot of jobs that are, they feel very AI resistant. I don't know, maybe something changes, but

• 17:18John Coogan?

  like, it just feels like, like the, like, the number of people that are software developers is less than 1% of America. The number of people that like work at tech companies broadly is less than 10%. And so even if there's some massive like reallocation there, and then you go into like, even in like white collar, if everything shifts, like the rest of world is hit. And, and there's just a lot of other dynamics that feel like, like. You can see crazy gyration in the markets and you can see really quick reallocation of 10% of capital, billions of dollars flowing around, but that doesn't immediately translate to what is happening in the real economy. There's always this disconnect.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm laughing a little bit because we've seen so many short seller reports over the last few years where somebody accuses a company of like really, really bad, potentially illegal behavior and the stock will like move down like half a percent. And then somebody writes like kind of a cool piece of science fiction, but like easily can poke a million holes in it. And then it every, you know, it sends like all these mega caps like down. Let's go through this piece from John.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Before we do, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  John Lober wrote a great piece very quickly after this called Contra Sitrini. And he says, "Popular markets commentator Sitrini recently published a compelling and popular piece of AI doomer fiction, admittedly with some small probability of occurring, but I'm old enough to have seen many cycles of economic doomsaying. I want to present a critique of Sitrini's work and show a much likelier, more positive view of the future. One, never underestimate institutional momentum. In 2007, people thought the US was geopolitically done under peak oil. In 2008, they thought the US dollar was just shy of collapse. In 2014, they thought AMD and Nvidia were done. Then came ChatGPT and they thought Google

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  was done. Every time, existing institutions with momentum have proven themselves far more durable than onlookers thought. When worried about institutional turnover and rapid labor displacement, it's very funny that Sitrini writes, "Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated 5% to 6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer." People have been calling for the end of the real estate broker for 20 years. You don't need super intelligence for this. All you need is Zillow or Redfin or Open Door. That's exactly, this example actually shows the very opposite of Sitrini's point. We have the type of labor that most people consider obsolete and yet market inertia and regulatory capture have made the real estate broker far more resilient than anyone would have bet a decade ago.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  My wife and I bought a house a few months back. The transaction required us to have an agent ostensibly for the above reasons. Our buyer's agent made about $50,000 on the deal for about 10 hours of form-filling and party coordination that I could have done myself. This market will eventually be efficient and price this labor fairly, but it takes a long time to get there. I know a lot about inertia and change management. I built and sold a company that focused on moving insurance brokerages from service to software, and the main thing I learned is the iron rule of dealing with human reality. Everything is always more complicated and takes much longer than you think it will, even if you already know about the iron rule. That doesn't mean that a meaningful change in the world won't happen, but that the change will be more gradual, giving us the time to respond and adjust.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Second point, software has infinite demand for labor. The software sector has been struggling in recent months as investors fear that companies like Monday, Salesforce, Asana can now be easily replicated and that the value of their backend systems is indefensible. Citrini and others talk of AI coding as a spell of the end of jobs at SaaS companies. Are one, the products become obsolete, zero margin, and two, the jobs themselves disappear. What everyone seems to be missing is this: these products effing S U C K. That's his opinion. I can say this because I've actually spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on these products. Sure, maybe AI enables competition to replicate their products, but more importantly, AI enables competition to deliver better products. It's no surprise to see the stocks drop in an uncompetitive, sticky lock-in sector filled

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  with another swear word, incumbents becoming competitive again. And my own personal call-out here is, even, like, until we see a round of layoffs at a company that is 5,000 software engineers at once, it's hard to believe that AI is replacing software engineers versus just making them a lot more productive. If somebody's a lot more productive, you'll pay at least the equivalent amount to maintain them.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  More generally, it is uncontroversial that virtually all current software is garbage. Everything I use and pay for is littered with bugs. Some software is so broken that I can't even pay for it. I have not been able to send a wire using Citibank's online banking in three years.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  This was my pushback against Rune. Rune was like, oh, like, Codex is so good. You know, you can just vibe code everything. It's amazing. And I was like, why is the United app bad?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  The United app is good.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  And then he was like, it actually is good. And then I used it and it's like, not that bad. But the point holds. There is some bad software out there. I will die on this hell. But yes, hopefully it's going to get better.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, there's a deep and important truth. Even if we get something like the software singularity, the level of demand for labor here is practically infinite. Famously, it is the last few percent of completion that take the most work. And by that token, virtually every software product could probably scale up its complexity and features by something like 100x before beginning to saturate demand. Three, this was probably the best point from his response. Reindustrialization. There will be some labor displacement, of course. Driving stands out. Many types of white collar work, as Citrinus suggests, will undergo some gyration as some jobs disappear and others change meaningfully. AI may be the straw that breaks the camel's backs for jobs like the real estate broker, where the job had actually already disappeared a long time ago, but

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  the pay was still there. The saving grace here is that in the US, we have virtually limitless capacity and need for reindustrialization. You may have heard about bringing back manufacturing, but it's more than that. We largely no longer know how to create and don't have the facilities for making the core building blocks of modern life, batteries, motors, small semis. The whole electric stack is something we are almost entirely dependent on China and other countries for.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  We can barely make fertilizer. Once you start looking at the physical world, you see a virtually endless scope for work on job-creating nation-benefiting fundamental infrastructure work that is politically bipartisan like that. He, where does he close? He says, "And beyond, the outcome of industrial megaprojects is, of course, that we move toward abundance." He's abundance build. America will once again be more independent and make things at large scale and low cost. Transcending material scarcity is the key in the long run. If we do lose almost all white collar jobs to AI, we have to be able to provide with a continued high quality of life. Part of this will get automatic. We get automatically just because AI taking margins to zero means that those consumer

• 24:32John Coogan?

  products will become equivalently cheap. This is a deflationary effect. My view is that different parts of the economy will take off at varying speeds and virtually all the areas are slower than a piece like Satrie's might suggest. To be clear, I'm extremely bullish on AI and expect that one day my labor too will be obsolete, but it's going to take a while to get there and that time gives us the opportunity to make good policy. On that front, preventing a market meltdown the way Satrie imagines is actually pretty easy and the federal government's response during COVID showed how proactive and aggressive it is willing to be. I'd expect large scale stimulus to kick in quickly once needed. It slightly irks me to say that it won't be efficient, but that's also not the point. The point is material prosperity for people in the course of their lives, broad consumer

• 25:16John Coogan?

  wellbeing that legitimizes the state and carries forth the social contract, not satisfying the accounting metrics or economic norms of the past. If we are nimble and responsive to the slow but sure technical revolution, then we will be fine. That's a good, good, good response.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  Rise calls out, out of every example they could have chosen, they went with DoorDash. The barrier to entry for launching a delivery app is not and has never been software. It's distribution, restaurant adoption, user adoption, and of course, driver adoption. It would be really funny to be using like the vibe coded version where somebody's like, yeah, I just launched a delivery app and your food will be here in four hours.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it does feel like-

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  If I was Tony, I'd be, I'd be flying to find Satrie, face to face, opening up a can of-

• 26:10John Coogan?

  I know what you're going with. Yeah, it, it feels like, okay, so you built, like you, you vibe code a-

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Profit lists, like open source delivery app that anyone can use. And you assume that it would get adoption just because it's it's more economically efficient. Like it's cheaper for all parties, so they will join. But DoorDash is actually like a three-party transaction. So you need to market to all three. And it's really, really hard to break through right now. And maybe it would just go viral and everyone would onboard. It just feels tough. And then he was saying that like, well, in this future, it's like all three parties are using agents that are perfectly rational and hunting around for the best opportunity. So things can shift faster. And I I believe that to some extent, but it just feels like still a little bit farther away

• 27:05John Coogan?

  because of adoption and actual.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, DoorDash has modes. That is the big that that is the the simple trick that all vibe coders hate.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's like there's a lot of capital that went into building the network and the app. But also a lot of capital that went into marketing and onboarding the pool of of in the marketplace. Like the actual liquidity.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only the only scenarios that I can see the the sort of like vibe-coded delivery or sharing economy app working is at a local level. But there's already a bunch of competition there. Like I have a guy that when I want a ride to the airport, I call him, he picks me up. I don't necessarily use Uber because I like having the same.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  The guy's my buddy now. I like I like going to the airport with him.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Right? Uh, so.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was thinking about Amazon Basics. And like, that hasn't destroyed every company, every brand, like, and why is that? Like, will that, is that a good analogy that like, okay, the big AI labs will have Amazon Basics for SaaS? But people will probably still want certain brands. There will be certain people that are locked in. Okay, yes, I know the Amazon Basics paper towels are cheaper, but I just happen to like this particular brand that's a little bit more tailored for me.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  But Amazon Basics was like, hey, we're, you buy paper towels from this brand normally. We're going to sell you the same product. With our, with our logo.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Effectively the same product.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  And I think the AI disruption that is much more real is like you have entirely new paradigms for software, an entirely new relationship with software. And it's not just like, oh, you know, somebody built the exact same version of Salesforce. It's like somebody built an app that automatically sets your schedule every day and you're not even, you're not even thinking about like, oh, I need to be monitoring this dashboard or.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I, I, I agree. I think the, I think the Amazon Basics of Salesforce, it probably is not that big of a business opportunity because the whole value prop is that it's lower margin. And so Amazon Basics is not driving Amazon's market cap.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, Amazon has solved the distribution. They're like, we have the customer. But when you have a lower margin profile and you don't have the customer yet, naturally means you can't spend as much money to acquire customers and build out sales and distribution and all the stuff.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  That seems correct.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  It's not like people are just going to like the SaaS, you know, supermarket.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  I, I think his, I think his pushback would be like, they will effectively because they will go to an agent that says like, I need to accomplish this job. And it will say, okay, well, for that job, I need a tool. There's a legacy SaaS provider and there's a, and there's a Neo SaaS provider that's vibe coded and I could actually build my own version too. And it will pick the most economically efficient across that frontier. And so that's where he's, that's where he's coming away with like some downward pressure, which I think is like reasonable. It's just, again, I, I just keep coming back to timelines here. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, let's continue.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Very funny post from Dime Square Holdings. You, you think this is crazy, but just wait until next weekend when I publish my Substack article, you should freak out and kill yourself right now.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  People are really having fun with this. What was this next one?

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Dimes is on a roll. Average 2026 AI macro research.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  I am a legend.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  This may be the most terrifying novel you will ever read.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Isn't that just the zombie apocalypse movie?

• 30:54John Coogan?

  That might be the most market moving piece ever written, says Cluso Investments. That seems accurate. I mean, there are other factors going on, but this does really feel like remarkably impactful. And I don't know, maybe it's a buying opportunity. Maybe it's a warning to everyone else, but it certainly, certainly broke through. I mean, these articles is really, really underrated. I've been, I noticed like, I heard about something big is happening on a car podcast. I, I, I got that forwarded to me in an email. Like, like these pieces of like AI is a thing that you need to be paying attention to are breaking through in a way that AI 2027 did not.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  And like the, you haven't seen Ilya Dorkash, like that actually, that's a joke because really that did not break through. But something big is happening did break through to the tune of 100 million views, which actually means like everyone read it. Beyond it, it went, it went, it broke containment, like it truly, truly went big. And that, and that's, and that's certainly market moving and the Citrin post did too. We can, we can go through his agentic commerce thing, but it's a little wonky. Let's see what venture anthropologist had to say. Citrin is completely wrong about the impact of AI on the economy, but his article does correctly show that various forms of AI doomerism will become incredibly popular in 2026.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  You know, people are, people are pushing back. And someone was saying that this is similar to Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. One of the, this is from Mohit. One of the often slept on benefits of attending the University of Chicago is that they make you read Marx as part of the core curriculum, which is why this article gave me flashbacks of taking S O S C 114 as a freshman. Marx's writing during the industrial revolution predicted capitalism would periodically

• 32:48John Coogan?

  devour itself firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits but competition diffuses the technology drives prices to marginal cost and the gains get competed away this was the collapse of profits meanwhile displaced workers lose purchasing power hollowing out the demand for the whole system depends on production rises but no one can afford to buy what's produced the contradiction between production and realization so trini's piece describes this exact dynamic then declares there's no natural break but it's the most Marxist it's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis written in years and it makes the same errors Marx did Schumter offered the obvious rebuttal 80 years ago creative destruction doesn't just destroy it creates industries we can't

• 33:31John Coogan?

  yet conceive of everyone in the replies is already making this point and I think they're right but the sharper rebuttal is Hayek's prices are the break citrini says doesn't exist who funds $200 billion in a quarter in CapEx when equities are down 40% private credit Marx are in the 50s and consumer demand has collapsed cost of capital rises incremental build out becomes uneconomical capital gets destroyed and reallocated citrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie the 180k PM driving Uber is textbook but the article claims this collapses consumer demand and that's where it breaks the top decile drives

• 34:12John Coogan?

  50 plus percent of their spending and their wealth is in equities not W2 income there long the hyperscalers posting records in citrini's own model blue collar is insulated because AI replaces cognitive labor not physical the professional middle class gets crushed but aggregate demand doesn't the spending class is the capital owning class the K-shaped recovery they fear actually stabilizes the demand base they say is collapsing in the stable aggregate demand the petty bourgeoisie finds a way to reinvent itself I think the citrini piece is excellent and worth reading but history has repeatedly shown that periods of transformative productivity gains ultimately accrue to the consumer through lower prices deflation more leisure and higher quality of life Marx's air wasn't diagnosing the disruption it was

• 34:54John Coogan?

  underestimating the system's ability to adapt very good let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster really going heavy on the goat emojis today I like it

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Everyone is reading the latest Satriani piece, thinking it's an institutional research piece, when in fact, what they are reading is a marketing piece of fiction meant to go viral. And viral it did go. Lesson, lesson there. I wonder, I wonder how broadly the, the article, the article virality, like, long form has not been going viral on X or Twitter for a decade. Like, even before the link ban and stuff, like, it was really, really hard for articles and links to really go big. They did go big when Twitter started, because there wasn't that much content. So people would write, and then they'd bring that, and then they'd discuss that. But I can't remember a really big debate erupting

• 35:55John Coogan?

  around an article. Maybe a little bit, but.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Steve asked, does Tyler clap for each ad reader? Is that a soundbite? It is real. He clapped. Yeah, I clap for every single one.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  We'll give you a chance to do it again. fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. We did get some feedback that the clapping can be a little loud during the ad reads. So, you know, Tyler, constructive criticism there. Anyway, should we continue with the Satriani back and forth? We do have someone from Satriani coming on.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can, we can keep going.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  The thing about the Satriani piece is that, that is internally inconsistent is, where does all the surplus go? Okay, we become impoverished and aggregate demand collapses. What financial asset is spared from that? A lot of people were asking that. And, yeah, I mean, the answer is, is commodities. You want to be in like, in like, gold and, and silicon and whatever is at the bottom of the stack, and then whatever has the deepest mote, and then you want to be at the, in the AI companies as well.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Sean says he claps as well. Thank you, Sean.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's switch gears to something that is certainly more important than the Satriani piece. A street legal modded garbage truck.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  What?

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  Pratt and Whitney J3 jet engine.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Okay, let's see it. Is this real?

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this up. You don't even know anymore.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Wait, I've seen this Pratt and Whitney before. Hermes, I think, bought one. I have no idea if that's real, but that's remarkable if true. Yeah, no, you can, you can, those are expensive, but I do think that they will sell those to you.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Feels like a six-foot flame at the end of your vehicle is not street legal.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  I would agree. I would agree.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, uh, horrors coming out of Mexico.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yesterday.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Really sad situation. Our very own Joe Weisenthal had been in the Puerto Vallarta area.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  And had just left. I think he got out of there an hour.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, an hour before the chaos erupted. So very grateful.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  I hope everyone is down there is safe.

• 38:00Jordi Hays?

  R slash Marriott on Reddit.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, somebody said Weston Puerto Vallarta won't honor late checkout with streets closed. I am platinum elite.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  No way.

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Over 1,000 lifetime Marriott nights.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Wait, I thought that was a joke. I didn't realize somebody actually posted this.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  Peavy is on fire due to the cartel setting fires and buses, cars and buses on fire all over the city. The airport is closed and Ubers and taxis are not running. I asked for a 4pm checkout, which I'm entitled to based on availability. They won't extend past 2pm and said we would have to use the hospitality suite. We are supposed to be leaving for Buceros this afternoon, but that, that isn't looking very good. Worst convoy property I have ever experienced. I don't think anyone will be checking in today. So there's no reason to not, to at least not extend us to 4pm. This is so fascinating.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Does this person just not understand the scale of what's happening? Maybe you could break it down for anyone who's, uh, living under a data center. Like what actually happened in Mexico? Because it, it, it was not just fires and a few cars. This was like a military operation, correct?

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Because, uh, my wife.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Texted me yesterday afternoon while I'm on X monitoring.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  You're monitoring the situation.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  All the open source intel.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  You texted me. You texted me and I was like, oh, what's up, Joe?

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, wow, I've expected something like this.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  For a long time, given the tensions down there. And then I'm just watching this. My wife texts me. Our friends want to go to Mexico in April. Can we go? And a long weekend. And I was like, are you, are you, are you joking?

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, the really, really sad situation, basically, uh, the, uh, leader of the cartel CJNG, which is like effectively is paramilitary group. Uh, any, like, if you looked at any photo or video of them over the last. 10, 20 years, they look like they're special forces.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  I think the story is that many of them actually did train at some point with US special forces and then flipped.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Or, or the, probably the Mexican military.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, they were, but the, but the US special forces have trained the Mexican military.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  And so these guys are like, like they have their own version.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, it's not a LARP, like, oh, they just like picked up something, they watch like a video on YouTube.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure some of them are not elite, but in general, this is like a paramilitary organization. It's like one of the largest, like, private armies in the world, probably the largest private army in the world. Um, and so Almencho, their main guy gets taken out and then, uh, they respond by, uh, starting to just like blow up like roads, they, they, uh, took over an airport, I guess. Like, they just start causing mass chaos.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, because their leaderless.

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  And so this person in Puerto Vallarta, if you look at any video of Puerto Vallarta, if you just went outside yesterday and looked around, there's like, fires rising up everywhere, it looks like, uh, it literally looks like a war zone. So for somebody to be hitting Reddit at this moment and being frustrated, it's like, hey, maybe just, uh, you know, the, the state department put out like, almost exactly when this person was posting a security alert saying, due to ongoing security operations and road blockages and criminal activity, US citizens in the following location should shelter in place until further notice. And like, they, they, you're, you're getting a shelter in place warning and you're, you're mad about your Marriott, uh, points. But again, uh, ho- hopefully, uh, hopefully things settle down.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Down south.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Well, uh, I want to move on to some nostalgia. We are going to get Tyler Cosgrove up to speed on what it was like to live in the nineties and the early 2000s. First, I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than it? The AI market, your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. I grew up in an era before MongoDB, I think of my life as pre MongoDB. It's crazy, back then you had to store files and text files, now, my sequel existed. But, uh, the nineties and the early 2000s were iconic and we gotta get Tyler Cosgrove up to speed on what it was like during the heyday.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  These were the vibes, the blockbuster.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  So much consumer electronics, like everything had a, you had a different device for everything. A Walkman, a Game Boy, an Xbox. You can still, you can still go see a Monster Truck Rally.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  I had an Xbox.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  You had an Xbox?

