Something Mini is Coming, Anthropic's $20B Round, Ackman’s Meta Move | Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, Matthew Zeitlin, Joon Sung Park, David Risher, Todd McKinnon, Alexander Ksendzovsky

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:05) - Something Mini is Coming (10:28) - Anthropic's $20B Round (20:11) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (28:51) - Where the WB Deal Stands Now (36:44) - Higgsfield Accused of Ragebait (49:20) - Ackman’s Meta Move (01:03:54) - Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur and founder of Braintree, is dedicated to extending human lifespan through his "Blueprint" protocol, which includes consuming three tablespoons of high-polyphenol extra virgin olive oil daily, accounting for 15% of his caloric intake. In the conversation, he discusses the health benefits of this regimen, emphasizing the importance of specific types of olive oil for longevity, and introduces his "Immortals" program—a comprehensive, data-driven health initiative designed to optimize biological age through personalized protocols and advanced monitoring. (01:34:01) - Matthew Zeitlin, a correspondent at Heatmap News, discusses the significant energy demands of data centers, noting that large facilities can consume as much electricity as entire cities. He highlights the challenges utilities face in meeting this demand, including the need for substantial infrastructure upgrades and the potential impact on electricity prices. Zeitlin also addresses the environmental concerns associated with data centers, such as increased emissions and water usage, and emphasizes the importance of balancing technological advancement with sustainable energy practices. (02:03:14) - Joon Sung Park, co-founder and CEO of Simile, discusses the company's development of a foundational model of human behavior capable of simulating society at both individual and population levels to predict outcomes. He highlights applications such as enabling Fortune 500 companies to interact with agents representing real people, allowing for more accurate market predictions and decision-making. Park also emphasizes the potential of these simulations to model entire markets or nations, aiming to enhance policy and product development through a deeper understanding of societal dynamics. (02:15:15) - David Risher, CEO of Lyft and co-founder of Worldreader, discusses the company's record bookings and profits, attributing this success to a strong focus on customer satisfaction. He highlights Lyft's strategic initiatives, including international expansion and the integration of autonomous vehicles, particularly through a partnership with Waymo in Nashville. Risher also addresses the challenges posed by market volatility and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a clear focus on data and long-term goals amidst fluctuating stock prices. (02:31:41) - Todd McKinnon, co-founder and CEO of Okta, discusses his journey from leading engineering at Salesforce to founding Okta in 2009, aiming to address identity management challenges in the emerging cloud computing era. He highlights the company's growth to a $3 billion annual revenue with 6,000 employees, emphasizing the increasing importance of identity management amid trends like AI and remote work. McKinnon also shares insights on the surge of interest in AI agents across industries, stressing the need for secure implementation and the evolving role of software engineers in a rapidly expanding software landscape. (02:47:11) - Alexander Ksendzovsky, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, has been cultivating neurons on electrodes for two decades. He discusses leveraging the superior energy efficiency and adaptability of biological neurons to enhance artificial neural networks, aiming to address the energy challenges in AI computing. Ksendzovsky emphasizes that this approach is not science fiction but a current, deployable technology, with his company actively integrating biological networks to improve AI model performance and efficiency. (02:55:15) - Andrew Huberman is an American neuroscientist and tenured professor of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he studies brain function, behavior, and visual system plasticity. He is the creator and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, which translates neuroscience and health research into practical tools for sleep, focus, fitness, and mental health. Huberman is known for bringing academic research to a broad audience through long-form interviews and solo deep dives on science-backed protocols. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, February 12th. We are live from the TV van Ultra down the temple of technology, the fortunes of finance, the capital of capital, ramp.com baby. Time is money. Save both these corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're taking a little tour of the health world. We got Brian Johnson and Andrew Huberman on the show. Of course, we also have Matthew Zeitlin, June Park, David Risher from fit from Lyft is coming in, Todd McKinnon from Okta. We have a number of other folks joining the the lightning round. It should be a fun show. But first, I have to tell you what linear is. Not only do they sponsor the lineup, but they are the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces

• 0:44John Coogan?

  on linear are using agents. So something big happened yesterday. There was a massive viral article. And do you know how big the something big is happening? How much that grew?

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  It went big. I was getting

• 0:59John Coogan?

  It has over 100,000 likes now. We were looking at it was like 50k likes.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  How many views?

• 1:05John Coogan?

  I think it's over 100 million now. It's quickly becoming the most read thing in the world. I don't know. It's it's crazy.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  75 million.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  75 million views?

