Microsoft’s Energy Tab, OpenAI Goes Super Bowl, Ellison Makes His Move | Marc Benioff, Brian Chesky, Baiju Bhatt, Gabriel Carafa, Alfred Wahlforss

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (03:01) - Microsoft and the AI Power Backlash (30:44) - OpenAI's Superbowl Ad (48:55) - Google Launches Personal Intelligence (01:04:36) - David Ellison Eyes Hollywood Throne (01:29:51) - Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, discussed the company's strategic focus on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance user experiences. He emphasized the importance of developing AI interfaces that go beyond traditional chatbots, aiming for more intuitive and visual interactions. Chesky also highlighted the potential of AI to revolutionize consumer applications, particularly in the travel and living sectors, by offering personalized and seamless services. (01:54:01) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:04:03) - Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder of Aetherflux, discusses his new venture's mission to build a power grid in space by deploying satellites in sun-synchronous orbits to collect continuous solar energy and beam it to Earth using infrared lasers. He highlights the advantages of space-based solar power, such as consistent energy generation and the ability to provide power to remote or contested areas, with initial applications targeting Department of Defense needs. Bhatt also reflects on the challenges of transitioning from finance to aerospace, emphasizing the importance of rapid iteration and learning in developing innovative technologies. (02:38:31) - Gabriel Carafa, co-founder and CEO of Noise Labs, discusses the development of Noise, a trading platform that allows users to long or short trends, brands, and ideas by integrating market activity with social data from platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to objectively measure cultural relevance. He highlights the platform's ability to identify emerging trends, such as the rise of indie rock music over the past 18 months, and emphasizes the importance of markets in predicting future shifts in relevance, moving beyond traditional social media metrics. Carafa also addresses challenges like distinguishing genuine interest from manipulated data, underscoring the platform's reliance on market-based relevance where users invest capital, thereby reflecting authentic engagement. (02:47:04) - Alfred Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO of Listen Labs, discusses how their AI platform conducts large-scale, personalized interviews to help companies like Chubbies develop better products by understanding customer preferences. He highlights the challenges consumer brands face in gathering meaningful insights and explains how Listen's AI overcomes these by engaging with thousands of customers, providing nuanced feedback that informs product development and marketing strategies. Wahlforss also shares the company's growth, including a 15x revenue increase and raising $100 million, emphasizing their focus on scaling and hiring top talent to meet demand. (03:00:53) - Marc Benioff, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce, is a pioneer in cloud computing and a prominent philanthropist. In the conversation, he discusses the integration of AI into Salesforce's products, highlighting the enhanced capabilities of Slackbot, which now offers advanced reasoning and personalized responses, aiming to significantly boost workplace productivity. Benioff also addresses the broader implications of AI in the enterprise, emphasizing the importance of context-aware AI agents and the need for responsible AI deployment to ensure positive outcomes. (03:32:51) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://cisco.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://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 TVBN. Today is Wednesday, January 14, 2026. We are live from the TVBN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a smoke grenade and it's not a sponsored smoke grenade. We should have put a brand on there.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  You should.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Throw that smoke grenade, Jordy. Let's check out the new graphics.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you want to see it again?

• 0:21John Coogan?

  I want to see it. Throw some smoke. Ramp.com. Time is money.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Save both.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  That doesn't work very well.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Well, you know about Ramp. You also know about Microsoft, who's making some waves because they jumped. They were on Truth Social scrolling as they do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on? No, of course, they were talking to the Trump administration.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever scrolled through social, by the way?

• 0:52John Coogan?

  It's.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  It's like five, five ads for every one post.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  The ads are crazy.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  And they're crazy.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  They're crazy.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  The ads are like, are like, are you a real patriot? Yes or no? And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next state, like next phase of the funnel. And then it'll just be like, glad to hear it, patriot. How about $200 donated? You're like, actually 100. And they're like, 200 it is.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  This is, I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have Truth Social, they have a Truth Social ETF now.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social ETF?

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Invest in the patriot economy.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Truth Social is really the, uh, building everything.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, multi-product.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  They're building nuclear power plants, do you know? What?

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they are.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  What a time to be alive. Well, we have a lot of great folks joining the show today.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  It's chess day.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  The linear lineup. It's the system for modern software development. Linear's building, is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb. It's chess day.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  We have Baiju from Robin Hood, now Aether Flux. He's the founder and CEO of that company.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Spaceman.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Space data centers. Gabriel.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  From Noise, Alfred from Listen Labs, and of course, capping it off with.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Marc Benioff.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Is the lightning round somehow sound theme? We got noise labs and then listen labs. We need Signal. We need the founder of Signal on the show.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm actually, well, I actually, I, I, Moxie's gonna come on the show.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Today?

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  He's got a note, so, so, no, no, no, not today. But he has a new privacy focus LLM.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Called confer.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna get him on the show to talk about it.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Awesome. Yeah, no, I, I, I'm a huge fan of Moxie Marlin Spike.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  And I'm excited to hear that he's coming on the show. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, cryptos, bonds, treasuries and more with all amazing customer service. So, Microsoft. I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers, increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, he, and, and the key, the key line in here is really just that he says, uh, he, you know, he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't quote, "pick up the tab for their power

• 3:33John Coogan?

  consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills." There's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025. You know, the, the, the new technology came out, everyone was, there was a lot of excitement in 23, 24, in 25, things got serious, the numbers got really big, the impacts got big, and the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  And one of the challenges is the early AI-generated videos were pretty bad. And so people were like, "These are bad, my power bill's going up, I don't like this."

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the point?

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Now, this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  They're really good, yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  So I think people might start saying, "Hey."

• 4:16John Coogan?

  It's totally worth it.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  It's actually totally worth it.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Seeing those little, you saw those, those four cats on the boat, that was.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  I haven't seen that one.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up, Tyler.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  We gotta see that.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Find the four cats.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, well, we will get to that at some point. Uh, I did see a. An AI video of people racing full, uh, full eighteen wheelers with the boxes in the back. You know how sometimes there will be real races with, uh, with, uh.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this video.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Rigs.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  See, I think most people would see this and say, can we get some sound?

• 4:47John Coogan?

  There's no, yeah, there's no amount of, of, uh, power bill. It's pretty fun.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, turn it off, turn off the sound. But anyways, I.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's worth it, worth it.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  It's worth it, clearly. Yeah, you see that and you're, and you're like, yeah.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  I think most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that, uh, they're getting this content for free.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  They, they gotta pay for it somehow. There's no free lunch.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the, the, the, the power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in twenty six. The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly. Uh, there were a number of just, it sounds, seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys and they're like, uh, yeah, we actually, we do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it and we just circle it, circle it around and we actually don't dump it out and waste it. And so you're just like, oh, that's over. And then we're like, but what about the power? Like, no, as soon as we use the power, the power's gone forever. Like we trans, we, we, we, we use the power to generate and then we need more power.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  So the power thing stuck around. Uh, there were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up. The one-shotting stories were very harrowing. And a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails, went GPT psychosis, like that one felt real, but it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails. The, the whole time it seemed like, look, these labs are, as soon as they're made aware of this, they're going to put a reality checker in the flow. And so if you're twenty prompts deep.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Uh, it'll just run an extra query and say, does this seem crazy? Like, does this seem like two crazy people talking to each other? Okay, let's shut it down. Like, it was pretty simple and you could solve it just in software. And when it's a product issue, you can solve it with a weekend hackathon. You can just lock in. It can be one Claude code prompt for all I know.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  You, you can, you can make the change to the app. And I actually noticed this, the Claude app has a pretty short context window, like chat length. Like if you're chatting with Claude and having it do, I wanted it to pull the market caps for every single one of our sponsors and I was a couple prompts deep and it was just like, this is, you've maxed out the context window, you've got to start a new chat, which is sort of annoying.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  What was the market cap?

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Over five trillion, let's go. We have some great news today, but TVPn sponsors have been having a good year. Obviously, Google Gemini is a big piece of that, but we do have some, we do have some very large companies supporting the show and we thank them for their support. We also thank the smaller companies that haven't raised a lot of money like TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Hey, one day, maybe it's a $10 trillion company, maybe it's the entire market cap.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  I could see it.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  So, the power one was tricky because with power, you know, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers and then you just see, demand is increasing, supply's staying flat, as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When, when demand increases and supply stays flat, we know what happens to prices, they increase, this is basic supply and demand. Yes, we can build nuclear power plants, but we had Scott Nolan from General Matter on the show yesterday. He's working extremely hard on this. He says, hey, we're going to be online in end of the decade.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  End of the decade.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  There's a lot of amazing folks. We've had Doug Bernauer from Radiant on the show. We've had Isaiah Taylor on the show. As aggressive as these founders are.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  They're trying to go critical this year. That just means, think of it as testing.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's still years away. And so, and then solar panels, solar panels, we can deploy those, but that's still slow and that doesn't solve the baseload power. What if you want to use a deep research report in the middle of the night or generate a cat video at 2am when the sun isn't shining? Of course, you can do it somewhere else, but, but it doesn't solve, it's not a panacea. And so. You got to build more power infrastructure. That takes time and I don't think very many Americans care about what the the the supply dynamic of power in America will be in 2035. If just last month, they saw their power bill go up by 20%.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  They're like, this is hitting my pocketbook today and I'm upset. So Bloomberg reported that a reported a 267% wholesale electricity price increase if you're near a data center. So basically, if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way, although it's there's a huge amount of variation. And it's now, even even if you're, you know, like, like, even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center build out. So there's $64 billion.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One, one thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers, if have have very real reasons to push back, right? It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products, right? Like, it doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's some jobs, maybe there's some jobs that come.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  I'm kind of, I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. I want one. There's empty buildings all over LA.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  We did joke about moving the show to Abilene.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  That would be good.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, it's very real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built and suddenly you're going to be able to go watch.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, like you could be a football fan, but even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're just like, I already have all the products. That's the big thing. It's like, power bill goes up, you know, what do you get in return? Nothing.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Aura.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Aura.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  A nice view, a nice view, if you're a data center appreciator.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, before we move on, 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. So $64 billion in data center projects are currently held up and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because. Prices are going up. Now, there's a couple of other reasons. Some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard, I just don't want a big, white, square building. Maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should, maybe it should have some aesthetics, put some

• 11:18John Coogan?

  windows on it.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Token cathedral.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know how big, that feels like a less, less important one, but there's a lot of communities that care about the, the beauty of the community, the natural, the natural beauty of whatever they have, and the fact that it feels like homes, and it feels like, it feels like, yes, there's a, there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there, and I know the cashier, and I go there, and I walk in, the data center, you'll never go in. They don't do tours, there's no reason for you to go in.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  The Walmart is local jobs, and it's a, it's a, it's a product for the community.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly, at least it has a brand, and you know, okay, well, I can get something there, it does something for me. Whereas, this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know. My slop might be coming from somewhere else. So, interestingly, the anti-AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims, in the affected districts, the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So, pretty much, just across the board, a bipartisan issue. And, you know, tech has obviously been, worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans more in the more recent history, but now they're facing...

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think, I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, you're just, you're, these are Luddites, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive? Why do I want this?

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because, like, it's gonna get built somewhere, and might, might as well not be in my neighborhood. It's very, it's the easiest NIMBY, NIMBY argument to make.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  So, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. We're going to talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first, and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong, actually. I think it's a very good move. Now, to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the clean tariff, clean transition tariff, where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers. And Amazon pays a surplus above electricity costs already. But Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement, like it's a whole story

• 13:47John Coogan?

  in the Wall Street Journal. And they've actually put a face to the program with Brad Smith, who's the president and the vice chair of Microsoft, giving quotes, laying out a five-point plan. He talks about a number of environmental issues as well. He talks about water, too, that they want to be net zero on the water that they use. In fact, I think Microsoft's

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Again, that's such a, that's such

• 14:08John Coogan?

  It's a lamp. It's a lamp. It should be a lamp. But it's still good to just say, hey, you know, if that was the talking point that you were going to hit me with, we already got it sorted.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Also, Microsoft is planning to be, I think, completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050, they want to be so carbon negative that they will, as a company, since the dawn of Microsoft in the 70s, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire life cycle of the company, which is interesting. But, so Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers. Now, a true free marketer, Probably against this. Why is one watt of electricity more expensive for one person

• 15:01John Coogan?

  or another? If I'm watching TikTok and you're, you know, building the next, and you're curing cancer, you know, on your laptop, why do you have to pay less than me? Why are we putting a value judgment on a particular use of a public good? Most public goods, like the roads cost what they cost, whether you're driving an ambulance or whether you're driving.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Zach Meyer says, "Would be cool to see a Microsoft liquid death collab for water that was used in a data center."

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Used water? Somehow, I have no idea if the water that comes out of a data center is drinkable.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, of course, you can just filter it.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Filter it again.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  And it'll be good to go.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  And the liquid death. So, the diehard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply and demand issues, let prices rise, and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally. But there are political realities, and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things, even if you're just going with natural gas. It takes time. There are backlogs. At a certain point, you buy all of the natural gas turbines, and then you need to build more turbine factories. That's why Boom, Supersonic is getting in the game. And at a certain point, you know, you have to build more factories, to build

• 16:26John Coogan?

  more factories, and it does get slow. And then there's also a capex consideration, because if you're a, if you're an electric, if you're a power company, and you say, "Oh, great, the rates are going up. There's a data center in my area. They're going to buy a ton of electricity. I got to bring a new power plant online." That's great. And then you go to your team, and you're like, "Okay, we need to put up how much money, and where's that money coming from? And we got to pay for, yeah, we're going to finance it, but we still have to pay for a bunch in the front, and it's going to hurt the interest payments on that. We're not going to, we're not going to be making money from this new power plant for a while, so we have to pay the interest, so we have to raise prices." So then prices do go up, even if they are responding as fast as they can. So, so there's a, there's a few different dynamics there that basically Microsoft and the big tech companies, I think, will be saying.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Hey, look, we want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up capacity, and so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully, you can pass those that revenue on into bringing up capacity. So I think overall Brad Smith is playing the game on the field, and the good news is that it feels like Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers, electricity represents 40% of data center OpEx, about $7, $7.5 million annually per major facility. Now, Microsoft has over 400 data centers. And so, energy is a significant line item. I think like $3 billion a year in electricity,

• 17:54John Coogan?

  something like that. That's very rough. Probably got to go to semi-analysis for the real number, but this is back of the envelope stuff. But again, $3 billion in energy costs for $245 billion in revenue. Microsoft's going to be okay if they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio. We're talking about $1 billion of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a major rethink on the company. But it is a big step towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of higher energy prices.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Satya is simply the GOAT. He's my GOAT.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  He does. He does appear to be the GOAT. Play that GOAT noise while I tell everyone about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's I think it's super smart. I think it was inevitable. Trump needs this for the midterms. He's putting pressure on everyone, right? Credit card stuff, data center stuff. We'll see. More of this and yeah, being being the first mover ultimately only the first mover, the one that sort of like says like, hey, yeah, we're excited about this.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Is the one that gets any credit, right?

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Like, Amazon doing this, it they don't, they're not going to get credit for it.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a weird sort of game theory dynamic where it this will probably wind up landing like a small tax on the entire on all the hyperscalers or all data centers as a as a as a broad like unenforced, it won't be a true tax, but they will all be paying it because the political reality is necessitated. But the but the first mover gets the compressed cycle, which is funny. It is it is from truth social to corporate concession. Like, that is the era we are.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Pipeline.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You you're in favor of of data center subsidies, right? Like, you want data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable to have.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Government back data centers, electrical subsidies.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  You gotta feed Claude.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I I just think like, this is kind of disappointing because it it just it's telling me that like, if you imagine we have like a real free market.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  There should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  And that's obviously not happening because energy prices will be going down.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  They're going up.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  So it's like, this is just like, this is telling me that in the future, we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Or at least on any kind of like, short term scale.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. It does feel, I I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is is at least in the short term, much more zero sum than people thought. It it's there's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But it's it the pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want, which is why I was I was, you know, a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy and and and a lot of work being done across all different technologies, unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not and not be unaffordable because people do want to to scroll Instagram reels and they want to

• 21:19John Coogan?

  watch AI slop and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone after watching four hours of Instagram reels.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent $200 million at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property, which will reportedly be used for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal. Seems like as part of that, TSMC will will expand their operations in Arizona, which is very exciting.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  And and they are basing their design for this off of Costco warehouses, Nick here? The render here is is very sci fi. I've seen I've seen renders of their facility in Taiwan. It looks beautiful. Seems like they're bringing some of that some of that aesthetic to Arizona. Seems seems pretty cool.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. He says, this isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her farm by a data center company. 11.2 million total. This is what big tech is doing in Michigan. So anyway, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember on the University of Michigan campus, there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like, stop the AI data center, or it was stop the data center build out.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  And that's when you knew you had to drop out.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, all right, this place is not for me.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Organ rejection. You got to go back, take the take the fight to them, put up some posters that say yes on data centers. Put a data center in the stadium.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  Subsidize the data centers.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Tear down the stadium.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so just just some context on that last exchange. Matthew Zaitlin at Heat Map says, I think this is shared as an example of big tech doing a bad thing, but I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6,200 per acre.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  So they're paying over 10x the price.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, it's they could easily be paying a premium because of this land, specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. But I wouldn't be surprised if some some land maxers are going out and just buying up, buy, you know, why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that In hopes that you, somebody comes in.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  I wonder how real this, I wonder how real this text message is because I get a lot of spam. Text messages for business financing. Oh, we'll invest in your company. You just, you just get like random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out like random numbers just for price discovery, just to sort of like aggregate some sort of, you know, metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out. Like if this person had said yes, what's the probability?

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  My wife got a spam text today that just said, babe, I dropped my phone and it broke. She immediately texted me and said, this isn't you, right?

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  But it's pretty interesting, interesting kind of like loop to get somebody and to, I imagine, send, send me a thousand dollars so I can get a new phone.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Do you remember the text that Ben got? He was asking him if you want to get steaks?

• 24:34John Coogan?

  What? Oh, that's, that's elite spam.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  It said, let's get steak tonight.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Let's get steak tonight. I mean, she said, yes. Yeah.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Did you respond and just say, I'm in? No, I just posted it. I should have responded to that. Oh, missed, missed opportunity to, to make a new friend.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Well, now is a great time to tell you about our newest sponsor, Cisco. Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. They're building the foundation for AI.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  We are very excited to be partnered with Cisco.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  It's truly an honor.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Truly an honor.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Um, in other news, the stock market is down, the Dow falls, weighed down by JP Morgan. Not good, not good news. There was a rocky quarter for JP Morgan and it weighed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Headline prices rose 2.7 from a year earlier, 2.7% according to the CPI. This was in line with expectations and November's rate core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, also held at the prior month rate. Now, overall, weren't things doing, wait, wait, wait, what did they say here? I don't have this. JP Morgan earnings, investment fees both fall off. JP Morgan reported that the bank's profit fell 7% in the fourth quarter, dragged down by a change from its deal.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  To take over the Apple card, credit card program.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  And surprising slip in investment banking fees. The investment bankers are not making enough money. Still, the nation's biggest bank saw revenue increase for both the quarter and for the full year and was optimistic about the trajectory of the U.S. economy and consumer. From Jamie Dimon, he said, consumers have money, there are still jobs, even though it's weakened a little bit, he said on a call with analysts. I saw a great Jamie Dimon hype reel on Instagram reels the other day, it was fantastic. In other news, the, there's more details about that Apple card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through, we should pull this up. Behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs, after

• 26:42John Coogan?

  two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time will see Goldman replaced by J.P. Morgan on Apple's credit card. Before we read through this, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So, in early December, a long-delayed deal hung over a call between J.P. Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  If you don't know David Solomon.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  You probably know him because.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  As DJ D Soul.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  DJ D Soul, but he also runs a big bank called Goldman Sachs.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program, and it's roughly $20 billion in balances, but the talks had stalled. Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations, you're moving too slow. J.P. Morgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, they'd secured a discount on the balances, we talked about this, where normally, these balances, they trade at a premium because people expect them to be paid back with interest. But in this case, they were, J.P. Morgan was going to get a discount, but they wanted more protection in case the loans grew worse, in case they were higher than expected defaults.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Goldman executives, meanwhile, didn't feel the need to bend much now that the Apple program was finally looking profitable. Some executives on both sides had started questioning whether to walk away. Diamond and Solomon got on a call on December 8th. According to people familiar with the matter, they discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon, people said. Just before the new year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week confirming the Wall Street Journal's earlier report. A little patting on the back for the Wall Street Journal for getting the scoop. The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  JPMorgan is adding the flashy program to its credit card lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances. Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card. Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses, a chapter it is hoping to forget. Moving the Apple credit card was never going to be simple. Card programs this big aren't put up for sale often and few buyers, few potential buyers exist. Apple is famously finicky about details and control, including with its credit card.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Before launching the program in 2019, Goldman and Apple agreed to unusual terms that other banks balked at taking over. Interested executives were especially worried about higher than normal delinquencies and subprime exposure and wanted huge discounts to consider a deal. Even still, almost nothing about the process of finding a bank to replace Goldman has been normal. To begin with, Goldman began looking to exit from the contract with Apple only a few months after it had extended its partnership with the tech giant to the end of the decade. Apple and Goldman had discussions with larger and smaller credit card issuers, American Express, Capital One, Synchrony, Barclays and Satander, as well as tiny fintechs.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Apple even debated bringing in private credit firms to help a smaller card issuing entity take over. But it didn't go that way and they landed with JPMorgan. So, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about Labelbox, delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Labelbox.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Get in the box.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Get in the box.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  The label box. Um, moving on. Uh, OpenAI is going to be running another Super Bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Why don't we?

• 30:49John Coogan?

  We need to watch last year's ad, react to that and see what we think will change, what will stay the same, what will they do? The artificial intelligence company behind the popular chat GPT tool is set to broadcast a 60 second commercial during NBC's broadcast.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  All right, with sound, with sound.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Let's watch it with sound if we can. The ad is the latest component of OpenAI's expansive marketing, expensive marketing offensive, which began last year with its first Super Bowl commercial.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  We can't, we don't have sound?

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Into, okay.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we, uh, the production team is telling us, unfortunately, we do not have the technology to play sound on a video.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Let's work on that.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, it's, uh, if I remember the song correctly, it's like doo doo doo doo, like something like that.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Is it, is it a, is it a licensed song? Cause you were thinking that they should, they should license, uh, Creed's Can You Take Me Higher for this next one, right? That was what you thought?