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have mod retros right here.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so you're maybe up to speed. Well, there's another one that, that talks about the liquid metal object design, and I found this real, uh, very informative to show how technology in the digital world actually shaped the physical world. So we can play this. Liquid metal object design. I feel like this is overdue for a comeback. It's pretty close.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Fluid forms.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Good music, too.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Other terms floating around were blobism.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  Blobism.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Organic minimalism and biomorphic design.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Biomorphic design.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  It's easy to see that industrial designers were trying to push past the

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Cause everything was really blocky in the eighties.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  For things like sportswear, watches, music players.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  The clear, clear case.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  This is a prime example of when technology influences form. CAD, a modeling software, introduced what is called

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Nerves.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Non-uniform rational beast lines. What this allowed is for industrial designers to create mathematically smooth curves to be calculated with precision. It enabled people to make

• 43:40John Coogan?

  So before you had to just like use blocks, basically, and like you'd get like a sphere, and that was it. And you could do like a sphere and a cube, but you couldn't really do whatever shape you wanted.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  And back then, they were rocking this kind of hardware.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  When they were saying that all retail stores.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Globally will be wiped out

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  In the next five to 10 years.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  You had to be there.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we're reflecting on the dot com boom, and I think it's particularly interesting right now. I, I mean, I do like the, the takeaway from the dot com boom, when most people, when most people pull up the dot com boom, they're, they're just like, oh, it's a bubble and everything's going to zero. And like, that's not quite the lesson, because the internet was still like actually the most powerful force for economic growth and change, and it did radically change society. It just did so over two decades instead of like one year, as was predicted. Uh, so there, so there's an article in the New York Times that's sort of comparing the dot com boom to the AI boom. And, and, uh, it's a piece by, uh, David Streitfeld at the New York Times. He says, "People loved the dot com boom, the AI, the AI boom, not so much." And

• 44:47John Coogan?

  I I buy that generally like like the the the tenor around the dot com era. Yes, there was a lot of froth, but in general, people were like, oh, this is like sort of interesting and cool. I got to play with this like tinker. They just missed it more as a toy than like true doom. Yes, there was Y two K and people were worried about that, but the stats weren't quite the same. So right now, uh, there was just.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Were you like aware of Y two K?

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Extremely aware, extremely aware.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  How did you process it? Because my parents were trying to explain to.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  Like a five year old.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I was, I was like.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  I could, I could generally.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I, I remember the turn of the millennium, I was overseas on, on a vacation. And there was a little bit of fear. Yeah, you, you, well, you gotta get out. Everything's collapsing. You know, you gotta, you gotta seek refuge. No, no, there, there, there was like a fear that like, okay, like something crazy might happen. But in general, my parents were like dialed in enough that they had been through the boom and bust of like there. Something bad will happen to actually understand that like, no, the fixes were in place. And there were a bunch of interesting fixes. So if you're not familiar with Y two K, basically the idea was computers were programmed to store dates as two digit numbers.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  So you would just say it's eighty six, then it's ninety five, ninety six, ninety seven, ninety nine. What happens when you get to two thousand? It just says zero, zero. And all of a sudden, all your interest calculations for your bank account freak out. You have negative money. The whole financial system collapses. Anything that's planned, right? All of this was like the fear of what might happen.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that doesn't make any sense, right?

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Why?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Well, like.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  Easy for you to say, Tyler, you weren't born for.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, my gosh, the numbers are resetting all of a sudden. Like you can see, it's like a calendar, you can.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  You had to be there, Tyler.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  You had to be there.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Didn't no one have foresight?

• 46:47John Coogan?

  Uh, no.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  I guess nothing happened, right?

• 46:48John Coogan?

  No, no, yeah, yeah. Uh, people did have foresight and so they started implementing changes. And the changes cost a ton of money. I think the total bill for Y2K systems updates because if you had hardcoded like our dates and our systems are, we're a bank and we store dates in two digits, uh, you gotta go and change that. And that's a couple of days of work.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't have Claude.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Writing some code and they didn't have Claude code back then. And so, yes, uh, it, it, it, it wound up being something like hundreds of billions of dollars were spent in the lead up to, to Y2K.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Hit the gong, hit the gong.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  The gong for the Y2K paydays. A lot of people made a lot of money.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  But there were, uh, but there were also a whole bunch of interesting rules and, and, uh, you know, hot shot over here, I'm going to give him a pop quiz. Uh, do you know how to calculate a leap year?

• 47:39Speaker 02

  If you get, if you get, if you get this wrong, there's going to be consequences.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. No, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. Do you know?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Consequences.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Do, do, do, oh, no, no.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  No.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  I told you there'd be consequences, Tyler.

• 47:54John Coogan?

  All right, okay.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  That was the most zoomer thing I've ever seen in my life.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, he just has to go. He's, he's brain dead.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Wait, how to calculate leap year?

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Yes. Like, like, like, like, when do leap years happen?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  I don't know. Like the actual calculation. Isn't it every four years?

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Every four years, except every hundred years, except every thousand years. So they toggle back and forth. And so in, in, at 1900 was not a leap year. And so if you, if you didn't know any of the rules, you would just think, oh, every four, any of the special rules. You would just be like, every four years is a leap year. It's a leap year 2000. But if you knew the, the hundred year rule, you would be like, oh, actually it's not a leap year. So I need to hard code the system that is not a leap year. And you can fact check this too. Uh, cause I'm not sure. I'm just riffing here. And it might be wildly wrong. But, uh, but the thousand count cancels out the hundred and you wind up with just

• 48:53John Coogan?

  a normal year. And so if you did nothing, you win.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, but okay. So Gregorian calendar.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Goes into place 1582.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  So you have like 400 years to figure this out.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  So.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  And we did, but it cost us a hundred billion dollars, uh, as is all, all technological change. Um, but, uh,

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Y2K was like, it was very millenarian. People were dooming about the apocalypse, but these were like fringe sort of cult types. The same thing happened with 2012. I don't know if you remember 2012 apocalypse stuff. Y2K was the same thing. But it was not widespread. AI Doom is truly widespread. There's a study in YouGov. More than 30% of Americans are concerned that AI could end human life on Earth. Like, that is a wildly high number compared to how many people believed 2012 was going to be the end, or 2000 was going to be the end. Like, I would be shocked if either of those dates were single-digit percentages. Most people were like, "Yeah, okay, like, I might need to like, print out my bank statements."

• 49:55John Coogan?

  A lot of people were doing that, like, "Print out your bank statements before Y2K," because like, then you'll have a backup, and you'll be able to go in and say like, "No, I actually have $10,000 in my bank. I don't have negative 9 million because it's not the year 1000 right now." But, you know, everyone got through that. The other interesting thing is that there's this disconnect between the doom, AI is gonna kill everyone, and then what is the impact of AI? There's this new research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER. They polled a whole bunch of firms in America, a whole bunch of companies, and they said, "Are you getting a benefit from AI?" Tyler, what percent do you think said, "Yeah, AI is helping out"?

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's probably pretty low.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  It's extremely low.

• 50:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, 20%?

• 50:40John Coogan?

  It's exactly 20%.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  Nailed it.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  80% said that AI was having no impact on their productivity or employment. We gotta get those numbers up, folks. There are clearly good ways to use AI to benefit your company and your people. I mean, it could also be like-

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Those surveys, you never know who-

• 50:57John Coogan?

  You never know.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  Might be somebody who's just not-

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  Who's gonna answer the survey quickly-

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  And they don't realize-

• 51:03John Coogan?

  But, I mean, just think about it. Like, there are lots of companies where you have to be HIPAA compliant, and maybe they just don't have a HIPAA compliant LLM available to them. And so they're just like, "Yeah, I literally can't use it." Or like, "All LLMs are blocked on my local work network because the IT department's still figuring out how we roll it out." Like, these things happen all over, and it affects like, lots and lots of people. I mean, if you're just a cashier at Walmart, is AI helping you? Like, it's just not, right?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm sure there's still like they use services that under, you know, like behind a bunch of layers, there actually is AI going on, right?

• 51:35John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. And I mean,

• 51:36Speaker 02

  So like, maybe they're not interfacing with LMS directly, but at some level, like there are LMS running.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. And even if you zoom out to AI just being like machine learning, it's like, okay, so the Walmart person at the checkout counter is not seeing a benefit. But like Walmart definitely has a recommendation system on their website.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, or like the Walmart software is being updated faster than it usually would be. Isn't that L M? That's AI.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  You believe that that's happening?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Could be.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  You're willing to bet it all on that? You're willing to bet it all on Walmart going through a dramatic digital transformation right now. You don't think it's slow? You don't think they're still like, let's figure this thing out?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  I think they're probably running stuff faster than they used to be.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  You think they're past the pitch deck phase? Maybe, hopefully. Yeah.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  And we gotta talk about, we should, we should talk about Rufus. Do you guys hear about Rufus?

• 52:23John Coogan?

  No, what happened with Rufus?

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Rufus is going crazy.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  Okay. While you pull that up, let me tell you about public dot com investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to pull up the.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  I have some more. My, uh, my takeaway was that the average American believes that they are in Terminator Judgment Day, but they still have to go to Cyberdyne Systems and do their fake email job. Uh, and just right up until the bombs drop. That, that's the general tenor around AI. Like the vibes are, are, are rough. But if we go back to the dot com bubble, uh, and try and understand what's different, there's some interesting stuff that we can learn. So first, there was definitely a vibe around permanent high growth and a new economy. There was this economists, analysts, executives. They were arguing that productivity would permanently accelerate and recessions would largely, largely disappear. And the business cycle would be broken by information networks that moved at the speed of light.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  Before the SaaS apocalypse, there was what you referred to earlier, the retail apocalypse. The most extreme formulation formulation was total physical retail extinction within 10 years. So within 10 years, they predicted by 2009, there would not be a single retail store anywhere in America. This was the prediction. This was the prediction. This is a prediction. Directionally. Directionally accurate, for sure, for sure. So, shopping malls would become obsolete. All brands would be commoditized by cheap online alternatives. Some of this happened. Amazon Basics is popular. Temu flooded America. Shopping malls are struggling. But Walmart's a trillion-dollar company. Nike's worth 90 billion. And Rick Caruso has seemed, you know, to sort of figure out a way to make malls work in LA, in LA at least.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  There were also a ton of other crazy dot-com proclamations. Revenue doesn't matter, only eyeballs matter. All media will permanently be free because file sharing and products like Napster simply cannot be stopped. And so, every piece of media will be free forever. That obviously didn't happen.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  And offices will disappear entirely. Digital currencies will replace fiat money. At its core, the most extreme claim was the Internet was a civilizational phase change equivalent to the printing press or electricity. And, most importantly, this transformation would happen in five years, not 50 years. And so, time compression was the biggest forecasting error here. Not every dot-com prediction, like nearly every dot-com prediction, had some directionally correct element to it. But various breaks were applied, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and things slowed down. Media companies sued file-sharing companies, for example. Financial markets pulled back. Companies adjusted their strategies and retreated to Internet-proof modes.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  And so, protests and political movements also had another role to play as a break. There was this really interesting anti-tech protest in the late 90s. The Battle of Seattle. So, over four days, 40,000 protesters rallied against the World Trade Organization to push back against Internet-driven capitalism.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  There were six hundred protesters who were arrested at the Battle of Seattle. And they were arguing that the Internet was linked to corporate consolidation, outsourcing, and labor displacement. Like, all relatively true things, hard to disprove, but the timelines are what matter, of course. And so, the Battle of Seattle didn't result in any specific dramatic curtailing of Internet adoption, but it did raise the political salience of international trade relations, and was clearly in the back of policymakers' minds when they set sectors-targeted tariffs and domestic preference procurement rules over the next decade. And so, I was thinking about this in the context of the New Brunswick data center protest.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  So, the actual, this data center that got canceled in New Jersey, by comparisons to AI, like, it's tiny.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Generous to call it a data center.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's more of like a data point.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Edge computing.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's twenty-five thousand square feet. The current, like, meta-large data center campus is five hundred thousand square feet. So, five percent of the size. And so, this data center, we don't know who is actually going to buy the capacity, where it was going to go, but you can think of it much more like, you know, delivering you Netflix faster than, you know, training the next AI model. But, like, it worked. They got the data center canceled. And so, this is going to be like a data point in the minds of AI policymakers, decision-makers, leaders, for a long time. And I think that that will, that will affect things.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  So, you know, the Internet rollout continued even during the bubble, and the bubble popping, and pushback, and all sorts of different things. AI will continue as well. But I think it's important to, like, refocus the conversation on actual impact, like... The 20% needs to go up and people need to say, yes, this is helpful. And then mitigate the negative externalities before they turn into problem, like real problems for average Americans. The energy issue was foreseeable, like it was predictable. And maybe that's what we need to be forecasting. Like the next turn of AI 2027 or AI 2028 should be like, here are all the problems that we're going to bump into along the way.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Like, let's go mitigate those now because all the hyperscalers could have been subsidizing electrical build outs like years ago, for sure. So, anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  We need a moment of silence for international business machines.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Falls over 10%, actually 11% now after Anthropic announces that Claude can streamline COBOL code.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Oh, no. There we go.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Wild times. The example that I was talking about earlier about Amazon's Rufus.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  I thought you were going to say Anthropic announces they're going to launch an international business machine.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  We are an international business.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac was reporting, no, Financial Times, he was just commenting, "Amazon's internal AI coding assistant decided the engineer's existing code was inadequate, so the bot deleted it to start from scratch. That resulted in taking down a part of AWS for 13 hours, and it was not the first time it happened."

• 59:05John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes the best course of action is to delete and recreate.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Delete everything. Sometimes that's what you gotta do. Lots of people are having fun with the data center protest. I think it should be taken seriously, but apparently, the New York Times ran an article in 1887 that says peasants destroyed a balloon? Is this a real, is this a real article? Peasants?

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  1887.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  1887, what?

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  You can actually find it on the New York Times website. October 25th, 1887. The Russian peasantry appear to be sunk in ignorance and superstition during the recent eclipse of the sun. Three famous Russian savants to send it. I'm trying to read. This is in the Times machine. It's very, very.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Oh, it's actually like it's a scan, right? It's not text.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Incredibly hard to read, but they, the peasants did destroy the balloon.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  They destroyed it.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  They got it.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Somebody asked, would you live next to a date center? Not a data center, but a center for dates.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Dates are underrated.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, dates are good. Healthy, delicious. Anyway, 11 labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Let's go over to the horse section of the show. There's some big horse news going on.

• 1:00:26Jordi Hays?

  The moment you've been waiting for.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  In the Financial Times. A horse walks into a lab. Let's see.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Andal says peasants destroying a balloon in 1887 is setting a Waymo on fire in 2025.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Yes, but, okay, so the interesting thing about the Waymo fires was that we, we live in LA where the Waymo fires happened. And if you were on the internet, it looked like Los Angeles was burning to the ground. And Tyler went to the.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Philharmonic.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  The Philharmonic, which was directly like a block away from where the main protest was. And we were like, whoa, man, like it seems pretty dangerous from what we're seeing online. And it was fine, right? You just pulled right in.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw someone holding a flag.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  And that was it. I didn't see, I didn't even see the fires at all.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  And so a lot of these, the scale of these protests is hard to pick up on because things can go really viral and you can have a protest that's, that's a couple hundred people and it's, if it's in one block and the photographer is good about lining it up and you're not seeing like a helicopter shot of like tons of people in the street, it can actually be sort of small. I remember that video of the data center protest where he runs outside and he's like, we did it, we did it. Like it seems huge, but I actually think. There were only like a couple hundred people there and you comp that to the World Trade Center Organization Battle of Seattle. Those forty thousand people, they arrested six hundred people. Like, that's pretty significant. And so, I guess I'm not saying like, we're still early for protests,

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  but it is important to understand like, the scale of like, what's happening in the real world and the actual impact of that. And, you know, you need to be charting this because if they're getting bigger, like, they need to be addressed more. And even if they're small, like, people have good points, so they should be listened to. And, you know, and the solution should be brought to the populace before it gets to a vote. Like, you could tell that New Brunswick debate would go way differently if the hyperscalers were there saying like, "Hey, good news. Like, we've done so much forward-thinking here that your energy prices are gonna go down." Like, people would be like, "Oh, okay, cool. And we're making it beautiful."

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  We're building a park.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  And we're building it underground.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  We're putting brass on the roof.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. There's like, five easy tricks to like, get, you know, data centers approved all over the country. But everyone's been putting them in the, on the low priority pile, but they're certainly gonna be more important over the next couple of years.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you read us this?

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Yes. A horse walks into a lab. It's a December afternoon at the Campo Argento de Polo at Palermo in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. The sun is shining in a clear, in a sky of clear Argentine blue. The jacarandas, this is too noisy, I'm gonna put this down. The jacaranda trees are in bloom. You're sitting in the stands overlooking an immaculate green lawn, six times the size of a football pitch. A military band with brass trumpets and drums, red epaulettes and shiny blackjack boots has just marched away. Argentina's President Javier Millay, famous for his Elvis sideburns and economic chainsaw, has taken his seat above

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  the center line. Eight players center onto the pitch, tanned arms, taut muscles, hair curling over the collars of their polo shirts. It's the first semifinal of the Argentine Open, the most prestigious tournament in the polo world, the one the players really want to win. This year, the stakes are higher than usual. It may be the last Open for Adolfo Cambacio, the world's number-one player for more than two decades, and the sport's GOAT, the greatest of all time. Cambasio has changed the way polo works, not only through his skill and tactical genius, but as a result of a bet he made nearly 20 years ago. He bought into the idea of cloning ponies a decade before his rivals.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  This year, many of the ponies he will ride in the open will be clones, identical twins of his favorite horses from years gone by. The players line up, four against four, the ponies waiting, ears pricked, poised for action, the whistle blows, the game begins. The players streak up the pitch, sticks swinging, using their ponies to ride off their opponents to block them from getting to the ball. They gallop, turn, stop, turn on a sixpence and start speeding in the opposite direction. They bounce on the ball of a small head of the stick. They bounce the ball on the small head of a stick, hit backhands onto the pony's necks. If there's a break, they gallop to one end and leap onto a fresh pony before charging back into the fray. You can tell, sitting high in the stands, the ponies get the game, they can anticipate

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  what's going to happen, they're enjoying themselves. That in and of itself is remarkable. In the millennia since humans, a thought to tame the wild horses that roam the steeps and plains, we have bent them to our will for our species. Horses have charged into battle, dragged plows through rocky fields, and carriages through the slop of medieval cities. The real slop problem, medieval cities.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Humanity versus slop.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Man has taught them that a hard white ball needs to get to the end of a large field and through the gap between two poles. In return, we feed them, tend to their shoes and teeth, we give them massages and march them up and down hills to make sure they are fit enough to play. We polish their coats, plate their tails and bandage their legs and to the best, give them a chance at life through cloning and another and another. But it seems that isn't enough. Now two men, a scientist and an entrepreneur, are going beyond making copies of an original. They are engineering polo ponies to make them even faster, in the hope that in a game of high stakes and slim margins, it will give them the edge to win. For one pony.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Polo Puebla, the circle of life began on an estancia, estancia near the town of Coronel Suarez, a six and a half hour drive southwest of Buenos Aires. She was born on December 12th, 1988, a slight mare raised on a diet of weeping love grass, the silvery fronds that grow in the red soil of the Pampas. It was apparent from an early age that she had what it took to make a great polo pony. She played in her first Open final, aged only five, ridden by Pepe Higay, one of four brothers who competed at the highest level. Four brothers, all polo legends. That's elite. Polo remains a macho sport. The top players are male, though there is an open tournament for women, too.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  The grooms who canter the spare ponies up the side of the pitch, wearing the gaucho's traditional floppy beret, the bonia, are typically male. The Open has only had multiple, has only ever had male umpires, but the ponies are usually female. The players favor mares, citing their intelligence and grit. Polo Puebla was one of the great polo mares of her generation. She was a bright bay, the color of autumn conquers, with black legs, a white star between her eyes, and another splash of white on her nose. She played at the top level for 14 years, winning the cup for best pony at the Open, among many other awards. And speaking of ponies, the purple llamas, Vanta, automated compliance and security,

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. That mare was a natural polo player, one in a million, he said, the guy said, in a video made to celebrate Polo Puebla's induction into the Polo Pony Hall of Fame. She had an impressive heart also. She was a mare who never got tired. Polo Puebla retired in 2004. Before she died, samples of her DNA were banked in liquid nitrogen in the laboratories of Chiron, a biotechnology company co-founded by Gabriel Vicera and based in a science park in the town of Pilar, 35 miles northwest of Palermo's polo fields. With his neatly trimmed beard and white lab coat, Vicera, 46, would not be mistaken for a polo player.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  When I first emailed him, he apologized for not responding sooner. He was competing in the World Indoor Archery Championships. Whoa. Made sense. His company is named after Chiron, the mythical archer, half man, half horse. It's the morning of the open semifinal and we're sitting around a large table in the cool of the conference room at Kiran, just a few meters away from the vats of nitrogen housing Polo Puebla's remaining cells. There are photographs of horses on the wall. Each clone, each is a clone Vichara was responsible for creating, each a genetic replica of a famous polo pony. One photograph, the newest is of five bright bay foals covered in baby

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  fluff, their legs still too long for their bodies. These are the gene edited Polo Puebla's, he says, "The ones you are going to meet." I stare at their photos. There is no clue in the faces of their unusual conception. No way to differentiate them apart from their similarities to each other and to the videos of Polo Puebla that I have watched. What do you think? Would you go to a polo match if all the ponies were genetically modified and cloned? Or are you, do you want, do you want a natty league? Natty ponies only?