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Views.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  And they're saying that only 200 people actually read it. But everyone has an opinion.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Everyone has an opinion. I had an opinion. I wrote a piece about it yesterday comparing saying AI is not like COVID. I kind of got one shot by the by the COVID analogy, just from a mathematical perspective. Spent a lot of time talking about the difference between exponential growth and and sigmoidal curves and logistics curves. But I, you know, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed talking to the author on the show and Will Manitis had a great rebuttal as well, talking about these are tool shaped. What are they tools? Tool shaped objects. Tool shaped objects. Just the idea of like getting your workflow set up. It can be a little bit of a nerd's knife sometimes. There's a whole bunch of news. But the best reaction.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  For two, something big is happening. It's gotta be John Palmer, something small is happening. I was reading this this morning, actually laughing out loud. So we'll read through it. John Palmer says-

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were, you were reading it to yourself-

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  And then you just started belly laughing.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  And so then I started filming, then I asked you-

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Were you filming?

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  I was filming you, then I sent that to John-

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Oh, I missed that.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  To get his reaction, you reacting to his.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, before we read through this, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations. If you want a multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So, think back to 2014, a little over a decade ago. If you wanted a burrito, you had to get in your car and drive to the restaurant. You had to stand in line, you had to talk to a person. If someone told you that one day, a stranger would bring you a burrito to your front door because you pressed a button on your phone, you would have said, "That sounds dystopian, and also incredible." Then, over the course of about three years, it just became normal. And this was before Chipotle started skimping out on the portions too. So it was really, really good.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  I think we're at that same inflection point right now, except if instead of burritos, it's your entire job. I've spent the last two weeks reading about AI and watching clips of people building things with it. I live in this world now. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people. A few hundred researchers at a handful of companies. "I'm not one of these people," says John Palmer. "I work in crypto." But I am close enough to feel the ground shake. I follow several AI researchers on X, and I also recently purchased a Mac Mini. I haven't set it up yet, but I think you can understand what I'm saying. I know this is real because it happened to other people first. Here's the thing nobody outside of tech understands yet.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  The people sounding the alarm aren't making predictions, they're telling you what already happened to them. I am relaying this information to you, secondhand, with conviction. For years, AI had been improving steadily. I absorbed these improvements fine, because I wasn't really paying attention, to be honest. Then, apparently in 2025, everything got much faster, and then faster again. I know this because I watched a three-hour podcast about it last Wednesday. The host was visibly shaken. I could tell, because he wasn't even able to finish a single pint of Guinness, digging shots.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day and something clicked. Not for me personally, I was at a birthday dinner for my wife's coworker. But for the people who tried the models that day, it was apparently a huge deal. One guy said, he tells his AI what to build, walks away for a few hours and comes back to find the work done. This will very likely be what my life is like as well, once I set up my Mac Mini. AI will be doing things while I'm in the other room. That's potentially huge. Huge. Let me give you an example, so you can understand what this looks like in practice. A guy on Twitter built an entire app just by describing it. The AI wrote the code, opened the app, tested the buttons, decided it didn't like the layout, fixed it,

• 5:15John Coogan?

  and only then said, "It's ready." I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna do something like my Mac Mini. Some type of cool app or something. I'm still figuring it out, but I have all the hardware. And I'm definitely gonna optimize my setup with all types of skills and plugins. I'm not exaggerating. That's what my Tuesday could look like. Potentially.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  But I tried AI, and it wasn't that good. People will say this, they say this, "I tried AI, it wasn't that good." Here's John Palmer's response. He says, "I hear this constantly, I understand it, because I also thought this, but the models today are apparently unrecognizable from what existed six months ago." Some of the people who are saying this have hundreds of thousands of followers, and make sure you're not on the free plan, you have to get on the paid plan. That's key. How fast is this actually moving? Let's answer that question. In 2022, AI couldn't do basic math. By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software. And by 2025, some of the best engineers in the world had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  In February 2026, you can make AI send you a morning summary of the top posts on Reddit from your Mac Mini. Here we go. What should you actually do? I'm not writing this to scare you, says John Palmer. I'm writing this because the single biggest advantage you can have right now is being early. Early to understand it, early to buy the hardware, early to subscribe to the paid tier and ask it to make a meal. You can start using it for real work. If you're an engineer, give it a