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Can you take me higher? And it's like to a higher plan. You're on the free plan. Please upgrade to the $200 a month plan. Oh, we got it?

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Look at these guys.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Let's go. We do have the technology. AGI is here. Okay. So there's a, someone throwing a spear. We create fire, then the wheel, then the wheel with smokes, then the horse, the horse came out of the wheel.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Man created.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  We created the horse and corn. We created corn. Maybe they should use a corn song. Freak on a leash. That's the song they should license. And a, and a nod to corn. I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like it is, it is a very well done piece. So they go inside the skeleton, build the 747, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV news, that's us. They go to the moon, somewhat equally important, create the internet, and then you start talking to the computer. And now.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  The merge.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  You got AI.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  And then you get the blue chat GPT dot.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so I, I love.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  I love this.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  It was just not necessarily.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  I didn't need a Super Bowl ad for me.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  I need a Super Bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Right? The people who are maybe on the fence about AI.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  But yeah, as a technologist, it has the aesthetics of like, wow, this is the coolest tech company ever. And this is like, this has the vibe of Apple. This has, it has a lot of throwback stuff. It feels like high technology. It feels techy, elite.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Designed. It feels refined.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  It's possible at the time, they were like, look, we're growing so quickly. We don't really need to run a Super Bowl ad.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's just, let's just flex on everybody a little bit by running one.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  I mean, there's a certain.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  But this year I expect it to be much more pragmatic.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  About what you can use to do, to do something.

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Exactly how they want.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  The average American to think about ChatGPT.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Where it integrates into their life.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so do you think it'll be one specific use case? Like, there's been OpenAI videos about ChatGPT helping you cook dinner. And I actually got an odd email from a friend, all about how he loves cooking with friends and how food is this important thing. And then he was calling out the ChatGPT video on food being like, I don't like this because it's, it's taking away the one thing I like as a human and.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  I actually had a funny thing.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Practically, I think it's fine.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Using an LLM to, for, for a pancake recipe last week.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  We worked.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  And it completely, the pancakes really did not work.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Skilly.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Because it's, it's basically taking the average of all pancakes.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  You made a mid pancake.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's just made the most like runny mid pancakes. Really bad.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I, I don't know. It'd be interesting. I wonder if they try to do anything on the, like, anything on the, um, it's probably too early for commerce side. You could see some of that. Maybe they want people to know commerce is coming. I could also see them trying to make it interactive somehow.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  You could imagine like when.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, maybe this.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Win?

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, but I was gonna be like, ask, like, talk, like, like, uh, chat with chat, chat, like, tell ChatGPT you want it. I don't know.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Well, it, well, it, it, it could, like, they could sort of launch, like, ChatGPT Sports or something where, you know, you're, like, the demo of what it's showing you is that if you have ChatGPT as your second screen during the Super Bowl, you're going to pull up more interesting stories about the players. You're going to pull up statistics. You're going to be able to understand the, the, all, like, add more context to your experience of Super Bowl watching. Even, like, oftentimes, if I'm watching the Super Bowl, I'll see an ad and I'll, you know, go and go to Google and say, well, what are the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time? And I'll wind up on some listicle and ChatGPT, of course, can generate that type of stuff all the time. You could filter and say, show me the best, uh,

• 35:53John Coogan?

  show me the best Super Bowl ads from tech companies back in the dot com boom. I want to know about those.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  And you can go anywhere. Uh, and that is the magic of ChatGPT. Uh, there's a whole bunch of other ways that they could try and contextualize it. They could try and be emotional, go with ChatGPT health.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if they'll do anything on the Dis- with the new Disney integration, like, if they wanted to spark, like, another Studio Ghibli moment.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  That would be really good.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  That IP is coming online.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Originally, they said some in January, so maybe the timing lines up.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  Be really wild.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you get Darth Vader in there or something, or who else?

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's a lot of characters to choose from. No, I was, yeah, I was saying, like, try to, try to use a Super Bowl ad to prompt people to make.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Go to.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  Go to ChatGPT and turn.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Make your, turn yourself or turn your family.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  Turn your Super Bowl party into.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Into a Disney themed thing. That would be very good. Uh, yeah, surprise celebrity appearance or celebrity endorsement would be, would be good. Uh, they, they, they've sort of shied away for.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Scarlett Johansson. Maybe they can bring her back into the fold.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Reversal, reversal and getting her back on the team would be fantastic. Um.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  But I expect that this will be this will be the AI Super Bowl.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  You think there'll be even more ads?

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there will.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  So for context, tech companies across Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity collectively spent 333 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the United States just last year, and that was up 43% from the prior year, according to estimates from an ad tracker, iSpot. They also shelled out 426 million on digital ads in 2025, more than triple their 2024 outlays. So, interesting. Digital is growing faster than linear? That's, I would not expect that. I would expect the digital to have been really, really popular and then them to have just jumped into linear, but I guess they've been.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Wait, are they talking about like streaming ads?

• 37:48John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe. It's from Sensor Tower. It just says digital ads, which I assume is Facebook, Google Ads, all that sorts of stuff. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL, NBA, and college sports games with ads for its Claude chatbot. It shelled out an estimated 16 and a half million dollars on linear TV ads in 2025. Despite boasting a base of over 800 million weekly users, OpenAI is, and that is such a stale number.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  Dude, they cannot get people to download this app.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  What do you mean?

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  Like, they really can't. I mean, they're not in the top 25 apps.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  Wait, which one?

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  Claude.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, you're talking Claude. I, I, so, sorry, sorry. That 800 million weekly active users is for OpenAI, for chat?

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but I know, I know. So they spent, they've been spending money all over.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Well, you know, you know why, you know, you know why the Claude is not at the top of the App Store charts? It's because if you generate a deep research report on the iOS app, it will not read it to you out loud. It doesn't have that functionality. And that's clearly a gap that everyone has experienced and recognizes. And, and as soon as they run into that, they uninstall it and they don't recommend it to their friends. So if you're listening, Anthropic, please add that functionality. I want to be able to listen to deep research reports.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think, how do they figure out how to get it? How do they figure out how to become a real player and consumer? Because clearly they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be spending that money.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  I mean, they need hooks. They you need you need some viral flywheel like. So the the chat GPT number, eight hundred million weekly active users. That feels woefully out of date. It feels like they're well over a billion and they're just waiting to actually drop that press release at a key moment. And now is not the right time to wow everyone with the real usage numbers. But I I definitely think that they're beyond that. This this number is very stale. Like, we got this eight hundred million weekly number months and months ago, and it must have grown.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Google obviously has a whole bunch of hooks into the Gemini ecosystem through Gmail and Google. There's so many different entry points. Claude, as an independent app, doesn't really have that. Also, I think just on a product sense, Chat GPT, I do think that the holidays were successful. And it was not discussed on on X, the tech elite and the tech. You know, like, anyone who's like in tech was focused on Claude code. They were doing vibe coding projects. They had time off from work and time to lock in and play around with like the hottest new coding agent. So people weren't people were people knew that Chat GPT could do images.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  But right before the holiday started, Chat GPT launched the image tab. And if you go to the image tab in the app, the most interesting thing there is that it's not just a prompt box. They have preloaded. Have you seen these? Like, it will it will show you like retro anime, like it will show you. It will show you like ideas, like turn yourself into a bobblehead. Turn yourself into a sugar cookie or a fisheye lens or ink work or pop art. And so it's taking the work out of someone like most people in tech. An image model comes out, Studio Ghibli thing happens. Everyone's like, what's the prompt?

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  They were like, it's too much to ask people to have an idea.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  It is.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  We need to give them the idea and we need to make the image for them.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  It it actually is too much. It actually is.

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  And then eventually, when when you have your

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  when you have your little sweet pea, whatever they're calling their new device.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  It will just be generating images on the fly based on your day.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  And then eventually you'll just be able to stay laying in bed all day long.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, just from a product perspective, the ChatGPT Images tab is, I think, an important just growth hack, which is something that they just have to do now because they're at that scale. And I saw that people were generating images and then sharing them and they weren't screenshotting them or downloading them with some watermark. They were clicking the share button in the ChatGPT app and sharing a link to the ChatGPT app that would show you the image in a preview if you shared it in iMessage or in a group chat. And that would onboard more people. And those sorts of viral loops, they they feel like, oh,

• 42:19John Coogan?

  the tech is so magical, it should just grow organically. But it already grew organically. Like, the organic growth was a billion people. Now, how do you get the next billion? Well, you probably have to do some growth hacking. And a product like Images in ChatGPT with Disney characters and links that beg you to install the app for yourself. And Claude isn't quite there yet, where there's an obvious thing that a huge swath of people can go to and then hook in and we can collaborate and I send you a link and then you install.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tough thing is like, if you're spending all this money trying to drive consumer downloads.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  But then you don't have image generation at all.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  At what point, why don't they just, even if that's not a priority for them.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:05Jordi Hays?

  It still feels like a product that consumers really want.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  In their daily driver.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  And so at some point, they may have to capitulate there.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  I mean, I don't know if they care about the the app race at all, the consumer app race. It feels like Anthropic's been super focused on the enterprise, super focused on coding, and that's been.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. But they say that, like, all I'm saying is you can say that you're not focused on consumer.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  But they run billboard ads all over LA.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  They're spending a lot of money on television.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  And so you kind of need to, like, make up your mind.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't really advertise on NFL and NBA. I mean, I guess enterprise buyers, you know, watch those shows. So 16 million, maybe it's worth it. But I agree with you generally.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Their ad campaigns have been great.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  That's it. And maybe they just want to rub it in, rub it in the face of the other labs. They're also going public, so they want, they, they, they developing like real name recognition broadly, I think is important. But.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  I mean, in, in, in theory, if they, if they host, if they, if they host Claude Code in a virtual machine that you can access from a phone and have it write software for you, it should be able to go and, you know, set up an API with an image generator and generate you images. And so you should be able to do that from the app, like Claude Code, if I, if I ask Claude Code to generate an image for me, it will figure out how to find an image generator, sign up for the API almost, or at least I will give it the API key and then it will be able to generate images for me, correct?

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, it would ask you to, like, you would have to go generate the API key and stuff.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  But that's actually, I'm, I'll try that right now.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what happens if you just ask Claude Code to generate you a picture of four cats on a boat or something like, how does it actually work through solving that? At some point, it, it, it should, it should, you know, prompt you to at least make, maybe make a decision about which image generator you want to use and, and at least ask for credit card information to pay for it. Maybe it goes to a free image generator. I don't know. Um, but the Wall Street Journal continues and we will continue after telling you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise money, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Um, selling to, selling AI to the masses isn't easy, says the Wall Street Journal.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Due to sustained public fear about the technology's potential downsides, businesses have already cut jobs using AI for tasks previously performed by humans and executives have articulated plans.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  Why would the masses be scared? Why would they be scared of this technology?

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Half of US adults are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence, according to a spring survey by Pew Research. That's a while ago, but.

• 45:53Jordi Hays?

  Only 10% say excitement outweighs their worry.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Skill issue. Just be in the 10%, right Tyler?

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between AI.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this would actually, this would actually be a great bit. We should make an AI Tyler that we can go to and say, and just we'll just compare the two of you guys. And this can, this can just be a good barometer for AI progress. How do you feel about that?

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Um, it could probably do a pretty good job because it's, I mean, it can already do like a talking head if you just put an image of me and then the voice you can clone.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  I know, but I don't think it would have your takes.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  I don't think it would have your takes.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Just say like.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  Or your aura.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Dwar Cash or.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  You would say, I'm sorry, that's too controversial. I can't hold that opinion. Uh, while OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions such as the light bulb. More recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. They feature people using the chatbot for everyday problems such as finding a recipe or searching for exercise tips. Which way will OpenAI go in the new Super Bowl ad? I imagine that they will go more proactive, more productive, more tangible. There will be a human shot

• 47:27John Coogan?

  with a camera using the app, probably on the phone. Uh, but we'll see. Uh, in its ads, Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Uh, yeah, why would you, why would you want to run an ad saying that? Uh, this strategy anchored by the tagline.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  This is a Super Bowl ad concept. We are not a threat to human intelligence. We are not a threat. Don't worry about us.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. How about a Super Bowl ad that says?

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  We hear you. We hear that you're concerned.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just, just, just a massive Super Bowl ad.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm warranted.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Our P doom is actually really low relative to the true risk. We think that the P dooms should be low. Everyone's like, what are they talking about?

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  5% chance of annihilation by end of year.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Well, uh, if you're running the Super Bowl, you gotta get on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. I want to be able to watch the Super Bowl on LinkedIn. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com and I know the folks who have the rights to the Super Bowl.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Sasha really should push to get LinkedIn, the streaming rights.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  For sure. Be a game changer.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  For the Super Bowl.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Uh, okay. So, uh, Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today, designed for you. Personal intelligence, they're calling it. Uh, personal intelligence draws insights from across your Google Apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below. They say Gemini already remembers your past chats to prevent, to provide relevant responses. But today we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of personal intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google Search and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses. Here are some ways you can start using it. Planning Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel

• 49:24John Coogan?

  because it'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been, and know that I went to Austria and recommend a different city, maybe. Shopping Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level, help you find items you love faster. Motivation Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards. Look at your to-do list. Privacy is central to personal intelligence, how you connect, uh, other apps to Gemini. The new beta feature is off by default. You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at any time. Personal intelligence begins rolling out today as a beta to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. That's me. So I gotta turn this on. I'm very interested in seeing, um, I, I imagine that I will not be able to link

• 50:09John Coogan?

  multiple Google accounts because I have a personal Gmail and then I have a work Gmail. And then I'd sort of want to integrate my old work G-mails that I think I have access to still because that says a lot about me, even though I'm not really using that stuff anymore and I'm not actioning those emails. I could see that being important in terms of like building out a.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you were sick of switching between, constantly switching between calendars and Chrome and having your personal calendar, work calendar, get ready to be sick of switching between. L L Ms.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, some of them have been have been surprisingly good at bootstrapping knowledge. I feel like a few of the L L Ms have been have surprised me by I'll ask a question and it'll just be like, and here's the context for T V P N. Here's the T V P N angle. And I'm like, oh, I forgot that I mentioned that to you or like you figured that out somehow or like, yeah, you did something. I don't know. The personalization is getting better. Maybe this is the year when it really hits. I know Chat G P T introduced it as a concept a while ago, maybe almost a full year ago, uh, and it hasn't felt magical yet. Pulse was cool, but it it I I never became like a daily active user of Pulse. Um, the the interesting question is like, yeah, i- is it is it a data source problem?

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Is it an architectural problem? Or is it an actual like model level problem? Are the models just not smart enough? Do they not have enough data? Or are they not designed in the right way where they can actually go over all of your uh, all of your information? I was using the new uh, Salesforce Slack Bot that we're going to talk to Marc Benioff about at two P M. And uh, it was remarkably useful in Slack because I I'm not on Slack a lot. And so I had a ton of notifications that had built up over months. And I was able to go in and write a prompt or just talk to chat Slack Bot and say, hey, like, catch me up, like, what's been happening in Slack in this Slack workspace?

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Uh, and it did a good job summarizing all the different uh, key things, where I was mentioned, what was relevant to me. Um, I did prod it on what anthropic model it's using exactly. And it's not using the latest and greatest, uh, four point five. It was using, I think, three point five. It didn't seem aware of the latest models. And also, it didn't have the ability to search the web. It didn't have the ability to to to act as like a full fledged L L M. You couldn't just ask it things. It was it was very confined to Slack. But within that domain, it was pretty useful. And it and it did help me like, sort of get to like inbox zero in just like a couple of minutes. Because I was just scan a digest of everything that's happening across all the channels instead of clicking through them, scanning, so reading the threads, the going down the

• 52:56John Coogan?

  it was just able to be like, here's the deep research report on it.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I am waiting, uh, I'm waiting for the moment where people are like, I'm not really interested in trying a new L L M that's hot because. Like having memory in the LLM and personalization is so important. Like waiting for that lock-in moment. Don't think it's really, you have some forced lock-in where a company is saying like, we use this LLM.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Or, or I mean, vice versa, where, you know, they're just, it's just like, yeah, in the course of my day, I use five different LLMs. Like on my phone, I use Apple Intelligence and that's routing to Gemini and then I log into Slack and that's using the Anthropic APIs. But it doesn't really matter because I don't care that they don't talk to each other. Like it's all, it's all fine and they're, and they, and they work, they, they're good enough for the particular thing that I'm trying to do at a particular time. That's another possible outcome here. Andrew Curran is summarizing some of the, some of the news here, saying that it includes Google Workspace. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into, you know, Nano Banana, you can have, you know, more suggested images. Hey, do you want to touch this photo up?

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Do you want to create some sort of holiday card? Like what ChatGPT ultimately wound up doing with.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  Go through Google Photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every photo I've ever taken.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Set the GPUs on fire for sure. Before we move on, Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  New York Times has some coverage today talking about IPOs of this year, 2026, maybe the year of the mega IPO. Not really new news for those of you listening. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic are going public. They talk about Eddie Malloy from Morgan Stanley says, we're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented IPO deal sizes. We are confident they're executable, given the scale of these companies and the investor interest.

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  In two decades, I haven't seen private companies that are this meaningful and are this impactful, said Jeremy Abelson, an investor at Irving Investors. Not only are they bigger and more relevant, but they're incredible companies with numbers that we haven't, that we've never seen before, ever. I can't, I think they're, I think everybody's excited to just get into these S1s.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  I expect them to be extremely impressive for a number of reasons, but-

• 55:31John Coogan?

  There's been a number of reports about like, how bad the gross margins are, how much money they're losing, we're about to find out the real details. It's gonna be exciting times, exciting times.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, we'll see. All the geopolitical chaos, you know, even, even this, this ruling around tariffs, which we didn't get today, all this stuff is gonna play into whether or not, whether or not the window stays, stays open.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Saks Fifth Ave. Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman filed for bankruptcy, crumbling-

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Are you a Saks guy? Do you shop at Saks Fifth Avenue? Have you shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue?

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  No, I've never been a-

• 56:20John Coogan?

  A department store guy?

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  A department store guy, ever.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Okay, you go straight to the Chrome Heart store. You're, you're the guy in line outside of Supreme.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Go direct, yeah.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  And they don't sell Supreme at Saks, right? Maybe that's why they're going bankrupt. The hype is moved on.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Zero Chrome.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  Zero Chrome.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, they filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday, crumbling under billions of dollars in debt, affraying relationship with vendors and lagging sales. The filing is the latest sign that America's luxury department stores, once landmarks, that served as immersive fantasy worlds for the wealthy and aspirational, are becoming an endangered species. Jeffrey Van Raymond Donk, the former Neiman Marcus chief executive, will return as Saks global CEO. He succeeds Richard Baker, the chief executive and executive chairman, who in 2024 orchestrated a $2.7 billion acquisition by Saks of the Neiman Marcus Group,

• 57:17Jordi Hays?

  which owns Bergdorf Goodman. Saks said it had secured roughly $1.75 billion to help finance the company through bankruptcy, much of it coming from its bondholders. Saks said it intended to emerge from bankruptcy later this year and it expected to honor all customer programs, make payments to vendors and continue to pay employees. Saks has brought in additional executives to help steward the company, including Darcy Pennick, former president of Bergdorf Goodman, as president and chief commercial officer. This is a defining moment for Saks Global and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future. This is, this is good messaging. Trump was messaging around the Supreme Court ruling.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  He said, if they rule against us, we're screwed.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  He was like, if they, if they rule against the tariffs, we're screwed. We're cooked. We're chopped and we're cooked. Ridiculous things.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like these stores are, if anything, just nostalgic, right? It really feels like an end of, of an era. Essence, obviously, went bankrupt earlier this year. In this case, in that case, too, founders are gonna, are gonna actually maintain control. So we'll see how they navigate through. But again, I just wonder, you know, as these stores shut down, like who, who can even fill these spaces?

• 58:51John Coogan?

  They're big.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's just not, there's not companies that want to come in and occupy a bunch of this, a bunch of this real estate.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  You gotta get Rick Caruso in there. He's like the master of this. Like, there is something that's a little bit more durable about the mall that you go to for, there's restaurants, there's a movie theater, there's a coffee shop, bookstore.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Escape room.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Escape room, probably. Laser tag, VR, maybe, maybe a sphere. But there's a few key stores that are anchor tenants, the Apple Store and there's electronics. And then there are a few, there's a Louis Vuitton store, a Coach store, a Bottega store. And those brands want to own the entire retail experience, I think, more now. I don't, I'm not sure, but it seems like, you know, as much as we joke about like the Supreme Store having lines out front, like there isn't, there is a deliberate strategy to that. Like you control the full experience, not just a corner or a display table in a larger store. So these like aggregator retail stores seem to be having a lot of trouble.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  It's not good. Well, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Larry Ellison is being profiled in a vulture for New York Magazine. It's a very long profile that we should read through. First, we should debate this story that we almost got to from Reddit yesterday. Are there any real candy innovations right now?

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  R slash candy, which I didn't know existed. Hey, everyone, I'm curious to hear your perspective as candy lovers. Do you feel like there's any real innovation happening in candy right now? Are there any sweets, brands or flavors that are new? Someone's been reading Zero to One, the stagnation, stagnation theory has come to the candy industry.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  We're seeing progress in the world of bits, less so in the world of sugars.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, of candy.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Some people did make the good point that yes, there has been a phenomenal breakout success in the candy industry. Do you know what I'm talking about, Jordy?

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  There's one really big winner recently and it is Nerds gummy clusters. These Nerds gummy clusters, I don't know where this got buried in this. This went, this went very viral, I guess, but Nerds was a brand of candy that had been around for a long time and was doing, I think, fine, sort of like, you know, stagnant revenue. And then they came up with this way to create like, have you ever had Nerds? Are you familiar with this?

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like this like grainy like sand texture or something. I don't know, it's like a bunch of little pellets and it's sort of like.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Are you mansplaining Nerds?

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's sort of like hard to wrap, I don't know. It's not, it's not that accessible. It's like you either dump it all in your mouth and then you just have a ton of, it's not a great user experience. It's a little outdated.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was fantastic growing up.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  You did?

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Interesting, okay.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Nerds ropes too?

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, so basically what they did with the Nerds rope, they, they cut it up into these little clusters. And this product has been selling fantastically well and has done very, very well. And there were also some, yeah, there's a bunch of people chiming in, in the comments. Peelers, gummy mangoes, there's a whole bunch of stuff. There were even some companies that did like sugar free candies that I think have done well. There's been a number of sort of new, new startups. There really isn't like a David's Protein Bar type of breakout success in candy that I'm familiar with. Are you?