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm in favor.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Your favorite cloning?

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, why not? Push the sport to the limit.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Hmm. I feel like it's kind of like not in the spirit of just like a couple of guys getting on horses that they just like found, round them up, you know? It's a...

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, they should, they should have the, the, the sort of like wild league.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Where you can just go find, find a wild horse, go, go play.

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  This definitely creates an opportunity for the wild league.

• 1:10:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  For sure. This is kind of the, uh...

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Free range league.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  What do they call it? The, uh, the enhanced games?

• 1:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  This is the enhanced games for polo, for sure. Anyway.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, are you a polo accelerationist?

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Sorry. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Tyler, are you a polo purist?

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  I, I think I'm in favor of the cloning.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  You're a polo accelerationist?

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  P-A-C, as they say.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Well, uh, good news for you. There's lots of cloned ponies coming your way to a polo field near you. What did this post say? If you run every day, you'll be ready for any situation that calls for extreme cowardice. Was this deleted?

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  I think so. Probably the running community.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Zach Pograb came in and said, you're about to be running for me.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

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

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  There is a game called Data Center on Steam, which lets you build and manage your own data center. This is low-key genius, the best way to educate people on a new trait. Hyperscalers should learn a thing or two about edutainment.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Edutainment, this is fantastic.

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was saying this.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  It's not out yet. It's coming out March 31st.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  But very excited.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Mark your calendars.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm gonna grind this.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Productivity is gonna fall.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was saying it's like a, it could easily be an ender's game scenario where it's just.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Those racks weren't simulated. Those were real NVL 72s, Bender. Yeah, I love that. This is all a ploy. The humanoids are already deployed. They just need you to wire everything up. This is amazing. And it feels like it's, the game mechanics feel, just from this video, remarkably deep. Like, you're not just walking around a data center doing cabling the entire time. You're also deciding tax treatment and what software runs and getting probably Kubernetes installed or something like that, Slurm. Very, very fun. I love these, I love these one-off games.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, there's another game called, just called Insider Trading, coming to Steam.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  If you're good at insider trading, you're gonna love this game. Steam has a game called Insider Trade and get ready. It's a rogue-like deck builder that lets you literally pump and then crash the market. This is gonna be wildly, wildly popular. No, depends a lot on the actual mechanics of the game, but hilarious and says a lot about the society. But I think it's, I don't know. I'll give it a try. I wonder if it will have microtransactions. That's the big question. Or if it's pure for the love of the sport, love of the game. But these rogue-like deck builders are fantastic. Bellatro went mega-viral a couple of years ago. Really, really fun game.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Crazy poker, basically. It's like poker rules, but with a whole bunch of crazy modifications that allow you to just do like insane things and sort of turns it into a completely different game.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Brian says, I want to make a TVP and intern simulator.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  That'd be good.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm still waiting for. We would, we would actually, yeah.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Now, now that Tyler's like promoted and just, you know, a real, a real deal employee, which happened after like two weeks last year, but that kind of would be kind of fun for a whole of us to kind of like relive the days of intern, intern summer.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, whoever has the highest score gets hired.

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  I do, I do wonder, we've seen this, I heard the story about like, everyone talks about the death of AAA games right now. Have you heard about this? So it used to be, you know, GTA V, Halo 3, Bioshock, like there were these big games that would sell for 50, 60 bucks. They would sell a lot of copies, but then they weren't, what do they call them? Permanent service games, online service games or something perpetual, like Fortnite is a game that has endless updates and monetizes forever. And same thing with Counter-Strike, League of Legends, there's a few others that have, that have wound up generating a ton of money for these companies because once they get them up, they're like ecosystems, Roblox, great

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  example. Versus if you're doing like Bioshock and you make a bunch of money, then you have to do Bioshock 2 if you want more money from those customers and then you have to do Bioshock 3. And at each point, people are like, well, I didn't actually finish Bioshock 1, so I'm sort of out of the market for Bioshock 2. And your TAM just gets smaller and smaller while your development costs get higher and higher. And there's been a whole, a whole spate of AAA perpetual service. Why am I blanking on the term? There's online service games where they've come out and they said like, okay, we've seen what Counter-Strike has done. We've seen what, you know, League of Legends has done. We want that for our company. So.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Free to play?

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, free to play is the model, but there's, there's something around the word service that's, that's the gaming lingo, but. There's been a lot of flops recently, like a lot of companies have spent a ton of money on these these online service games that they hope will become the next League of Legends or the next Counter-Strike 2, and then they just flop and then they're shut down in like a couple of months, and it's a huge loss. At the same time, there's been a whole bunch of developers that have gone sort of the indie route and done really, really well. Live service games, thank you Bobby Cosmic, they're called live service games.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Nailed it.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  And and the and and there was this interesting story, this developer that spent like three years working on this live service game and it like completely flopped and then like in the free in his free time made like this game called Peak for in like three months and it went like super viral and did really well. And I'm excited to see like like do when do we see the actual acceleration in vibe coding? Do we get more of these like meme type games that have like like really interesting mechanics? Does it actually free up the developers to come up with not just interesting viral hooks like data center simulator is funny enough to get us to like

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  click on it, but like the mechanic actually has to be good too and

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  A million people will think it's funny.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  10,000 will try it.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:33Jordi Hays?

  How many people actually

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  play for more than

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  10 minutes?

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  And and the key to playing for more than 10 minutes is not like the graphics will be taken care of. We already have Unreal Engine, the engine will work like you're not going to be falling through the floor, it's not going to be buggy, but and you'll be able to generate assets and actually make the thing look like it. But if you can come up with some sort of novel reward mechanism, progression system that's interesting, that shows, okay, I'm learning and I'm having fun, I'm re-engaged, I think that will. I Dan says, Peak was that developer's peak. Nominal determinism hits again. Yeah, you never want to launch a product called Peak. Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Signal says, serious question, how do you make someone with absolutely zero gaming experience CEO of a very prominent and important gaming platform? Asha was announced as the new EVP and CEO of Microsoft Gaming after a multi-year run over on the enterprise AI side of the business. A lot of people Had had opinions on this.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Well, I have an opinion. How do you, Signal's question is, how do you make someone with absolutely zero gaming experience CEO of a very prominent and important gaming platform? You make them lock in and spend three months gaming. And so that should be the first task. It should say, okay, you have no meetings. Microsoft Teams is shut down for you.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Clippy's got it.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're handling everything. Your job is to speed run every major Xbox game. Fable, all the Call of Duty series, you're going to play all the Halo, all the Halo games. You're going to get good. You're going to rank and you're going to learn to speed run. And you're going to really, really lock in and establish true credibility that can't be faked. And then we will announce you. That's the, that's the hack. People are, people are pouring, pouring one out for Phil Spencer, who was at Microsoft for 38 years. And his, and his profile picture is just the Xbox X because he's a legend.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  And Palmer Lucky quoted it and put an F in the chat because the world you grow up in no longer exists, apparently. What else is going on here? Um, okay, so someone asked Asha, what's your favorite game? Um, and Smash JT says, okay, I'll play your game, you rogue. Chrono Trigger, Forever Goated, Final Fantasy VII, Goldeneye 007. Chrono Trigger will forever be number one. I never played Chrono Trigger. I did play Final Fantasy VII and Goldeneye. And Asha said, great list. I did my top three. And another reply, Halo, Valheim, which I believe is newer and has had much less sticking power, and 007. It's been a long time since I played Chrono Trigger. Have you done every ending?

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Thanks for all the detail. I appreciate it a ton and is.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  Is the question that Chrono Trigger doesn't have multiple endings? I actually don't know.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Okay, so I don't know what's going on here. But Xbox CEO accused of using AI for replies. Saying she played Chrono Trigger in her reply to Smash, she would have been six years old. You could play it later, which would be a very young age to play it, but maybe she loves JRPGs and picked it up later. It is a curious thought. She must be a huge gamer, or this is AI. This doesn't read like AI. I don't know. What does Palmer Lucky say? He says, "Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time, and I was only three when it came out." True, yeah, good point. Also, I don't know, Chrono Trigger, like, I played Final Fantasy VII. I don't actually don't, I think there are multiple endings. Like, I would not remember. I don't know. Anyway, what else is in the timeline?

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  We should tell everyone about the linear lineup for today, because we have four guests joining us. We have Alap from Citrini, we have Will Brown from Prime Intellect, and Michelle's coming on.

• 1:20:44Jordi Hays?

  And Alap is not at Citrini. He just co-authored the piece.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  He co-authored the piece, and he also wrote a part one, that's a very good read, that was released before the mega-viral essay. And then Mike's coming on from also Capital at 150. So, linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and you should be too.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Hot take, does it matter if it's?

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nick says, "Hot take, doesn't matter if CEO's gamer." Strauss Zelnick has said it's perfectly, "A CEO's job is to attract, retain, and motivate the best talent in the business, and then get out of their way."

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  New Xbox CEO Asha doesn't need to be a gamer to run a company. She simply needs to do what the CEO's job of running a gaming company is supposed to do, which is to hire talent and allow game studios to make their creative vision come to reality. The thing I think they maybe could have done better with the announcement is like, talk about what the rest of the management team looks like. Because if you position Asha as this like, elite operator who's going to, like...

• 1:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Like really, like there's a way like if she's like managing a team of people that are gamers and love gaming and she's like working with them to figure out how to make the platforms better and better, that's more compelling than, you know, bringing somebody in than that.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm trying to think of other industries where the CEO doesn't use the product.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Part of this is like

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  industries where the CEO doesn't use a product. I mean, like, think about almost every category of enterprise.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Software? I think they all dog food the product.

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  But not, not, not on a personal level, like their teams might.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess that's right. Yeah, I was, I was trying to think of like, are there like, I mean, it's like Rick Rubin doesn't know how to play instruments, but he does listen to the music. And I feel like most of the, the big like Hollywood agents or power players, like maybe they didn't know how to use a film camera, but they watched movies, I believe. Like I, I don't know if there's like someone out there who's just like, yeah, like I've never seen Saving Private Ryan, but it made me a lot of money because I greenlit it because like I knew.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing's for sure, Xbox is not in founder mode.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  And will never be, but.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Who did be though? Should it be? I don't know.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, how, how do you, the guy, the guy who started Xbox, what is, um, uh, the guy that's, it's, uh, Seamus Blackley is like credited with.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, creating and designing the original Xbox. I think he's now in the, in the chocolate business.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I definitely think the, the, the CEO of a video game company can just provide a fantastic environment for creative individuals. And also, I mean, Xbox is a hardware company. It's also a live streaming company. It's also a studio that just, where you just have studio heads that go in green light projects. It's not all directly related.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  Handel says Larry Ellison using Oracle on a nice Sunday morning.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Let's go. Good job. That's correct. I don't know. He probably does store a lot of data in, uh, in, in Oracle. Who knows?

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Aaron says the CEO necessarily is not in the product daily.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? We'll wait to see. It's uh, it already happened.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, well, yeah, I mean, we'll see.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're working on, we're, we're, we, we got in touch with her on Friday. We're gonna find a time for her to jump on the show.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, PS6 might be delayed because of the memory stuff. Um, there's also, I don't know.

• 1:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they should just delay the next Xbox and let, let Asha just game for three months, like you said, six months.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. The real, the really interesting uh, thing on the hardware side is uh, a lot of people were freaking out over the weekend uh, playing with chatjimmy.ai from Talus. We had the founder on the show. Uh, he has baked Llama 3.8B onto silicon, and so it runs at 16,000 tokens per second. So you ask it your typical LLM query, and it just boom, loads the page, it's all done. There's no token streaming in, you're just at the bottom of the page. It's actually sort of jarring because then you have to scroll back up, but it's clearly like incredible, and this is coming, and we've experienced with Codex 5.3, Cerebrus, or uh, Spark, is that what they call it? Um, and there's a few others, Croc.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Um, and so-

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  And it doesn't have web search.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, so, so there, there, there's a lot of-

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  So if you ask it, what is TVPN? It says, "Gwen Butcher's Pizza Network."

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  We gave you a different answer this time. Wow, it's really hallucinating. Anyway, uh, that, I, I, I think that the uh, the, the, the system on a chip, Cerebrus, the wafer scale, super fast inference is gonna be very amazing for-

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really, it really is just a, is a next token predictor.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  It says, "TBPN could also stand for the Black Pine Network." This is not a well-known term or organization, but it, it could be a fictional or made up name.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  It's having fun.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  It's having fun.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  But I think that there's a very interesting play where uh, the gaming systems basically bake a style transfer diffusion module onto silicon and put it on the chip. This is what Nvidia did with DLSS, Dynamic Something Supersourcing, uh, Supersampling, Deep Learning Supersampling, DLSS. So if you have a Nvidia-

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  What is it? G force like forty ninety, thirty ninety? There's a section of the chip that's trained to take a ten eighty P video game and upres it in real time to four K. And so you can run, if your hardware can only run the game at seven twenty P, sixty frames a second, it will, it'll upres all of those frames. It's not perfect, but it gives you a sharper image. It's basically just AI sharpening that's happening. You could imagine a model that is trained to turn the images that are generated from a video game, from Unreal Engine, into something that's actually photoreal, like make it like a movie, that prompt that we've seen happen. And you're like, wow, that's actually looks like a movie.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  You could run that in real time at sixty frames a second and be playing a video game that looks truly photoreal. Because the actual game engine graphics have totally plateaued and there doesn't really feel like they're just gonna jump to cinema quality anytime soon. But if you use AI to do the last step, I feel like that could be really good. What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could also do like a genie three type model bake down, right? So like interactive video.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really slow and limited right now, but if you bake that down, you could play that. I still think there's a lot of work to be done on genie three.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe it's like one or two more models.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, like those are like llama two level right now, but yes, yes, yes. I completely agree. Anyway, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, thirty plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream dot com. Dan's Gaming says, my theory is that Phil and Sarah did not want to shove AI into everything at Xbox, they were forced to retire and resign. Microsoft is replacing them with someone with a strong background in AI and no experience in gaming. This is just getting insane. I don't know, I have a very, I'm completely white pilled on AI and gaming, as I just said. Like, I think AI in gaming can be really, really great. I mean, there's a ton of games where the developer would love to have the NPC dialogue

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  that they don't have to sit there and write, okay, this towns person's gonna offer you five coins for your sword. It's like, no, just like. Be an NPC, be, you know, you have coins, act agentically. And then you go up and you're exchanging with the towns person, your sword for your coins or whatever, and you have like a much more natural interaction. That feels really great. I don't know, I, there's a million bull cases for AI in gaming, in my opinion. It seems like the hardest, it seems like one of the easiest things to sort of justify.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have Mr. Shaw.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  So, let's tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one with Figma, including introducing Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options and push ideas further. And without further ado, we'll bring in our first guest of the show. Elon, how are you doing?

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  What's going on? Oh, great. How are you guys?

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Doing great. Is, uh, is this your first time?

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Is it over?

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Triggering a, a global sell-off?

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  The first time so far, but you know, I'm, I'm just a messenger, just the way I look at it. We've got a lot of opportunities and a lot of scary things coming down the pipe.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Okay. So, yeah, take us through the, the, the thought process, like how long has this been simmering? What was the actual process of putting together this report? And then what do you want people to take away from it? And then maybe we can go into some of the reactions and your reactions to those reactions.

• 1:29:57Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The, the process ultimately is that, you know, I've been building in AI for 15 years and I've been an investor for 20. And so especially the last six months, as I've just been using agentic coding myself and my teams have adopted it, it's just been a step change function and how much we can get done. And just thinking through, hey, how is this gonna, we're, we're early, we're a startup, you know, we're gonna be at the leading edge of how people are adopting things, you know, assuming the corporate world is a year or two years away, uh, it's, it's gonna be pretty profound. And I think the underlying thing, you know, as, you know, sort of an amateur macroeconomist is we're just not producing white collar jobs to begin with. Uh, I hadn't actually seen the extent of that until I kind of looked at, you know, specifically

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  what we call like the information sector, so different parts of kind of technology. Those jobs are down 8% from the peak in 2022 already. And so those are the places where people are adopting the most aggressively already. And we know, you know, every week there's firings out of like big tech. And so in that world, what happens when the technology that big tech's been using for a while has gotten a lot better? And now, you know, your average corporate starts, uh, using it as well. Uh, it can get quite scary. And so, you know, we wanted to kind of think through the implications of that and, you know, the, the piece.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  But how much of those, how much of those layoffs do you think are? You know, we've talked about a bunch of those layoffs on the show. They're usually attributed to AI. But if you dig under the hood, it's like they just wanted to kind of resize or get more efficient or they're reprioritizing resources. And not actually because they just launched some new agent and suddenly everything's changed. Hey, we don't need these thousand engineers anymore.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  So I think, you know, those are all great corporate euphemisms. And of course, that's how they're going to say it. But I think the way I would think about this is it's not necessarily like agentic powers happened and now everyone's going to get fired. You know, agents and LLMs broadly are just sort of on the tech tree as a continuum from software. And so software has been making companies more efficient for decades. And, you know, that has caused a lot of downstream effects. And now that software has just become much more intelligent. And so in that sense, I think, you know, companies that are efficient have been doing a form of this for a really long time. And we think about, you know, the age starting now in 26 is just something that's going to accelerate that.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  So, yeah, what else was like key in the thesis or maybe potentially overlooked that you think people should be really focusing on?