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Not a meal, a meal plan.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  A meal plan. Oh, a meal plan, yeah. Actually, make a meal. That would be cool. If you're an engineer, give it a GitHub repo. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet. If you're in other industries, definitely figure out what you can give it, then give it that. But give it something for sure. I just need to think about it more. Mention it to your coworkers. Right now, there's a brief window where most people are still ignoring this. You can be the person ignoring it less, which puts you ahead. Be the person who walks into a meeting and says, I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days. It's fine if it actually took you three days. The point is, people will respect you. Get a Mac Mini. This is point number three.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  And by the way, you can actually get a Mac Mini on DoorDash.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  You can, just like a burrito.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  It's important.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Every single account I've seen posting this stuff has a Mac Mini. It's the ultimate tool for this stuff. You gotta get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, says John Palmer. That said, I did just spend $599 on a Mac Mini, plus Apple Care, and $50 on Claude tokens. But if it gets too expensive, have a backup plan to switch to an open source Chinese model. Fourth, watch the podcasts. Actually, don't just watch, study, TBPN, Door Cash, et cetera. The good thing is that these shows are several hours long, so you can basically fill up your entire day if you want to watch them.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  Or making them.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Or making them, in our case. Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook, good grades, good college, stable job, it's over. Tell them it's likely not looking good for them. Go to your four-year-old and tell him it's not looking good.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  It's not looking good, buddy. It's not looking good.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  What I know, I know this isn't a fad. The technology works, and the richest institutions in history are pouring trillions into it. I know this because I've seen it mentioned pretty frequently over the last few months. I know, I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now. Not with fear, but with curiosity, a sense of urgency.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  A Mac mini.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to, and when it does, I will be ready. My Mac mini will be unboxed. My agent will be configured. I will describe what I want in plain English and it will appear. I just have to optimize everything first to make sure my setup is super legit. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in your life who should be thinking about this too. Most people won't want to hear about it. It's too late. You can be the reason someone you care about buys a Mac mini. Oh, so funny.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Such a banger. So, so good. I really, I really.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  No words.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  No words. I did, let's see, let's see how, uh, how Codex is doing. I gave, I, I went and I described in plain English to Codex 5.3 medium. Build me an app, an amazing app, the best app ever, one that will win awards and make me a legend in Silicon Valley.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  An award-winning app.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  An award-winning app. And it appears to be working. Let's see. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll check in on this. I need to, I need to run it? No, it's running it. I don't know. It's describing it. It doesn't, it hasn't said what it's thinking of doing, but it says.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  You don't need to know that, John. You don't need to know that. More seriously, John, John Palmer's post feels like a response to Will's essay, Tool Shaped Objects, which is fantastic. We won't read through Will's whole essay because I think you should read it yourself.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  He might be coming on the show soon.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna get him on the show tomorrow.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which we're excited about.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  But we do love reading a Will Monitis essay laced with tons and tons of advertising. We know that that's one of his favorite things and, you know, we'll read one right now for the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Anthropic.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than 20 billion in a funding round led by investors, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, D E Shaw, and Dragon Ear. Let's dig in. Uh, of course, being a little bit silly with the pronunciation, Sydney over on X said, "British AI researcher be like Anthropic."

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  So I'm gonna start integrating that into into my sentences as well. Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than 20 billion in a funding round led by the group I just mentioned. The deal is set to value Anthropic at about 350 billion, nearly doubling its prior value, and could be announced as early as this week. The funding round includes a range of investors, including Co2, Singapore's GIC, Microsoft's, Nvidia, and has become a who's who of Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors. I think it's worth kind of talking about this just from a PT lens.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you want to break it down, given that.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  He's your former boss.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yes. So Founders Fund is known for the monopoly thesis. Like, there's a power law. You want to be in the best company in the category. You want the best ownership.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  Put all your money in that one.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll go all in, famously. They did some other social networking deals, but obviously like Facebook was the big one at seed, and that was enough to return that fund many times over. And so the whole thesis of the fund for a long time has been like this concentrated bets, concentrated bets. AI has been an interesting one. They're now in three major labs because they have a huge position in SpaceX, which now owns XAI. And so they're in that lab, sort of coincidentally. Peter Thiel, I believe, is listed on Wikipedia as a co-founder of OpenAI, or at least he was like an initial donor and got like a co-founder title. And so has been involved in OpenAI for a long time. And then they

• 12:35John Coogan?