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love candy. I just assume that it all wants to kill me.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Bring me the poison.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  The poison. What was your favorite candy growing up?

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Hmm. I don't know, that's a tough one. Maybe Starburst, Skittles, the classics.

• 1:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  Is there anything else?

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Hot tamales?

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Hot tamales, okay, interesting. Tyler? What candy do you?

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  More of a chocolate guy.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Chocolate?

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  I don't really like any.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Fine.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, I, I don't know. I pick up candy from time to time at the airport, uh, something.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, you do.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. If we're getting on a plane, I like to have some candy hanging around, but, uh, you know, the Nerds Gummy Clusters, I've had those on plane flights a few times, but, uh, good to see that the candy community is coming out in full force in, in support of candy innovation. Well.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I went and found this original post on r slash candy.

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  You did. What do they say?

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  The post seems written by ChatGPT, M dashes, uh, all of it. And, uh, yeah, ba- basically, everybody's just, uh, nostalgia maxing.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  What are they most nostalgic for? What do they like?

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  They're just saying, uh, they like the old school stuff, Willy Wonka candy.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Does a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup count as a candy or is that a chocolate?

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  I think of chocolate as a.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  A subcategory?

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Within candy.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Halloween candy. I gotta buy Halloween candy.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Okay, Snickers came in there. Okay, yeah. Snickers, Snickers counts, that's good. It's also an ingredient that you could use. Like, you wouldn't say like a chocolate cake is candy. There's something about the size.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Producer Ben wants a protein, uh, Twix.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  That could be pretty good.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  If, if that revitalizes the, the candy industry. Um, anyway, let's move on to this story about David Ellison. The, the sun king of Hollywood. Uh, before we read through this, we'll tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So, uh, with help from his billionaire father Larry, David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in history. Uh, one weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie Flyboys had opened that weekend to reviews so bad

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  that one of the stars has, had abruptly checked into the hospital. What? On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison, Devlin said. Devlin made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s. Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla. Wow, what a run. But he struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, had a college-aged son named David, who was not only trying to break into Hollywood, but was also an amateur pilot. David even

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  had a nascent film production company with an aerial name, Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role alongside James Franco as a pilot named Eddie, who can't shoot straight. Come on, Eddie, David says in the climactic fight scene, do something right.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Can we try to find Eddie in Flyboys?

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's find a David Ellison hyper reel, or maybe just the trailer. And do you see the photo that Vulture chose for this is sort of a collage, a rendition of David Ellison, but you know, they put him in the Royal Oak, right there in the photo. You'll love to see it. So, Devlin, yeah, let's watch the Flyboys trailer. I'd love to see this. I actually haven't seen this movie.

• 1:06:37Brian Chesky?

  Looking back, we had no idea what to expect.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Franco. Maybe this is the movie to watch this weekend.

• 1:06:46Brian Chesky?

  Except, they wanted to learn to fly.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  No, that's a cool shot. Gentlemen, you have bravely volunteered to preserve freedom. We gotta turn this into a cool closet.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  I think that's David, right?

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Guy sure knows how to make friends.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  All his friends out there. Huh. This is your quarters. That's him. Yeah, wow. Let's go. Hurt is good luck to rub your head. I wouldn't do that if I were you.

• 1:07:17Brian Chesky?

  Sorry, fellas. This room's reserved for killers.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Oh. You a foot dare killer?

• 1:07:24Brian Chesky?

  Going to war in two days. Worried about me?

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  The Germans are moving toward our town. I definitely saw this movie as a kid, because I just love, I love plane.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. There he is. We'll be back by lunch.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  This is a pretty sweet movie for about 2001.

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Worth the 60 million.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  They underpaid.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  They underpaid. Are they missing a zero? This seems like a 600 million dollar movie to me.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  There's a zero.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  I'm gonna turn this into a cult classic for fans of enterprise databases. If you're a fan of hyperscale and data center buildout and data center construction like the rest of us.

• 1:08:09Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be watching Flyboys.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  You gotta be a Flyboys guy. You gotta get the original Flyboys merch. You gotta get the DVD copies. You gotta start collecting this stuff.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Devlin.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn't all that stressed about the money. He had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Sick.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  He was, however, concerned about his son, the actor in the hospital. Wait.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation. Doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 1:08:50Jordi Hays?

  This is bullish.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  This is bullish. He was so upset about losing that he was hospitalized.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:08:58Jordi Hays?

  You think he's gonna lose Warner Brothers?

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Maybe not.

• 1:09:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  Maybe he's coming back and getting it.

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  I think this is a guy you want.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is good, okay.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  He was thinking that whole weekend I just lost my dad a bunch of money. He was upset about letting his father down. Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him. Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison's family's adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun, Maverick.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  And Mission Impossible series, along with a number of largely forgettable movies.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  Have you seen Top Gun?

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  Sick. Have you seen Top Gun Maverick?

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  It's good. It's not as iconic as the first one, but it is a great ride. What about Mission Impossible? There's like seven movies in the series. Have you seen any of them?

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:09:46John Coogan?

  The first one's great.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  No. He was, in other words, a producer, much like many others in town. Then last year, David's father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood's legendary movie studios and a company more than 10 times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellison's set their sights on an even bigger prize, Warner Brothers. At 43, David is now the first millennial, let's give it up for the millennials, to control a major Hollywood studio. While running Skydance, he'd built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action-packed blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them. But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Brothers had revealed an empire-building streak in line with his father, who is currently the fifth wealthiest person in the world.

• 1:10:29Jordi Hays?

  It's possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth 18 billion and couldn't afford Paramount, which was valued at 22 billion. By last year, the 6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Which briefly peaked, and his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to 400 billion. Oracle, Larry's company, is the world's most boring tech giant. Disagree. Disagree. It's one of the most exciting to me.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Tell that to Chase Lochmiller Crusoe, okay? We'll see who's boring then. We'll see how boring Oracle is when we talk about Abilene, Texas. Go to Abilene, Texas and tell me that Oracle's boring. Come on. Who's writing this? Who's writing this?

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  But Larry had long harbored more globe-spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal Titanic Octopus.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  That's so sick.

• 1:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Today, he keeps some of his wealth, which includes 98% of a Hawaiian island in an entity called Octopus Holdings LP. In the past year, Oracle has become central to the AI boom, providing backend computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build LLMs. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI-infused revenue, its stock shot up so much that Larry's net worth increased by 89 billion in a single day. That still was such a wild moment.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Fifteen paramounts, basically. You get 15 paramounts in one day and you're like, okay, yeah, I'll take 10% of the gain from this day and buy a movie studio.

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that combined with David's ownership of one and perhaps two major studios, as well as one and perhaps two major news networks. Paramount owns CBS and Warner owns CNN, has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellison's are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  What the Ellison's want with their conglomerate individually and together will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens, and the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis. Larry divorced David's mother when he was young, and the two became close only as David grew older and especially once he got into business. David has always struck many people as his father's opposite: shy and competent, not a bombastic, world-conquering visionary. David's ambition was initially as humble as making movies he likes, but the current climate has thrown him together with his father and shown him a path to something greater, if he can pull it off.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Here, I'll continue, but first I'll 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. So. Last month, the Warner board spurned the Ellison's and Paramount's offer and agreed to sell its movie and TV studio to the HBO Max and the HBO Max service to Netflix, creating a potential streaming colossus. The true streaming octopus is forming under Netflix's reign. The Ellison's have continued to argue that their offer for all of Warner Brothers, including its cable networks, is superior. They are currently attempting a hostile takeover and trying to persuade Warner Brothers shareholders

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  to accept Paramount's offer instead. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Glad to be in the media business covering this because it's certainly entertaining. Of course, thanks to Dylan Byers over at Puck for putting this on my radar by posting it on X. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Some observers believe that acquiring Warner Brothers is in fact critical to Paramount's survival. Either way, now that he has made his move to become one of the industry's leading moguls, David Ellison is faced with proving to a skeptical Hollywood that he's up to the task. David's mentors are Steve Jobs and David Geffen and obviously his dad. Those guys are ruthless killers, single-minded people with a different DNA, a former Skydance

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  employee who worked closely with David said on the record. A former Skydance employee said, "David is a smart dude who is reasonably shrewd, but he's not that. He's not the ruthless killer. He's not the Steve Jobs, the David Geffen. He's something else entirely." During the Warner Brothers auction, the company gave code names to each of its suitors. These were the code names. Netflix was Noble. Comcast was Charm. Paramount was given the name Prince. Interesting. One of the reasons David Ellison loves blockbuster movies is the way in which a spectacle can contain a more intimate story, how a battle for an intergalactic peace or control of an empire can really be a story about a family.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  He has often described the formative experience of seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a child. The fate of humanity was at stake, but what David remembers is Arnold Schwarzenegger rampaging across the screen to protect a young boy who never knew his father. It's emotional. It's a great movie. Terminator 2, have you seen it? No. Brutal. It's like one of the greatest movies.

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Did I watch it?

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that what I should add?

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  You should, you should. And, and truthfully, you can watch Terminator two without watching Terminator one. They have very different vibes, very different pacings. Uh, you should watch both, but, uh, Terminator two is just a fantastic movie. It's so, so good. And there's iconic like memes and gifs that I feel like you should know. I'll be back, you know?

• 1:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Azar and some of the chat actually put together.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  What'd they put?

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  A film list for me.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  They sent it to my DMs. Uh, Interstellar, Heat, Inception, Shawshank, Steve Jobs, American Hustle, Silver Lining Playbook, Almost Famous, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Sting. The issue is these are so, so many movies, you could easily be messing with me and just sprinkle in like ten that are just like really bad.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  The worst movie ever.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  And I'm like, well, the boys said I had to watch it.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  You gotta watch G-geely. I think that's, uh, notoriously one of the worst movies.

• 1:16:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's, there's a lot, there's a lot here. There's three, three pages of movies. So I promise I will do my best to watch all these. It may take me multiple decades at my current pace.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Jordi Hays?

  But I'll work down, I'll work down the list.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Uh, well, so at the end of Terminator two, David Ellison sitting in the theater, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to spoil the story, but Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in a vat of molten steel in front of the boy and the eight-year-old David Ellison starts to cry. Wow. Larry wasn't around much when David was a kid, one of the only similarities in their very different childhoods. Larry was born in New York City in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who gave him up for adoption at nine months old. His adopted father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who took his last name at Ellis Island. And a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Louis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything. Wow, what a crazy thing.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Why did you adopt this nine-month-old kid just to dunk on him? This is so, so bad, but clearly it lit a fire, uh, in Larry and he went on to build one of the greatest tech companies in history.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Larry should write a book called Hardcore Parenting. You know, people talk about soft parenting, right? You wanna, you know, you don't. Uh, but hardcore parenting, it's like wake up every morning, tell your children you will never amount to anything.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Crazy. As a result, Larry likes to say that he had all the disadvantages necessary for success. And colleagues at Oracle got the sense that Larry's seemingly endless ambition came partly from a desire to prove himself to his adopted father. "I'm not sure I would recommend that everyone raise their children like this," Larry later said, "but it certainly worked." Wow, that's crazy. David's mother, Barbara Booth, was Oracle's 10th employee. He hired his mom when he needed a 10th employee. And Larry's third wife, oh, David's mother, sorry. Larry hired David's mother, Barbara Booth. They divorced shortly after David's third birthday and right after his sister Megan was born.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  When Larry and his first wife tried couples counseling to save their marriage, Larry told the therapist that the very idea of love eluded him. "I don't understand love. I don't understand people bonding to one another. What is it?" Larry said. He spent obligatory weekends with the kids and seemed to only realize later that a family was something he wanted. One night-

• 1:19:01Jordi Hays?

  Guy doesn't understand love, but has been, is on his fifth marriage?

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Something.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  He's like, "I just, I just need to get my rap set."

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Marriage, yeah. Larry called Booth to say he was lonely. "You're never alone because you have the kids. You always have a body," Larry said. "I'm here by, I'm here all by myself." David credits his love of movies to his mother. The family had a collection of 3,000 VHS tapes. And David's ideal day as a, as a child was to watch the Star Wars trilogy or all the Rocky movies back to back. I did the exact same thing when I was a kid. It was fantastic. I had Star, the Star Wars trilogy on VHS was one of my prized possessions. 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.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  It wasn't until David became a teenager that he and Larry started taking flying lessons together. They grew close, eventually staging mock dogfights over the Pacific. These guys are dogfighting each other? This is insane. Yes.

• 1:20:07Jordi Hays?

  How to bond with your son.

• 1:20:08John Coogan?

  Yes, as a matter of fact, I do have that dog in me. I, I literally dogfight with my dad in planes that we fly over the Pacific. David went on to compete as an aerobatic pilot, whipping barrel rolls, flying at 300 miles an hour, just 15 feet above the ground, and pulling off his signature move, the dava-lator. He has a signature move. This is incredible. After graduating from high school in 2001, David went to Pepperdine University as a prospective business major. He hated it and he transferred to film school at USC. He commuted from the beach in Malibu where he lived in one of the many homes Larry had purchased there on a $65 million buying spree. His neighbors included Jennifer Aniston, who was renting one of Larry's other houses. For his senior thesis, David wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller called When All Else

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Fails, in which he plays a billionaire's son who has to rescue his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers before her insulin runs out. That's an interesting frame for a plot. His girlfriend at the time, who was a diabetic, played the part. According to people who worked on the production, David was respectful and eager to learn, if a bit oblivious to the ways in which he wasn't making an ordinary student film. The budget was close to $100,000 and he shot part of it in one of his father's giant homes in the Bay Area. When they ran out of film, David offered to fly his plane to Los Angeles to pick some up. Instead of graduating, David left USC to film Flyboys. He worked with an acting coach to prepare, but his performance didn't do any favors to a mediocre script. David spent the next several years going to auditions and landed a few more roles

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  from Devlin, the Flyboys producer. He played a bumbling assistant to a corrupt mayor on a TNT show and a shirtless drug addict who punches an FBI agent before leaping from the second floor of a motel in a TV movie. His most significant screen time came in a raunchy 2009 comedy called Hole-in-One, in which he plays- John, have you seen this? No, I haven't. Should I have? Do you expect me to see every movie? I haven't seen every movie.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  He plays the owner of a golf apparel company, and there's a picture of him here in a sort of golf polo, whose partner loses a bet that leads two nefarious plastic surgeons to give him breast implants, sending David's character on a quest to drum up enough money to help him get them removed. What a wacky plot. Only in 2009 are you making movies like that. That is wild. He delivers one of his first lines in the movie after a woman takes off her shirt. That was pimp. Wow, that is a phrase straight out of 2009. No one uses those words anymore. That slang has fully died. His acting career more or less came to an end a few years later after he wrote a script called Northern Lights about a pilot friend of his who had died.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Taylor Lautner signed on to play the lead but dropped out after finding David had written a role for himself rough.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  What did Taylor have against David?

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  I guess he was like, I don't want to act with him or something, or I don't want to be in, I mean, you know, it's like in F1, there's always like the, oh, is this person, do they deserve the seat? Or, you know, are they there for the, because they just have the money? And so, you know, you sign up for this, you're in this role, the movie bombs and it's seen as, you know, a black mark on your IMDB resume, I suppose. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate, compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. While David inherited a love for movies from his mother, it became clear that if he wanted to stay in the business, he needed to think more like his father. David wanted to be an actor. And when that didn't work, he was like, if I'm not going to be

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  on screen, I'm going to be the biggest guy in the room. A person who knew him at the time told me, the writer of this vulture piece. Larry's friend, David Geffen, introduced David to Skip Brittenham, a legendary Hollywood lawyer who had represented Pixar, which was co-founded by Steve Jobs, who was Larry's best friend. Brittenham helped David make a business plan for building a production company and learn to navigate the web of agencies, producers and studios in Hollywood. David wanted Skydance to make the type of movies. He loved movies with explosions. Let's go. Finally. Like the last, the last Hollywood producer understands how to get me in the theater.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  You know how Truth has their ETFs, their Patriot ETFs. I think they got to get Paramount. Paramount, Skydance in there.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Because this is the movie studio.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  That likes explosions.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Committed to explosions.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Explosions, very American.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  So Andy Kessler was an investor who worked with David to raise money for Skydance early on, and they had a rule. They said, "He swore to me, no rom coms, no touchy feely emotional Oscar bait, just explosions." But funding the Hollywood dreams of the 25-year-old failed actor's son of one of the world's richest men was a tough sell to investors. Will people show up to these movies? And Larry ultimately made the point moot. In 2010, he stepped in to provide almost all of the initial $150 million David was trying to raise, according to multiple people with knowledge of the company's finances. Their timing was good. The late aughts Hollywood was roiled by the financial crisis and Paramount, the studio

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  behind The Godfather and Titanic, was struggling movie, was the struggling movie-making arm of the Redstone family's Viacom cable TV empire. Deutsche Bank had bailed on an agreement to fund Paramount's movies and the studio needed cash. When Larry's funding for Skydance came through, David signed a deal to co-finance Paramount's movies, which meant he would help fund production in exchange for a share of the profits. David had initially considered partnering with Relativity Media, which later collapsed in a fiery bankruptcy. While co-financiers often get stuck funding risky projects, Paramount's desperate state opened the door for David to negotiate his involvement in some of the studio's biggest franchises like Star Trek and Mission Impossible.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  The first feature film David backed, the Coen Brothers remake of the western True Grit. I've seen that, it's a great movie. Have you seen it?

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  No. Went on to make $250 million, but they couldn't get a dime out of Geordie Hayes, apparently. And it earned 10 Oscar nominations, but couldn't get Geordie to throw it on streaming on one random Sunday night. His sister Megan followed him into the industry, co-financing True Grit and launching her own company, Annapurna Pictures. Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting. Annapurna has been on a run. I think they also have an interactive division, although that might not be related, I'm not sure. Uh, the Skydance thesis, according to a person that worked closely with David, was that Hollywood wasn't prepared for the overwhelming economic force of a Silicon Valley billionaire throwing around his wealth and ambition. Plenty of dumb money came into town, but producers and talent mostly viewed it as something to take advantage of. Money in Hollywood

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  is not appropriate appreciated, uh, the person said. This was an opportunity to reverse that to make Hollywood treat money with respect. We gotta respect the dollar in Hollywood.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Nicholas Cage was, it was early here.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, he famously said, uh, I do not chuckle when I get a big check. I have respect for the dollar.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Uh, Cage, Nicholas Cage. Uh, shortly after signing the deal with Paramount in 2009, a person who knew David then said that he had declared, quote, "We are going to buy Paramount one day." He called his shot in 2009. Well, here he is. He did it. Uh, David proved to be a savvy enough operator negotiating better terms with Paramount when his deal came up for renewal and working hard to pick up the quirks of a job that involved everything from managing the egos of talent to negotiating debt facilities with JP Morgan. He would sometimes tell colleagues about an instructive conversation he'd had years earlier about running a company in Hollywood. At the premiere of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, he walked up to congratulate David Geffen, who had produced

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  the movie through his company, DreamWorks. As David told it, Geffen shook his hand. Steve is getting paid. Tom is getting paid. How much do you think DreamWorks is getting paid? Geffen said. He held his hand up in the shape of a zero. DreamWorks was making a relative pittance on the movie, an early lesson in the confusing economics of the business, where a poorly structured deal could mean even a hit might generate little for the company that produced it. It was always in the back of David's mind. On Minority Report, everybody got paid except for DreamWorks, a former Skydance executive said. Have you seen Minority Report?

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  That is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is a fascinating, fascinating movie. It is amazing.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  It's not on the list. It's not on the list that the chat made.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Add it to the list. Add it to the list. Minority Report is fantastic. A really great vision of what the future of VR and augmented reality could look like. Has a whole bunch of other interesting sci fi elements. Tom Cruise obviously puts off, puts on a masterful performance, but the, the interactive, how they interact with computer technology is, is remarkable in that. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I think we're running out of time. Chesky is going to join in a second. There is some funny dialogue happening. I'll fill you in. The Kalshi market, will Elon win his case against OpenAI? Was at a 36% chance this morning.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  What's it doing now?

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  He asked, what are the odds looking like? They responded. Now Elon is posting, I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Elon said that?

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  Scores earth. Well, we have Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TV panel. John, Brian, great to see you again. How are you doing?

• 1:29:59Brian Chesky?

  Hey guys. Good to see you. Thank you for having me back on.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Of course. You're welcome anytime. It's great to be here with you. First, kick us off with the news. You've been acquiring talent, building the roster. You have a new CTO. How did it come about? Tell me about this person.

• 1:30:15Brian Chesky?

  Yeah. So like, you know, obviously a couple of years ago, I started asking around like, who are some of the best leaders in AI? And I started meeting people and one of the names that came up over and over was this guy named Ahmed Al Dahl. And he was head of generative AI at Meta. We met and I, I just was completely blown away by him. You know, not only was he at Meta and he essentially created, led the team that created the Lama models, been downloaded a billion times. There's been over 60,000 derivative models. But he was also at Apple. He actually joined Apple at a College, worked on the original iPhone in two thousand and five. Led a lot of the multi-touch technology. He led the autonomous technology group that was the self-driving car project at Apple.

• 1:30:57Brian Chesky?

  So he was somebody at the frontier. He really understood both frontier technology, but he also understood that like kind of Apple design craft, which I think Airbnb also is really passionate about. And we just really hit it off, became friends and as my current CTO, we were talking about handing the baton to somebody. We thought I'm gonna be really great.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about design in the era of generative AI? These apps are amazing and the fun and the models, like you see the benchmarks, you you use the models and it's it's magical. It's like, you know, we created fire. And then one rough edge, one button that doesn't quite work the way you expected it. I was lamenting the fact that I was using Claude and I couldn't get a deep research report to read it out loud to me. That feature is in one app and there's different features there.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels it feels very notable that even in all the leading L L Ms, there's still so many rough edges in the product.

• 1:31:50John Coogan?

  Little low hanging fruit.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  Part of that is like a new new product paradigm. We're kind of figuring out what the edges are.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, maybe there's all sorts of metaphors. You know, I remember when I was a kid,

• 1:32:03Brian Chesky?