• 1:32:28Speaker 04

  I think the problem, A, the first thing, the most important thing is just the labor market dynamics. We've just been in a really weak labor market for a while. And that's before these things roll out. But then you put that together with the fact that, you know, we just have a very structural environment where what is the thing that drives our entire economy? It's wages. Most of those wages that are ultimately driving all the discretionary spending is coming from the white collar worker. And the problem with that is that we're now entering this place where you made all these assumptions on like loaning money to all these companies, you know, to mortgages and everything else. Like, well, white collar economy is our economy. If you all of a sudden just take a leg out of that economy.

• 1:33:12Speaker 04

  It has a contagion effect into basically every asset in the world. And so that I think is the part that people haven't thought about because when you know, people were making these loans, no one ever consumed of a world in which, wow, okay, now like white collar jobs are in sort of permanent decline, right? If that's at 2% a year, then I think we can skate through. But if it's at 4% or 5% a year, then you know, we have, we need action, action a lot more quickly.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Is the, is the white collar economy actually the full economy? Or is it more just like the stock market? Because it feels like white collar workers are disproportionately allocated to assets versus consumption. And you see things like, you know, like there's a lot of health in more blue collar sectors, healthcare is growing. And then you also see dynamics like, um, just, uh, uh, you know, like we've seen like, like jitters in the, in the consumer market for a long time. And then we just see the health of the American consumer just continuing, continuing, continue. And it feels like it's maybe driven by something like lower level. And there's always this disconnect in my mind between like the economy and the market.

• 1:34:19Speaker 04

  It's a great question. Uh, I think the issue here is that it's all just one labor market. And right now, blue collar is doing better because there are not firings there.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't think, you know, I think robots are probably 18, like 24 to 36 months behind.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  Uh, other forms of L M's that are, you know, just diffusing through society. But the problem is, let's just say that it's one labor market ultimately. And if there's no more white, if the white collar jobs are going away, let's say, you know, in our scenario, we talk about 5% of folks might get fired in a couple of years. Those 5%, if there aren't white collar jobs for them to relocate into, then they're going to have to move into the gig economy and the blue collar labor force. And so that puts pressure on the entire labor market, uh, not just, uh, the white collar one. And to answer your other question, healthcare is growing, uh, education is growing.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:02Speaker 04

  Uh, the reason those things are growing ultimately, and we, we did some work in our piece to try and isolate white collar that is not government driven. And so the government continues to spend more.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  That's why healthcare is growing. They're the biggest payer in healthcare.

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  They're guaranteeing all the loans in the education industry.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:18Speaker 04

  And so those sectors continue to grow because government spending grows. But that's, again, it gets very circular. If government spending is coming primarily from taxes and primarily payroll taxes, because the average worker pays a lot more in taxes, you know, per dollar than the average corporate does. And so some corporates make a lot more money, workers' payroll taxes go down more, then there is a bit of a contagion effect into bonds as well there, too.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:41Jordi Hays?

  On Saturday, John and I were going back and forth about some of the really wild predictions around the impact of the internet that were being made in the 90s. There was clicks replace bricks. People were predicting total die off.

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  Licks did. Well, I mean, to be fair.

• 1:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, to be like, I'll just finish. They were expecting a total die off of all brick and mortar stores in five to 10 years, which was like widely, widely discussed prediction. It was like, why would you ever go to a store to buy something if you could just get it online, sent to you directly?

• 1:36:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Speaker 04

  And I think it depends on the category.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  A couple of others, so like, not as relevant to your piece, but people were predicting like permanent high growth, the end of business cycles.

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  There was the like media disintermediation narrative, which was like the Napster era. Everyone was going to get all media for free forever. Newspapers would die off, record labels would die off.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Aren't you guys the, aren't you guys the media disintermediation narrative at large?

• 1:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we are, but 20, 20 years later, and CNBC is still a much, much bigger business than all, all business media, at least in our world.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  But like newspapers, like magazines, completely gone, right? All of that has moved to the internet.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. It's just like, like 5% employment shock in a quarter is way different. I mean, like a 5% unemployment shock is completely different if it happens over a quarter than if it happens over two decades, right? Like, these are just fundamentally way different things.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the other, the other thing.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  The last thing I would say is like, there was like this concept of like frictionless capitalism, meaning that like middlemen would be eliminated because you could just go directly to the source and that would push pricing pressure down. My question. And I know you guys are not writing your piece saying like, you know, this, we believe, we will stake our entire reputation on this sort of narrative, but what do you think? What, what, how much did you pay attention to like the nineties, early two thousands internet predictions? What do you think they got wrong? Why is this time different in terms of how a new technology will diffuse to the economy?

• 1:38:02Speaker 04

  I think the difference is if you just plot what's happening to technology, it's all just going exponentially. These are all just continuous timelines of like, we have microcomputers, we have the internet, we have mobile phones, and today, you know, we have very powerful AI. And so I think most of the predictions that you ticked off there, it's kind of interesting. I would, you know, just looking at them today, you know, I would say they couldn't really happen until you had proper AI. Cause like, if you have the ability to just freely, you know, commerce, like have commerce the way you do today, doesn't work if you still have to do all the work. Ultimately, like you have to go and you have to log and think about the friction, amount of friction there is in buying a product for most people today, right? You still have to go to the website, you have to put your

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  credit card in, it's all work. We only have gotten to kind of the tech required for those predictions, I think, this year. And that's why this is the year that I think it really begins, because now it is completely seamless. You just, and no one's really doing this yet, but it's going to happen, I think, you know, in the next six months, is just tell your agent, you know, tell Gemini, tell ChatGPT, go buy these things, it has your credit card. And now that world that they were describing is truly going to come to pass.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the canary in the coal mine analogy? I was looking at unemployment statistics in India and the Philippines, and it doesn't seem to be doom and gloom over there. I don't know, I didn't dig in super far, but would you at least expect that the unemployment rate would spike overseas before it spikes in America? Or do you think this all happened simultaneously?

• 1:39:39Speaker 04

  It's a tricky question. I think ultimately white collar work is a lot more of our economy than it is the economy of India and the Philippines. And they are much sort of like more immature economies that are growing through investment and things like that. But certainly, I think we called it out, the consulting sectors in India are certainly going to be challenged in other places as well. But the reality is like, the timing, the timing is everything in the markets, clearly. But the trick here is, if you're a corporate and you are hard pressed to get AI into your organization today, you know, ChatGPT and OpenAI will send you a forward deployed engineer if you have billion dollars in budget, right? If you have a $10 million budget, they're not going to. And so who are those folks turning to? They can't

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  usually do it themselves. And so they are going to the outsourced providers, the centers of the world. And so I think those businesses are likely going to be in a lot of trouble over the medium term, but they probably will have a big bump from people really putting that AI into their organizations first. And so it's a bit of a tricky timeline there.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  What moats do you think hold beyond this? Because I think a lot of people latched on to like, the DoorDash example as something that they thought had a moat. And that in the post, you sort of underline like, how that could maybe not be as durable as a moat as people thought. But in the long case, like what moats do exist? Like, do network effects stay? Do complex coordination, intellectual property, like what doesn't break down?

• 1:41:13Speaker 04

  You know, real brand value, where people are choosing you over other things because of the brand and the status signaling across brands matters a ton. Network effects are more powerful than ever, I think, in this world. So things like Meta really have a lot to sort of gain in that sense. But I think things that look like they're network effect businesses, but in fact are just the ones that are doing the hard work of aggregating demand and supply, I think will be more challenged. And so DoorDash is a good example there. It's not necessarily the biggest risk versus some of the other things. But I just was in a thread with Gavin Baker talking about this. But the problem for DoorDash and Uber and folks like that is right now, they're doing two jobs. They're doing the job of aggregating demand and the job of aggregating supply. They're both hard jobs, but the demand

• 1:41:56Speaker 04

  side is the harder side. And in, we think the world of the future, there are lots of folks, like in, let's say, food delivery, you know, Instacart wants to get a bunch of market share. And you know Grubhub wants to get a bunch of market share. And so let's say the agents are the ones doing the buying. It's 2028 and 40% of the the sales are through agents. You just tell Gemini, hey, order me some noodles. Uh, in that world, instead of it's going to go to each and every provider. And right now there are four providers that do that. But now it's very easy as if I'm building a startup in the space. Previously, I had to get all the drivers on board, get all the restaurants on board and acquire customers. Now Gemini and ChatGPT are acquiring the customers for me. And all I have to do is get the get the supply side going.

• 1:42:40Speaker 04

  So it makes it much easier for new entrants to come in. And for existing, you know, second, third, fourth tier players can really sort of say, I'm going to like relax my margins. Try to get more top line. And so you think that, you know, whatever the 15% vig is that DoorDash gets today, maybe it's more than that. Uh, you know, some of that I would think Gemini and ChatGPT are going to ask for themselves. Wherever I send the traffic, I'm going to get a piece of that. Uh, and then some of that's going to go back to the consumer.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like was this the most like stretched or controversial prediction?

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  It seems like it was certainly the one that got, you know, it's getting the most chatter. Uh, and I think we did it for a reason. We wanted to be a little provocative in in thinking, thinking it through because, you know, it's an amazing business and they're gaining a bunch of market share. But the fundamental idea that you're, because what did the lock in, right? Like, do the drivers have lock in on DoorDash or on Uber? Not really, right? They're, you know, most, most drivers are doing Lyft and Uber, so they're they're not locked in. The real lock in, the real business value, the franchise value of an Uber or a DoorDash is the customer lock in. Because the customer gets comfortable, they've got everything saved, they want to hit a couple of buttons. They don't, they don't price shop. Agents are happy to price shop as much as possible. And so if you take that away, then it's a real problem for businesses that, you know, are ultimately built on customer lock in.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think the interviews that we've had with the lifts, I mean, you know, again, take, take it with a grain of salt. They have a narrative that, uh, is important to their business. But like, if you ask these people, what is the greatest challenge? It is managing, managing the supply side. It is not, the demand side is not where they're saying like, hey, like. This is really what we need to solve. It's like, hey, as we get more drivers on the platform, revenue naturally, naturally goes up. And so I just, I'm, I'm just hard pressed to imagine a world in which, uh, you know, somebody, think, think about if somebody in my town,

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  which is like 15,000 people, like vibe codes, a delivery, a delivery app, and I go into chat GPT or with another agent and I say like, I want food. It's like, the agent wants to get the best possible service. I would imagine the agent to route to the platform with the supply that is going to be able to deliver in the shortest possible time horizon. And imagining a world where there's like this, you know, vibe coded, small team operating that just happens to aggregate as much supply, which is just as increases the likelihood that my order will be delivered on the best possible timeline, which is going to be the

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  number one factor for customer satisfaction. I just don't see how solving the front end kind of demand piece actually makes a better consumer experience, which I assume the agent would optimize for on behalf of the user.

• 1:45:32Speaker 04

  So let's, let's consider what actually happens here, right? You make the, the, the order on DoorDash.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  DoorDash sends it to the restaurant.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:39Speaker 04

  Uh, the restaurant essentially, you know, sometimes they use their own drivers. Sometimes they send the drivers from DoorDash. Uh, but now imagine the agent can take you directly to the restaurant site and place the order directly with the restaurant. Uh, and you can keep half the, the savings and, uh, the agent can keep half the savings, right?

• 1:45:59Jordi Hays?

  But where's the driver, where's the driver?

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Driver coming from? Because I, I feel like I understand, I understand the, the, the customer demand side. Like you start with an LLM or an agent who shops around for you. So maybe that's solved. Maybe it'll find you just via SEO and you can just put out like, we only take a 5% cut instead of 15% and the agent picks you. I understand getting all the restaurants on board because you email them and say, hey, it's 5% instead of 15%. They're sure, we'll turn it on. But for the drivers, how do you actually reach out to them and get them on the platform? And how how does AI like lower that cost? Because right now, I I think about like, what was the driver marketing budget over the last decade at Uber? Or at DoorDash?

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  And it's probably like in the billions of dollars. And so I feel like to to to generate that much liquidity, I have to invest that much to onboard all those drivers, build awareness. Maybe it just goes viral because they're like, hey, I can make more money here. But that feels hard.

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  I think it's going to take time, but I think there are a bunch of smaller sort of driver aggregation networks that exist today that are not the ones that we know about. For instance, I started a business called Thistle and we do delivery of healthy foods to your door. We we split it between half of them are our own employee drivers and the other half. And I think we have like about like 500 or 700 drivers that we just use a third party service to provide. So I think there are a lot more of these businesses. All those businesses now will also just have huge opportunities to kind of take market share. Ultimately, what we're saying is the friction in doing commerce is going way down. Places where there are rents, the prices can go down. But ultimately, this is just an opportunity for more entrepreneurs to kind of build businesses for the new world.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the the it's interesting because we're here like debating like this this like somewhat temporary thing because like self-driving cars, robotics, like changes all of that like in a huge way. But but but we we use the term sloppable for companies that are that can be vibe coded away and and clankable for companies that can be disrupted by robotics. And I've always put the delivery services more in the clankable category than the sloppable category. So I was I was shocked to see.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  What what are the?

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  But it's reasonable.

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  What would you have spent more time on if you knew you were going to get 50 million views? And the the markets would react in the way that they have?

• 1:48:22Speaker 04

  I would have finished writing the third piece where I talk about solutions, which I have not.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  A lot of people are demanding solutions. They're like, you just got to, you just hit me with a ton of problems. That's funny. Do you think that there's any there's this question about like? In my mind, like, yes, Google and Nvidia are public, but Anthropic, OpenAI and XAI through SpaceX are not public. There's sort of like this massive, you know, multiple hundred billion dollar sell-off in the public markets that sort of should, if you believe your thesis, that should sort of funnel to the labs, I would imagine. When I read it, like, there's a lot of doom and gloom about companies that are out there, but it's a lot of bull case

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  for AI labs. But that can't happen in one day, because like, rounds happen every once in a while, they're private, there's all these different things. But do you think that the world would change when the big labs get out in the public markets?

• 1:49:22Speaker 04

  I think it's absolutely gonna change. I have a strong suspicion that Anthropic is gonna go, you know, in the next three to six months. They just have so much momentum, and there's a lot of value in being first. Their P and L also just looks a lot better than anyone else. So I would think that gets public, and it's gonna be pretty interesting if it happens. Certainly, labs are ultimately, they seem like they're very well positioned to win. I would wonder over the medium term, like, you know, what happens with some of the Chinese models and whatnot, if people actually want just something that's more local and something that they own. But it does seem like the most likely outcome is gonna be that the existing incumbents are gonna get the most share. And I think Google is particularly well positioned, since they already own all of those customers today, and they can finance losses from inference a lot longer than everyone else. But I think

• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  ultimately, like, there's a world in which the labs are the biggest winners here. There's also a world in which, like, you end up with just a lot more competition, and people trade and change. But the thing that seems very clear to me, that the absolute, like, there's no way they won't be the hugest winners here, is gonna be the underlying tech, meaning the semiconductors.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. But you could go even deeper. You could go into like, you know, commodities, and like, copper, and energy, and oil, and natural gas, and stuff. And people have.

• 1:50:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:50:33Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the, some of the criticism was that the essay was very Marxist. Mahit said, "Marx's writing during the Industrial Revolution predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself. Firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal costs, and the gains get competed away. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power." Hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on, production rises but no one can afford to buy what's produced, the contradiction between production and realization. Zitrini's piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares there's no natural break. It's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis, not my words.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  I don't think you were expecting that critique.

• 1:51:17Jordi Hays?

  And makes the same errors Marx did. Yeah. Creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, maybe that's going in the solutions.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Is that it going in the solutions?

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  So let me address it a few ways. Marx was a really smart dude. He got a lot of things right very early. Marxist can mean communist, Marxist can also mean just understanding how capital and labor interact. And in that sense, yes, it was Marxists, he was very insightful. But I think the thing that we're missing here is that it's, there's the economic layer, but ultimately it's the political layer that matters. And, you know, we're in a world where we've had two parties and both parties, you know, economically have a little bit of difference but not a huge amount of difference, and so we kind of bicker. But in a world in which jobs are going away really fast, I think there's going to be a much stronger alignment for, you know, just the laboring class overall to say, hey,

• 1:52:15Speaker 04

  we need to fix this problem. It's a very fixable problem. What we're actually expounding here is that GDP, if done properly, will absolutely explode, right? We're getting way more efficient. We have, you know, we've built a machine dot, we build machine intelligence, but we have to structure our society such that as those things happen, very, you know, hopefully very slowly, you know, we do the right thing from a taxation perspective to say the winners should win, but, you know, if that's what's causing the displacement, let's sort of make the pie a little bit bigger for everyone. And that, I think, ultimately should be something that appeals to a lot of folks in the AI complex. Because if we don't, then something like this is likely to happen, and, you know, AI progress will slow down because we'll have an economic crisis and we're not going to be able to finance nearly as much of it as we otherwise would.

• 1:52:58Jordi Hays?

  So do you think the future is what Anthropic's head of sales position in France, the company will be spending 530,000 euros per year, the government will get 340,000 euros, and the employee will get 190,000? Is that the level of taxation you think we're headed for?

• 1:53:20Speaker 04

  I think when we're at France's level of government spending, then the math probably means roughly that. I would say that government spending would be at France's level, I'm guessing, like five, seven years from now, if this scenario kind of comes to pass. And so I think we'll head there over time, but I think it's less a question of the percent of spending and how much goes to the employee versus goes to the government. And ultimately, what is the size of the total pie? So the bet here is that the pie, if done properly, can just increase multiples of what it is today, and thus, it's just a win-win.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  One question. I mean, it sounds like you're working on potential solutions post, which I'm very excited to read. Thank you. I'm interested to know your reflection on the messaging that's coming from the leaders of the AI labs, because they've outlined many sort of low probability, but potentially negative scenarios. We have the white collar work number. We've had many of these comments from lab leaders, but I rarely hear them follow it up with, and the answer is, print, print, print, or interest rates will save

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  us, or unemployment insurance, or UBI. All of those solutions, that I think people, it's funny, because people are quoting your post, being like, this is easily solved with this solution. It's like, okay, well, that's great, if we all agree. And I think you might, with some of the quotes, people are all over the place. But I'm wondering about your reflection on the messaging from the labs around solutions versus pure focus on problems.

• 1:54:59Speaker 04

  I think it's a really interesting question, and very interesting setup, in that the labs are, on the one hand, want to get the word out there. And so Dario especially has been the loudest here. There's a really good Axios article from last May, where he's kind of on the sound of the alarm bells. People aren't really, he's like saying people are not listening. Obviously, a lot's changed since then. But they can't go so far as to say, like, hey, if you put the pieces together, then this is how it's going to play out. I think it's too damaging to their reputations, and their ability to fundraise, and things like that. And so I think it's other folks like ourselves that kind of have that. Duty to go and really start thinking that through. I certainly it seems like Anthropic is pretty engaged.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 04

  You know, should that conversation really start happening? And I think this is the year it needs to really start happening. And so I think they all kind of get it. And so it's just a question of like, how do we as a society start moving in that direction?