  invested, I believe, in like the 60 billion dollar round right after, right when ChatGPT was launching, there was a big funding round that happened. And it was an odd deal because the company had not yet converted. It was very unclear what Microsoft would get, what the employees would get, what the investors would get, what. The nonprofit would get because the nonprofit was going to keep a stake. And so it was this like wild bet. And I know a lot of investors.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  It was a leap of faith.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  It was a leap of faith. A lot of investors were scared off because there was, you know, what am I investing in? Like, I'm not getting shares. I'm getting units. And it was like a very odd structure. And I know many investors that were scared off by that. They were like, yeah, the product's amazing.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people said, well, I'm kind of a unit.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  An absolute unit.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm an absolute unit, but I'm used to buying shares.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So you had to do a lot of sort of leaps of faith. At the time, I was sort of trying to, I mean, I was enjoying ChatGPT. I thought it was an important product. I didn't really have fully, uh, full thesis around like the aggregation theory and, you know, maybe there would be a winner take all in consumer AI, any of that. I was just looking at the team. Because at the team, at the time, it was Sam Altman, who'd founded and sold a company in this like aqua hire, then worked at Y C, been a successful investor. And it was just like all green flags for like, if it wasn't all the baggage of like OpenAI and stuff, just like,

• 14:07John Coogan?

  if someone with that resume came to you and was like, I'm starting a company, you'd just be like, yeah. You check all the boxes. Great. And then you have Greg Brockman, who was the CTO of Stripe. Huge, hugely successful company. And so it was like, wait, you got that guy to come be your co-founder? Okay, that's great.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  A nonprofit.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And then you have Ilya, and you had a whole bunch of other folks who were just really, really top tier, just in terms of like founder quality, like worth backing. And so you did have to put the valuation out of your mind because it was so not, so disconnected from like startup valuation.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  But in terms of just is the team high quality, it seemed like it checked all the boxes and that they would figure it out. They, of course, ultimately did. There was another, there was another sort of interesting thing just about, you know, like the thesis at the time, how big can this be? What is the market? What are the opportunities for really, really huge categories? A lot of founders' funds investments like SpaceX, it's like this massive category that's very, very hard. But if you crack it, it's going to be an entirely new market. Social media was certainly that as well. And so that made a lot of sense. Obviously, they're in X. Now they're in Anthropic. Sequoia is also in all three. And the interesting thing is like,

• 15:22John Coogan?

  P T has given a number of talks where he's sort of been anti-AI. You've seen this whole thing about like crypto is libertarian, AI is communist and that AI is like a consolidating force. He's, oh, he's never been one to say like, oh, the tools are so amazing. It's been a lot of like, is this just doing your homework for you?

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  He's not putting out threads about using his Mac mini.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  I don't even know, I don't even know if he has a Mac.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  You should send, you should send John Palmer's piece to P T. Just flip it over. Then say, hey, I think you should read.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  I think you should read this.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  You know, I think you kind of understand this. You did invest in DeepMind like, you know, more than, more than a decade ago.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the DeepMind deal was, was, was wild. So, um, Demis met, uh, P T at a party, I think. And instead of pitching him on DeepMind, he said, let's play chess. And so they, they played chess and then Founders Fund invested in DeepMind very early in.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  Do we know who won?

• 16:20John Coogan?

  I don't know, actually. That might be deep lore. I'm not sure. Uh, but DeepMind, the, the, the initial pitch was like this counter force to Google a little bit, or like this like renegade group of AI. It's, it's the same thesis over and over again. It's like, let, let's get the pure play going. And then it always gets tied in with a hyperscaler at some point. But, um, Google acquired.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Beat them, join them.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  DeepMind in 2014, January for 600 million. And, uh, Founders Fund owned more shares than all, than the, than the co-founders who had split up and then, um, and then all the employees, because, because they had, again, uh, developed like a very concentrated position.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, apparently here's some of the lore. Knowing Teal was a chess player, Demis struck up a deep technical conversation about the relative strengths of the bishop versus the knight.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  So they were just talking about chess. They didn't actually play.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 17:12John Coogan?

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

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, apparently the first investment was two and a half mil.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  You can't get deals like that anymore.

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  Can't do anything with two and a half mil.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  It's a nightmare.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a nightmare.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  Nightmare check size.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Wasn't the initial Facebook check, was it a hundred thousand dollars or was it a million dollars? It was like not a lot for 10% of Facebook or something like that. It was crazy. Yeah, wild, wild times. But so, yeah, I mean, reading into this, does this say that the Founders Fund team thinks that there's like a divergence in the market? That there's actually two, there are actually two markets going on here, one in consumer AI, advertising, knowledge retrieval. The other in code and developer tooling and code gen. And that Anthropic has actually carved out a separate space. So they're less competitive than people think. Maybe they're just more competitive and it just makes sense to get into both. We'll have to talk about them once the deal closes and everyone's ready to chat.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you have something to add about?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, didn't Scott Wu ran back that playbook, right?