  I had, I think I got like a compact computer and I was running MS DOS. And we're kind of more in the MS DOS phase of AI. You know, I don't, I think, not to belittle the interfaces, but the chatbot is not the end state interface. The current chatbot is not the end state interface for AI. I mean, think about your phone and your app. Do you want to chat to get the weather? Do you want to chat to like do most of the functions? The answer is no. And so I think the the the future AI interface will have a reference to chat, but it's probably going to be much more visual. Most people aren't completely text-based. And I I do think there's been a, it's kind of like we've been iterating the engine of the car,

• 1:32:45Brian Chesky?

  but we haven't really redesigned the car. And so the chatbot is really a pre-AI interface that we've plugged onto this incredibly powerful engine. And so I think what we're trying To do is think through like what are where can we take this interface? What is the like multi-touch reference for an age of AI? And we're not going to do this overnight. We're not going to be the only company doing this. But I really think like the models are even more powerful than people realize because we have hardly harnessed them. And if you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to like skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So I totally agree with you. And I think the other thing I'd say is like I'm on the board of Y Combinator and I think the last I checked eighty seven percent

• 1:33:29Brian Chesky?

  of the companies are enterprise companies per batch.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  People. I know we're all we we we go and we meet with every batch and to have them on the show and and we're always trying. Hey, every we want every consumer company to come on because they're oftentimes. Yeah, oftentimes they give you. Yeah. And and the interesting thing is all of them, all these founders started doing consumer businesses. You ask them, they're doing Minecraft server. Yeah, it's true. Flipping sneakers and stuff. So they actually have some consumer DNA. But they end up.

• 1:34:00Brian Chesky?

  And so you're you're bringing up a really good point. I joined Y Combinator two thousand nine and that was not like two years after the iPhone was introduced. And almost every startup was a consumer company and enterprise is awesome. And I think it makes complete sense why AI is starting with enterprise because the models are not cheap to run. You can basically vertically integrate any business and completely automate the workflow. It's going to revolutionize how we do work. But the point is that the biggest prize is consumer because that is what's going to reach daily life for billions of people. And I think a lot of people are a little bit, a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to go into consumer. That's the biggest thing we've heard. They're afraid. Partly they're worried that like OpenAI or Google are going to like essentially eat their lunch and vertically integrate. The other concern is consumers is hard.

• 1:34:46Brian Chesky?

  You know, it's a little bit more of a histrism business. Distribution's a little more mature because of the App Store. There's not really new distribution channels in the same way. At the same time, we are in the midst of a revolution and it more than just a couple of chatbots have to be the way that you interface with the world. And I also, this might be self-serving to say, but I also believe this independently. I don't think we're going to use just one agent. I don't think, we don't have just one person in our life. I don't think we're going to have just one agent in our life. I don't think we'll use thousands. But I think there is going to be some level of specialization that's going to help. And we, like, there's going to be too much specialization where I wouldn't download that agent or use that agent. But I, I think even if you want a meta orchestrator, whether it's Claude or Gemini

• 1:35:31Brian Chesky?

  or ChatGPT, specialization is going to help even within consumer. So we want to do some really cool stuff within traveling and living.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what advice do you give to the 13% of Y Combinator founders that are going after consumer, at least for now, or at least in, at this moment? Is it, hey, keep your burn really low, run a ton of experiments, stick it out? Because it feels like part of the reason why 87% wind up in enterprises is because businesses are just throwing money at them. They're saying, yeah, you're doing consumer, but if you come solve this one really small problem for me and build this API for me, I'll give you a contract, I'll be your first customer. It's very easy to get the money flowing on the business side potentially. But what, how can you actually make it as a consumer founder when there is a big prize, but it might be a harder road?

• 1:36:22Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, so many thoughts here. I mean, one of the things that Paul Graham taught us and Gary Tan teaches, which I think is very effective, is use other Y Combinator companies as your early adopters. Hence why a lot of companies go into enterprise. If you even are a company, don't go to like Boeing to try to use your service. Go to a young startup and work your way up to the large companies. And so they've developed this incredible ecosystem where thousands of companies are adopting each other's tools and they bootstrap each other. And that's actually been part of the explanation for why Y Combinator has so successfully created so many enterprise companies. But when I was in Y Combinator, we got everyone to use Airbnb. And so in other words, like, we have a huge alumni network. I would tell people, That are going into consumer. Number one, don't be afraid to do AI consumer.

• 1:37:03Brian Chesky?

  It might fail, but like investors aren't going to hold it against you that a startup failed. They're going to like a founder who's failed is more fundable the next time than someone who's never started unless they really blew it.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Brian Chesky?

  Because you have experience and I think that's what's so great about this. Number two, you've got a lot of early adopters within Y Combinator who are normal people too. They have daily life. I would agree to keep your burn rate low. I would pick a niche. I wouldn't pick a niche that's too narrow. So like maybe like AI to do something incredibly narrow is going to get really, really difficult for somebody to want to like change their work for loan behavior. But just think about all the parts of daily life that are kind of annoying and maybe pay attention to like your sister, your significant other, your children, like whoever's in your life and just look at their life and ask like, how could their daily life be a little bit easier? And I would just go for it. I mean, and by the way, like the App Store is mature.

• 1:37:57Brian Chesky?

  That's a little bit of an issue. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are AI apps. So if something is truly great and truly breakthrough, people will seek it out. And I do think my prediction is it is that AI is going to revolutionize consumer applications in the coming years. And they might not be apps. They might become agents. Agents might be the new apps. We have to figure out what that means. What's new platform paradigm? It's probably agents, not apps, but we'll see. But ultimately, I think that's the big takeaway here. And so what we're going to do is we want to really innovate on the consumer experience. We want to integrate, we want to interface on like, what does consumer interfaces look like in the age of AI? And I think they should evolve past the current design paradigm and we'll see where it goes.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would be, I'm not expecting to open the Airbnb app and see a blank text box purely. Like there's so much more that you can do. Have you thought more about Airbnb app is is unique, I think, because it's not this reactive, people are opening it 10 times a day. There is an intention and there's probably a lot of value in understanding. Okay, this person, they like to travel around the holidays. They're opening the app in October. Let's think that through. Agents and L L Ms can probably work through a customer's history, their preferences, just do better recommendations, what you're servicing them. How how much have

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  you thought about being proactive about reaching the customer with something that's more tailored? What's been working? Where do you see it going?

• 1:39:29Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, so many things. One of the other problems with consumer, to have to keep coming back to it, is there's a business model challenge, right? Like, these models are not cheap. And so there's probably one of three ways you can make money in consumer. You can put ads in your chatbot, you can pay a subscription, or you can do essentially transactions. Well, Airbnb luckily has the business model. We have transactions, and our transactions are pretty high-dollar transactions. So we actually have the really, the business model going for us. We also have a lot of data. We do about 50 billion searches a year on Airbnb. That's nothing compared to Google, but 50 billion. So that's that number of times somebody's typing in something into Airbnb search box.

• 1:40:11Brian Chesky?

  So we actually do have quite a bit of data about people, their preferences, and we can bring it in. And so, and part of what we want to do is if the interface is a little more chat-like, again, it won't be per se a chatbot exactly, OpenAI, but if it's a little more of a turn-by-turn chat-like connection, you're going to get a lot more information from people. And I think, you know, the one benefit of the current chatbots are they have memory. And so you're putting a lot of context in the window. And I think memory, by the way, is something I think we're going to want to technically innovate on, because the chatbots still are stateless. And so you're essentially, the prompt is putting in this kind of, you know, obviously a lot of your memory. So I do think there's going to be an area around, how can Airbnb understand people's

• 1:40:55Brian Chesky?

  preferences, learn more about you, understand what you care about, and just be really thoughtful? Like, what's your bucket list? Who are you traveling with? One of the other things Airbnb can be really good at is the majority of trips have multiple people. Most chatbots are single-player mode. They have collaborative tools, but most people are not chatting with multiple people. Most people on Airbnb are searching for an Airbnb with multiple other people. So I think another thing we really want to do is really be great at, like, understanding two people, they have totally different preferences, how do we help them figure out the right choices for them? So a lot of collaboration tools are, I think, going to be really important. But I think at our heart, what we want to do is really build out these robust profiles, deeply understand people, and give them what they want in the real world.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the challenges of generative AI imagery in Airbnb listings? I can imagine there's sort of a risk of, what is it called, catfishing? Where someone takes a photo, it is their house, but they said, hey, like, patch up the walls. And, you know, let's, let's change the lighting and make it look a little bit warmer, a little bit nicer. And there's probably a little bit of that that's fine, you know, if you took it on a phone, you want it to look nice. But you want it to represent the actual experience. How are you thinking about the challenges with that?

• 1:42:06Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, like, it's really interesting, right? Like, I don't know, I saw on Twitter yesterday, like, the stranger things where, like, you can turn your face into someone else's face.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Brian Chesky?

  And so what this really means is that, like, know your customer authentication. A lot of it is like, you know, you do a selfie and ID or you do a video. A lot of this stuff now AI can get around. And so, I mean, we should remember, AI stands for artificial. And so we're now starting to live in a world where if you see in a screen, it might be artificial. And so I think authentication is going to be critical. And one of the best authentications is in the real world. I mean, we're going to be pretty soon living in a world where you don't know something's real unless you've seen it in the real world, unless we have authentication. One example of the way Airbnb can solve this, for example, is we do have a network of professional photographers. Over 5,000 around the world. In fact, we built an on-demand professional photography network before Uber even launched,

• 1:42:57Brian Chesky?

  where you hit a button and a photographer shows up and takes photos of your home. An advantage of that is those photos are by Airbnb. And so if we took them, a customer would know those are authenticated photos from us. That's just an example of something that is possible. But I do think, like, solving this, is this real, is this authenticated, is really important. So we're going to have to have something, we're going to have to have the technology solutions for it.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  What's your latest thinking on integrating Airbnb with various LLMs? Like, how are these conversations going?

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Agent of commerce.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What kind of?

• 1:43:30Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I'm interested. I think, I think last time I was on, I said they weren't ready.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:34Brian Chesky?

  Um, and I, I. My view, you know, um, we chose not to to launch with ChatGPT. They launched with Expedia and Booking. And the reason why wasn't like, like, I was a huge fan of that project and um, gave them some advice on it and stuff. And I think it's awesome. I would love to show up on ChatGPT. I would love to show up on Gemini. I'd love to show up on Claude. I don't, here's the thing, I don't want to be the first. I want to be the best. Like, we want to have the best integration, not the first integration. There are some limitations. Ninety percent of people booking Airbnb send a message to a host they had a time. You have to have a verified ID. There's just some things we need in integration for Airbnb to have a really good integration. We'd love that. By the way, the traffic coming with ChatGPT

• 1:44:17Brian Chesky?

  converts higher on Airbnb to a booking than the traffic coming from Google Search.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:22Brian Chesky?

  So actually, there's a win-win.

• 1:44:24Jordi Hays?

  And various like e-commerce brands have been reporting this too. Like, the traffic is super high intent because people are informed.

• 1:44:32Brian Chesky?

  Yeah. So I get, I get, this question's asked to me often as an existential thing. As in, are you going to partner with them or not? And are they going to kill you? And there's going to be no app in the future? And my answer is there probably are no apps at some point in the future. They're probably agents. That's, there's probably some platform like paradigm. We're probably designing agents. I don't know for sure. But I think that we're going to exist on those platforms. But I also think specialization is going to matter. I don't think there's just going to be a few chatbots and they do everything and you are separated from every application. That's going to be true of some apps. And that's going to be true if you need like, maybe a commodity. But there are going to still be reasons to work with different agents or different applications. I think some specialization will make a difference.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  What are the big, uh, what is your Super Bowl?

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  One thing, one thing I appreciate about your framing of like, we don't want to be first, we want to be the best.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Jordi Hays?

  Is because I think, uh, other CEOs in travel that are not tapped into Silicon Valley that aren't on the board of Y Combinator feel this pressure to be like, I have to prove that I'm like, at least trying to be AI native. Whereas I feel like you don't have any like, there's no ego around like, can we build great products with AI? It's simply like, yeah, we're going to, but like, I don't need to, I don't need to prove it by like rushing into something.

• 1:45:46Brian Chesky?

  I remember, I appreciate you saying that. I remember when the Metaverse launched, I had a, somebody who didn't, on my team that was not.

• 1:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Which Metaverse? You mean the, the idea of the Metaverse?

• 1:45:56Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, yeah, well, you're sorry. When, yes, when it was announced, Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:45:59John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:45:59Brian Chesky?

  They're like, what's our metaverse strategy?

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Brian Chesky?

  And I, I remember like other companies are like, we have to have a metaverse strategy. And it's like, that is definitely like what someone usually would say if they're not really steeped into it. So, you know, I think it's important that you're, you do something really, really well. But I don't think you want to be first to signal, we care about AI. That's kind of vanity. You don't need to do that. And so when it's ready, we'll do something great and we want to add value to customers. And that's kind of all that really matters.

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you were running Apple, what would your AI strategy be?

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  It's a big question.

• 1:46:32Brian Chesky?

  Oh, wow. I would, um.

• 1:46:38Brian Chesky?

  I.

• 1:46:40Brian Chesky?

  I, um, I would say that like.

• 1:46:45Brian Chesky?

  The devices should be completely built from the ground up, AI native, AI first, probably not even AI first, AGI first. We should ask ourselves, what is it going to look like in a few years? It's probably going to be fully agentic. These devices are going to be able to work while you sleep and you should work backwards from that. These devices and the paradigms haven't changed since the advent of AI. These are pre-AI devices running AI. So my question is, what would it look like if you designed it from the ground up, knowing what we know today? It would probably look pretty different.

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Jordi Hays?

  So less gen emoji, more actual hardware, more hardware.

• 1:47:21Brian Chesky?

  We are, we are in the midst of a revolution, obviously. I mean, I don't want to be like saying what everyone already knows.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:27Brian Chesky?

  But here's what I do want to say. Like, the everyday life of the average person has barely changed in the last three years. We're on ChatGPT a lot, we're on Gemini, we're on Claude. People listening are much more technical than the average person. They're doing unique things, workflows. The average person is still mostly living the life they lived three years ago, using the same devices. The world hasn't funnily made the shift yet. It hasn't funnily made the shift. It won't make the shift until daily life has changed. And daily life doesn't change until the devices have changed, the operating systems have changed, apps become agents. And we're all living in a completely natively consumer AI world. And we're not using chatbots, at least not today's chatbots. We are still living in the DOS era of AI and we need to move into the multi-touch era.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  The chat is begging us to ask you for an arm routine. Is there a dedicated arm day? Are there any particular machines that you recommend? Free weights? What is the secret to those arms?

• 1:48:26Brian Chesky?

  Oh, thank you very much. So, well, first of all, genetically, I have better arms than shoulders or chest. So that's just one thing. But I actually don't have an arm day. I used to do a five day split where I do back legs, chest, shoulders, arms. I now do arms with shoulders. So I'll usually do two exercises of biceps, two exercises of triceps, typically a compound free weight movement and a machine movement. So maybe like a dumbbell curl followed by like a hammer strength cable with like a rope or a V bar. And then triceps, always doing a push down with a cable and then maybe like a French press or skull crusher, depending what we all call it.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  Okay, that's a good one.

• 1:49:07Brian Chesky?

  I like to call them skull crushers. They sound a lot more hardcore.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, you know, there's heavy metal.

• 1:49:12Brian Chesky?

  We don't know how to name exercises like that anymore.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  We don't.

• 1:49:14Brian Chesky?

  The world's become soft.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  It has the best, the best names.

• 1:49:17Brian Chesky?

  I do think, I do think generally, if you're like under 40, for sure, you should be doing almost entirely compound movements and free weights and dumbbells and barbells. You know, I'm 44, so I think transitioning to some more machines is good just because the tax it puts on your joints. But I still try to put in free weights.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  Are you using any AI in the gym? Are there, are you tracking movements or asking questions?

• 1:49:45Brian Chesky?

  Going to the Church of Iron, John.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  Or is it all raw?

• 1:49:46Brian Chesky?

  Nutrition and I have a, I have a trainer. He was a former Mr. Universe. He competed in Mr. Olympia. So he, I let that, I let him do that. He is, he is, he is, but I, my diet and my supplements are very much like I put everything into AI. And I get like, I do, I do things. I don't know if this sounds eccentric, but like I'll get blood work and they'll give you a PDF. Then you can put the PDF in a chatbot. It'll tell you like to analyze it and it can even tell you what supplements you need based on your blood work. It's probably something everyone should do. It's not that hard. And so like, I don't get, I don't go out enough. So I don't need more vitamin D. The blood work said that. So I take a vitamin D supplement because I'm not, I'm like inside working a lot. So it's stuff like that.

• 1:50:31Jordi Hays?

  Have you been surprised seeing the explosion of peptides? I wouldn't have imagined a world where, you know, people are clamoring to do like actual Injection. injections. And given, given how popular it was, I mean, it's in the bodybuilding world that there was always like a divide between how hardcore you were, which was like, are you like natural? Or are you gonna?

• 1:50:53Brian Chesky?

  Are you natty or not?

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, natty or not. And now, nobody's natty anymore, seemingly.

• 1:50:58Brian Chesky?

  No one's natty. Um, I'm, I'm not surprised, I, I'm surprised actually a little bit how much the tech community's embraced fitness. I mean, like, when I came to Silicon Valley, I was like slightly self-conscious about like wearing long sleeve shirts, because I thought if I wore shorts, these are people think I'm a meha and therefore an idiot.

• 1:51:15Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:51:16Brian Chesky?

  And people just didn't really lift weights in like 2007, 2008. And I, I, I really think that like everyone's come around, probably to just the science, that like nutrition and weightlifting is good, it's good for longevity, it's good for your mind, you'll live longer, you'll feel better. And honestly, weightlifting is far superior to cardio. You should do both. The weightlifting is far superior, increases bone density. It's just you can only do one thing, you should do lift weight, weightlifting. And, um, so I'm, I'm really excited to see people actually embracing this. I mean, one of the things I learned about bodybuilding that I think is very much consistent with Silicon Valley is I was like, you know, I was like 120 pounds in high school. I played hockey. I remember I broke my leg and I had to do physical therapy. And, um, through my physical therapy, I said,

• 1:52:01Brian Chesky?

  I'm gonna like, I want to learn about like my body. And there wasn't a lot of information on the internet. So I'd like go to the Barnes and Noble and read as many books as possible. And I learned something about bodybuilding. And that was if I can change my body, I can change my life. And it was about control. And it's about this idea that you don't get in shape in one workout. It's 1% a day. And frankly, those are the lessons I learned with Silicon Valley. There's, it's not about one idea. It's about grinding every single day, year after year, with consistency. And overnight successes take thousands of days, actually, typically. And so I think there's a lot of lessons from bodybuilding that I Brought to Silicon Valley.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, 100%. It's a really, yeah, it's a really important frame of mind and we appreciate you sharing all of that with us. We know you have a hard stop, so we gotta get him out of here.

• 1:52:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, hard stop?

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Do we have time for one more question?

• 1:52:49Brian Chesky?

  I hope to be back soon, guys. Really thank you for having me here.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, awesome. Great to see you.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  We appreciate having you on the show. We'll talk to you soon, Brian. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 1:52:58Jordi Hays?

  Wanted to ask him about Super Bowl ads.

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  Specifically like how, how they're thinking about it. I know they've run an ad in the past.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Jordi Hays?

  They haven't been an annual spender on that front, but.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, they do those annual showcases, sort of like the WWDC style. You wouldn't expect it from Airbnb because they're not necessarily introducing like a new iPhone, but Brian's been very outspoken about putting the whole team on an annual cadence, a rhythm of releasing all of the information, packing, packaging everything up, getting everyone to, you know, rush towards one deadline. It's an interesting way to run the business.

• 1:53:35Jordi Hays?

  We got cut off on The Sun King of Hollywood.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  We did.

• 1:53:37Jordi Hays?

  About David Ellison and Vulture. I encourage you to go read it.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should go read it. It's a very long piece. It goes on and on and on.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  But so many great stories.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  You should go check it out in Vulture.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad that we know that the father and son are dogfighting together.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  I mean, some great, some great writing from Reeves over at Vulture.

• 1:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Matthew McConaughey.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Before we go into that, let me tell you about Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized AI fakes trademarking himself.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  He's trademarking himself.

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

  The actor plans to use trademarks of himself, saying, "All right, all right, all right," and staring at a camera to combat AI fakes.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  And the print headline is "Actor is Not All Right With AI Fakes." I love it. Over the past year, over the past several months, the Interstellar and Magic Mike star has had, has had eight trademark applications approved by the US Patent and Trademark

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  Office featuring him starring, smiling and talking. His attorney said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from sim- uh from simulating McConaughey's voice or likeness without permission. An increasingly common concern for performers. Maybe we'll have to get a trademark on you're watching TVPN. So we will get paid when someone generates a deep fake of us. The trademarks include a seven second clip of the Oscar winner standing on a porch. A three second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree and an audio, an audio of him saying, all right, all right, all right. His famous line from the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, which I know you haven't seen, but I don't think I've seen Dazed and Confused either. Tyler, have you seen Dazed and Confused?

• 1:55:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just a little bit before all of our times. Maybe we gotta lock in and watch that. Uh, is there anything else in this Matthew McConaughey piece? What else is he doing here?

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he says, my team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it's because I approved and signed off on it. We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution. The norm in an AI world, so lawyers, lawyers finding a way.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Well, if you do pay Matthew McConaughey like Salesforce has for an advertisement and you want to run it on connected TV, on streaming TV, you gotta go to vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is interesting. Um, I, it doesn't seem like they're gonna trademark this and then go to chat GPT and say like, hey, you want to license my likeness? It feels like he realizes the value of like doing a handful of big deals with a Salesforce.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  And probably wants to keep, keep doing that.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Be interesting to see if every, all talent needs to go and.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  File trademarks. I mean, at a certain, at a certain level, uh, I wonder what he's total, what is total all in cost for all of those trademarks? It's not super cheap to file a trademark. We've done it. Uh, you know, it's not nothing. It, it, it's not, it's not a billion dollars, but.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  What did, what did Rune say? He replied to the deciphering of the Rune Elves vague post. Rune said, "The elves have left for Valinor." And Boaz Barak says, "Our internal models are so good, they can decipher Rune's posts." Says Boaz, who is a computer scientist at Harvard and OpenAI. And Rune says, "After a vague post gains a certain level of mystique, I lose the ability to correct misconceptions. I'll let them have it." And Brandon Gurrell says, "I was just made aware of John's theory that you were literally just watching Lord of the Rings and live tweeting." No one looked to see if he had tweeted, you know, "Gandalf has reached the Shire."