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, there's, I'm still processing part of the piece. I agree with some of it. I disagree with some of it. But what's really underrated is just like, how useful this process of writing an article for a particular audience is like, I disagreed with a lot of, you know, something big is happening, but it hit with a very different audience than machines of loving grace, or the adolescence of AI, or of machine intelligence. And there's, there's pieces that are written for like, you know, AI insiders, leaders, researchers. Then there's like, the broader tech community. Then there's like,

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  everyday people. And you clearly hit the nail on the head with like, speaking to the financial community. And we see that in the markets, not amazing results, but maybe it's maybe it's worthwhile, because we will get really great solutions and a better conversation around it. So I, I, I think, I think in due time, this discussion needed to be had. So, thank you.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  What, what's, what's an industry or job of the future that you could see emerging?

• 1:57:01Speaker 04

  I think, again, if we solve this, like, everything related to sort of leisure is going to absolutely zoom. And that, those are going to be the biggest growth industries of the future, right? Like, what do humans want to do?

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Total Chesky victory.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Watch polo.

• 1:57:15Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  Let a cloned horse play polo, for sure. Yeah.

• 1:57:21Speaker 04

  So, you know, imagine humans have like, the entire day to just enjoy themselves, instead of having to work.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Now, that is something I've been promised for 100 years. So I'm deeply skeptical, but this time is different. I want it to be different. Let's bring on the leisure. Boom. I'm here for it. I'm here.

• 1:57:39Jordi Hays?

  On, anything in your solution stock around reindustrialization? I mean, the frustration that so many people in tech that have That have been building in in kind of hardware in the real world or trying to recruit people that that are getting offers from social media companies or now labs or SaaS companies. You know, one of the the problems of Ameri-, you know, for America in the last 20 years was that if you just wanted to make $100 million, you probably were much more likely to do that building enterprise software than building critical infrastructure or or anything in the real world. So is that is is kind of new new infrastructure and reindustrialization like a a potential

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  landing point for people that had the 180 K a year PM job that might be going away?

• 1:58:30Speaker 04

  It's a great question. I think there's there's certainly going to be a lot more opportunity in those sectors. And I think we've we've done some pretty smart policy things that are moving us in that direction. But we're also, you know, just in a lot of ways so far behind China there. And doesn't AI affect kind of those jobs, both for, you know, on the reindustrialization side, just like it does for writing code? And so that's where I think it will get trickier. I think over as a as a country, we're going to spend an awful lot more on that. And I think we're going to we're going to catch up. But we're not, it's not clear that's going to be through just creating a bunch of additional jobs versus, you know, the the ultimate thing we're seeing with AI period is just high agency people who really know how to reuse the tools can just do the work of many, many people.

• 1:59:13Speaker 04

  And and I think that trend applies in every industry to some extent.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. What an exciting time. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  When's the next piece dropping?

• 1:59:23Speaker 04

  Hopefully by the end of the week, but don't don't hold me to that.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Now, when you when you when you know that it then it could, it'd be hard for the follow up to get as much reach as as this one. That's kind of the way these things go. But now now the pressure's on to really pay attention.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Just don't don't have any sequel anxiety anxiety. You'll be fine. We're excited to read it and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And I'm also going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Will Brown from Prime Intellect in the TVP.

• 2:00:09Will Brown?

  How's it going?

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, Will. How are you doing? It's been too long.

• 2:00:13Will Brown?

  I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's great to be back. I think this is the fourth. Something like that. I looked at, there was a list at some point of the record and some people are like, have been on.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Some people have been on, on something like 18 times.

• 2:00:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking forward to the 400th.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  It's great. It's been a lot of.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  What are your, your old buddies at Morgan Stanley thinking about the current thing in tech? The, the 2028 intelligence crisis? Have you gotten any messages?

• 2:00:41Will Brown?

  That's a great question. I have not had the full deep.

• 2:00:44Jordi Hays?

  They're too busy, they're too busy hitting the sell button.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  No, everyone at Morgan Stanley is too quickly, too busy setting up Mac minis to run OpenClaw. That's what's happening because they all just read something big is happening.

• 2:00:56Will Brown?

  Right. And so like, I think there's definitely a lot of opinions on, on all sides. And I feel like that, to me, the piece was pretty cool. I don't necessarily like, agree with it, but I think it was effective at getting people to have more interesting conversations than, for example, recent other, maybe viral pieces about how everything's going crazy. Um, and it seems like the, the conversation ended up getting like into the weeds of monetary policy and like, how people are going to react and like, how hard is it to vibe, put a DoorDash clone? And like, these sorts of things I think are actually like, the sorts of conversations that are good for more people to be having, like whether or not a certain prediction is right. I think like, like, it's just generally like, as stuff is getting crazier, I feel like this is the sort of stuff

• 2:01:39Will Brown?

  that allows the rest of the world to kind of like, hear about from their friends, like a little more grounded discussion about what could happen.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, give us an update from Prime Intellect. What's going on in your world?

• 2:01:52Will Brown?

  Yeah, yeah. So there's a few things that I think are interesting as well as like I want to talk about just today, given some other stuff that's happening on the timeline. But so a couple of weeks ago, we released a training platform to make it really easy for people to do RL on top of leading open source models with their own environments. And we've tried to really make the make it an agent native experience where you're kind of like, there's a lot of people have been kind of tweeting out their experiences that the term people have been using is vibe RL, which is we're kind of now at the point where the infra to manage the training is kind of in place and you can do it without thinking about the hardware and the GPUs where the models still kind of struggle. But you can you can really focus on like the environment and designing your tasks and specifying what you want and having turning existing data that you already

• 2:02:34Will Brown?

  have into kind of training recipes. And so we're kind of at the point now where like, this is pretty accessible for people to kind of go train models. And it's been pretty cool kind of seeing people have fun with it.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, concretize some of the like actual applications. I imagine this works best if everything flows through text, flows through CLI tools, like because when I think like, okay, great, I'm going to set up an RL environment and automate one of my workflows. And I'm like, well, I'll need to open Adobe Premiere, which has a license and then I'll need to go to YouTube and download some videos. I'm just thinking about like editing a short video that we have.

• 2:03:12Will Brown?

  Of course, yes. Some of that stuff definitely like there's definitely a range of like simple to complicated. But I think there is a lot of sweet spots where it's like the your it's coding tool use and interacting with kind of app simulators, which are the sweet spots of a lot of these like focuses for people doing training in the labs anyways, rather than like full fledged Photoshop. There's a great tweet actually from I figured the Ramp guys from Ramp Labs showing off how they'd been using it for some stuff. It was the team behind Ramp Sheets. And so you could kind of imagine like the sorts of things there where like you don't actually have to build the whole thing, but you can like, and this is where I think the coding agent stuff is really useful is there's a lot of ways you can kind of have the right simulation of the application that is like, it isn't necessarily the full

• 2:03:54Will Brown?

  backend, but it's enough to be able to capture the task. And the coding agents are good enough

• 2:04:02Will Brown?

  With human in the loop, using like, it's all CLI data. So you go into your terminal, you, we have our CLI, the prime CLI. Um, and you use that to kind of like, set up your skills and get your coding agent configured and your agent send D. And so we've tried to like, make that really smooth, but then you just are kind of like, talking to your agent about, hey, my data's here, my app code's over here, let's put it all in the right place and kick off some runs.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are we on the path to personalized RL? I'm, I'm, I'm thinking back to like, the RL that went into RLHF around

• 2:04:33Will Brown?

  Right, right.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  ChatGPT, GPT four. And I remember it was like, they had maybe tens of thousands of contractors sort of grading responses, giving thumbs up, thumbs down, giving feedback. Varying levels, like a really large scale, generalized process.

• 2:04:51Will Brown?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  If I'm running a medium sized company, is this something that I can pull from logs of what's happening in the business? Should I be firing up a data labeling company to help me generate more data? Because in the long term, I would love just a screen recorder, watch me what I do, and then it's RLing and it's getting better. And all of a sudden, it can just do what I do with just like a one prompt.

• 2:05:14Will Brown?

  Yeah, it's pretty close. Uh, it's definitely, it's, that's not, it's not that sci-fi. Like the, if you have stuff, especially let's focus, if we focus on like, uh, text or image input, full screen recording gets a little tricky.

• 2:05:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:25Will Brown?

  Um, but if it's like text or image input that kind of comes from like agent logs and it's like, human inputs, text and images to an agent log, and you have these logs and you're trying to synthesize these logs. Um, I think the, the trickiest part is refining criteria about like, what counts as good. Uh, for like, rescoring another tribe, but a lot of times the criteria are like, either pretty general across tasks, or you can infer a lot of them from a user's response. Uh, or just from the initial prompt and. From what we've seen, it's especially for a lot of very concrete problem solving use cases, more so than let's say like creative writing.

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:01Will Brown?

  But for things where it's like, there's a right answer and it's not too hard to see if the model like got the right answer from doing an agent trace, either from the human's response or let's say that if companies want to have their humans like label as part of using the product by default. Yeah, this is doable and the RL recipes are kind of stable and scalable enough that like it kind of, like it doesn't always work, but it works reliably enough that it, I think the barrier to entry and the cost are just like at a point where it, it's cool to see that this is now a thing people can go do.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Will Brown?

  And we're seeing a lot of people like have success with it.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the debate between MCP and CLI? Peter was going back and forth and it, it, it was something that I was wondering even when MCP came out, it seemed really cool, but at the same time it felt like, well, the front end and I, I, I remember going to the front end and inspect element and see what's coming across and oh, there's a HTML request right there. Let's reverse engineer that.

• 2:06:58Will Brown?

  Yeah, it's, it's all kind of the same thing.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:07:00Will Brown?

  It's, it's sending requests and so I think people realize models were good enough for coding that

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:06Will Brown?

  the skills are essentially, it's doing the same thing, but it's just you have more flexibility to, um, like I think the area where MCP makes the most sense is when you really want fine grained, like off stuff going on where there's like kind of credentials and you want to be able to kind of notice that it's being done and have the user like approve certain requests or not approve others. That's where like the formalism of like the tool call is really useful as opposed to it just being code that is, has an API token.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:31Will Brown?

  Um, but from the capabilities, like skills are nice. MCP has its areas where it makes sense. Um, but it's really just models using computers.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Will Brown?

  Whether it's MCP or code or skill files and reading docs, it's like models are pretty good at like reading stuff and. If it has instructions on how to do a thing, they can kind of just do the thing.

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:51Will Brown?

  And they can do that for a while enough that it's useful.

• 2:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:54Will Brown?

  Um.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  How how intermediated do you think this product will be? And what I what I mean is that, like, uh, let's just use some toy example, like, you know, the widgets company would benefit from a custom fine tuned model or RL model. Uh, but they don't go to you. There's actually a company that's an intermediary that is providing like a SaaS product that then is fine tuned on like anonymized industry data, or they went and generated RL, or they'll even come to the company and say, hey, we'll handle, we'll prime CLI. You're not going to have to know what that is. You just give us the data and and we'll act as like your customer. How how do you think that plays out in the market?

• 2:08:38Will Brown?

  I mean, it's definitely going to happen across the spectrum. I think the people who we'd work, who we work the most directly with are the ones who are a little more like AI native and the ones who are going to work with kind of, because I think we're really like building for developers.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:49Will Brown?

  Uh, as our kind of target audience, but not necessarily researchers. So I think like the people who are like following the benchmarks and reading about the new model releases and building with Claude Code and the agent frameworks, that's really like our target audience, people who like think about e-bows and prompting. Um, versus people who like, don't think about that. Uh, so we do actually work with a lot of like the big data companies where, um, there's like, I think maybe the one interesting story is like, there's a lot of market demand for, um, because everyone's like building environments and selling them to the labs.

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:19Will Brown?

  Um, but you can see a lot of these companies want to like know that their environments are good. And so like using RL as part of this process is the way that you value evaluate the quality and be able to prove like, hey, we've got, we got the good stuff.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:31Will Brown?

  Um, because it actually like improves capabilities. Um, and so there is this whole economy of companies that really specialize on building environments and working with data. And I imagine this does become a big part of like the way that, uh, this stuff is consumed by end companies is through people with that kind of expertise at the data level.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Jordan.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, what the Chinese labs are up to.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  I was going to ask the exact same thing.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  In terms of instilling American models, how how, talk about kind of the scale.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  I've seen some rave reviews. I I I've genuinely seen some rave reviews of Kimi K2. And then at the same time, I've also seen like, hey, it kind of fell flat on its face when I pushed it beyond a toy example. So, yeah, what what's real and what are you experiencing?

• 2:10:17Will Brown?

  Yeah, so I think they're definitely a couple of months behind. Like, they're not at the 4.6, the Codex 5.3 level. They're pretty close to what we had before that. And I think that's kind of where it's been, and it feels like this is tightening. But I think, at least where I get most excited is like, they're good enough that going the extra mile with customization is a differentiator, where you can take a model that's already almost frontier and make it the best model in the world at your thing, pretty easily and pretty quickly. And so I think that is, even if you have to do this every three months, like, it's always a capabilities race. But I think if this pipeline, if this process of like, taking your data and improving the latest model becomes really easy and repeatable, then it's like, you can get a lot of value out of doing that.

• 2:11:00Will Brown?

  And I think that's the sort of thing that's going to be in a lot of people's toolkits. In terms of like, the open source models generally, I think like, there was some interesting debate on the timeline today that I dove into for a little bit around Anthropic and DeepSeek and in the doing distillation. And I think like, it feels like there's kind of two things. There's the kind of geopolitical element. There's the kind of like, terms of service of like, oh, they're doing bot farms, they're scraping, that's not allowed. And there's also like, the idea of like, distillation more broadly of like, is it? And the two, I totally get, the first two. But I think the thing where I was kind of like, trying to push back a bit was like, I mean, everything on GitHub is someone typing a prompt to Claude and submitting it to Claude code,

• 2:11:43Will Brown?

  and then they're going to review the PR, then they're going to merge it. And this is like, perfect training data. And so, the internet is just getting flooded with perfect Claude distillation training data.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 2:11:53Will Brown?

  And there's not much you can do about that. And so it's like, is distillation really the hill we want to die on?

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. I guess the secondary question is like, put all of that aside, and then just ask the question of like, is there some, you know, ticking time bomb with using a distilled model where you run into some wall or you have some problem in performance down the road? And so, yeah, you're doing well on benchmarks, but then it's just a less effective? And is that like, actually problematic from a business perspective? Or is it just like, okay, yeah, like, I'm getting three months behind, but it's three times cheaper, so I'm fine with that trade-off? Versus like, I thought I was using something great, and then it blew up on me?

• 2:12:39Will Brown?

  Right, so it depends a lot on your application. So they think there's certain things for like the models are already like more than good enough. And these are like kind of more commodity like extraction or summarization or labeling use cases. Where like you kind of just want to optimize for cost. In some cases, you want to optimize for speed. If you want to optimize for performance, then if like cost isn't a concern and you really just care about top line performance, then customization is really where the open source models become interesting, which is that like you can do more to the open source models than you can do to Claude. And you can have a lot more fine-grained control of like saying, hey, this is my eval. This is how I'm measuring performance. We are just going to hill climb this. And then it's up to you as a business to define your business logic, say, hey, this is what I actually care about. This is what performance means.

• 2:13:24Will Brown?

  And I think we'll see a lot of companies realizing that like that is a useful knob to be able to turn, to be able to like, and I think concretely what it'll look like for a lot of cases is there'll be these multi-agent products that have their main orchestrator agent that's like one of the frontier models with lots of specialized sub-agents for things that are related to the business and specific workflows, which are then fine-tuned models. I think that's kind of what we see currently as like the most like dominant paradigm for mix and matching between the proprietary models and the fine-tuned open models.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  If you had told someone a year ago that there were going to be like probably millions of people running agents locally with custom setups and .md files for various skills, they'd probably be like, wow, that's pretty aggressive. Do you think that we'll be in a world in like a year or two where at least, you know, people on X will be talking about like my fine tune. I got the, I did, but I did RL on my specific problem. My personalized agent is like even better now because I did the RL.

• 2:14:33Will Brown?

  I mean, so we see it today already with this a little bit where it's like, I mean, there's people who are showing you can these you can get these models to beat any of the closed source models on sufficiently well scoped tasks. Yeah. Pretty quickly. Interesting. It's not rocket science. You can you can basically vibe code it. Wow. Um, you have to know, you have to like. Yeah. Be clear that you have a goal in mind, but if you can define the goal and you can spell this out in English and you can do the same sort of prompting that everyone's doing for coding. Yeah. Then yeah, you can just kind of plug it in and get it to work. But I think it'll become more like, a lot of it is still very much like these kind of more proof of concept or narrow research cases. Totally. Um, but it does seem like it's quickly, especially like code becomes cheap.

• 2:15:16Will Brown?

  And the more the cheaper the code gets, the more complex you can make your environments. Um, and I think like a year ago, we saw like Claude Code's about a year old. Yeah. Came out, I think February last year. And at the time it was like, wasn't actually that useful yet, but I remember playing with it and feeling like, oh, this isn't actually something I want to use that heavily today because it's kind of slop. It's very chaotic. It just makes a mess. And I was, I went back to cursor for a while, um, because it was much more controlled. But it was like, oh, this form factor feels like it could eventually work. And I think there are other form factors today that don't actually work yet. In some ways, like the open claw thing where it's like, open claw like kind of works, but there's also a lot of trouble it gets into. Yeah. Same with like, if you saw like the Gastown thing. Yep.

• 2:15:58Will Brown?

  Or these like crazy multi-agent systems where it's like, they aren't actually excellent yet for shipping quality production code. Yeah. But the thing we had a year ago now is at the level where like Claude Code is used for like most production code. Um, but by the heavy adapters or Codex. Yeah. And so like, it it feels like it is a matter of time until the, these things stabilize and like the goals of having that system kind of end back up in the models and people training for it. Hmm. Um, but like the recipes of how to train these models, uh. It's they've become like robust enough over the past year that it does seem to be like

• 2:16:39Will Brown?

  good idea in a lot of these cases to to optimize your models for the structure you want them to be in. And if that structure is this crazy multi-agent system thing, it's like, yeah, why not?

• 2:16:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:49Jordi Hays?

  What are you are you expecting real tangible breakthroughs in the next in the first half of this year? I mean, our intern keeps saying that he's close to cracking continual learning.

• 2:17:02Will Brown?

  Oh, yeah, continual learning is going to fall pretty quickly, I think. It'll be less of a big thing than. I mean, I think it's more of an engineering problem. I think it's like, no one's actually trying.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  No one's actually trying, why not?

• 2:17:12Will Brown?

  No one like no one like OpenAI and Anthropic don't want to continuously train their models for each user. Like it's expensive and annoying and hard to serve at scale. But like from a research perspective, like we're we do continual learning with the model learns news. They just keep training the model more and it knows more stuff because they put more internet in it.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:29Will Brown?

  And.

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:30Will Brown?

  Like.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uneconomical right now, but but yeah.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  But not for a product like Frontier, I could imagine that that would be

• 2:17:41Will Brown?

  Right, right.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  a selling point if you're McKinsey and you're going to a big

• 2:17:44Will Brown?

  Right.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, yeah, if you if you hypothetically, like, I don't know, you're a law firm and there's some crazy case update like, yeah, the model re-trains on that like the day that the Supreme Court completely changes the way the law works. And then everything else is like interpreted from that. Yeah. Makes a ton of sense.

• 2:18:01Will Brown?