• 18:22John Coogan?

  He did.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Cause he played, then he challenged PT in chess and then Napoleon in poker, wasn't that the?

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was like, if I win, I get my terms. If you win, you get your terms.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  And we have some breaking news.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  What's the breaking news?

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic has formally announced the round.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  They said, we've raised 30 billion. So they upsized it. 20 was.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  They are now at a $14 billion run rate.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  With this figure growing over 10% annually in each of those past three years. We'll see if they got another 10x in them. Dylan Patel on the show last week felt fairly confident.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, the, the, the, the, the big shift is that, yeah, I mean, the, the, the biggest update for me is that the, the forward deployed engineer thing is like very real. And, and even if the tools can build themselves, there's still so many blockers to actually rolling these out. That you're going to need a lot of people inside these organizations who are actually playing with Mac minis on the weekend and getting obsessed with these tools. And then bringing them into the enterprise because it's very easy for a lot of people in Fortune 500 companies to just show up and do their job the way they always do it. Because. No one gets fired for switching things up, but if you roll out some tool and it doesn't

• 19:45John Coogan?

  work the way you intended, or it sucks about a bunch of your time, even if you're just, I have eight hours of work to do in my traditional system, where do you get the extra hours to automate your work? It takes time, and that's where the forward deployed engineers come in. So, great gig for anyone who wants to go implement enterprise agentic workflows, because that will be the theme. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this chart. Andrew Curran over on X pulled it out. We can see Anthropic's run rate revenue growth. You can see here, quite the pop from $0 in 2023 to $100 million in Jan of 2024, to a clean $1 billion in January 2025, and now sitting at 14 billion.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  This is acceleration. This is true acceleration.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Are you feeling it?

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Dario sort of underplayed 2027, I guess, or I guess he said that, he was like, I don't think we have another 10x. If they go to 100 billion.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, he said, like, we've been to next thing, you know, we'll see if we do it again.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, wink, wink.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  If they, if they hit 140 billion run rate by the end of the year, that would be insane. But, strange times, strange times. You love this effect.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Tyler's been saying stuff along these lines for some time, so.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. We have a CEO of Okta coming on the show.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Pumped for that.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Back to the timeline, there are more, there are more.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  More in Anthropic. Nathan Lambert was quoting their announcement from yesterday, saying, "We're committing to covering electricity price increases from our data centers." This is Anthropic.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  "To ensure ratepayers aren't picking up the tab, we'll pay 100% of grid upgrade costs, work to bring new power online, and invest in systems to reduce grid strain."

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Makes so much sense.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nathan's saying that maybe this should have been their Super Bowl ad. Yeah, it felt like, when you looked at, when you kind of look at.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  Clearly how much energy the industry put into the Super Bowl.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  And what the net effect was for the average American. I don't think any, I don't think the average American came away from that like having more positive feelings towards AI.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  If anything, they were like, I'm sick of this stuff.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The meme was like, oh, beer ads like refreshing.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would have been good to focus on this. Microsoft did this, what, a couple of months ago? The news was on January 14th, so just one month ago. Microsoft announced that they were going to do this because there was a 267% wholesale electricity price near data centers. And local communities were starting to push back. Some $64 billion in projects faced delays or cancellation because of opposition. So it's pretty easy to say, hey, my, my, my electricity bill is going up. I don't want a data center in my county, in my city. And you call your city county representative and they say, I don't like the slop either. I, I, I see, I see a bunch of junk that doesn't seem that valuable.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Why do we need it here? It's not going to create that many jobs. It's not going to be that good for taxes, blah, blah, blah, blah. And other companies that do this too. Google had their clean transition tariff and Amazon also pays a surplus above electricity costs already. But Microsoft was unique because they, they timed it and did a whole press cycle around their initiative. And the volume was, was much, much higher. The, the other, the other interesting fact from that previous report was the anti-AI issue is remarkably bipartisan. Data Center Watch claims that 55% of Republicans and 45% Democrat in affected districts.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  So 55, 45, so it's not really like a red, a right issue or a left issue. Like there's pushback on both sides. Like when the data center comes in, it's not just, oh, it's, it's, it's all green flags in a Republican district. No, both are pushing back, so. They're also going in on on super packs, right? So Anthropic is putting $20 million into a super pack operation that is meant as a direct counter to the OpenAI super pack operation. The midterms are a battleground between these two rival AI labs, says Teddy Schleifer at the New York Times. And so we're going to see some attack ads. It's like Sam and Dario are running for election and we're going to see some.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Be the president of AI.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, this person can't can't restore the economy. What do you think, Tyler?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, we just said that like overwhelmingly on both sides, there's like a lot of pushback, right? So it's like, what are the actual differences between their their approaches?