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  "The fireworks have started in the Shire. They're having breakfast in the Shire." No one, no one checked on that. So, maybe that's the next one.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  Speaking of OpenAI, I have some breaking news. They partnered with Cerebras.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  So, there's 750 megawatts worth of like capacity over through 2028.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  No, no. Oh, no. That is massive news.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Well-deserving of the flashbang. Yeah, and, and it seems like Cerebras is on an absolute tear post-Grok deal. There are, there are a ton of rumors swirling about financings and, and IPOs. And it seems like they're in a great, great place. Do we know anything more about the partnership between OpenAI and Cerebras?

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  It's in the Journal.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:21Speaker 02

  Multi-billion dollar agreement. I think $10 billion.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  $10 billion?

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, through 2028.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  Wow. That's very exciting. I'm very interested to see how they, how they integrate it? Are they running 4.0 on it? Are they?

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I assume, I mean, it's definitely, I mean, not definitely, but I would be very surprised if it's going to anything besides just like inference, right?

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but what are they inferencing? Because they also do Sora video generation. That's a different model that might need different silicon at a certain point. OpenAI is working with Broadcom on custom chips. They're co-developing stuff with Nvidia. They're working with AMD. There might be an Intel deal at some point. Who knows? Like, they, they, they obviously, they use every part of the semiconductor supply chain. And, and how Cerebras fits in, it doesn't feel like it's just like, "Oh, OpenAI now runs everything on Cerebras." It's probably a particular piece of the...

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  Model architecture or a particular model, maybe when you go to a deep research report or do some reasoning, needs to be faster. I'm not exactly sure where they would be taking advantage of it, but it is exciting for them. I don't know.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Cerebrus raising one on 22 billion is the rumor. So they're doing the meme. Remember the meme 2021? It was like the classic round was like one on 20.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Jordi Hays?

  And but they're of course doing it at.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  B instead of an M. And also, I mean, good news for the the OpenAI folks, you know, they have the 1.4 trillion in deals. So they do another 10 billion deal. It's just 1.41. And at that point, you just round out. It still rounds down to 1.4. So you're still good.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's worried.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  It's a rounding error. It's a literal rounding error.

• 2:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  You're good at this point.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Plant says, every guest on CNBC is like, yeah, we are concerned with the end of the global order and death of US institutions, but we are looking forward to double digit EPS growth this year. So we want to remain focused on that.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Oh, brutal.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Real. So it's a tough time to be navigating politics and business, but we're having fun in the trenches.

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  We we already covered this one earlier. What are the odds looking like on will Elon win his case against OpenAI?

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Kalshi says 36% chance.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams actually build, create, code back prototypes and apps.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Tyler was joking around earlier. He was saying, I'm gonna move to Oakland.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  And become a resident for the chance of being a juror in the trial.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  I feel like there's a there's a plot of a movie with that where, you know, you try, you know, if you really are a crazy crop lawyer, you try and get a plant on the jury. They're making an OpenAI movie. Maybe they should make a second movie about this, the story of Tyler sneaking his way on the jury. And and the whole time, you're just like, you're just like, look, guys, we gotta, we gotta settle this in a way that maximizes the total amount of compute in the United States and ultimately delivers AGI as fast as possible. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Someone's guilty here. Uh, skilled AI has secured.

• 2:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, okay, so this market is, market is low volume.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's now up to fifty seven percent chance.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  That Elon wins?

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  What's at stake? Wait, like, i- if Elon Musk wins, uh, what does that do? Is that just a settlement? Is that just some monetary penalties? Does Elon have the sta- have the chance of getting equity in OpenAI? Cause at a certain point, if you convert it to a for-profit and you can just have a settlement where he gets ten billion in stock, it doesn't really change the structure. He doesn't get a board seat. That's kind of a, that's kind of a non-issue, even if he wins. But then there could be the nuclear option where he wins and he, uh, and he gets control and gets a board seat or gets a majority stake. I mean, if you run back the clock and you look at how much he donated, uh, if you, if you weight ownership by nonprofit donations, which is a crazy thing to do, this, I don't think on the table, um, you, you would wind up with a very, very different control structure.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  But, um, it is, it is an exciting time and I'm sure the court reporting will be fascinating. I wonder if there will be cameras in the courtroom and if we'll get more testimonies.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Or just, uh, somebody sketching.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah, we might just get the, the, the court, the court, uh.

• 2:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Is it, have we figured out why they still do sketching?

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  It is fascinating. I think.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Is it just for fun?

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  I think it's just, it has aura. It has, it has motion, like, uh, there's nothing.

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  I love how the person sketching can just.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Have so much ability to make the person look cool or really, really bad.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  A photographer does too.

• 2:03:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm not as much, not as much leeway.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Can catch you picking your nose and then you look like a fool or they can catch you from a really great angle with perfect lighting and you look like a hero. They can frame things up, but yes.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  If Tyler was in a courtroom, you'd just be mugging.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  And it'd be hard to catch him.

• 2:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Lacking.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Well, didn't they do that with, uh, SBF?

• 2:03:32Jordi Hays?

  That is all time. That's what I'm talking about.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. They just gave him the gigachad filter on.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's because, let's pull up this courtroom sketch.

• 2:03:42John Coogan?

  Yes, we have our next guest in the waiting room.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  That's probably more important.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gusto first. It's the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Cameras are just not allowed. That makes sense, but I'm saying, why don't we, like, is that not a rule that we could at one point say like, okay, we can have one camera in the courtroom?

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe there's a lobbying group. Maybe there's a union. Maybe it's just the way people like it. Big sketch, big pencil, big colored pencil. Well, we have our next guest. Welcome to the show, Drew. How are you?

• 2:04:15Speaker 04

  Gentlemen, how are you doing?

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  Oh, you gave us a preview of the wrist check. What's on the wrist today?

• 2:04:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I figured this was gonna happen. The liquid. And FP Jordan on today.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Whoa, there we go. That is beautiful. Fantastic. And what's behind you?

• 2:04:32Speaker 04

  The T30.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  T30. Very nice. And what's behind you? The liquid nitrogen. You're doing serious business.

• 2:04:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got a, I got a few tanks of liquid nitrogen behind me, which we're actually like making a ton of ruckus a couple of minutes ago.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:04:44Speaker 04

  And I'm glad they're not anymore. Yeah, they were like hissing and making all kinds of noise.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  So you're fully funded, you have a lab, you have a team, you're building, what are you building? What's the first product? And I'm sure I'd love to go into the far future, talk about data centers in space. And then I also want to go back and talk about your career at Robinhood, since this is the first time on the show.

• 2:05:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I feel like it's been a long time coming. So yeah, what are we, what are we doing here? So start out by telling you guys about Etherflex.

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  The mission of the company is to build a power grid in space. And the core idea behind this, when I started a little less than two years ago now, was that collecting electrical power or collecting power in orbit was this like really special and important energy source that had not really been thought of as such. And the reason is because if you place things in the right orbits, they're going to be illuminated by the sun. The solar panels are nearly continuously.

• 2:05:38John Coogan?

  This is sun sync, right? We learned this term yesterday. Scott Nolan, sun sync.

• 2:05:43Speaker 04

  Or the more specific one is called Dawn Dusk Orbit, which is also sometimes called the Terminator Orbit.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Oh, Terminator Orbit. I like that. We were talking about Terminator 2 earlier on the show. The Terminator Orbit. The Terminator Orbit sounds like the one I want to be in. So what is special about the Terminator Orbit? And then how does that lead into the whole strategy for the business?

• 2:06:05Speaker 04

  The thing that's cool about it is, is that it's always facing the sun, or nearly always facing the sun. So if this is the Earth, right, and the camera is the sun, then it sort of follows this orbit, if that makes sense. So it's kind of passing over sunrise and passing over sunset always.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. Got it.

• 2:06:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the benefit of this is, is if you take a solar panel, which is the cheapest form of energy as we know it today on Earth, problem is, is not terribly useful because it's very intermittent. It produces peak power for an hour to the middle of the day. If you take those same or very similar panels and you put them in orbit, they're going to be producing power 24/7 at nearly peak power. So you just get so much more energy production out of effectively the same panels. And also, lower off orbit is actually kind of an interesting place to build electronics applications. So I started the company out with the goal of making energy in space a commercial business. And a little bit more on that.

• 2:07:09Speaker 04

  The idea was that the reason space is in a bigger part of people's lives day to day is because it's like, for the large part of history, been mostly a government thing, right? Where it's in one shape or form funded by the government, or there's government pricing that kind of drives what the activity there is. But if you can find new ways for people to actually make money doing it, then you'll attract more young people to want to pursue those careers. And you'll just make space a more commercially relevant part of day-to-day life. So if the applications of space today are like Earth imaging, telecommunications, defense, and internet, what's that next thing? And my thesis was that energy would be the next thing.

• 2:07:54Speaker 04

  A little analogy to the past company that I started.

• 2:08:01Speaker 04

  The core idea when we started Robinhood was that if you thought of mobile as a platform, it was like back in 2012, 2013 era, then the applications that were built on top of it were like photo sharing, maps, email, you know, like there were mostly digital services like that. And the thesis that we had was that the next industry to sort of natively exist on this platform was going to be financial services. And that's Robinhood.

• 2:08:33Speaker 04

  And the idea here is, is that low earth orbit is a platform and that energy is the next vertically economy that's going to natively exist there. So.

• 2:08:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of the energy do you think will stay in space, just be routed around? Obviously, there's new narratives about what you can do in space with data centers and whatnot, but versus beam the, the energy collected on a solar panel down to earth via a laser, something like that. I've seen there's reflect orbital that's just doing mirrors. There's a whole bunch of people that have said, hey, there's cheap and abundant solar up there 24/7 in these orbits. Let's get it down to earth. Where, how are you thinking about where the power should be used?

• 2:09:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I think our, our view on it is, is we want to have electrical power in orbit. And you can use that for two applications. You can kind of think of the two applications that we're building as almost like appliances that you plug into this new fangled energy grid. And the first one is actually getting, they're doing sub, subcomponent assembly, like right next to me, right over there. So behind this, this, this container is our clean room, which kind of goes on for a long ways back there, where the first satellite that's going to space is hanging out right now. So that first thing is basically the appliance that plugs into the energy grid and then beams power down to places where there's no power grid. So the use for this is going to be places like DoD applications,

• 2:10:01Speaker 04

  excuse me, excuse me, Department of War.

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, Department of War.

• 2:10:04Speaker 04

  Applications.

• 2:10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, where there's no energy grid, where you can basically provide resilient, useful power, where there's a contested environment and stuff like that.

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:17Speaker 04

  The other application is, is rather than beaming the power down to the ground and doing things like powering artificial intelligence data centers, the more natural thing to do is cut out all those energy losses and take the chips and put them directly in orbit.

• 2:10:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  Because they don't actually, in the grand scheme of things, they're not the things that are the heaviest part of this.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:37Speaker 04

  So that's the galactic brain, and that's actually where a lot of our efforts are right now.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's exciting. I remember when we first talked about this like years ago, thinking, you know, the natural reaction was going to be, oh, what does this finance guy know about space if they're, you know, if there's, like, the math is so important, and if you get one number wrong in the spreadsheet, maybe the economics don't work and it's 10 years out instead of two years out. But of course, you have a math background, so I know you did the math, I know you crunched the numbers, but I'm interested to know, how did you actually crunch the numbers to understand that now is the right time with the amount of funding you're going to bring in to the orbital launch costs, to the value of what you're doing up there, to the materials, how much a solar panel costs? There's all these different variables, they all have to synthesize into something that

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  eventually makes profit within somewhat of a venture timeline, I imagine. What was the actual process? Were you talking to a team? Were you in an Excel sheet? Were you just asking an LLM to sort it out for you? Like, how did you do the back of the envelope to know that now's the right time, that the economics can actually make sense on a reasonable timeline?

• 2:11:45Speaker 04

  Well, I did what any rationally minded person would do, is I made a big old spreadsheet.

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  There we go. I love it.

• 2:11:54Speaker 04

  In all seriousness, though.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:58Speaker 04

  Like, I kind of make this joke with people sometimes, is when I started doing this, for all intents and purposes, I was a finance bro.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:06Speaker 04

  You could make the argument that was arguably perhaps the archetype of the finance bro in some ways.

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:12Speaker 04

  But in all seriousness, like... You know, I was approaching this as a novice, as a student of the field. Sure. And the cool thing about this is, is that artificial intelligence has made the learning curve dramatically, dramatically, you know, easier to cross. Because the hardest thing about physics, I remember, because I studied physics and math in college, was you'd sometimes get like a textbook and you're trying to like learn a new subject. You end up sometimes just getting stuck in the first chapter of it because you don't know the formalism. Like you're, you have to, in order to learn these things, you have to learn them in the language that they're written, obviously. Yeah. But the difference is now you can just ask questions as you understand them.

• 2:12:56Speaker 04

  And, you know, artificial intelligence will kind of meet you there. So it's been a huge accelerant in learning, sort of the ins and outs of doing it. But beyond that, look, we're a team of like 30 people. We've got optics experts, we've got folks from JPL, we've got folks from SpaceX, we've got folks from the, what's it called, Lawrence Livermore National Lab. So we've done pretty deep foundational work in understanding kind of how all the components work together, what the economics of them are, asking questions like, what is the raw cost of this, right? What is the cost to buy a component versus what's the cost to manufacture it from raw

• 2:13:41Speaker 04

  ingredients? You know, and if you see the delta in any one of these things being too big, you kind of know you have to ask the question, why? Yeah. But to kind of answer the question that you started out with, right? The goal from the beginning was, how do we down cost this down? How do we make this as close to the sort of theoretical minimum cost? And if we do that, does this make sense? Does this make sense at bigger scale? And I think that there's a path to doing that, you know? But the cool thing about it is the path starts with actually showing that you can do this. So, and by the way, you guys should come out when we do this.

• 2:14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  So we're gonna have a demonstration this summer, ideally. Cause we have two satellites going up that are actually gonna beam power down from space. So we're gonna have a, something between a scientific conference and like a mini Burning Man in the desert. Where we'll, where we'll show what this looks like in real life.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  That's remarkable speed. I feel like the modern space company, Varda did a little bit of this where it's like, if you're gonna be taken seriously as a space company, you gotta get up into space quickly. Start, get up there, get the experience, do something, iterate, start the process instead of, you know, 10 years of, oh yeah, we're gonna go one day, but it's gotta be the perfect system. Uh, you know, Varda went up and back and I think there were a whole bunch of chaos that happened in space, but they learned a lot and it obviously improved the second, third. And then already the Varda launches have become kind of old news. Oh yeah, though I guess they're up and back again, that happened and it just becomes part of the business. So, uh, I, I love that you're moving so quickly there. Uh, talk to me about.

• 2:15:23Speaker 04

  Those guys were inspirational for me in that regard. Like I talked to, I talked to Will Bruyton in the early days. I once called him my space Sherpa. And I think for that exact reason, I think they went from concept to real thing in space. Doesn't have to be perfect.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:41Speaker 04

  Doesn't have to be the exact version of the thing that you're gonna be doing forever and ever.

• 2:15:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:44Speaker 04

  But like, you're much better off just demonstrating it.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:49Speaker 04

  In year one, year two, year three, rather than waiting 10 years. Because the odds that the thing doesn't work are still pretty high.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:57Speaker 04

  You might as well get it out of the way early.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta blow some stuff up if you're working in the aerospace industry broadly.

• 2:16:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, you gotta be comfortable, make, you gotta be comfortable like having stuff not work and iterating from there.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what kind of weird groups are coming out of the woodwork to try to help, uh, uh, try to get you guys to help them do data center stuff in space? Cause there's a lot of different types of groups that seem like they have an incentive to just do something like, uh, space data center, just to, just for narrative purposes, right? I mean, this whole thing kind of like heated up because, uh, you had a handful of SpaceX investors really start to get. Excited about it, but I imagine you've got some kind of strange pitches because like you guys are working on this problem broadly and people are like, hey, do you have power? I want to put some chips up.

• 2:16:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're cooking some stuff. Stay tuned on that. We got some, we got some good stuff we're cooking up. I will say though, I think the credit for this goes to Bezos, who was looking just like very professorial in that talk that he gave last fall. Where he was like data centers in space might happen in the 2030s. And then everybody in the world was like, no, we're actually going to do this in the next five years.

• 2:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:10Speaker 04

  I will say though, that there is something kind of interesting to this point. Which is that I think a lot of the people in the space industry see this data centers and space concept. As one of the first novel ways to make money in space in kind of a long time, I would say in about a decade. And I think that that that's an important point and like wanted to kind of pause on for a second because.

• 2:17:35Speaker 04

  The reason space isn't a bigger part of our lives is because we haven't really figured out how to like justify people working on it in mass numbers, in my opinion.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Starlink has been a big, a big part of. Starlink, I feel like is the best example of like, hey, if you just build the capability of going up and down a lot, then you can build a lot of other capabilities telecom. Being one of them. One thing I'm curious about is how, how has it been like building and running this company? Versus Robin Hood, you've sort of like done the meme of like make your money in finance and then work on the thing that like you really want to work on. Of course, I'm sure you really wanted to work on, on Robin Hood as well, but. Is it like, you know, at the same time, like you have so much to prove, right? Like you needed, you wanted, you want to.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Do something at Robin Hood scale or bigger, right? Which is a high bar. But then at the same time, there's maybe more, I would hope like some element of like even just like calmness because you're like. It's not so existential as I feel like early companies are where it's like, I need to, I just need to like, I need to make something in this world.

• 2:18:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, a couple of thoughts on this. It kind of, kind of hit the nail on the head. This is something I think about pretty often. Cause on the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. So I do like that a lot. At the same time, it's like kind of a brutal reminder of like, when you're in the early ages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard. Cause you have all the problems of like a small company. In my case, all over again, right? Where you've got like, you've got, you know, a function within your organization where there's like one person working, right? And that person for whatever reason leaves, right? And then you're like, well,

• 2:19:31Speaker 04

  gotta rebuild that thing from scratch. And so there's like a lot of those kinds of growing pains where you're like, oh, there's nobody here that's doing that. I gotta go out and hire a recruiter. And then that person has to go out and recruit the person that's gonna do the thing. So in many ways, it's like, um, it's really hard.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Speaker 04

  I guess that's what I'm trying to say. It's like, it's a reminder that starting companies is actually not that easy.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you get, you get better, but it doesn't actually get easier because then if it's easier, it just means you need to be doing more and more and more and more and, and pushing yourself even, even further.

• 2:20:06Speaker 04

  I also did, um, do something that I didn't have a ton of professional experience in, which was kind of the point, right? I wanted to do something that was net new because it was intellectually very interesting for me. But at the same time, and not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SaaS company, right? Like that's, this is like, new company on absolute hard mode.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, like there just is the reality that in enterprise software, you can get a customer to pay you pretty quickly if you build something that works and in hard tech and anything that requires government approval or real science and R and D, like, the money is just gonna be further down the road. And so that's gonna require more risk. That's just a fact.

• 2:20:54Jordi Hays?

  When people talk about. Progress in space or really any human domain, there's this general sentiment that, okay, this thing, this thing that we want to do is really hard, but robots will be able to do it in like a few years. So, and, and you're, you're looking a little concerned, which is why I wanted to ask, what about the process so far? I'm sure you've been pitched by various robotics companies that want to help speed up processes internally or, or help with the work that you're doing. Is there anything that, that's really adding a lot of value today?

• 2:21:31Speaker 04

  There's not a lot of robotics going on here. No, this is like

• 2:21:35Jordi Hays?

  That's what I figured.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  Just fire up the welder.

• 2:21:38Speaker 04

  It's not to say, it's not to say that, that's not going to happen. By the way, there is a welder, I think, either in the corner or it got moved back to my garage.

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Have you picked up any new skills? Can you use a blowtorch now? Are you, are you, are you learning this stuff? Or, I mean, I imagine you have a team, but every once in a while, you know, you want to take the, you want to take the crane for a spin.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you gotta do it yourself.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:22:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm really good at opening boxes.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Okay. That's good.

• 2:22:06Speaker 04

  I joke around with the team about this sometimes. I'm like, yeah, I left a software company to start a hardware company, but somehow I ended up with a job that's emails and spreadsheets.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 2:22:18Speaker 04

  No, but it is fun because I do get to, I mean, my background is in physics. So I get to think about the actual physics of it pretty often, but we have a team of people that's actually doing assembly and doing a lot of the hardware design. But I get to live vicariously through them. And I can't, I can't show you this right now, but literally there is assembly happening, like on and off. You'll see people walking behind me because they're like carrying boxes and stuff in there for, for the first satellite that goes up.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  Yep. When we watch tours of Abilene, Texas and see data centers, there are a lot of people buzzing around. It feels like, you know, even if you just get an off the shelf, like NBL 72 Nvidia rack, there's people that are maybe doing wiring or dealing with the cooling issues or a variety of things, a chip that's, you know, died and you need to replace it. That all feels really hard to do in space. I heard one pitch that was sort of making the case that wafer scale compute could be more popular in space because you want the entire model on one chip that's just in one satellite. You don't want to put an NBL 72 up into space or whole rack.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  You're just going to have more problems in space and so it's going to live on one sort of complete system. We asked the CEO of Cerebras if this was in his forecast and he said, no, I'm not really interested in it in the next three to five years. And then he went and did a $10 billion deal with OpenAI. So he, he kind of denied that that was on the roadmap, but what do you think the shape of like the compute workload or the compute hardware that you will eventually put into space or, or any company would put into space? What, what will be the norms? What will be the, you know, the, the full, like we, we have, we very much coalesced around like one rack and AMD and Nvidia, they all work within rack scale architectures. What will be the equivalent on a satellite bus that is compatible with a starship or

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  a SpaceX rocket? Like what, what will the shape of the compute stack be in space?

• 2:24:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. The way that I think about it is in terms of workloads and the energy draw or send workloads. And there's versions of this in the future that are more ambitious, right? Where you say, we'll get to much, much bigger scale integrated power levels per satellite. But I think the, from my perspective, the right starting point is to say, what can you do right now in terms of satellite size, power envelope per satellite? And can you solve meaningful problems with that? Right? Because if you're trying to do something brand new like this, you want to, you want to, you want to sort of like, you want to have a conscious approach to how you take on risk, technical risks more specifically.