  Yeah, and there's enough kind of tricks. I think there's a lot of experimentation around like exactly the recipe that's going to be the most reliable. But we kind of have a grab bag of like six or seven tricks that kind of work. Or they work in different ways and you can mix and mash them. And it's just going to be like, whatever's the best combination of these tricks. People are going to experiment with it and find the versions that work the best. And there doesn't seem to be any like big wall inside that prevents that from like being. Practical.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what are you tracking on the silicon side? We were playing around with chat jimmy.ai.

• 2:18:35Will Brown?

  Oh, yeah, that was sick.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Jimmy's quick.

• 2:18:38Will Brown?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  But is he smart?

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  Too fast. You have to like scroll up once you get the answer.

• 2:18:45Will Brown?

  Yeah, I was trying to see how many tokens I could get it to print so that I could actually see it go. And I was like, give me every number between one and like 10,000.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:53Will Brown?

  But like Lama just won't do that. And no matter how you prompt it, it'll always stop after like a few thousand tokens. So you can't actually get to feel it like blitzing past.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Whoa, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like sort of a throwback experiencing Lama three eight B because I remember when that model came out and there was a lot of hype because open source developers just love open source stuff. And it was exciting and it was cool. It was like, wow, they really did train a big model and they just put it out there. Uh, and I remember some people being like, yeah, like if you actually go talk to it, like it hallucinates a fair amount. Like, I don't know that this is like actually at the frontier. It might have done okay on some benchmarks, but it's not quite there. Uh, and it was a little bit of a throwback, but you can just imagine baking any of the current frontier back there, giving it access to tools, giving it a reasoning loop. Like, yeah, it's going to be, even if it's only 10 times as fast, like that's still so much faster than like,

• 2:19:43John Coogan?

  okay, gotta close the app and come back after 20 minutes. Cause my thing is running now. It's going to be a completely different. And I think it'll be a big like step change for like people that are like, oh yeah, AI like hallucinates. And like, I need to check that out. It'll be like, no, like it's like totally, you can just have it right there and it's perfect. And it works a ton very fast. It's gonna be a really cool moment. Will you be buying an AI lamp?

• 2:20:09Will Brown?

  An AI, I want the one that goes over your bed and folds your clothes.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:20:12Will Brown?

  Have you seen that one?

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:14Will Brown?

  It looks like a Pixar thing.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  It also looks like it might dismember you if it doesn't like you. It's a little bit horrific, but I do agree. If it folds your laundry, like that's pretty, pretty amazing.

• 2:20:24Will Brown?

  Right.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't care if there's a one in a 10,000 chance that it goes crazy.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  I don't care if there's like a one in 10 chance of me just being dismembered in the middle of my night because it gets mad at me because I was trying to. It prompt injected or something. No, I am excited for hardware. It feels like it feels like even even the first gen hardware like the humane AI pin, the the rabbit R1, all that stuff with like frontier models starts to get interesting. I really hope we get a solid next iteration there, even though it's obviously very much outside of your core competency, but maybe some hardware developers will be coming to you looking to fine tune a model, RL model.

• 2:21:05Will Brown?

  Do you want local on device for something?

• 2:21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:08Will Brown?

  Way to like, cause yeah, you can, I think especially for like these narrow things like if the R1, the rabbit, whatever, and this is also Apple's strategy. It seems like is Apple's like, they like keeping stuff on device.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:18Will Brown?

  The whole privacy thing is part of their whole pitch. And so I think part of the reason why Apple's been slow on the AI stuff is they're shipping a feature once they can do it on device with a sufficient reliability.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:29Will Brown?

  And so that means they're slower in their rolling out of features, but it means that like the stuff like summarization and the image search, like they can do this locally now because the hardware is good enough and the model are good enough at that scale.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You have to imagine that that the same Talos principle of like baking the model down to silicon. Well, it feels like they're doing something maybe like wafer scale, like not iPhone scale. So like, maybe that's another couple of years. And then you need another couple of years to get it to, okay, it's now frontier on a chip that's the size of your phone, fits in your phone, doesn't suck your battery down. But you play that out and you get to something like really, really fun and interesting. I'm excited.

• 2:22:08Will Brown?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Future is bright.

• 2:22:10Will Brown?

  And I think the, yeah, definitely exciting. I think the people always said the internet was going to like run out of data, but I think what we're like, we're getting more data, but it's and it's better data because it's just from the last generation of models.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:22:20Will Brown?

  And so you can kind of like, you kind of get this flywheel of like, there's just more data to learn from and it's all getting better as the models get better. And then you do more on top of that.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:29Will Brown?

  To boost beyond where you were from the old data. And that's where the RL and the filtering comes in and the human data.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:34Will Brown?

  But like, seems like you just have a pretty clear path of models getting better as you put more data into them and we have the data.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for coming on the show and producing a bunch more data. That's helpful. It goes on to YouTube.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to produce data with you.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  It's it's an honor to join the training set with you.

• 2:22:51Will Brown?

  Yeah, that's the goal.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  That is the goal. And thank you to everyone in the chat who's also providing data for the internet. It's God's work. Thanks for having us. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. And speaking of data, let me tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And I believe we have our next guest already in the restream waiting room. Five minutes ahead of schedule. Michelle Lee from Medra is in. What's going on? The TV bit, I'm welcome to the show.

• 2:23:34Speaker 06

  Hey, guys.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 2:23:36Speaker 06

  Excited to be here.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. You and your robots. Punctuality. Oh, yes. What is behind you? Wow. There's a robot that's actively working. Explain. Introduce yourself, please.

• 2:23:46Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So I'm Michelle. I'm the founder and CEO of Medra. And a little bit about me.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:52Speaker 06

  I come, I studied chemical engineering in undergrad. Was a typical chemistry, life science nerd. And then I did an internship at SpaceX. And was just really excited about like, what if we can build in the physical world?

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:07Speaker 06

  Right? Like, I wanted to build in the physical world. I want to build real things with real impact.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:12Speaker 06

  Ended up doing my PhD at Stanford, at the Stanford AI Lab in robotics, building robotics foundation models. I worked with Jeanette Bog and also with Faye Lee. Shout out World Labs.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  No worries.

• 2:24:24Speaker 06

  And I, I ended up, when I finished my PhD, decided I wanted to combine life sciences, robotics, AI. And I started Medra and we are building physical AI scientists, which we

• 2:24:41Speaker 06

  think that is necessary to eradicate disease.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  How narrow do you want to go to start? I mean, it feels like there's piloting, there's centrifuging, there's different stuff going on behind you. But like medicine, bio, these are massive terms, can be animal studies, mice models, you could have monkeys in there. There's a million things that you could do. But I feel like you, you probably want to pick a beachhead, but you tell me what the strategy is.

• 2:25:07Speaker 06

  Definitely. Look, like, one day, we will have Medra robots doing animal studies, like, Mark my words, right? But, you're right, we have to start somewhere. And we're starting with early discovery and development. We have physical AI robots at Medra that can do experiments at scale. We can work with instruments that humans already can use. And most importantly, we truly have intelligent robotics. This is not just lab automation, where you program things and they do it exactly like you tell it to do. This is actually physical AI autonomy that is intelligent, that's constantly sensing, making corrections. And more importantly, we also have AI scientists that can actually reason about the science itself.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  So, what is an example in the lab where you actually do want some probabilistic reasoning or some stochastic result, as opposed to something deterministic? Because if I'm vibe coding a website, like, I don't want it to guess what an HTML tag is. I want it to just use a div every time. It does a great job at that. But, so I imagine there's some things where, you know, the pipette always needs to go in the same place, so it's okay to stand on the shoulders of giants and puppeteer that. But where does the variability come in?

• 2:26:26Speaker 06

  Definitely. I think, like, if you think about the best scientist, right? The best scientists are the ones who are reading all the papers, they have all the scientific knowledge, but they're also the ones going into lab and running the experiments. They can, like, sense what's happening, they can smell it, they can, like, visualize what's going on, and they can make changes as they see things start happening inside the experiments. That's what we're trying to capture, right? The ability to be really flexible, to actually reason about the science as it is happening, and also taking into account all of the knowledge that's come before us, all the scientific papers, all the different results, all the past experiments you run. That's actually what enables good science.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  So, tell me about the distribution business model. I could imagine a world where you're basically doing drug discovery, going through the FDA process, at the same time, you could sort of sell a lab in a box to a pharmaceutical company. There's a lot of different ways I could see this taking shape. Where do you think this goes?

• 2:27:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, we are building the infrastructure layer. We want to be the TSMC for drug discovery. So we are partnering closely with pharma companies, biotechs, such as Genentech, where we are, they can either work with us by using our system, our physical AI scientists in their own lab, or we're actually about to open our own lab, our own fully autonomous lab, one of the largest autonomous labs in the United States in 2026.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Talk to us about the fundraising. I think we missed you on the day you announced your Series A, but I still want to ring the gong. What happened?

• 2:28:07Speaker 06

  Bring it.

• 2:28:07John Coogan?

  Who's in? How much did you raise?

• 2:28:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, we raised fifty-two million dollars for Series A.

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:28:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, Scott, thank you.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Who'd you raise it from?

• 2:28:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, Human Capital led. They came in and pre-seed and seed, and they tripled down on us for Series A, really preempted the raise. We also have Lux, who's also a repeat investor, also Mental Ventures, Catalio, great investors, joining in for a very ambitious mission and very ambitious journey of eradicating disease.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  And fifty-two million Series A, that feels like a lot of money. Congratulations. But is, I could imagine spending it on a training run for a foundation model or buying a bunch of robots, like that stuff behind you doesn't look too cheap. Where do you see the money going? What does it unlock?

• 2:29:00Speaker 06

  Well, actually, the hardware that we use at Medra is all off the shelf. Robots right now, especially their hardware, is fairly commoditized. And we use this off-the-shelf hardware so we can build AI on top of it, so we can actually reason about the science and actually be able to use our, what we have trained ourselves, which is the vision-language lab-action model, to be able to autonomously run experiments. And a lot of what we have raised our Series A for is actually to open our own lab, right in San Francisco, to be able to scale up data generation. Because ultimately, what we want to do is to be a data foundry

• 2:29:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:38Speaker 06

  for life sciences, to be like a Mercor or Searge, but for biological and life science and chemical, chemistry data, so that our partners can train foundation models in biology.

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, because there's probably not a lot of really clean data out there on GitHub or out on the open internet, and so you have to sort of generate it yourself. Is that generally correct?

• 2:29:59Speaker 06

  That's right. That's right. I mean, if you think about in biology, like the largest biology foundation models are still about three orders of magnitude, trained on three orders of magnitude less data than like, you know, even like oh, one.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Google launched one that was showed really impressive results and the scaling laws were there, but it was much smaller than what you see elsewhere. So yeah, very interesting. Very exciting. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  No, this is a super exciting.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  And in the future.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  And I'm sure we'll have you back on the show soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that goes with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  And we got a little bit of time, I think.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  We do. That's great.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  For our next one.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Well, then I'll tell people about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:30:56Jordi Hays?

  And let's pull up this post from Gucci.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  Gucci? What did Gucci do?

• 2:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Not the kind of account we pull up every day. They say Primavera, February 27, 2:00 PM CET, and this picture is created with AI. They hit the, they dropped this on main, and the photo looks.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  I've not seen any hallucinations. It looks, it looks complete.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  Quite dialed. It looks like it could have been out of a catalog, any catalog over the last.

• 2:31:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Twenty years.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  I'm sure it's really peaceful over there at the Gucci offices now.

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure this wasn't controversial at all.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  No, but they're, they're, they're going, this is, this does feel like a more tasteful dipping your toe in the AI boom than say the Svedka ad where everyone was kind of like, this just, it's not polished enough. It's still in the uncanny valley. And I feel like we're going to go through the same thing as CGI where like there are some terrible movies out there that are CGI based. There's this, there's this one, it takes place in like Greek mythology that's like notoriously terrible. There's one with The Rock in Scorpion King, where he comes out and like, it's very clear that they just didn't give the 3D artists long enough to make it look good. And so it just like, looks really awkward.

• 2:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Like just shit.

• 2:32:13John Coogan?

  Didn't age well. But then some CGI from like the original Star Wars in 1979, you see the green screens and you're like, wow, that still looks amazing. It holds up. And so you gotta know when, when to actually go in, dip your toe in. There's been another turn of events in the Warner Brothers takeover. Have you seen this on Kalshi? It's been going back and forth, neck and neck. Now Paramount is in the lead. 54% chance that Netflix takes over, or that Paramount takes over Warner Brothers. Netflix is at 36% and none is at 10%.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  And I believe the final offers need to be submitted by tonight or tomorrow night. I forget exactly, but Paramount's revised offer for Warner Brothers will likely come in at $32 per share. Let's pull up this video of Ted Sarandos having a chat.

• 2:33:08John Coogan?

  Absolute goat. While we pull that up, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use to keep their apps working. And let's go over to Deadline.

• 2:33:21Speaker 07

  I like how you asked that question. We've been working hard on this transaction to acquire Warner Brothers and HBO and we're deep in that deal every day.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  Would you prevail?

• 2:33:33Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely. There's no reason for not to. Right now, our deal is the best deal. It was determined by the Warner Brothers board. It was reiterated to suggest it to their shareholders. We're going to vote on March 20th and that there's no rational reason to block the deal. It is, you know, we're 9% market share growing to 10, so there's really no concentration risk in our deal. And what's exciting, I think, is we'll be able to have this 100-year legacy of great storytelling finally in the hands of a company with a balance sheet that can celebrate it and invest in it and grow it.

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  The Trump language kind of comes, it works its way in because you're hanging out with your friends, you start doing some Trump impressions, and then it just comes out. It just comes out sometimes. It's just one of the greatest impressions ever. So you just gotta do it every once in a while.

• 2:34:26Speaker 07

  The year before, it's gonna look like that next year and the year after and the year after.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  It's gonna be the greatest documentary that the world has ever seen.

• 2:34:33Speaker 07

  Traditional forty-five day windows, theatrical exclusivity.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  You should be like, didn't you read this Satriani piece? Everything's going to zero. Does it matter? Does it matter if two companies that are zero combined? No, just let it happen.

• 2:34:49Speaker 07

  So we're excited to be in there. We want to help them win.

• 2:34:51John Coogan?

  He's lapel maxing.

• 2:34:52Speaker 07

  Pam and Mike, Warner Brothers, they've opened nine number one films in a row. That's amazing. That's the kind of track record we're excited about.

• 2:34:59Jordi Hays?

  All right, we can pause it. Uh, over the weekend, there was some new, uh, reporting from Bloomberg. The Justice Department's investigation of Netflix's proposed takeover of Warner Brothers includes a scrutiny of whether the streaming giant's behavior wields anti-competitive leverage over creators. He talked about it going from nine to ten percent market share.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  Yep, but in terms of buying.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  But the issue is it's taking buyers from like, a handful of buyers down to one.

• 2:35:24John Coogan?

  This is more real. And I hadn't considered that and it is.

• 2:35:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that's, that's, that's what we were talking about with Ashley Vance. Hey, you, you sell documentaries.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  You excited to have.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  One less buyer.

• 2:35:34Jordi Hays?

  Literally no one to play offers against each other, just kind of, here's the price, take it or leave it.

• 2:35:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, Netflix for a while has had co-CEOs. Maybe you can mommy daddy them. Go to one. Oh, the other one said he was gonna buy it for five hundred million. He's like, he didn't say that. I was just texting with him. What do you want to say, Tyler?

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  At some point, the big labs are gonna be buying these documentaries, right? If you have good enough, if you have very high quality training data, you can sell straight to OpenAI.

• 2:35:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, yeah. Uh, I mean, honestly, like a Sora deal wouldn't be out of the question for, uh, for Warner Brothers, you know? Uh, I wonder if the Disney, the Disney deal is exclusive in that they will not be on another AI generation app. But is it exclusive the other way? In the sense that Sora will not add Superman or Batman? And they will only have Spider-Man? Because it does feel like never the two shall meet. Like, we're not gonna see Captain America and Superman fighting in anything other than a Chinese model that's getting a cease and desist. But, um,

• 2:36:36John Coogan?

  in theory, Sora could go and do a deal with Warner Brothers in addition to Disney, but that might have been stipulated as like, no, we want to be the exclusive provider of superheroes.

• 2:36:46Jordi Hays?

  We don't want anyone to out, out-slop us.

• 2:36:49John Coogan?

  Yes. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So I

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  I think it's gonna be a big moment when Disney IP

• 2:37:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:06Jordi Hays?

  This is horror.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  But also when this, when this concludes, I mean, it's gonna be, it is neck and neck, as we've seen in the call sheet chart, and then also, it's, it's, there's a lot at stake, like the breakup fees and the billions, I think, like, there's, it's a, you know, political story, there's so many different things going on. Anyway.

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  I think

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  We have our next guest. Well, while we bring him in, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Come on to the TV panel. Mike, good to meet you. How you doing? While he's sitting down, let me tell you about vibe.co. We're D to C brands, B to B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like

• 2:37:52Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:37:54Speaker 08

  What's up, gentlemen?

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  What's up? Please introduce yourself. First time on the show.

• 2:37:58Speaker 08

  Sure. First time on the show. Happy to be here. Long time watching.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Nice hat.

• 2:38:01Speaker 08

  Thank you. Thank you. We were actually talking earlier, saying, how long have you been watching the show? And you're like, back to the hotel room. I was like, I can't remember the hotel room, but I remember the printed tweets.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:38:10Speaker 08

  I was like, that's that long.

• 2:38:12John Coogan?

  We have a lot of paper today. We always stack up a ton of papers on Monday because we get the weekend edition and the Monday edition.

• 2:38:18Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:38:19John Coogan?

  And then we print some other stuff. We gotta bring back the printed tweet for like the best tweet of the day. But honestly, the printer was like a major rate block, rate limiter for us. Like, because we'd be like, we're going live. And we used to just like, start the show around 11. We'd be like, ah, we're 30 minutes late, you know, because we would just do RSS. Now that we're live at 11, it's like, the printer's gotta work. And we would print like hundreds of pages.

• 2:38:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Because we'd be printing whole articles. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted your introduction.

• 2:38:47Speaker 08

  No worries. So Mike Anziata, founder and managing partner at Also Capital, and we're early-stage hard tech fund, investing in inception, pre-seed, seed.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you get into VC?

• 2:38:58Speaker 08

  How did I get into VC? Had a bit of an interesting path, a little bit non-traditional, so.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Stanford?

• 2:39:04Speaker 08

  Stanford, yeah.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  Did you actually go to Stanford?

• 2:39:06Speaker 08

  Uh, no.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:08Speaker 08

  I started at Harker and then now it's good.

• 2:39:12Speaker 08

  No, no, no, so I've been doing venture for a little bit more than a decade, but actually. Over night success.

• 2:39:21Speaker 08

  So a little bit more than a decade, started my, went to Cornell for undergrad, which.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Still Ivy League?

• 2:39:26Speaker 08

  Still Ivy League.

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  You got it. You got it. You're right.

• 2:39:29Speaker 08

  Exactly. Have you ever heard of it, though?

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have.

• 2:39:31Speaker 08

  Exactly. Yeah, Cornell undergrad, did the family office thing for a few years, actually worked at the Cornell Endowment, so I've been an LP, so. Been on that side of the table. And then business school and then started a hard tech company back in 2016.

• 2:39:46John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so founder, yeah.