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Maybe, I guess, maybe Anthropic will be more like about the China chip issue.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's they should be more in alliance than against each other.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like crypto, there's a crypto super pack.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  It's like the big one.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  There's no like big AI one right now.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it would be weird if there was like a USDC super pack and then a USDT super pack and they were like fighting each other and just constantly surfacing bodies that are buried in the closets or skeletons in the closet. Because every time there's a successful attack on OpenAI, yes, people might be like, oh, OK, I like Anthropic a little bit more, but most, most people will just come away being like, I don't like AI.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  So if they're attacking each other, that could just be bad for both, maybe? I don't know. But we'll see, we'll see what they run.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll find out.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  We'll see what they.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Ben over on X says, if you were falsely accused of a crime and it went to trial, who would you prefer to listen to the arguments and give the verdict?

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  And the options are a jury of your peers or Claude Opus 4.6? There's been 2,000 votes and 63% of people prefer Claude.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Yes. Might be the audience here.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, a little biased.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  But Ben does work at Orchid Health, engineering whole genome embryo screening. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's his audience. But I don't know.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think the jury of your peers will be around for a very, very long time. I think that that will be something. I mean, they still have courtroom scenographers.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  I think Claude's gonna be around a long time, too.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. If you're thinking in centuries, maybe. But, I mean, the courtroom sketch artist. We've had cameras for 100 years. Like, the jury's-

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm not saying that I think this will ever happen.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. But you'd prefer it. You would ideally. I mean, how many jurors will be sitting there being like, "Okay, Claude, how should I vote? I haven't really been paying attention. I've been playing Candy Crush. I've been playing, I've been vibe coding my optimal workflow on Claudebot." Really quickly, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Will OpenAI or Anthropic IPO first? As of late last year, it was sitting at 75% of people on call. She thought that it would be OpenAI. Now it's flipped. Almost 70% of people think that Anthropic will get out the door.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  It is narrowing. It is narrowing.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  But I expect these to kind of fluctuate just with the headlines.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  It's all, it's all red meat for Michael Grimes. I got so many text messages about his move back and being like, "It is the most bullish thing for late-stage growth technologies that he's back at Morgan Stanley." Like, you just like, if you had any doubt that there will be major, major blockbuster IPOs, it's Michael Grimes being back at Morgan Stanley. So, very excited for that. Really quickly, Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Teja over on X says, "I turned on Meta AI's auto reply for Facebook Marketplace. I listed an item for $75, and when someone asked if it was available, the AI replied asking if they wanted it for free."

• 27:57John Coogan?

  It's elite. It's all, it's all just a bait tactic. So, um, hold on.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  This is getting.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Community note.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  We gotta dig in. It says Meta AI only suggest one reply. So this is a typo in here. Only suggest one reply for every message of the listing. Then you can say, edit or say that this one is manually written by the user. So some fake news, but still funny.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, Tejas responding to Taylor. Do not trust community notes. This happened to me. No idea why the community note appeared. Meta AI only sends one message. I cannot edit it, but I can unsend it.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Whole Mars catalog. Stop talking trash about it publicly and it might stop giving away your stuff.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  That's on you, buddy. That's on you.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Rocco's basilisk.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  This is Rocco's basilisk.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's up with Warner Brothers?

• 28:43John Coogan?