• 2:25:06Speaker 04

  And if your idea is predicated on making something that's like, you know, the size of 10 football fields on day one, you might want to see if there's a way to do it much smaller at like satellite sizes that are commonplace. So. The the thought process is is that we'll start out in the next eighteen or next twelve to eighteen months or so with demonstration missions culminating in a first of its kind satellite from us that has, let's say, the ten to twenty kilowatt electrical power drop that powers a set of eight to ten interconnected GPUs that can host a model and do inference on it. So inference, I think, is the primary initial use case for this. There's the idea

• 2:25:51Speaker 04

  of like, could you do training with this? Or could you do stuff that requires massive interconnectivity? And it's possible, I think. I think the orbital mechanics of it might be challenging if you're trying to connect a hundred thousand GPUs together. But you don't want to start there because it's it's kind of interesting because we kind of ran into the same problem when we were working on power beaming from space, where the old versions of that concept called for one gigantic satellite that would beam power down with microwaves and a byproduct of the frequency of light and the aperture sizes that you

• 2:26:32Speaker 04

  would need. That thing called for like satellites that are like one to five kilometers in diameter, right? Like, that's too much. Like, if you if your demo mission is a kilometer wide satellite in space, let me give you a little hint, you're probably not going to get funded for that. Like, there's there's probably not funding out there to like, spend a billion dollars on something that may or may not work for the first time. So that's kind of how I think about it here.

• 2:26:59John Coogan?

  Are you feeling any any pushback yet? Or pushback coming on the horizon around like space junk blotting out the sun? It's annoying when I'm stargazing. Is that something we need to worry about? Is that something you should be worried about? Even if the worries are unfounded, you need to get out ahead of from messaging perspective, like how a lot of the AI data centers probably should have been talking about recycling water a year ago. So that never became an issue. It did and then it got debunked, but it still was something that, you know, took over the news cycle for a few days at least.

• 2:27:35Speaker 04

  No, I think it's a good point. So on space junk in general, I think a couple of things. You have to look at space and realize that it's going to get commercialized. And that might happen this year, it might happen five years from now, it might happen 10 years from now. But I think that there is an inevitability that as humans exhaust or really push the the boundaries on like the resources on planet Earth, that we're going to look to space to do more stuff there. So I think my starting point is there's going, the civilization that we want to build has a massive footprint in orbit. And so the question is, is how do you design these satellites? And how do you design these mega constellations that are, you know, I hope in the next 10 years, putting gigawatts or more power up.

• 2:28:21Speaker 04

  So that actually works and doesn't create massive problems with things like the Kessler syndrome. And we think about that from the beginning, we think about the sort of component choices that we have to make sure that as we're de-orbiting them, that they're made with components that can demise on re-entry. And there's a lot of work that's actually going into this already to make sure that, you know, there's this, what's it called, where you can basically disanviguate the space that your satellites are in. That being said, there is space junk out there. There's actually a lot of effort to sort of identify where it is, to track it, and to do orbital maneuvers to make sure that you can protect your spacecraft against it. But again, like, space is really big.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry, Gordy.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, any plans to go to space yourself, Blue Origin? It's, it's gotta be a little bit weird, like, working on something. It's like working on like a restaurant, but you never actually go there, you know? Like, uh,

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Jared Isaacman's been, he's, I feel, I feel very confident with him at the helm at NASA, given that he's been to the the thing that he's in charge of. We gotta get you out there. What's the plan?

• 2:29:30Speaker 04

  He's a good dude. He seems very fit, too. He seems like he's like, um, seems like he's, he's, he was able to survive that and have the build for it. Um, I gotta tell you guys to be totally honest.

• 2:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Because he's been to LIA.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  Space, yeah.

• 2:29:43Speaker 04

  Oh, you think the space did the fitness for him?

• 2:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:45Speaker 04

  In that case, count me in.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  It's a miracle up there. That's funny. Um, one last question. Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:51Speaker 04

  In all seriousness on this one, um, can you imagine how upset your stomach would be in space? Like, can you imagine the pressure changes and like, oh?

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna wait.

• 2:30:04Speaker 04

  So that's my reaction.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna let, you're gonna let a lot of people go first.

• 2:30:07John Coogan?

  Okay, last question.

• 2:30:08Jordi Hays?

  What's the data centers?

• 2:30:09John Coogan?

  The Chevy Corvette ZR1X just posted a zero to 60 time of 1.68 seconds. It goes a quarter mile time of 8.675 seconds. Can we call it a supercar? Is America back in the supercar game? What's your take on the ZR1X?

• 2:30:28Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 2:30:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:30Speaker 04

  But I'll say this. I don't think people give a shit about that.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:36Speaker 04

  I think what people care about is the car fun to drive. And what they should do is they should make that thing with a manual.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  I think that's.

• 2:30:43Speaker 04

  You guys know I love cars, right?

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  That's a good take.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of a Chevy Corvette ST would be the move, something like that.

• 2:30:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:54Speaker 04

  That Corvette's really cool. It's based on a, or it was like inspired by the 458 Ferrari.

• 2:31:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to like about it. They set the speed record for American cars. I really like how they have the Chevy executives driving it on the track, setting the records, the employees themselves, they don't just hire some. I think that's really cool. I mean, that's equivalent of like sending an Aetherflux employee to space, you know? It's like, it's a little bit of a gimmick, but it just feels like, oh, they really take it serious.

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think it's a gimmick at all. It's like way cooler to be like, okay, one of their employees.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, what were you saying?

• 2:31:26Speaker 04

  If they want to do a gimmick, you know what would be a really good one? Put a manual in that thing.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  There we go back to the manual. Yes, 100%. I completely agree.

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you see any predictions around, yeah, just cars, supercars with manual transmissions? It feels like there's certainly a lot of enthusiast interest, but it feels like potentially one of those things where the TAM is actually just like, you take like people that will buy a supercar and then like people that will buy a manual supercar because you get into this, you start running this calculation of like, okay, I'm getting this car and then, and then I'm on a hill in San Francisco. Maybe I'm Sam Altman, I pull up on a hill and maybe I drive stick, but I'm in a $4 million car and it's starting to slide back.

• 2:32:17John Coogan?

  Sam Albin stalls F1 on Gary Street or something.

• 2:32:22Jordi Hays?

  So, but the thing that I am bullish on is more, more analog controls in cars.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anybody that's owned a Ferrari loves the, how the buttons get all sticky.

• 2:32:35Speaker 04

  I may or may not have been dealing with some sticky buttons this morning.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  No, it's brutal.

• 2:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Sticky, the sticky button thing is, is truly so funny. They're like, yeah, like we made these and all after a few years, everything is gonna feel like a kid was eating candy in the car. And if you want to replace it, it's gonna be.

• 2:32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, you go to turn the volume knob and like the volume knob like comes off on your hand and you're like, this is disgusting.

• 2:33:01Speaker 04

  I gotta tell you guys, like the fact that there are not too many manuals that are being made today, it, it like, and I love cars.

• 2:33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:09Speaker 04

  It, it just takes people like me out of it, right? I'm just like, if you make a manual, I'm in, but otherwise there's plenty of cool cars out there. Um.

• 2:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, one exciting, one exciting thing that, that I've been thinking about is I feel like, uh, in 15 years from now, it is not unreasonable to imagine that it is illegal to drive a car yourself on the roads. Like at some point autonomous vehicles will become so safe and driving a car yourself is so dangerous as it, you know, one of the, the number one causes, you know, motor vehicle accidents being the number one causes of death, that car manufacturers will start making insane enthusiast cars that are effectively track only because you have some percentage of the population that's just like, they're not buying a 911 to like use as a daily.

• 2:34:03Jordi Hays?

  They're like, I love cars. So I'm going to get this like, you know, something like, uh, they're, they're making like a W1 track only edition, right? And I could see like track only cars having like a real renaissance.

• 2:34:15John Coogan?

  That'd be interesting, yeah.

• 2:34:16Speaker 04

  That kind of stuff is happening already, but I will tell you this, well, such a thing might happen in California. Florida man will never stand for that.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:34:25Speaker 04

  There will, like, Texas will never stand for that. There are parts of this country that simply will not.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  From their cold, dead hands, for sure.

• 2:34:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:34:33Speaker 04

  But like, Florida man's not down with that.

• 2:34:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I just feel like, uh, I, I, I see it, but at the same time, eventually, you know, you, it, it, these.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  The safety, the safety data is gonna be overwhelming for perfect self-driving cars in a decade. Like, they're just never gonna get.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  It will literally be like Moms Against Self-Driving, but they're talking about like driving yourself.

• 2:34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:58Speaker 04

  But, but the, it's so dystopian, though.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 04

  Right?

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not saying I'm excited. I'm not saying I'm excited about it.

• 2:35:04Speaker 04

  Because, because cars also, I mean, if, I'm gonna wax poetic here for a second on cars. Like, cars are really important. They represent freedom, in my opinion, right? They represent the idea of like, being able to have the, the freedom to, you know, explore the world, the geography of the, of the landscape of everything around us, right? It's a feeling of like, the wind in your hair, the, the way the steering wheel feels in your hands when you go over a patch of road, right? Like, the way all of these things feel, like, it's not just about transportation. It's not just about the feeling of power. For me, I think it is like the embodiment of freedom.

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:35:42Speaker 04

  And the idea of like, going through a sort of like technological course and a course of human history, where we make that freedom illegal, man, that's, I find that to be super dystopian.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's hope it doesn't happen. You can still ride a horse around if you want, in many streets.

• 2:36:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we might see a resurgence in, uh,

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  In horses.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  Stay with the horse, stay with the.

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  People are like, I wanna live within horseback distance of my office.

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  Give that horse a manual.

• 2:36:13Speaker 04

  But I don't think, I don't think this is gonna happen. I don't think this is gonna happen in the next 10 years.

• 2:36:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:18Speaker 04

  You know.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Okay. We'll, we'll, we'll have you back on and we'll, and we'll, and we'll see what happens.

• 2:36:22Speaker 04

  In 10 years.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  We'll check in in a decade. We'll check in next month when there's some amazing news.

• 2:36:26Jordi Hays?

  You'll like California, California, there's some, uh, there's some like mileage tax that they're working on where you'll be allocated like a certain number of miles and pass that point.

• 2:36:36John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Pass that point, it's like, you're gonna pay.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Speaker 04

  Leave it to California to come up with all these brilliant ideas.

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  Who knows. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out with us.

• 2:36:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Come back on, come back on. As you have these, uh, launches, announcements.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Always welcome.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:36:55Speaker 04

  We'll have you guys out too.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:36:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  Goodbye. 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. Uh, see, we have some, we have a small piece of news and then we'll bring in our next guest. Uh, CBS is preparing a new segment called Whiskey Fridays.

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  Whiskey Fridays.

• 2:37:16John Coogan?

  Uh, Dokopu, Dokopu, you know, I can't pronounce the last name. Uh, some staff were only first made aware of it because they encountered CBS testing set design of a faux stock bar.

• 2:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Brought to you by.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Jack Daniels. Uh, so they saw Cheeky Pint.

• 2:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheeky Pint.

• 2:37:33John Coogan?

  And they were like, we gotta have a Cheeky Pint at CBS.

• 2:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Cheeky Pint, great concept. They got the faux bar.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Whiskey Fridays.

• 2:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Hanging out, it's casual, but they're not drinking. So what if you did Cheeky Pint with whiskey?

• 2:37:45John Coogan?

  Wait, is this a, this cannot be a real photo. This is, has to be fake. Update, here's what it, here's what it may look like. Okay, because that makes no sense to just put a news desk in that type of, uh, set. Anyway, we'll have to tune in, we'll have to, uh, give it our review, but until.

• 2:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Wait, one more post.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  Friday comes out, we'll review the second post.

• 2:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Cause we were just talking about cars.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this post here from CDTV, The Goose says, remember when Quavo flexed driving 60 miles per hour? I go a mile a minute, skirt.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's actually quite slow on most freeways. The speed limit is 65 and most people are going 85. 60 might be time to speed it up, Quavo. Let's step it up. Let's step on the gas. Let's get you into a ZR1X, hopefully. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Gabe from Noyz. He's the CEO and we got some fantastic news. Thank you for waiting. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Good to see you.

• 2:38:48Speaker 05

  Absolute pleasure, gentlemen. It's great to be here.

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  First time on the show. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and Noyz.

• 2:38:55Jordi Hays?

  And get the gong ready.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  I will, I will warm up the gong.

• 2:38:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, so my name is Gabe. I'm one of the co-founders of Noyz. We started this project maybe at the start of 2025 when we started building it. But the idea is to build this trading platform for relevance, right? So can we give users the ability to long or short trends, brands, ideas? And have these markets kind of be rooted to social data in a way. So, you know, when you combine the trading activity and you combine the kinds of things you're seeing on Twitter or TikTok or Reddit, you kind of end up with this objective measure of cultural relevance for different types of brands or trends. And for many reasons, we think that's extremely important for where the world is at today. But maybe we can jump into those that you guys need.

• 2:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so maybe, yeah, maybe an example. So like, we, when we started covering La Boo Boo, we were like, this must mean it's about to be over. And I think it was. I think there's a lot of, the stock at least has sold off a lot. In that situation, there's a public company associated with the product. So that, that is one element.

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  Trends, but yeah, walk me through more of how you pull out signal from all the noise around a brand. There's so many different data points that you can use to train.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so like Google Trends is a good example, but Google Trends in an era where people are spending more time in apps, more time in, in all these things like social relevancy, how much something is being talked about. Is, there's less signal there.

• 2:40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the process like?

• 2:40:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Google Trends is, you know, if you were to look at a market on Noyz, let's say it's Claude Code or it was La Boo Boo, you would see something structurally similar to Google Trends. The problem with that is, you know, like, Twenty percent of the information that is going into Google Trends is what actually matters in today's world, right? Which what he was saying, you're seeing things on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter.

• 2:40:48Speaker 05

  So the LaBoubou one's interesting. We basically, we partnered with Kaido first. So they were doing this already for the crypto industry specifically. So they're building social graphs on Twitter and they were able to tell you, you know, how much relevance does Polly Market have versus Call Sheet? In that industry, how much relevance does, you know, AI compared to DeFi have? And then you can see kind of how that relevance changes over time. What we care most about is kind of the market component of it, which is, you know, it's great. Like you can get a snapshot of where attention is today. You know, can you really trust it? That's, that's something to discuss as well. But we want to use markets to have kind of this forward looking nature. And help basically, all these different types of industries make decisions based off of trends and resource allocation, right?

• 2:41:35Speaker 05

  So where are trends going to go in the future? Where is relevance going to shift? We're talking about movie theaters, if we're talking about, you know, is Claude, is Anthropic still going to be as important as it is today in the AI industry in 20? By the end of 2026, these are all like extremely interesting questions, right?

• 2:41:52Speaker 05

  So yeah.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  If you're pulling, if you're, if you're using signal from social and, and these markets get to some amount of scale, there will become an incentive for market participants to try to game it, right? I can think of somebody spinning up a bot farm and talking about LaBoubou millions and millions of times in a, in organic way. How have you guys thought about like parsing through all the noise and trying to find like real signal?

• 2:42:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:42:25Speaker 05

  It's a good question. It's also like one of the number one questions we get, but we pull from a variety of sources. And I'd also add that.

• 2:42:34Speaker 05

  The relevance on noise is very much market-based, so it satisfies the criteria of any other market, which is, you know, if the relevance of, let's say, Claude or movie theaters or peptides is going to go up, it's because people are inherently putting capital behind those positions, right? They're longing it. And those are good questions, but I think the best question that we could try to answer right now is, is social media data alone today a good measure of relevance, a good measure of understanding the shared interests of the world? Our bet is that, you know, markets are probably the best coordination mechanism for these kinds of questions, and we just need markets to be a little better about reading where genuine interests are and where those trends are than social media data alone.

• 2:43:19Speaker 05

  So is it a solved problem? No, we'll continue to basically build in that direction, but it's definitely interesting.

• 2:43:27Jordi Hays?

  What are some rising trends that you guys are thinking about building markets around for this year specifically?

• 2:43:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, I really, indie rock music, I think people aren't really noticing this, but it's been on the rise for the last eighteen months. My prediction is this is coinciding with this return to the in-person meta. Indie rock music is probably the best kind of music for that.

• 2:43:55Speaker 05

  So that's one. Obviously, Claude Code, I think one of the interesting things with noise is you kind of get to see where echo chambers are breaking, right? Because Claude Code was kind of this thing in Silicon Valley that took over the entire timeline, and everybody assumed, you know, nobody's using ChatGPT at this point, that these open AI products are basically in the dust. But the things that we are seeing is the engagement and the kinds of interest that people have in ChatGPT is still higher than Claude, no matter what, so. When you actually compare these things side by side at a very global level, it's interesting to see where these trends are actually at. Yeah.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  How do you think about relevancy to particular sub communities or niches? Because we were reading this piece in Vulture about David Ellison and we were joking that they were saying that Oracle is this sleepy no-name company that makes a lot of money, but it's not known or it's not popular. And in us, it was like in the headlines all last year. We were following it very closely. We know everything about the company. And so, but at the same time, I understand where the Vulture writer is talking about in the sense that like Oracle is not a company that...

• 2:45:06Speaker 05

  They're like Oracle, the sailboat company?

• 2:45:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, like if you stop someone on the street, they might not be talking about Oracle, where they might know about Labubu. So how do you think about someone's stock rising relative just to their niche?

• 2:45:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. One of the most interesting things that we found when we launched our beta in summer of last year was that people were kind of, you know, we kept seeing maybe 40% of the users that we had invited onto the platform using it every single day, every single day, consistent time patterns. And we were like, you know, why the hell are you using this so much? Right? So we're trying to talk to these people. And part of it was they were, they wanted these niche trends to be part of their daily news cycle, right? They wanted to see how the relevance was changing based off things that they really cared about. In my view, we're talking about some projects in the crypto industry that people don't really know, your audience probably doesn't even know exists.

• 2:46:03Speaker 05

  And it was about kind of engaging with other people who are also interested in those things or have differing opinions about those things. And basically creating communities around these niche trends. So yes, it's interesting. More interests are becoming niche over time. But still, the echo chambers and seeing where you're actually at is something crazy.

• 2:46:24John Coogan?

  We love, we love it.

• 2:46:26Speaker 05

  We love echo chambers. We celebrate echo chambers.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  Give me the lead. Who led the round? How much did you raise?

• 2:46:34Speaker 05

  Paradigm, 7.1 million.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Great hit with authority, with authority.

• 2:46:41John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:46:44Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to finally have you on the show, Gabe.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Excited to Cheers, guys. Excited to track noise on noise in the near future.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 2:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. We have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room. We have Alfred back on the show for the second time from Listen Labs. He's the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show again.

• 2:47:17Speaker 06

  Thank you so much. We're excited to be here.

• 2:47:19John Coogan?

  Time to say

• 2:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back. I love the energy. We're fired up.

• 2:47:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:47:24Jordi Hays?

  And we got a, we got a special, we got a, I mean, real quick. Reintroduce yourself for people that missed the first appearance. And then we'll get into the special deliveries that you got for us.

• 2:47:36Speaker 06

  Amazing, yes. So I'm Alfred. I'm the CEO of Listen Labs. What we do at Listen is an AI that speaks to thousands of people and tells you what they want and why. And this helps you develop better products or fix your marketing campaigns. And what you have in the room with you is some incredible products that have been developed using Listen.

• 2:47:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So take us

• 2:47:56Speaker 06

  We have it there.

• 2:47:56John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what is this? How are you involved? What happened with this crazy?

• 2:48:01Jordi Hays?

  Did you want John, did you, did you want John to wear these?

• 2:48:04John Coogan?

  Who are you talking to? You didn't talk to me about this, but somebody's gonna be happy.

• 2:48:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yes. No, so

• 2:48:13Speaker 06

  You know, products are all about finding the right audience. And so these are shorts from Shubbies, which has been one of our early customers. And they use Listen to test their prints, test their fitting. And actually, one of them, they developed a new, entire new product line for kids. Kids shorts where they used Listen to interview hundreds of kids. And they figured out like the liner in the shorts that they had previously were very uncomfortable.

• 2:48:42Speaker 06

  Maybe something for you to wear.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very fascinating.

• 2:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what?

• 2:48:47Speaker 06

  Maybe ten years ago.

• 2:48:48Jordi Hays?

  What are some of the challenges with consumer brands when it comes to like really understanding your customers? Because I think with, you know, with a SaaS company, early-stage SaaS company, you can almost, you can just talk to all your customers.

• 2:49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you don't have that many.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe you have dozens.

• 2:49:04John Coogan?

  And there's probably a power law where there's one customer who's providing eighty percent of your revenue in the first couple of years.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Whereas with consumer brands, you go talk to twenty customers and then like you could get like a terrible signal.

• 2:49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Because you just happen to pick incorrectly.

• 2:49:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, like you, in the olden days, you were stuck in this paradigm between you could use a survey, but then you would get a ton of people not really paying attention and they would answer your questions, but you wouldn't get like rich, deep insights. And you could then have one-on-one interviews, but as you said, if you have thousands of customers, it's really hard to do them at scale. And so with Listen, you get the best of both worlds where you have an AI talk to all of your customers and then you can figure out the nuances, like which segments work, which don't. And people are much more honest talking to an AI than talking to a person. It's something that we found out. And so you get kind of, their feedback is more driven to how they actually will behave in the future.

• 2:50:05Jordi Hays?

  I have a company that I'm going to email and tell them to use Listen Labs. I don't know them at all. It's this company, they make sound machines for kids.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:50:15Jordi Hays?

  And I've had multiple of them. I don't know why I've had multiple of them because both of them, when you're trying to, if you just like touch the thing in the wrong way, it triggers like a motion thing and it just starts playing music.

• 2:50:28Jordi Hays?

  It literally, I went, I was messaging.

• 2:50:30John Coogan?

  Quietly trying to adjust.

• 2:50:32Jordi Hays?

  I felt bad, I was messaging the support after a week ago saying like, "Please let the CEO know that your product makes bedtime worse, a disaster." And I will buy another. I will buy another one.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  As soon as you fix it.

• 2:50:47Jordi Hays?

  But you need to fix it. I'll give you the third chance.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:52Jordi Hays?

  And that just seems like an incident where they shipped a product and then it sells well because it's in demand, but they're not actually paying attention to like how people experience.

• 2:51:00John Coogan?

  Do you feel like you're able to pull out that emotional response from like you interview 100 people? They're all like, eh, it's okay. And then there's that one person that clearly found a fatal flaw with the product, is animated about it, they're aggressive, they're emotional, maybe they're screaming at the AI. Maybe they're being rude. You censor the expletives, but you know that there's emotion there.

• 2:51:22Jordi Hays?