• 2:39:48Speaker 08

  Founder, yeah, same year Andrel started. We're worth a fraction less than 60 billion right now, but you know.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  What were you doing?

• 2:39:56Speaker 08

  We were doing food technology development, so.

• 2:39:57John Coogan?

  Okay, oh, cool.

• 2:39:58Speaker 08

  Around the same time you're doing Soylent, John, so I'm sure we're doing food manufacturing technology, kind of from scratch, me and a co-founder in a lab, through Series B companies, still going, built out a big facility. So I've been doing hard tech, manufacturing for quite a, quite a bit.

• 2:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Give us a history of Also, then.

• 2:40:15Speaker 08

  History of Also, so, you know, it's funny, Also started as Will Brewery, Mike Anziata, and Colin Smith's Backyard Angel Investing Adventure.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:40:23Speaker 08

  In 2019.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  He was on the show on Friday.

• 2:40:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, he was on the show on Friday, I saw it. So I did Dormant Fund when I was in business school. So I've been a DRF partner for, for a number of years now, alum, started writing angel checks in 2019, kind of scaled up through SPVs and then raised our first fund in 2023. So that was a $22 million fund and through that journey, you know, we wrote the first check into Radiant Nuclear, you know, Varda followed shortly after that, and I've been on the Board of Varda since inception. Yeah, we did K2 at Seed as well.

• 2:40:53John Coogan?

  Killer, too.

• 2:40:54Speaker 08

  Any Signal, software type radios, we raised our first fund in, in 23 that I mentioned, and then wrote the first check into Northwood, so it's been a bunch of.

• 2:41:01John Coogan?

  Was that post-Zerp ending, the crash?

• 2:41:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, so it was post Zerp, you know, kind of hard time to raise a fund one as a new manager.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  But you're not saying I'm just going to go into crypto and like the frothy stuff. You're in the stuff that's on the next boom.

• 2:41:18Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, I think, let's just talk a lot more about this, but I think, you know, our thing from the beginning is, you know, who are your smartest friends and how do you believe in them before others do? And then I think the hard tick thing candidly grew outside of that, grew from that.

• 2:41:30Jordi Hays?

  When, how many checks had you written into Gundo companies or Gundo adjacent companies before John went?

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Put it on the map with that video.

• 2:41:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, I don't know. We did like six or seven before the Gundo bus and your thing, so.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  The pre-bus and.

• 2:41:47Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  The bus is really the defining line.

• 2:41:51Speaker 08

  Exactly, you know, VC, pre-bus. Yes, I mean, we did a bunch. We did Varda, Radiant, K2, AnySignal, that kind of crew of folks. And then since then did Northwood, first check there. You guys had Mesh on the show. We did that one recently as well, so.

• 2:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Every company.

• 2:42:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we've been very fortunate. They let like the non-engineer guy somehow cosplay as an engineer VC, which is a lot of fun sometimes, but I'm not afraid to make myself look silly every once in a while to try to learn something new, so.

• 2:42:24Jordi Hays?

  What is your, you're non-technical, but so what is your process for underwriting? Some of these companies where at pre-seed, they can often actually seem like a science project. And that's like the, I've probably made that mistake once or twice across 60 some bets where I invest. You know, I'm not a professional investor, but accidentally invest in a science project that was being positioned as like a commercial opportunity. But the ones you listed off, you know, started as kind of like far out ideas and now have very real commercial opportunities.

• 2:43:01Speaker 08

  Yeah. Look, I think.

• 2:43:04Speaker 08

  The unique lens that I kind of bring to this is the fact that I ran a company doing hard tech stuff for seven years across engineering, built the whole team, kind of know what a good engineer sounds like and how they execute product, go to market, operations, all that vertically integrated. We, for the most part, are investing in people that have done these kinds of things before. And if you look, by example, the Varda team, a lot of those guys are doing Dragon at SpaceX, right? They miniaturized it and turned it into Winnebago. If you look at the Mesh Optical team, they're doing lasers at SpaceX, they're doing lasers now. If you look at any signal, right, doing radios. A lot of the Northwood team, doing ground stations, right? They're doing the thing they were doing before, but with a different market opportunity. So the common thread is like, these are serious people building serious companies. And that's, you can kind of see that, once you've lived it

• 2:43:47Speaker 08

  for seven years, is, you know, I didn't, it's great that more people are coming in and wanting to be excited about investing in this category, putting more capital to work in the category. I think we need that.

• 2:43:55Jordi Hays?

  Marking you up.

• 2:43:55Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm really excited about the broader Silicon Valley community coming in and marking you up, five times, 10 times.

• 2:44:03Speaker 08

  Jordan, I got an on-cap note for you, if you're really excited about one of these things.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  It was in the cover of the Wall Street Journal Business and Finance section today. Investors go heavy on AI immune assets. Explain to us what HALO is, what it stands for, what it means.

• 2:44:21Speaker 08

  Yes. So heavy assets, low obsolescence, which is a term that I just learned a week or so ago. So thank you, JP Morgan. Are they a sponsor yet?

• 2:44:31John Coogan?

  Not yet.

• 2:44:32Speaker 08

  Do we want them to be?

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  Depends on what the product is.

• 2:44:35Speaker 08

  We love JP Morgan. We love JP Morgan. Yeah, I think this heavy assets, low obsolescence is, you know, these things that are very difficult to replicate. You build a chemical plant, or you build an aerospace production capacity. These kinds of things are much more resilient than your traditional B2B SaaS product that may be able to be replicated by Callitcode, for example, or OpenClaw, something like that.

• 2:44:58John Coogan?

  This was Delian's bit when we had him on for the slob versus steel debate.

• 2:45:05John Coogan?

  Uh, debating of, of, you know,

• 2:45:06Speaker 08

  The pay-per-view.

• 2:45:07John Coogan?

  What would be, yeah, it was a pay-per-view. Uh, what would be most resilient? But, uh, unpack that a little bit because, uh, heavy assets, high assets, uh, what does that actually mean in the defense tech context? Because there still is a lot of R and D that's happening.

• 2:45:22Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  And then low obsolescence. I want to know more about like the curve of like what can be obsoled because there are some companies, when I think about like, you know, a lot of people have been saying like, oh, like buy raw materials, like go long gold. And it's like, that is fungible. So it's, there's no real moat there. If you just own some gold, you just, it's commodities. So how do you think about non-commodity, non-commodity products?

• 2:45:49Speaker 08

  So, so two things. First, uh, like any great venture business at the core is some, is a company that has the potential to generate high return on capital in the long term.

• 2:45:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:59Speaker 08

  Like you have to account for the assets that it takes to generate the revenue and then how durable is the revenue over the long term?

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:05Speaker 08

  Um, that can come from Dow Chemical, which has just such massive scale that it's very difficult to replicate that scale and they have a very durable business, low obsolescence. They're not going to remake all those chemical plants.

• 2:46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:15Speaker 08

  Or it could come from something like a radio nuclear, who is building very complex, uh, nuclear reactors in a shipping container equivalent. And they're going to scale up, not just the design of that, but the manufacturing, the supply chain, the regulatory. And that gets to the second piece that we always talk about, which is we love companies that are novel in the aggregate. Right? We're not looking to, to your point on how do you underwrite a science or engineering, Jordy? It's like, it's not one specific thing we're trying to understand. It's what are the 32 things that have to come together? Why is this the right moment right now for this thing to happen? And if it does, now all of a sudden we've got a moat. Cause it's, it's not impossible for somebody else to get a reentry capsule like a Varda.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 08

  Right? It's not impossible for somebody to build ground stations like a Northwood. But the dynamism of these companies is in the ability to execute and move with speed and integrate these complex systems that become low abs- obsolescence, but they are heavy assets.

• 2:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like the factory is the product. I've always heard that thrown around as like, and I always read it as like, the real challenge is manufacturing at scale. But I, I think there's another cut on the factory is the product, which is probably something like, like. You actually would be very reticent to invest in a hard tech company like Varda if they were like, yeah, we have a third-party manufacturer that produces the capsules. We just send them a CAD file.

• 2:47:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think it really depends, right? Like, I love the, I love the theory behind the factory is the product, but I also think there's some pretty strong, you know, strategy that that needs to be built on, you know? Why should we build a factory? And if you look, SpaceX is a good canonical example of this. Why should they build a factory? Well, it's because they were creating a lot of the demand at the same time as they were trying to deliver it at a given unit price to unlock a bigger economic opportunity. And there was no third-party even available.

• 2:47:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47:58Speaker 08

  That they, so they had to do it themselves. So they couldn't meet a spec, so they had to do it themselves. And I think that's the different dynamic where you should not, and I post about this a lot because it like, definitely is a thing I believe pretty strongly, you should not vertically integrate just for vertical integration's sake.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, no car.

• 2:48:13Speaker 08

  It's a poor use of capital to take a bunch of equity and shove it into a commodity machine, which you could not do, for example. But if you look at like a Varda, for example, cadence is everything for that business. So if cadence is everything, you got to be able to turn fast. So they have a lot of capabilities they built in-house to be able to do that. Same kind of thing with the Northwood, right? In-house, as much as they possibly can because they have to turn fast to move with speed. Speed's really the advantage, but it is built on a foundation of the ability to deliver at rate.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:42Speaker 08

  And that's kind of the core. When you say factory is the product, I think, I agree with that.

• 2:48:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:45Speaker 08

  But where are you pointing that advantage? Where are you pointing that? Because it is an investment that you're making as a company. And it's something that even in day zero investments, like all of our stuff is pretty much inception precede.

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:55Speaker 08

  We're thinking like, if you're going to build a factory in three years, you need to be thinking about it now.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:59Speaker 08

  So why are you building that factory? Why are you doing that? Like, what competitive advantages it give you? And I think that's how, you know, the people that we backed have really had a good sound, like head on their shoulders of how to think about those trade-offs of buy-build decisions.

• 2:49:11Jordi Hays?

  How did you react to the general intelligence crisis of 2028? The viral essay that nuked the markets? I saw this guy, John Lober, had a, had a pretty... Kind of a response to it, breaking it down. He was in some part saying like institutions have a lot of momentum. They can carry that momentum and adapt to these new market forces. He also suggested that re-industrialization could. It seems obvious that if a lot of our jobs can be just automated with a computer, maybe they weren't that real in the first place, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done in the physical world.

• 2:49:52Jordi Hays?

  There's, America needs to figure out how to make stuff again, not just kind of push paper around. And so are you optimistic that this could shift talent from, you know, making the 50th like vertical CRM to making stuff? Do you think this could be?

• 2:50:13Speaker 08

  Look, like I, I'll say this. I don't think we need to send our boys back to the coal mines.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  The children, they're for the mines.

• 2:50:22Speaker 08

  The children, no, I'm just kidding. You know, my kids, if you're watching, which I think you are.

• 2:50:28Jordi Hays?

  Get off my.

• 2:50:29John Coogan?

  It's light blue collar.

• 2:50:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's, well, I think it's, you know, what are we doing next? Right? So if you go back to horse and carriage, right? It's, hey, Ford has a job for you on the production line. Like, go learn how to do that. And I think the opportunity is in the companies that develop recurring education rework as processes or capabilities as part of their normal operating cadence. Right? So a lot of our best companies, they will get seed funded and they will immediately start an internship program. And that internship program will become a funnel for new talent to come in after they graduate. For example. And I think institutionalizing that around these companies that are moving fast in new areas, whether it's lasers or nuclear or space, right?

• 2:51:12Speaker 08

  I think we could bring back that retraining, but inside the corporate entity.

• 2:51:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:51:18Speaker 08

  As it's the responsibility of the corporation is really our company's problem, that there's a talent shortage. We should take that on.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  He had someone who was working basically a blue collar job and just wanted to get like a forklift certification and he brought him on and then pretty quickly he was like. Writing CAM, CAD automation software, computer aided manufacturing. And like sort of became a CAM programmer, like almost, and that was like a lot longer path a long time ago. And so the upscaling thing is definitely real at these companies.

• 2:51:49Speaker 08

  Look, I think the, we could get into like this whole different thing around like the student debt crisis is definitely a big bottleneck to people being able to do this upscaling.

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 2:51:58Speaker 08

  Where they may be constrained financially that they just have to kind of keep, keep working to be able to make their student debt payments, for example. So I think that's a big thing that people.

• 2:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was having a conversation with Tyler. We've, we've had a, a number of, of interns, all of which have been always paid. But I was thinking if I didn't have the opportunity to just work for free for people in college, where at the time I was like working a job at a hotel, like grinding. But then in my free time, I didn't have a lot of skills. And so I would just tell entrepreneurs like, hey, let me just pick up little things to do. And ultimately learned a number of things that allowed me to start my first business and all that stuff. And going back, it, it feels like the, the, the sort of like unpaid intern is like completely like no go now. Like it's a, it's a negative signal if a company is doing it.

• 2:52:50Jordi Hays?

  But it might have to come back and it actually, if, if people really want it, it's like, yeah, you can work a job that is very low skill. So that, and then spend all the rest of your time, like re-skilling yourself.

• 2:53:06Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:53:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I think it might have to, might have to come back, although I'm sure that there's a million reasons why somebody would hate that idea.

• 2:53:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, look, I think it's just really important. So one of the things that's most inspiring to me about this moment in time is it feels like not only are there people spinning off of like the SpaceX's of the world that are now continue to take on really big challenges. They're doing two things, they're doing things that are really meaningful, that when you get at the root of them and there's an authentic drive behind a lot of what they're doing. But they're also willing to tell the stories and inspire other people to be better. If you look at Jared Isaacson coming as NASA administrator, like he is an inspiring human being, right? That I think we, we need more people like a Jared who's 30, 40 years old, whatever it is, like young person.

• 2:53:49John Coogan?

  He's been to space.

• 2:53:50Speaker 08

  He's been to space.

• 2:53:52Jordi Hays?

  He's processed payments. Every time I get a shift, shift payment checkout, I just go.

• 2:54:02John Coogan?

  Talk about debt. What is a reasonable debt load for a Series A hard tech company?

• 2:54:10Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  In software, venture debt is seen as cancer. Like, you do not want to go near it with a 10-foot pole.

• 2:54:18Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  Paul Graham said it blows up companies left and right.

• 2:54:21Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  It's very scary.

• 2:54:23Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  I think a lot of entrepreneurs, over time, they get comfortable, they learn how to use it effectively. But then it's always just like, well, I have this money sloshing around anyway. It's all one big pool. Like, it's not like the dollars get allocated one place or another.

• 2:54:35Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:54:35John Coogan?

  How are you talking to founders in your portfolio about debt?

• 2:54:39Speaker 08

  Yeah. Like, I could get hyper-technical about this, but I won't for this audience.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  No, get technical.

• 2:54:45Speaker 08

  Get technical. Get hyper-technical.

• 2:54:50Speaker 08

  The right amount of debt at Series A is zero.

• 2:54:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:53Speaker 08

  The right way to use debt in companies is in two places.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  Says the guy who sells equity.

• 2:55:00Speaker 08

  Says the guy who sells equity.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  No one should ever... Just come to me for another check.

• 2:55:08Speaker 08

  At the right time and the right place, it makes a lot of sense. There's really...

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  When does it make sense? When does it start to... You could take me out to Series D, I don't care. But where...

• 2:55:14Speaker 08

  For sure.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Because there are a lot of companies that we've talked to where it's hard tech, and they wind up buying a ton of machines in a big warehouse. And it just feels like the liability side of the business is very different than a couple programmers in a bedroom or in a garage, right?

• 2:55:28Speaker 08

  Yeah. So, you know, in a past life, when I mentioned I worked at the Cornell Endowment, I also got my CFA while I was there.

• 2:55:34John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:55:34Speaker 08

  And then went and got my MBA, so I'm probably... Yeah, such a non-traditional background.

• 2:55:38John Coogan?

  How did you wind up in finance with just a CFA and an MBA?

• 2:55:41Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:55:43Speaker 08

  But, you know, revenge of the balance sheets is kind of what I...

• 2:55:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:45Speaker 08

  How I think about what we're investing in now.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:47Speaker 08

  But, look, I think you're using debt for a couple situations. Number one, to buy long-lived assets.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:54Speaker 08

  But the caveat is they need to be tied to actual contracts.

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:59Speaker 08

  That will be pushing out real revenue.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:01Speaker 08

  And cash flow.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:02Speaker 08

  If you are buying, if you are using debt to speculatively invest in capacity.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  Risky.

• 2:56:07Speaker 08

  You are taking a lot of existential risk into the business until you have contracted revenue that has significant bookings and backlog. Alright, so if you've got two years of backlog and you want to take on, you know, an interest rate of 7% while your equity is 30% and you think you can get to a revenue milestone that blows out your equity multiple, that's actually a really good use, right? Or if you have, you know, there's a canonical example I always think of when I was working at the Endowment, we looked at a venture debt fund. And it was super interesting, like 2015, this was 2015. And they had a very good use case of using venture debt. And it was, they were lending to Pandora. And Pento for streaming.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  Just Pandora.

• 2:56:46Speaker 08

  Cheers to Pandora.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  So they were lending. Music service, not the makeup place.

• 2:56:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, yes, exactly. Not the jeweler.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  The jeweler.

• 2:56:53Speaker 08

  The streaming service.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  Streaming.

• 2:56:55Speaker 08

  They were lending to Pandora and Pandora basically had like a cash flow timing issue where they needed to buy servers to be able to store the music and stream it. And there would be revenue that would come off of the streams. So the revenue would lag the cash investments in the servers.

• 2:57:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:57:09Speaker 08

  But as they were growing streams, their multiple on the revenue was growing.

• 2:57:16John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:57:16Speaker 08

  So you actually could use the venture debt to bridge to a higher revenue multiple when you went to raise more equity and reduce the cost of equity. So even if you were paying 18% implied cost of equity IRR on the venture debt, including the warrants.

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:31Speaker 08

  It was still cheaper.

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:32Speaker 08

  Because the cost of equity was declining as you hit milestones. So it was episodic use where you knew you could raise equity as you hit a specific milestone to pay it down.

• 2:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:40Speaker 08

  Or it was part of the permanent capital structure that was tied specifically to cash flow. The trap is when you use debt to try to extend runway.

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:48Speaker 08

  As a crutch for not being able to raise equity.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  So even in a Pandora example, like it, maybe it's on asset back loan, but it's like almost asset back because you are just taking the money and buying assets.

• 2:57:57Speaker 08

  Correct.

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  That probably have some resale value.

• 2:57:59Speaker 08

  And you know the revenue is going to come.

• 2:58:01John Coogan?

  And you know the revenue.

• 2:58:01Speaker 08

  Because you know streams are going to go up.

• 2:58:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:58:03Speaker 08

  And then you'll be able to refinance it because equity investors say, you know, you're at 10 million streams, I need you to be at 15 million streams. And like, how do you get there?

• 2:58:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:11Speaker 08

  Well, at the time, like this was one way you could get there and buy the physical asset. So I think understanding where did the slope change of your multiple effectively.

• 2:58:18John Coogan?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 2:58:19Speaker 08

  Like those inflection points or permanent capital.

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Jordan, anything else?

• 2:58:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no. What, what founders in, in what categories do you want to meet?

• 2:58:28Speaker 08

  What founders in what categories?

• 2:58:29Jordi Hays?

  Like what kinds of founders, not specific?

• 2:58:32Speaker 08

  Uh, what kinds of founders? Good question. Uh, look, our big thing is founders that have fun.