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

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  The situation intensified this week as Paramount CEO David Ellison and a vocal investor made new moves to thwart rival Netflix's planned takeover.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  The storied Hollywood asset and the home of Batman, Harry Potter and the White Lotus.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Paramount, the long rebuffed suitor for Warner Brothers Discovery, enhanced its 77.9 billion all cash offer for the entire company Tuesday in an effort to bring Warner to the negotiating table. And ultimately abandoned its deal with Netflix, also an all cash transaction valued at 75 billion. Uh, Cleveland investor, Ancora Holdings entered the fray by acquiring a small stake in Warner with an eye toward increasing its holdings and pressuring the company to negotiate with Paramount. I wonder if they're friends with the Ellison's.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Paramount's gamble. Paramount is hoping its latest pitch can persuade Warner to ditch its agreement and sell its movie and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix. Unlike Netflix, Paramount also intends to buy Warner Discovery's cable networks, which includes CNN, TBS and Food Network. But Warner has so far shown little interest in engaging with Paramount, telling investors that Ellison's previous offer was not even comparable to the Netflix agreement. On Tuesday, Warner said its board will review Paramount's new offer, but it, but isn't modifying its recommendation regarding its agreement with Netflix. The company advised shareholders to not take any action now regarding Paramount's amended tender offer. The bar for Warner to reopen talks with Paramount is very high, given its contract with Netflix.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  A massive termination fee.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Paramount said it would pay the 2.8 billion. Let's give it up for the multi-billion dollar termination fees.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Love those.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Warner would owe Netflix should the agreed to deal collapse and pay a ticking fee of 25 cents a share to Warner shareholders for each quarter its deal hasn't closed.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  We got ticking fees.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Ticking time bomb.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  Some stakeholders are holding out for Paramount to further boost its bid. I'm not surprised, given that they've repeatedly said with their offers, this is not our best and final offer.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  Analyst from Raymond James wrote in a note to clients that many Warner Discovery shareholders still expect Paramount and its backers to raise its $30 a share bid by $2 to $3 a share. So everyone is waiting around saying, let's get those numbers up.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  And remind me of how Paramount is doing right now. They have UFC, correct? And the experience watching UFC was a downgrade from pay-per-view, but cheaper? What was the takeaway?

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, I don't think we can like give a analysis of Paramount as an entire business based on the pro- the the experience was not as good as paying for the pay-per-view.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  And was that because you had to, you had to go through all the, you had to jump through all the hoops to sign up for Paramount Plus and you weren't already a member?

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  No, the, the, like, the viewing experience was different because it's now subscription and ad-supported, whereas previously pay-per-views had ads, but not nearly as much.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  So the thing you're missing now watching is like in-round commentary, walkouts, things that like hardcore fans really like.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Is there less Joe Rogan commentary?

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Well, the markets are reacting. Paramount's down 7% today.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  That might be the good day.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Of course, not just reacting to this analysis of the UFC viewing experience.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yes. So.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  But no, the the the stock dip was apparently in reaction to the breakup fee. People being like, oh, great, you're gonna pay even more.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, let me tell you about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. So for now, Paramount's move Tuesday to sweeten its offer could push Netflix to increase its bid for Warner. Paramount needs to test Netflix's pain threshold without having to bid too high. The revised offer does exactly that without further constraining its balance sheet. For now, the ball is now with Netflix. Warner and Netflix are focusing on getting their deal approved by the Justice Department as well as regulatory authorities in Europe. As part of its investigation, the DOJ is looking into whether Netflix has engaged in anti-competitive practices. Last week, President Trump reversed course and said in an interview with NBC News

• 33:13John Coogan?

  that he didn't think he should weigh in on the deal and would instead leave it to the Justice Department. "I've decided I shouldn't be involved. The Justice Department will handle it," Trump said in the interview. He previously expressed concerns about the size and scale of a Netflix-Warner combination, saying the combined company would command significant market share. But he's clearly been watching YouTube, and he just says YouTube's too dominant. Too many watch hours on YouTube. It's fine. Let it rip. That talking point probably probably worked on him. We'll see. Paramount said Tuesday.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  That said, we did in talking to Ashley, what was it, on Tuesday? Ashley wasn't super excited about having basically one fewer buyer on the documentary side. But he said it was already so cooked that.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  He was blackpilling hard. If you want some white pills, our newsletter, tbpn.com, has a list of AI white pills you may have missed. There's a number of them, so go check them out. Digging through the archive, finding, basically, the vibes on the on the timeline have been miserable. Everyone's like, you know, fast takeoff, permanent underclass. Tyler Cosgrove is not blackpilling. He thinks that we're in the fast takeoff.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  There's been a lot of white pills.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  A lot of white pills, recursive bio labs.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic raising, that's a white pill.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  They they hooked they hooked an AI agent up to a bio lab.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  That is a white pill. Yes.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  No, I agree. I agree. But a lot I understand that a lot of people might see it as a black pill.