  I didn't swear.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  Good, good on you. And you're able to give that more weight? Like, how do you think about balancing out all the different emotions that come through in responses? Because sometimes they can get collapsed in AI models.

• 2:51:36Speaker 06

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, the CEO of Sweetgreen, I think, was on TBP and talking about this, how like surveys miss the outliers. Yeah, that's the protein ball that they developed using Listen. But the other methods of collecting feedback miss the kind of the crucial pieces of feedback that really matter. And it's often about like one or two or a couple of people that are part of your segment that will drive most of your revenue, and they will be much more animated and care much more. And so the AI is able to detect kind of their emotional, the way they show up emotionally, as well as kind of the nuances of how they answer the question. We have something called response quality.

• 2:52:20Speaker 06

  So the AI can rank how well this person kind of answers the question and how much they know about their product. So it's able to kind of surface those outliers to you and then like give you actionable recommendations.

• 2:52:31Jordi Hays?

  What is the actual workflow like in general in order to actually start talking with customers through Listen? I imagine it's also different with like a kid's product line with Chubbies. Like, how do you actually facilitate getting a parent to allow their kid to talk to a robot? I'm very curious.

• 2:52:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course, you need the parental consent. But it's essentially four steps. So you start by asking your question, which could be, you know, SaaS tools also use it like Replit. So they could ask, how should we, what should we change in our product if you compare us to Lovable? And then Listen will go and recruit that audience for you. So we'll find Replit users as well as Lovable users. And we have 30 million people in our database, so we can find like pretty nuanced recruits. And then Listen will go and have video calls with them, where they could potentially also share their screen. So you can have thousands of those video calls. And then the AI will kind of analyze those and give you recommendations of what to do. Makes sense.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  Take me back. We didn't really talk about your earlier career, the first time you were on the show. BeFake image app, what was the story there? How did you build it? How'd you scale it? What was the value prop? And how'd you wind up selling it too?

• 2:53:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure. So we, my co-founder and I, we built this AI consumer app, which was essentially kind of Ghibli-fy. You could Ghibli-fy yourself. You could do this kind of image prompts.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Style transfer almost?

• 2:54:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. And the real use case was creating Tinder profile pictures, of course. And so it like blew up on Reddit. We were on the front page of Reddit and we had 20,000 downloads in one day. And that was the inspiration behind Listen, because we had these many users and we were experimenting with LMS at the time and thought it would be interesting to let an AI talk to our users. And it turned out to be really useful. So we were like, why are we making this shitty app? Like, let's just sell this thing. And then we actually ended up in this limbo state where it did work for us, but it still took us 18 months of like making the product perfect before it became useful. And that's something I've learned, that like being early looks the same as being wrong.

• 2:54:52Speaker 06

  And a lot of people we talked to told us they've already built the product that we were building and it didn't work. And so we had so much rejection. But now, since we launched nine months ago, and when I was last on TBPN, we grew on our revenue of 15x. We interviewed a million people. Let's go. Raised a hundred million in total now, so.

• 2:55:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:55:19John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:55:20Speaker 06

  I'm still trying to get used to the energy of, you know, I'm Swedish. I'm trying to amp it up, but.

• 2:55:24Jordi Hays?

  No, this is night, this is night and day from the last time.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:27Jordi Hays?

  You're fired up. I love it. Uh, what's, uh, what's next? Just, just scaling, uh, on the, on the customer side, hiring.

• 2:55:35John Coogan?

  The whole Fortune 500. You gotta get them all.

• 2:55:37Speaker 06

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:55:38Jordi Hays?

  You gotta collect them all.

• 2:55:39John Coogan?

  Sweetgreen, Google, Nestle, Skims, Microsoft. There's a couple.

• 2:55:43Speaker 06

  We have a list we're going after, five companies, one at a time, but we have, like, hiring is the number one priority. And, uh, we're trying to do these tricks to stand out. We did the billboard. I don't know if you saw that where we had,

• 2:55:57Speaker 06

  and one thing we've learned, learned is that there's so many companies growing really fast, raising a ton of money. And so you just gotta communicate your culture and get people excited to join. And so we made this billboard that had just black text on, on white where that led to a puzzle, an engineering puzzle. And that made it much more attractive for folks to like, join the team because they realize we're a team of like, competitive programmers and puzzle hunters overall.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Puzzle hunters. Love it.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, yeah. Mike Isaac in the New York Times wrote a whole piece about how like, how obscure billboards are in San Francisco. It's like a few people talking to each other, very in-group, but I love when people do, uh, fun stuff with billboards.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Gotta stand up.

• 2:56:40John Coogan?

  It's always great.

• 2:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Gotta stand up.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:56:43Jordi Hays?

  So great to have you back on. I'm sure you will be back on this year with the amount of momentum you guys have, uh, and looking forward to it.

• 2:56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:50Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, thanks. Thanks for this. Thanks for this protein max bowl. We'll, uh, we'll split it. We can each still get like 50 grams of protein.

• 2:56:58John Coogan?

  That's plenty.

• 2:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Plenty.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:57:01Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:57:01John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:57:02Speaker 06

  Hey, guys.

• 2:57:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:57:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. Uh, TJ Parker asked a question. He said, why are there not a hundred times more weird consumer AI things going on? Nikita Beer answered. He said, hold that thought until Dom Hoffman. Launches and Dom quote tweeted and just said sup. Of course, Dom is the creator of Vine.

• 2:57:35Jordi Hays?

  And his company is called Sup.

• 2:57:37John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 2:57:39Jordi Hays?

  So, but it was a, it was a good response. Dom created Vine.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. And in a number of other things, a fantastic creator on the internet has created a bunch of like fun moments on the internet. I've been following his career for a long time. I enjoyed Vine. Were you ever on Vine?

• 2:57:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I was on it, but I never, I never, I never like fell in love.

• 2:58:00John Coogan?

  I created the skit, so I added on Vine. No, not really. But I was actually experimenting with the Vine format very seriously. And I would do these like hyper lapses and infinite loops. You could do this, this fun format where you would take a little, like basically an image as you went around your house. And if you ended at the start, it would be an endless loop. And Vine was very good about endlessly looping videos. So you could do all these cool, fun things with it. I had a lot of fun with that format. It was great.

• 2:58:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, did you see that Havana syndrome is real?

• 2:58:31John Coogan?

  Apparently. This is crazy. I have no idea.

• 2:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Noah Smith says Havana syndrome was real and we got the device that causes it.

• 2:58:37John Coogan?

  Conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, a number of months ago, the US captured a weapon that has been associated with Havana syndrome.

• 2:58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Havana syndrome.

• 2:58:46John Coogan?

  It's a disputed medical condition. Starting in 2016 in about a dozen overseas locations, US and Canadian government officials and their families reported symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound. The symptoms lasted for months, including disabling cognitive problems, balance problems, dizziness, insomnia and headaches. Havana syndrome is not officially recognized as a disease by the medical community, uh, but apparently, uh, there is reporting in CNN now that there's a device.

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, there have been a bunch of real investigations in this because it's happening all over the world. People are like, I feel terrible. Why do I feel terrible? I'm hearing things. I have a headache. I can't balance. Uh, and so this was just a great mystery. CNN now reports the device linked to it was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration. And DoD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits into just a backpack.

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:59:47Jordi Hays?

  Which is scary.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  Will a defense tech startup build one and go through Y Combinator? Who knows? Stay tuned.

• 2:59:57Jordi Hays?

  Havana AI.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  Commercialize this technology any day now. Tyler?

• 3:00:02Speaker 02

  I want to see someone, if they're building it, I want them to use it on themselves, like Jake Adler at Pilgrim.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:00:08Speaker 02

  Cuts his leg open.

• 3:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:09Speaker 02

  At the pitch meetings.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  Prove that it works.

• 3:00:11Speaker 02

  He shoots the VC with the.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  Just kidding. I'm so dizzy, I gotta write you a term sheet. Alz says the jobs exist because important people want to have large pyramids of people reporting to them, even if the pyramids do nothing useful. AI will not change this. Oh, interesting. Fake jobs. In other jobs news, there's an opinion here. Our brightest minds are disappearing into finance, management, consulting, and corporate law. And.

• 3:00:40Speaker 02

  Is this one of like the oldest?

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Marinetti says, no, we are using our best minds to allocate resources optimally. How terrible. Of course, we love finance, management, consulting, and corporate law. These are all valuable pieces of the economy. They are important.

• 3:00:54Jordi Hays?

  New research.

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Salesforce, who we have the CEO of, joining us right now. Marc Benioff is in the Restream waiting room, and we will bring him in to the CBP in UltraDell. Mark, how are you doing?

• 3:01:05Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 3:01:06Marc Benioff?

  Great to see you guys.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  Back for round two. I prepared for this interview. I prepared for this. I prepared for this interview.

• 3:01:14Marc Benioff?

  Wasn't that bad?

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  I went to Slackbot.

• 3:01:16Jordi Hays?

  We loved it. We loved it. I will say it was one of the most fun conversations we've had all last year.

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  It was amazing. It was amazing.

• 3:01:22Marc Benioff?

  Really?

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  No, yeah.

• 3:01:23Marc Benioff?

  Well, then you guys are just not having enough fun in your life. I'm your biggest fun.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Here it comes. Here it comes.

• 3:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Don't sell yourself short.

• 3:01:32John Coogan?

  The bogging starts. But I prepared for this interview by going to Slackbot, now powered by Anthropic, and I asked, what is the single best Metallica song? It said, "Master of Puppets." Agree or disagree?

• 3:01:46Marc Benioff?

  Okay, guys, I know that you are, this isn't at the tip of your tongue, so I was ready. And I was gonna flip it for your partner so you can, he can get all the words, cause you know, we had some issues last time.

• 3:01:58Jordi Hays?

  We did have some issues.

• 3:01:59Marc Benioff?

  We'll go through the details.

• 3:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna, are you about to say, are you gonna give us a-

• 3:02:02Marc Benioff?

  Metallica, Name Your Tune.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:04Marc Benioff?

  It was not a great moment for your show.

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  It was a rough moment. It was a rough moment.

• 3:02:09John Coogan?

  It was rough.

• 3:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, are you gonna sign that, are you gonna sign that and send it to us so we can hang it in the rafters?

• 3:02:14Marc Benioff?

  I'm not, it's mine. You can get your own. Metallica.com, we run it actually on Salesforce.

• 3:02:21John Coogan?

  Oh, you do?

• 3:02:21Marc Benioff?

  We run Metallica.com.

• 3:02:23Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 3:02:23Marc Benioff?

  You can get to your Metallica album on there and all the other good stuff that you need to kinda-

• 3:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna give the, I'm gonna give my, uh, recap of John using Slackbot this morning. Because he, this was an ASI moment for John. He was like-

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  I was very pleased with it.

• 3:02:41Jordi Hays?

  John, uh, we do the show all day long, there's a lot going on in Slack, and so catching up is, is tough.

• 3:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  This absolutely nailed the summary.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  It did.

• 3:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Immediately found something that was like very actually interesting, important, and we're like, whoa, we missed that.

• 3:02:57John Coogan?

  I probably truthfully had about like 200 notifications across 15 different channels as they build up. And it basically put together a deep research report of every little item, picked it out, when am I mentioned? And it was exactly what I wanted to catch up. And then I went to it and I asked, okay, clear all of the notifications. It couldn't do it, but it gave me the shortcut, shift, escape, and it did it in two seconds. So I was very satisfied. How has the response been from your customers?

• 3:03:23Marc Benioff?

  First of all, well, there's the response of my customer right there. I would say, I'm so excited that we could finally get this out of the shop and into people's hands. I've been using it myself for months.

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:35Marc Benioff?

  It's completely changed my life. I think it will change your life. I think it'll change your show. I think it's gonna make everything better. Because- You know, we've talked a long time about prompt engineering in AI. You know, when you're writing your prompt, you're kind of coming up with your question. Now you really see the power of context engineering. That is, it's looking at all the data about your show and everything you guys have ever said. It can even read your DMs. And then it's coming in and it's saying, hey, right here, this is what you need to ask Marc Benioff. This question, this is the zinger for him. And that's the prompt you could give it, which is, hey, based on everything we know about Mark, everything that's ever happened in the show, everything that's happening inside Slack now,

• 3:04:16Marc Benioff?

  plus everything that Anthropic knows, everything that everyone knows, what's the zinger for Mark? And then it's going to come up with it.

• 3:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about the tone and the speed. I noticed that it responds like an LLM. It's giving me a few paragraphs. It's not acting like a person who might respond with on it. And then, okay, here's what I found. And then it's like six different messages. Do you, is that intentional? Do you like the tune? Or do you see it evolving to your style over time? Where does all this go in terms of the flavor of Slackbot's personality powered by?

• 3:04:57Marc Benioff?

  This is really different than our last interview. We're going deep in product. Okay, so number one. Number one, every company is going to have a customer agent and an employee agent. And that's why we've been working on Agent Force to build the orchestration layer, the observability layer, so that companies can get out there with their agents. And that's what I've been so excited about. Then, all the apps, like Slack is only one app we make. We have a whole bunch of apps, like Tableau, our sales cloud, our service cloud, marketing, commerce, and on and on and on. We have a whole family of apps to help you run your business. And then, a huge set of data capabilities, including Informatica, MuleSoft, our data 360 layer,

• 3:05:39Marc Benioff?

  that let you federate and integrate your data, which means that it's going to find all the data in your company and bring it together. Now, what you're not seeing yet in Slackbot, but what I have. Is that you just, you just hit a button and it connects to all your Google sources also. And it connects to all your

• 3:05:57Jordi Hays?

  You're keeping the good stuff for yourself. This is a fast takeoff scenario. And you're like, we're keeping this for ourselves. We can't let it, we can't let it out.

• 3:06:04Marc Benioff?

  Well, I, my, like, I was at a conference for the last two days, really cool conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.

• 3:06:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:06:11Marc Benioff?

  Um, I live in Hawaii, so I popped over to Honolulu. And it was called the Honolulu Defense Forum. And there's so many of my customers there. It was really cool. But I don't have time to get briefed on all these customers. So I'm doing the briefing myself. I just say to Slackbot. In real time, I'm meeting with this customer. Tell me everything about the customer. And it's not just getting the experience from the public web. But it's also then looking at all my proprietary databases and saying, boom, here you go, Mark. You're ready. And the prioritization. I, I think you're going to have a great experience. I want to hear your exact feedback after you kind of get into it for a few days.

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, so.

• 3:06:51Marc Benioff?

  It's changed how I work. It's awesome.

• 3:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I had a, I had a great experience. I didn't feel like I needed a smarter model. It did seem like I was on Claude three, not four, five, which I've used and is great for some.

• 3:07:04Marc Benioff?

  Do you want to know why you feel that way?

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  Why? Yeah, why?

• 3:07:07Marc Benioff?

  Because you're getting the data from Slack.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:07:10Marc Benioff?

  You have so much data about your business or what, you know, your show, your, everyone. That you, that's what you've been missing in all of your prompts.

• 3:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:19Marc Benioff?

  You're, when you go on Anthropic or you go on Gemini or OpenAI or whatever you use.

• 3:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:25Marc Benioff?

  You know, it doesn't know anything about you. It doesn't have your context. It doesn't have your data.

• 3:07:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:30Marc Benioff?

  And that's what I mean, context engineering.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:33Marc Benioff?

  It knows you now. It really does. It knows so much about you, your company, everything you guys have done, what you've built, this great show you have.

• 3:07:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:41Marc Benioff?

  And now it's able to really tell you, and you should like, ask it like, hey, what are the three things we should do to? You know, increase viewership. What are we gonna, what should we be doing to, you know, increase our revenue, make us more profitable? What is my prioritization for the week? Try like, because it knows so much about your company now because of the huge investment you've made in Slack, you're gonna get a great outcome. I'm really confident. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen some of the videos that Mr. Beast has been doing, but he is really in it to win it on this. And he runs, you know, his whole company.

• 3:08:15Jordi Hays?

  People talk about Mr. Beast like, like he's this consumer guy, but this guy loves enterprise software.

• 3:08:20Marc Benioff?

  He is the entrepreneur's entrepreneur.

• 3:08:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 3:08:24Marc Benioff?

  Oh, he's amazing. The first time I ever talked to him was a couple of years ago. He goes, "I am gonna be like Steve Jobs. I am gonna be like Larry Ellison." I'm like, "What?" He's like, "Yeah, I want to be one of the great entrepreneurs of all time." So, he really has a mental model that's super unusual. Well, he runs his whole companies on Slack. So now he has the ability to kind of get to a new level by bringing AI in. Because when you take AI, data, and the app together, as you see, you get a tremendous outcome. AI by itself, the models, great, fantastic, but they're commodities at this point. We

• 3:09:05Marc Benioff?

  all know that. The data sets, those are commodities on the consumer side, but not your data set. The only one who has your data set is you. And then three, the app, you've chosen Slack. Thank you for that. And so now you put one, two, and three together, and bam, you are ready to roll, you know? You can now sleep with one eye open.

• 3:09:26John Coogan?

  There we go. Give us a Super Bowl preview. What's, what's been exciting in the past that you've done? What do you want to do in the future with the?

• 3:09:33Jordi Hays?

  What's your most memorable Super Bowl? Let's start there.

• 3:09:37Marc Benioff?

  I think there is going to be some pretty cool stuff coming from us for the Super Bowl. I'm not going to give you all the secrets.

• 3:09:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:44Marc Benioff?

  I may have already given you some of the secrets.

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:47Marc Benioff?

  But I don't think I can give you any more of the secrets because it is going to be astonishing.

• 3:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:51Marc Benioff?

  What we're doing and everything that we just talked about somehow serendipitously, maybe you guys already know.

• 3:09:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:57Marc Benioff?

  You know, but everything that we just talked about, take all of that and make it into a Super Bowl ad over the last 10 minutes. And I think you're going to have something astonishing.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what do you think about, uh, uh, model pickers selecting the model that I want to use? How much of that should live with the end user? I go to Slack bot and say, hey, I want to use Opus or I want to use four or five versus, uh, your team deciding what makes sense for that overall. You know, infrastructure that you've built and then it's below the surface and I don't really care as a, as a user.

• 3:10:31Marc Benioff?

  Well, you're already using a whole synthesis of models.

• 3:10:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:10:34Marc Benioff?

  Because Salesforce hat make, we make a lot of our own models.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:10:38Marc Benioff?

  We use, uh, we use all the, all the major vendors.

• 3:10:42John Coogan?

  Uh huh. Yeah.

• 3:10:42Marc Benioff?

  And we bring it all together to get what you need to be successful. We don't want you to have to worry about that. We, we want to just deliver a great, I want you hit Slack bot.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:52Marc Benioff?

  And it just says, boom, here we go. And I don't want you to have to think about those things. I want to make it just great, a great experience and I want to help you grow your business.

• 3:11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:02Marc Benioff?

  You know, I want to help you grow your customers. I want to help you service them. I want to help you make your employees more productive. That, that's what I'm excited about.

• 3:11:11Jordi Hays?

  You guys have, uh, insane scale as you look across the, the, the, yeah, to, to put it, to put it, uh,

• 3:11:20Marc Benioff?

  Yeah, it is, it is crazy.

• 3:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but specifically have you been surprised by any industries that are resistant to AI? Like just blanket saying like, ah, we're,

• 3:11:30Marc Benioff?

  Well, there's so much dark things to AI that it freaks everybody out. I mean, I mean, how do, how dark do you want to go? Like we can go really dark.

• 3:11:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we were talking, there was, uh, the journal had a statistic earlier. They said only 10% of adults are excited about AI.

• 3:11:44Marc Benioff?

  I don't think that's as dark as I would go. I would say the rate of suicide that I saw with kids this year because of AI, that was the one of the worst things I've seen in my life. It was very reminiscent of kind of what we saw with social media, kind of this unregulated technology dramatically impacting the families in the most horrible way possible. I watched an episode on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago on character AI, and I could not believe what I was watching. And I think that that dark part of AI, the unregulated AI, because we know AI is kind of, you know, it's inaccurate, it's, you know, it's very kind of unwieldy.

• 3:12:25Marc Benioff?

  We don't know how these models work. And to see how it was working with these children, and then the kids ended up taking their lives, that's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. So, that's the darkest part of AI. And I think we have to be careful. You know, tech companies hate regulation. They hate it. You hear that all the time, except for one regulation they love, Section 230, which means that those companies are not held accountable for those suicides. So, those social media companies, or in this case now the AI companies, that's not, they basically say, oh, we're protected by Section 230, we're a platform

• 3:13:06Marc Benioff?

  company. They, they will quickly run to that regulation. But the reality is, is highly unregulated in every other area. So, this is kind of a moment. I'm sorry, am I going too dark? No, no, it's fine. I'm sorry. You said go dark.

• 3:13:20Jordi Hays?

  No, we, we have these kind of conversations. We've talked about all this stuff. And in general, I, I wrote, I wrote about this in our newsletter last week, which is that why would the, why would the average Ameri, the, the, all the interviews that all the lab CEOs have done have just resurfaced over the last couple of years? Maybe they did the interview five, six years ago, talking about how the classic line From Sam is, you know, AI will lead to the end of the world, but there's going to be a lot of great companies created in the meantime. And so when people, I saw that exact video yesterday had a hundred thousand likes on Instagram, right?

• 3:13:59Jordi Hays?

  So like, that is everyday people just seeing this and being like, okay, I like, they maybe like chat GPT. But they're like, I, I like my job more, or I like, you know, living in this world and being a human. So I think we have a, there's a real like narrative problem with the industry right now, and it's going to be.

• 3:14:20Marc Benioff?

  And look, and if we're not about protecting our children, what are we about? So let's just start there. And because we now have evidence of what happens when it's fully unregulated. And because we have the evidence of this huge horrible situation, we have to take action. And I think some countries, you know, have taken a lot of action, especially when it comes to things like social media, you know? If you're in Singapore, you can't use social media if you're under sixteen years old. So it's like, it, it, it will eventually get taken care of. But we live in, you know, in our world here in the United States, we're, we're very much like, oh, don't regulate technology. Cause we got to keep the innovation going at all costs.

• 3:15:04Marc Benioff?

  We got to keep the growth happening at all costs.

• 3:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what's the real solution?

• 3:15:09Marc Benioff?

  I'm a growth at all costs guy, so I get it.

• 3:15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. What, what, like, what's a pragmatic approach here? Because when, at the same time, LLMs can have some negative externalities. We've talked about the example of like, you know, if, if grocery stores were invented last year, all the headlines would be like, this guy just went insane in a grocery store. And that'd be a huge story, right? Or like, this person was murdered in a grocery store. That stuff happens, but like we don't, it doesn't get written about.