• 2:58:41Speaker 08

  Have fun, but they play to win. Uh, we talk about that a lot. Like have fun, play to win. There's like plenty of research that if you're having fun, that's when you do your best work.

• 2:58:48John Coogan?

  You see that with the Varda team all the time.

• 2:58:49Speaker 08

  See with the Varda team all the time.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  Thing Winnebago is like funny.

• 2:58:52Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  Like clearly they're having a good time. They did the LK99 thing and it's like

• 2:58:56Speaker 08

  Totally, totally.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Midnight side project, very fun.

• 2:58:58Speaker 08

  Totally. Yeah. It's like, are you building these little cultural things that people have a good time?

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:02Speaker 08

  Um, I think that's really, really important.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:04Speaker 08

  Uh, but also the playing to win side too, because I think you can over index on let's have too much fun.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:09Speaker 08

  And realize like, hey, you're competing out here. So that's really what we're looking for is you, you know it. Like you guys have a ton of fun here, right? Like I think this cultural vibe is definitely what we look for in founders is are they having fun? It's how you kind of get through the hard stuff. So we're

• 2:59:22John Coogan?

  Let's put the hard tech to work. Tell us about.

• 2:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you hit the gong?

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you hit the gong.

• 2:59:26Speaker 08

  Me to hit the gong. All right.

• 2:59:27John Coogan?

  And tell us the announcement of 50 million.

• 2:59:30Speaker 08

  All right.

• 2:59:30John Coogan?

  Fund two.

• 2:59:30Speaker 08

  Our second fund, 50 million.

• 2:59:32John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 2:59:32Speaker 08

  Also capital.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  Go smash that gong.

• 2:59:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on down to the TVP in Ultra Dome. This is great. Have a good rest of your day and we will talk to you soon. And lastly, but not least, I will tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.

• 3:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Mike really backed at least 50% of the breakout hard tech companies of the last five years.

• 3:00:08John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 3:00:09Jordi Hays?

  At the earliest stage, really wild.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  Uh, I like this, this deep dive from, uh, Teo Berga, who says, reading a 2005 Paul Graham essay, gasp. He used the forbidden sentence structure. And it says, writing doesn't just communicate ideas, it generates them in 2005.

• 3:00:30Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that, uh, it seems obvious at this point that, uh,

• 3:00:36Jordi Hays?

  PG's blog and Sam's blog are both like

• 3:00:39John Coogan?

  Deep in the training.

• 3:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, core, core to the, uh, to the, uh, anyways, we got a bunch of timeline here. Let's, let's rip.

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  Want to rip through some?

• 3:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's rip through it.

• 3:00:50John Coogan?

  Take me through it.

• 3:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, chairlift capital says opening eye killing application software to then try to rebuild application software is the funniest timeline. Still opportunities in the enterprise. Uh, we gotta have somebody on from McKinsey or one of these big consulting firms to, to hear how they're positioning it to customers.

• 3:01:12John Coogan?

  Make us a deck. See a deck.

• 3:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Moving on, uh, where are we? Jim Kramer underrated poster.

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 3:01:22Jordi Hays?

  He this morning at 3:33 AM was outside.

• 3:01:26John Coogan?

  The guy doesn't sleep.

• 3:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Saying cold, early, dot, dot, dot. I am not worried. Anthropic has a solution. I read it in a report. What?

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  Big post?

• 3:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. I mean, yeah, of course, sent, sent IBM down 11%.

• 3:01:40John Coogan?

  Going to work.

• 3:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dolly Bali says investors simultaneously think AI is over invested and AI will take over industries.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a funny moment.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  This last one. SaaS is dead. Open Claw replaced all my subscriptions. I went from $480 a month on tools to $1,245 a month on API costs and 15 hours a week fixing YAML files. Adapter be left behind.

• 3:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Hope, Hope's, Hope's revenge says woke up to Claude Bot running its claw through my wife's hair. I had explicitly asked it not to do that.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Stop, stop, stop. There was a, there was a post about, uh, some meta researcher, alignment researcher, got all of her emails deleted by Open Claw or something.

• 3:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that was, uh,

• 3:02:30John Coogan?

  That feels like a crazy thing to post.

• 3:02:32Jordi Hays?

  I think she needed to, to stress that, that I, my, my sense is that She like set up a new device with a new email.

• 3:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:44Jordi Hays?

  It was not just like running Open Claw on her main meta email, but I think people read it.

• 3:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:51Jordi Hays?

  On her main account, which seems crazy.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  People were saying like, oh, it's bearish. Like she's literally an alignment researcher. It's like, that actually might make her better at her job, though.

• 3:03:00Speaker 02

  Well, she was at scale too before. She wasn't like in, you know, in the less wrong, like grinding through like EA stuff.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And EA would never be caught getting their emails deleted. No way. Just all of less wrong gets deleted by Open Claw accident.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Talenteer is launching Valley Forge Grants $10,000 awards for high schoolers to solve the problem that most inspires them using our software. Ditch the coffee runs and fake intern projects. Whoa, shots, shots fired at Tyler. Claude with ads was incredibly real. We'll pay you upfront to, we'll pay you to confront the challenge you care most about. At Valley Forge, Washington soldiers endured a brutal winter, turned the tide and won the revolution. Their fortitude has carried America to its 250th birthday. We're looking for pioneers to lead America to its 500th. I like the sound of that. Very, very cool opportunity. Based on our audience data, we have very, very few high school students in the audience.

• 3:03:58Jordi Hays?

  But if you're listening to this, go apply. Feel free to DM us if you do apply and we will try to nudge.

• 3:04:09John Coogan?

  What happened with this F1 race? Someone smashed? Someone crashed?

• 3:04:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Who in the chat was actually at this demo? Cause San Francisco, I've never seen San Francisco go this extreme. Let's pull up this video first of the truck actually jumping over one of the hills. John, I want you to see this.

• 3:04:28John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's play this. Wow.

• 3:04:32Jordi Hays?

  This is San Francisco, John. They've still got it.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  This is the best part about San Francisco. They close down roads for crazy stuff all the time. There's beta breakers, Halloween is a whole scene. There's a million other events that happen throughout San Francisco.

• 3:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, I used to do something like that with my clutch when I'd be driving my manual.

• 3:04:49John Coogan?

  There you go. Jumping over an F1 car. Wow. That is amazing.

• 3:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Driving manual as a high schooler in San Francisco made me into a man.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  You're really facing death on every hill. And then let's pull up this, uh, one of the cars did a burnout. People were thinking this was Yuki Tsunoda, but apparently it was one of the other drivers.

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  This is the Red Bull. Wait, why is it on fire?

• 3:05:12Jordi Hays?

  At one point it caught on fire.

• 3:05:13John Coogan?

  I thought it just like had some minor bumper damage.

• 3:05:16Jordi Hays?

  No, this was a wild, this was a wild demo. I think, I think Oracle and Red Bull really wanted to make a statement.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  They're spinning around here. Okay. And then they go forward and smash into the wall. Like that feels like the easiest crash to prevent. When I was watching this, I was like, while you're spinning around, that's the point where you're going to go crazy. But then it's just smoothly going forward and smashing. Front wing decimated. No brakes, I guess.

• 3:05:41Jordi Hays?

  No brakes. And then at another point, the car caught on fire.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  10 out of 10.

• 3:05:46Jordi Hays?

  10 out of 10 demo.

• 3:05:47John Coogan?

  Red Bull knows how to entertain. They know how to entertain. Like they, I see so many.

• 3:05:51Jordi Hays?

  This was on purpose.

• 3:05:52John Coogan?

  Actually, in the Apple Vision Pro update, I watched a Red Bull video, an immersive video. It was a skier, uh, video, about 15 minutes, and they take you backcountry skiing, heli skiing with these, uh, skiers. And they have the Apple Vision Pro thing and it is amazing. It's like one of the greatest experiences because realistically, I'm never actually going to go heli skiing, backcountry alone, but this like just you, you feel the scale and everything. It's so good.

• 3:06:23Jordi Hays?

  I, I called you at like 10 or 10:30 on Friday.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  You up?

• 3:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I didn't even call you. I just said, are you up? Question mark. And you, John sends me back a picture of him in a selfie in the Apple Vision Pro.

• 3:06:35John Coogan?

  In the Apple Vision Pro, you know.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  You're, you were probably the only active user of that.

• 3:06:39John Coogan?

  Well, you know what? I use, I, I got a Mac Mini hooked up to my Apple Vision Pro now because I got, I got a. I got a capture card that can take in an HDMI input. So I hooked the PS5 up to the Mac Mini and then mirror that to the Apple Vision Pro. So I can play PS5 in Apple Vision Pro with way too much latency and it actually doesn't work well at all. But it was a fun experiment. And an obvious feature that they should have launched two years ago, but they didn't figure out how to do it. Just put the HDMI cable on the actual power brick and just let you plug in anything. And you'd have a massive audience of people that just want to play all sorts of stuff that's HDMI compatible. Anyway, very, very.

• 3:07:24Jordi Hays?

  If you are in the market for a Western sort of vintage Gulfstream, Greg.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Greg's got you covered.

• 3:07:33Jordi Hays?

  X has got you covered. It's a 1994 Gulfstream GI VSP. The latest ask was only 3.75 million, so.

• 3:07:43John Coogan?

  This is beautiful.

• 3:07:45Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to make jets like this anymore.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Everything about this is amazing. It's so, it's so good, so opinionated.

• 3:07:53Jordi Hays?

  Look at the, look at the bathroom.

• 3:07:54John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:07:56Jordi Hays?

  The bathroom, they went.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  The bathroom is crazy steampunk, yeah.

• 3:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Star Wars mode.

• 3:08:01John Coogan?

  Cantina, yeah. Uh, should we watch this latest, uh, video from Sea Dance?

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 3:08:08John Coogan?

  So it starts by saying Hollywood is cooked. Hollywood is cooked based on the new Sea Dance AI video model. It's showing Transformers, but let's actually track what's going on here. Starts out as a, as a jet, a combat aircraft. He gets out of the jet, turns in around, now it's Transformer. Okay, then he gets in another cockpit. Now it's a helicopter and it has a gun on it. Okay, he's shooting it. That's useful. You needed to be in helicopter mode, but now you gotta get back in the Transformer again. So he gets back in the Transformer. Oh, the, turns out the Transformer can run like a human and walk, but it turns back into a plane. Back into a plane. Then what do you want to do when you're a plane? You want to land on the freeway, on the highway, on the street.

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  You land, you get back out, then you get back into your Transformer to get in the front cockpit.

• 3:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Entirely realistic.

• 3:08:58John Coogan?

  And now you're back in human mode, humanoid mode, and then you blast off.

• 3:09:03Jordi Hays?

  You would not be criticizing this if this was an actual.

• 3:09:07John Coogan?

  A plane and you fly backwards.

• 3:09:08Jordi Hays?

  John. If this was an actual scene in Transformers, you would just be watching it being like, that's tight.

• 3:09:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so, I agree. I would be saying that's tight. And it is incredible visual fidelity. Incredible visual fidelity. And just an amazing video and entertaining to watch. And that's why four million people enjoyed it. And it only has one community note, and the community note is just AI slop engagement farm. Yeah, obviously, this is not cooking Hollywood today. It's cool, it's cool, but really impressive considering that this truly is the most expensive shot you can do in Hollywood. Like, it is so, so complicated to animate all of those different rigid bodies as they interact with each other.

• 3:09:56John Coogan?

  And they don't, and they tuck inside. It's so difficult. It's the Mount Everest of motion graphics and CGI.

• 3:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Tyler could do it if we gave him ten minutes, but I see your point.

• 3:10:07John Coogan?

  And the final step in any of these, like, you can actually go and animate the rigid bodies in Cinema 4D or Houdini or something, rig all this up. But the final texturing, the color grading, blending everything in, that's another major step. And it just nails all of this. The lens flares, the reflections on the glass, all of that's like another step. Because you create the jet, and then it just looks like, you know, a 3D render of a jet. So you have to blend it in. You have to make sure the colors match, make sure it matches the background. This stuff is so time consuming. And having a tool that at least allows you to do some pre-vis, animate, interpolate, do a bunch of different things, obviously would require a lot more art direction to get that to a place where it's amazing.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  And it makes sense, because a lot of the CGI that happens in Transformers, I know a lot of, some of the Transformers clips are silly, but... A lot of it's very motivated. Like, it shows you how things move and there's a decision driving one transformation to another. It's not just randomly switching from a plane to a car to a plane and back and forth. And it's usually meant for like dramatic weight and there's some weight and timing and there's art direction that sits on top of the actual CGI. Anyway.

• 3:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, open claw field ordering frenzy creates Apple Mac shortage. Delivery for high unified memory units now ranges from six days to six weeks. I called it. I did call it.

• 3:11:36John Coogan?

  You did.

• 3:11:36Jordi Hays?

  We did the math a couple of weeks ago and it seemed obvious that if the frenzy kept up, there would eventually be some shortages.

• 3:11:45John Coogan?

  I mean, demand for AI is continuing unabated. People are using this stuff. Martin Shkreli shared the Nvidia demand check on Lambda. Lots of things are out of capacity right now. People are using stuff. If you need to hop on Lambda, hit us up and we'll introduce you. But.

• 3:12:03Jordi Hays?

  People were pretty triggered by Gary Tan and the YC crew jumping on a podcast dressed as lobsters. And I was triggered by people's reaction to it because we have done similar gesture maxing many, many times. I think they were just having, they were just having a little fun.

• 3:12:23John Coogan?

  Let them have fun.

• 3:12:24Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but apparently fun, fun is illegal.

• 3:12:29John Coogan?

  Fun is illegal.

• 3:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Hunter Weiss.

• 3:12:32John Coogan?

  You have to pack it up. We got it. We got to talk about our secret plan.

• 3:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:12:36John Coogan?

  We're leaving, we're leaving California, not because of any taxes. Those don't apply to us. But because there is an entire Maine village with a church and multiple homes that's on the market for $6 million and we're going to move everyone there. I'm hearing some claps. I think people are in. They're down.

• 3:12:55Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna build a hut.

• 3:12:55John Coogan?

  The whole crew.

• 3:12:56Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna build a hut.

• 3:12:57John Coogan?

  It's a 40 acre village and it's, it was first listed for 5.5 million. You get the whole town.

• 3:13:02Jordi Hays?

  What actually qualifies as a village, though?

• 3:13:05John Coogan?

  Well, it has 21 structures, 21 structures. And this is where it gets funny. So, we were saying, let's move the whole team there. There's 21 structures. We're a small team. We've got like 10 people. That's enough. There's not 21 houses, Jordy. There's 21 structures. So it's entirely likely that Tyler over there will have to live in a barn. Or shed, or perhaps the church.

• 3:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Bidding. And the stable.

• 3:13:28John Coogan?

  But other properties found on the unique compound included Greek revival style dwelling, antique barns, and multi-bay garages. Would you go if you had just had to stay in a multi-bay garage? You can sleep in a GT3RS. You can also sleep in a multi-bay garage.

• 3:13:43Jordi Hays?

  If you get some cloned horses.

• 3:13:45John Coogan?

  Clone ponies. Let's do it. Everything a homeowner needs to build their own thriving community or set up one-of-a-kind rental than you. Very fun option if you have a need for 21 structures. Head over to Maine and pick this up.

• 3:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Hunter Weiss shares one of the best product ads ever.

• 3:14:02John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:14:03Jordi Hays?

  It's the iRun, the iPod Shuffle.

• 3:14:05John Coogan?

  Really good.

• 3:14:05Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to make ads like this anymore.

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  Really good. Simple.

• 3:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Really, really good.

• 3:14:09John Coogan?

  Tells you exactly what it's gonna do. Run around.

• 3:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Really, really, really good.

• 3:14:13John Coogan?

  Beautiful.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Bring it back. Will Depew says whoever builds Gmail App Search should be burned at the stake. Every time I use this app, I want a KMS.

• 3:14:25John Coogan?

  Seventy-five likes.

• 3:14:27Jordi Hays?

  Proof of insurance. And it's just pulling up a bunch of Delta Airlines receipts.

• 3:14:33John Coogan?

  This is actually extremely annoying. I don't know how the search got so fuzzy, but you can search for exactly the term and it'll just be like, there's this one cookie that's buried in white text that sort of matches it and it just shows it to you. They gotta do something here. I think it's a big app, so there's probably some overhead to like, fully rewriting this. But search is tough. Search is hard, even in the AI apps. I find that they generate so much text now that if I search for one keyword and I have it in my mind, it's like, well, that word came up the last 50 chats. Like, it comes up all the time. And so it's been, it's been very hard. But I do think, I do think it'll get better. But certainly an opportunity.

• 3:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Dylan Field was having a little fun. He says, "Nothing to see here. Sometimes the chairwoman of the task force on the declassification of federal secrets just likes posting pretty pictures. Please continue talking about the Olympics." And Anna Luna sharing an image of what looks like a wormhole. And just vague posting now. We got, we got Congress. Congresswoman vague posting now. I love it. I love it. Let's keep it up.

• 3:15:47John Coogan?

  You gotta, you gotta vague post every once in a while.

• 3:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Bone.

• 3:15:49John Coogan?

  Any vague post to go through?

• 3:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Last one says, "My culture is not your costume, Brian Johnson." Because Brian said he decided to live life on Friday. He was spotted just playing some video games, having some Taco Bell.

• 3:16:05John Coogan?

  He's having fun.

• 3:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Some pizza, some Dr. Pepper, having a lot of fun, looking not his, not his usual self, but locked in on, on, on the big game or something like that.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  Plant the bomb. I have some words of inspiration for the listeners.

• 3:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, no, we have to, we have to, we have to say this last one.

• 3:16:22John Coogan?

  That's my words of inspiration after you plant the bomb.

• 3:16:24Jordi Hays?

  No, and then I actually have a few more last ones.

• 3:16:26John Coogan?

  Okay, read this one off.

• 3:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's see here.

• 3:16:30John Coogan?

  Excuse me. Neil Renick says, "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Send them a Teams meeting link and finish them off." I love it.

• 3:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last thing we'll cover today, Anthropic posted earlier, "We've identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Minimax."

• 3:16:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:16:52Jordi Hays?

  "These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models." People were having a lot of fun with this. They said, "No crying in the copyright casino," in all caps. Or, uh, Daniel, uh, uh, Luke brought up a vintage, uh, growing. Daniel posts, "Oh, did someone take your hard work and use it to train a model to mimic your expertise without compensation?"

• 3:17:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Pot, cuddle, little black potential.

• 3:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Another person says, "I can't believe someone would just steal from Anthropic like this. The millions of man-hours Anthropic spent handwriting code, text, art, books, et cetera, to generate enough data for training must be taken into consideration here. Where is the respect for IP?"

• 3:17:39John Coogan?

  Wild, fun times.

• 3:17:41Jordi Hays?

  And well, here's where we'll, here's where we'll end. Neat says, "Reading one LinkedIn post is equivalent to unreading five books." And that is a good time to remind you.

• 3:17:54John Coogan?

  To leave us five stars. Yeah, follow our LinkedIn. We're on LinkedIn. We're posting regularly now. We got a bunch of fun stuff. Little clips from the show, rewritten, little takeaways, little things that are on our mind. Uh, we really would appreciate a follow over on LinkedIn.

• 3:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Computer.

• 3:18:08John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars.

• 3:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Make sure everyone in the audience has the best evening of their life.

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  And sign up for the TVPN newsletter at tvpn.com. Goodbye.