• 3:15:36Marc Benioff?

  It's not because of the grocery store.

• 3:15:37Jordi Hays?

  It's not because of the grocery stores.

• 3:15:38Marc Benioff?

  It's just because.

• 3:15:39Jordi Hays?

  And at the same time, AI, from an education standpoint, all the focus is on people like not writing essays anymore. But there, and there's very little writing on like, hey, this, you know, you know, a fifteen year old might like teach themselves like physics through using an LLM, and maybe that's amazing, right? So it's like, uh, it cuts both ways.

• 3:16:02Marc Benioff?

  Well, I own a media company too, not as exciting as yours. It's called Time. And in my little media company, we're held responsible for the content that we write and what we say. Oh, by the way, you are too.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:16:15Marc Benioff?

  But in the case of this technology providers, they are not. So I think step one is let's just hold people accountable. Let's reshape.

• 3:16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:23Marc Benioff?

  Reform, revise, section 230. And let's make, let's make it, let's try to save as many lives as we can by doing that.

• 3:16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who, who are you looking to in terms of leading the messaging around, around AI safety? Do you like Dario?

• 3:16:40Marc Benioff?

  Oh, I'm turning it over to you right now.

• 3:16:41John Coogan?

  Is it us or is it Dario?

• 3:16:43Marc Benioff?

  I'm passing this over to you guys.

• 3:16:45John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:16:47Marc Benioff?

  You guys can make this part of your narrative and take it forward.

• 3:16:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. What about in, in the workplace? Have you had to contend internally with the idea of someone confiding in, as silly as it sounds, confiding in Slack bot about a problem that they're having with, in an HR context? And how that might be a new territory, a new surface area for you to deal with?

• 3:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need to talk about Slack bot safety.

• 3:17:12John Coogan?

  I mean, it, it sounds silly, but really if somebody goes and they're like, you know, my, my boss said he's going to fire me next week. I'm overstressed. I'm, I'm thinking of doing something crazy. You're in this bizarre scenario for the first time in perhaps your entire career.

• 3:17:27Marc Benioff?

  We are, and I think in two areas. First of all, as I mentioned, every company is going to have a customer agent. And you've seen like there's 10, since we've spoken like 10, 20, 30,000 companies. I don't even know what the exact number is today of companies deploying agent force.

• 3:17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:40Marc Benioff?

  For their customers. And we've seen these amazing agents emerge like Olive, you know, Williams Sonoma site, or we're going to see one emerge next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos called Eva. And every customer company has an agent to work with their customers to make them more successful. And when we deploy those agents, we have a tremendous architecture to create the guardrails to help prevent crazy things happening. You know, we don't want, you know, we've seen this where customers try to come along and have kind of cyber sex experience, you know, with these agents on these websites. Like no, that's not going to happen, you know, on the Williams Sonoma site. Where you're, that's not what you're going to use the turkey baster here for. Okay?

• 3:18:25Marc Benioff?

  So we.

• 3:18:28Marc Benioff?

  We have a whole different approach. And so that level of guardrails is super critical. And on the employee side, we're doing exactly the same thing. We have to kind of, you know, put those tools together and work with our partners, but also do a lot of deep engineering work to make it as great as we can. And that core platform, Agent Force, has all of those capabilities built into it.

• 3:18:50John Coogan?

  On the employment side, has AI rethought your thinking about employment planning? How many people you need to hire? The scope of the organization? Has it been a roller coaster? Or do you feel like you've been on one trajectory? Or the trajectory has changed? Have you been processing just AI making your employees more effective potentially?

• 3:19:11Marc Benioff?

  Yeah, what a great question. I would say that, you know, we have about 80,000 employees now, and we'll do a little over 41 billion this year in revenue. We're now the number one enterprise software.

• 3:19:26Marc Benioff?

  Enterprise software company. In AI, we just passed 11.1 trillion tokens. Like crazy.

• 3:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Are you surprised that companies are not getting valued on token generation yet? There's such big numbers, you know, we.

• 3:19:46Marc Benioff?

  I am. I think, I mean, we're probably number one or number two on the token side.

• 3:19:53Marc Benioff?

  That's probably has to do with our relationship with Bilbo Baggins. But otherwise, we've got this figured out. Okay, I would say what we have to do when we think about employment, to get back to your core question. I've changed the employee mix.

• 3:20:09Marc Benioff?

  This year, we hired more than 20% more account executives. There still needs to be people like me and you, who go meet with our customers to really explain all of the intricacies and nuances of the technology. There's a lot of false narratives and people playing the market and saying things about AI that are not true, especially in regards to the enterprise. And we have to go explain it and talk to it and build the relationship and show them and prototype and deploy. And so those people are more valuable than ever and more important than ever to us. On the engineering side, I've held my engineering headcount mostly flat this year because I've gotten so much productivity increase. I probably have about 15,000 engineers.

• 3:20:54Marc Benioff?

  And. They're more productive than ever. I'm so proud of them. Look at what we just delivered for you guys. You know, they're like doing great and we need to go even farther. But you mentioned Anthropic, you know, we own about 1% of Anthropic. I would say that, you know, those coding tools, you mentioned Claude Code, other things, Cursor, we use that inside. We do things to have a more efficient, more productive engineering organization. And we, it turns out, we've reduced the number of CEOs to one because of Slack. We can do more because we can deploy that AI technology to the CEO also.

• 3:21:31John Coogan?

  Did, I mean, you've spent your entire career in technology. Did this, did the ChatGPT moment, did the AI boom? Were you expecting it or did it hit you like a flashbang? Was it just, was it just a, just a massive flashbang that just hit you like a ton of bricks?

• 3:21:51Marc Benioff?

  Hit me like a ton of bricks, I would say.

• 3:21:56John Coogan?

  We have a flashbang, I had to use it.

• 3:21:59Marc Benioff?

  10 years ago, I had the nastiest dream about AI and so I started a whole AI initiative at Salesforce called Einstein.

• 3:22:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:22:06Marc Benioff?

  And we became the number one enterprise AI. And so we were building models, doing these things, making all that happen. I always believed that this time would happen. But it was more about predictive AI and machine learning and machine intelligence and these kinds of things. And it was, you know, we still use all that, by the way, to make this work. And then when the large language model emerged and prompt engineering emerged. And by the way, you may or may not know, but I'll give a little credit to my engineering team because they deserve it. But prompt engineering actually emerged out of Salesforce research. And then all of these companies, you know, have new companies came along to say, we're just going to focus on the large language model. And it's been a huge, incredible success story. So.

• 3:22:51Marc Benioff?

  I am just so impressed with what's happened in the last few years, but it's just another core part of our infrastructure now. And I think you see that in Slackbot. So getting back to Slackbot, it was just a seamless upgrade for you today. You have Slack. We added Slackbot. When we added Slackbot, we added all the AI and all the data capability. And now, actually, in the new version of Slack, you're going to see a lot of new CRM capabilities as well. You'll be able to manage your customers' information without even having to go to Salesforce. You'll be able to manage your service organization. But here's the secret. Salesforce is behind the scene doing all of it. And at some point, if you want to upgrade to the bigger, more advanced adult versions of all those things, you'll be able to do that.

• 3:23:35John Coogan?

  Okay, I want to talk about that because we've talked to a lot of companies where they have a single product, their point solution, but because of AI, they're able to add on other surface area. Everyone's bleeding into everyone else's territory. Everyone's expanding right now. What is it like running an organization where you might have two products that are now bleeding into each other? And do you have to go and play tiebreaker a lot? Do you have a pattern for this? Like, how do you work through all that?

• 3:24:04Marc Benioff?

  I love it. I think everyone should innovate and create and compete with each other, especially inside the company. Some people stay in their land, some people don't. I'm not going to interfere with that. You know, we have these tremendous leaders like running Slack or our sales product, our sales and service product are $10 billion products each. They are some of the largest products in the software industry. And the new versions are incredible, but the new versions are all Slackbot first. And you haven't seen them yet, but if you want to get a demo later after the show, you'll see Slackbot and Slack sitting on top of Salesforce. And that boom, you can have all this incredible productivity. But it's the lineage of Salesforce coming forward

• 3:24:45Marc Benioff?

  into the present moment reality of these unbelievable new advancements in AI. And that is what I've been working on. So a Slackbot first world, the ability for every company to have a customer agent, an employee agent, the agent force layer, all these incredible families of applications we have. We just bought a company called Informatica, by the way, for like $9 billion. And it was...

• 3:25:12Marc Benioff?

  Kind of an incredible acquisition. All right, well, there we go. But I love, I always loved the company. But, you know, they've done things in their new technology that for AI, if you don't have your data right, you don't have your AI right. Remember, the reason why Slackbot is working is we have all your data in there, normalized. And so it's able to take all your data and give you really cool answers. Well, every company needs to normalize their data. So that's why we bought Informatica. Everybody needs to integrate it together. And then you have to go and connect all the other data sources in the enterprise, like Snowflake or Databricks or BigQuery or Redshift or even IBM Mainframes. We call that zero copy.

• 3:25:54Marc Benioff?

  So our system goes out, grabs all that data in all these other places, brings it together like it is for you already in Slack. And then everything sits on top of it and you get this really powerful AI experience. So that's what's going on. That's what's exciting for me every single day.

• 3:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about M and A. You talked about Informatica. There's, you know, the SaaS apocalypse has been widely reported. I'm sure you look at some charts and get a little, get a little.

• 3:26:21Marc Benioff?

  I'd rather not look at the charts. I can't figure them out. I mean, our revenue and profitability and cash flow go up and then the stock is all over the place because people think there's some weird end of SaaS. But I would just ask you guys, did Slack become a lot more valuable for you today or less? Way more.

• 3:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Way more.

• 3:26:41Marc Benioff?

  Way more.

• 3:26:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about you looking for value. You've done so, a ton of M and A. Like you must look around at companies that you feel like are oversold.

• 3:26:51Marc Benioff?

  I think there's a lot of incredible opportunities right now in the market. And you, if you were not looking at, look, we do about 15 or 16 billion in positive cash flow a year. We're going to use that, we're going to buy back some.

• 3:27:08Marc Benioff?

  We're gonna buy back some stock. We're gonna do some dividend action too. Fantastic. You know, but what else are we gonna do with our cash? I think we should buy some companies also, you know, because I love organic innovation, but I love inorganic innovation too. I bought about 100 companies.

• 3:27:24Jordi Hays?

  Give us a, give us a, give us a three-minute M&A masterclass. There's a lot of companies whose market caps have inflated. They've got a bunch of cash on their balance sheet. They're, you know, 1% of the size of Salesforce, but maybe they're starting to think about M&A. What have you learned about how to do it well in a few minutes?

• 3:27:42Marc Benioff?

  And this is the last question. You gotta, you have to innovate. Innovation is our core, one of our core values. What are our core values? Trust, customer success, innovation, and quality, sustainability. Those are our five core values. We can talk about any of those, but when we talk about innovation, we talk about organic and inorganic innovation, right? Organic is those 15,000 engineers making Slackbot. It's 100% organic. But then, well, actually, but it's not because we bought Slack. Remember five years ago when I bought Slack? Because I love Slack. I thought they did such a great job. I thought it was a one-time trade. I don't think anything was gonna replace it. And I thought I could make it a lot better. I thought I could put it on top of all of our products. I thought it could be a user interface for the future.

• 3:28:27Marc Benioff?

  I thought AI would be incredibly benefited by the data inside Slack. We just proved that to you with Slackbot. So, we bought Slack. Well, it was a huge purchase at the time, one of the biggest ever in the software industry. That was like $25 billion, our biggest. But guess what? The value that it's provided now, it's, you know, it's not a sub-billion dollar company like when we bought it. It's a multi-billion dollar company. I think it's like almost $3 billion or more. I don't have the exact number in front of me. But you can just go, wow, this is like... Incredible the value that Salesforce and Slack together provide. And that's what I'm looking for, or Informatica plus Salesforce together, or MuleSoft I mentioned.

• 3:29:11Marc Benioff?

  We bought it when it was a $300 million, you know, revenue company and, you know, now it's a huge multi-billion dollar software engine as well. So we have so many of those and our job is to buy them and make them work. Not all of them are going to work. Acquisitions are very risky. You gotta be really careful, you know? And then you can have it all worked out and it still doesn't work out, but it's worth it to take the risk because innovation is risky and organic and inorganic innovation, you have to do both.

• 3:29:43Jordi Hays?

  What is a good, what is a good hit rate? What is a good hit rate at, at scale? You said you bought something around 100 companies. Uh, but for, uh, it, it, when you're talking like with your M and A team, like how often are you okay with them just, you know, and, and the company just swinging and messing?

• 3:30:02Marc Benioff?

  I have such a cool team there because not only do they, that do that, they also run a $5 billion investment fund. You know, we have invested in so many amazing companies and taken so many amazing companies public. We just sold Wiz that we helped start to Google. We took, we helped grow Snowflake and took it public and made one, I think we've made a billion and a half dollars on that. I think we've made a billion dollars on Wiz. We're just, I think we have now about, you know, a point of Anthropic, which is a few billion dollars or so. I, you know, and it was started, you know, when it was a tiny company. So we love investing, number one. We love buying things and we think all of that is innovation.

• 3:30:48Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 3:30:48Marc Benioff?

  And it's all in one big innovation bucket and I'm, you know, but we're trying to do something that others have not done is we're trying to innovate in the enterprise at scale.

• 3:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:59Marc Benioff?

  And that is the hard thing because look, as I said, we have 80,000 people and more than 41 billion. And we're starting, going to start our next fiscal year out on February 1. And it's going to be a, it's going to be a massive year, bigger than that. So. I'm like going, whoa, these numbers are huge, but I've got a huge dream. I'm trying to go as fast as possible, you know, to a hundred billion in revenue, but while maintaining this incredible profit. Oh, we're one of the most profitable enterprise software companies too. We're delivering more than 34% margin this year.

• 3:31:30Jordi Hays?

  I have, I have one last question. Last question. Are dreams an underrated, are dreams an underrated source of business alpha? You said, you said you had a, had a, had almost a nightmare about AI and that started Einstein. Do you look for signal in your dreams?

• 3:31:47Marc Benioff?

  I, I pay attention to my dreams. I pay attention to my, my visions, my insights. And you know, Salesforce started because I was swimming with a pod of dolphins outside the coast of Hawaii where I live. And I was in about a hundred dolphins and I was one with the pod. And when I was one with the pod, all of a sudden in my mind, I saw this vision of what Salesforce could look like. And I came into Larry Ellison and I said, Hey, I think I'm going to quit my job. And he gave me $2 million and we started Salesforce. And that was that. That was 26 years ago.

• 3:32:21John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story with us.

• 3:32:24Marc Benioff?

  Thank you, dolphins.

• 3:32:25John Coogan?

  Thank you, dolphins. Thank you to the dolphins. The sound, the sound is amazing. Look at that.

• 3:32:31Marc Benioff?

  Thank you, dolphins.

• 3:32:32John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the show.

• 3:32:34Marc Benioff?

  Take care of the dolphins, Moles.

• 3:32:36John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Have a great review.

• 3:32:39Marc Benioff?

  Love you guys.

• 3:32:40John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, super fun. The chat's calling him the Steve Jobs of AI. He's a strong candidate.

• 3:32:47John Coogan?

  Strong candidate.

• 3:32:48Jordi Hays?

  Always great to chat with Mark.

• 3:32:53Jordi Hays?

  What else we got?

• 3:32:54John Coogan?

  There's, there's a few posts. There's some, uh, breaking news. Andre Karpathy has been on a following spree on X. This is why you come to this show. He followed Jacob Rintamaki, friend of the show. He followed Eric Daiman, the CEO of Ramp. Andre Karpathy is, uh, making the rounds. And Jacob Rintamaki says, you know, I still think it's funny that the guy who ran Tesla's full self, full self-driving program, his name is Car Path E.

• 3:33:23John Coogan?

  It's a good, it's a good nominative determinism for

• 3:33:25Jordi Hays?

  It is, it's always there.

• 3:33:26John Coogan?

  Although he's working on education now, so we're gonna have to rework the, the nominative determinism to figure out how that works. In other FSD news, Tesla says, Elon says Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14th. It will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter. So, February 13th, you go in, you buy the full self-driving, it's a one-time purchase, then he's going, he's going subscriber mode. Probably good for the

• 3:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Somebody here is in Google, just searching, "I'm a kitty cat, where is my owner, my bowl is empty." And the AI overview pops up, "It sounds like you are very hungry and miss your owner. Since you can't find your owner right now, you might want to meow loudly near their usual spots to get their attention. Check the common areas of your home, like the living room or their bedroom, in case they're sleeping or relaxing elsewhere." I'm really glad that the AI overview and Gemini powering it are, are

• 3:34:26John Coogan?

  It's open to all species.

• 3:34:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:29John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not humanist, it's not focused on humans exclusively. It's, it embraces the kitty cat and side of all of us, I suppose. By the way, Joel, I started saying yes to all the apps that can track me prompts. The internet is now noticeably better with more relevant and less spammy ads. Apple did us all a disservice and misplaced emphasis on privacy. He says, "Get into the targeted advertising flow. You wanna see good stuff? Hit yes on this app, can track me. Let them target you with the best possible ads."

• 3:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of targeting, Hermes is allegedly stalking their clients. A Glitz investigation has revealed that Hermes employees are Googling clients' home addresses to determine whether they have a prestigious enough address to be deemed worthy of a Birkin or a Kelly. Hermes is also allegedly scrutinizing clients' social media accounts and the content they post. After a quota bag is purchased, they continue to monitor for resale activity, which if detected Results in immediate blacklist for the client.

• 3:35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:30Jordi Hays?

  No surprises there.

• 3:35:31John Coogan?

  I think OpenAI should do this with their device. And they sell those, they should, they should say, oh, you know, you know, there's a quota, there's an allocation, we'll try and get you in, but.

• 3:35:42Jordi Hays?

  No promises.

• 3:35:43John Coogan?

  Really not using ChatGPT all that much and the questions you ask aren't that interesting. So, you know, I don't think we're going to be able to get one for you. I know, by the way, you know, AirPods, we were debating, is the OpenAI device going to cost a hundred bucks, three hundred bucks? I think they gotta do like thirty K. I think it's gotta be like thirty Gs.

• 3:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:01John Coogan?

  It's gotta be.

• 3:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Add a zero, why not?

• 3:36:02John Coogan?

  Add a couple zeros.

• 3:36:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:04John Coogan?

  Add a couple zeros and then.

• 3:36:06Jordi Hays?

  For the sweet.

• 3:36:06John Coogan?

  Make it a huge hassle, make it, oh, oh, well, how many ChatGPT Pro subscriptions have you bought for your friends and family? How much money have you spent with us? What's, what's your purchase history with us before we get you one of these devices? You need to make it elite. This is the key.

• 3:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever.

• 3:36:21John Coogan?

  To winning in consumer electronics.

• 3:36:23Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever churned from ChatGPT?

• 3:36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're going to the back of the list.

• 3:36:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. What was going on in, in November? We see that you, you, you tested Claude? Uh, yeah, yeah. You're not getting the device. You're not getting the, what's it called? Sweetpea? Sweetpeas.

• 3:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Ben Mullen at the New York Times.

• 3:36:41John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:36:41Jordi Hays?

  Says, what AI generated PR pitches are doing to reporter inboxes everywhere is a catastrophe.

• 3:36:47John Coogan?

  It's brutal.

• 3:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you're absolutely right.

• 3:36:49John Coogan?

  Says Lulu.

• 3:36:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, this is crazy because the, the challenge is, uh, they can, like, it, it used to be, you know.

• 3:36:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:58Jordi Hays?

  I, from our side.

• 3:36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:59Jordi Hays?

  Even, even maybe a year ago, like if someone was like, really enjoyed this segment where you were talking about this, this, that.

• 3:37:06John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 3:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Like actually seemed like they.

• 3:37:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:37:09Jordi Hays?

  Watched it and now you can just.

• 3:37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:11Jordi Hays?

  Easily get that from Gemini or wherever. So it's a disaster.

• 3:37:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Fortunately, Nick is there just chopping emails down, dodging.

• 3:37:21Jordi Hays?

  PR lasers.

• 3:37:22John Coogan?

  Maybe the last piece of news. Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, who joined Anthropic two years ago as Chief Product Officer, he's changing roles to co-lead an internal incubator dubbed

• 3:37:35Jordi Hays?

  I like this.

• 3:37:36John Coogan?

  Labs team. I could see him cooking up some really cool stuff. He, of course, in between Instagram and Anthropic, worked on a news application called Artifact that was sort of a precursor to Pulse. It was, it was, it was like almost at the perfect time, but AI wasn't quite there. And I could see him doing something really interesting. Obviously, he's good at going from zero to one in a consumer application. If there's some new surface area for, you know, an AI tool, an app, I wouldn't bet against him. So, congrats to him on the new role.

• 3:38:10Jordi Hays?

  One final post. Freya says, so fascinated by this product, and it is in some type of booking, looks like it's in the booking.com world.

• 3:38:20John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:38:21Jordi Hays?

  And it's a get $500 if it rains on three days of your nine-day trip for only $26. So, we're bringing gambling. Now, this feels like a pretty straightforward.

• 3:38:33Speaker 02

  This is just Friedberg's first company, right? It's climate insurance.

• 3:38:37John Coogan?

  Not really. I mean, he was selling to farmers, but yeah, it is sort of weather. Weather futures and insurance, crop insurance has existed for a long time. And yeah, this makes sense. But are we getting out of here? The bomb has been planted. Thank you for watching TBPN today. We had a lot of fun with you. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:38:59Jordi Hays?

  We actually do it.

• 3:39:00John Coogan?

  Please actually do it.

• 3:39:01Jordi Hays?

  It does make a difference.

• 3:39:02John Coogan?

  Leave us, drop your email at tbpn.com. We have our daily newsletter. Thank you to our sponsors and thank you to our production team and Tyler for hanging out with us today.

• 3:39:13Jordi Hays?

  Dylan, who's here today.

• 3:39:14John Coogan?

  Dylan is here in the studio.

• 3:39:15Jordi Hays?

  And we'll see you tomorrow. We really can't wait.

• 3:39:17John Coogan?

  We can't wait. 11:00 AM Pacific, we'll be here live.

• 3:39:21Jordi Hays?

  More great guests.

• 3:39:22John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:39:23Jordi Hays?

  See you guys soon.