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  Erica over on X posted that Eileen Gu to join Benchmark as a senior associate when she returns from the Olympics. She photoshopped this, of course, we did not put this out, but it's a good bit. Eileen competes for China in the Olympics, even though she's a US citizen.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  And an American student.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  An American student. Bill Gurley responded.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  I know a lot of, I know a lot of Americans do this. I have a buddy who was able to go play ping pong in the Olympics because he had dual citizenship, or he wasn't even like a dual citizen. He just like, his parents were from another country, so he was able to go be on that team. Cause a lot of the other teams are like way less competitive. So it's like, you wouldn't make the US team, but you want to play anyway, so you go with the other country.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  I think with Eileen, it's because the sponsorship dollars she can make by being a Chinese star. There's all these Chinese brands.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  I thought you couldn't.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  She's a global star.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  You can just get paid?

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  You can get a bunch of it, not, not to compete in the Olympics, but broader endorsement deals.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're on the Wheaties box.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  Getting, getting a gold medal is like UBI. Because you'll be able to do.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  You'll be turned into a libu potentially.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, in this case, in this case, yeah, but Bill Gurley actually responded.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  And said, I can't believe you actually found out about this. We were planning to keep it a secret, but he wrote it in Chinese.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  He's leaning in, he's leaning into the meme. Interesting. Turn post notifications on for Wendellian response.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Gurley will be coming on the show.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  Yes, we're very excited.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  When his new book drops.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  I have it over there. I don't know how embargoed it is, so I haven't been talking about it.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  So we're not going to share it with you yet. But moving on, we should talk about.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Public. We should talk about Public. Public is investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Amazing ad that Leaf over at Public put together, all about teaching kids the power of compound interest, a very different positioning from many other platforms. And I, you know, it was all AI generated. He made it in like two seconds, I guess, but it was like still emotional because the idea hit me because I'm a father, but it was good stuff.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, we gotta talk about Higgs Field.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  We've had the founder of Higgs Field on the show a couple of times.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  They've been accused of rage bait, basically.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  I think that's what's going on.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  More than rage bait. But Rashi in Forbes has the daily cover story.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  All the racist videos and payment problems, the dark side of this AI startup's super fast growth. Influencer marketing has helped AI company Higgsfield hit 300 million in annual revenue run rate in just 11 months, but misleading marketing tactics and a social media strategy based on shock has led to backlash among creators. In late January, Tim Sorrett, a London-based video game director, received a message on a social media site from the marketing team at Higgsfield, a fast-growing AI generation startup. This is the biggest moment in Higgsfield history, and we want you to be a part of it, Red. The $1.3 billion startup, whose tools are used by some 15 million creators and ad agencies to churn out four and a half million video clips every day, was about to launch a new

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  tool called Vibe Motion, which uses AI models to convert text prompts into motion graphics.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  You like good vibes? You have motion? Use Vibe Motion.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  The offer of Sorrett shared the startup's social media post along with a video clip from preassembled marketing materials the company would pay him $200. But Sorrett, who had spent years designing graphics, both manually and with AI tools, could tell something was off. Videos Higgsfield had shared with him lacked the visual quirks of AI. He's like, this is simply too good.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  And he quickly realized that some clips in the media kit weren't generated with AI at all.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  I said this was a huge alpha in just taking a cinema camera, filming yourself, and being like, this is AI-generated, and I'm raising. It's fraud, but alpha.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  That's not alpha.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Don't do it. But there was a moment, I mean, this happens a lot with OpenAI stuff, where people will see a video and they'll be like, wow, they definitely have a new model. And it's like, they also have a production budget. Like, they can just hire actors.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, so when Sam Blon launched Monaco yesterday, was his video AI? Because it looked, it was 50/50 for me.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's definitely, there's definitely...

• 38:56John Coogan?

  I think you would just rip a direct camera.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I know, you obviously could.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  But clearly, the models are good enough where you could... And it's kind of a funny thing, if you're launching an AI company to show, like, I made this with AI. It's that good.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  It's good enough.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so they get it, this guy gets Media Kit, says, hey, can you share some of these AI outputs?

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  But he found out and said there were video templates that appeared to have been lifted from a stock site in Vato, in which the startup had pasted its own logos. While Sora didn't share the videos, others did, circulating the stock video templates on X to promote Higgsfield.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  "All this hype is fake and it's bots," Sora told Forbes. Higgsfield's co-founder and chief strategy officer Mahi told Forbes the media kit was created by an employee in the startup's marketing team for ideation purposes and was inadvertently shared with creators, saying the company's processes went haywire. With its library of 400 presets of camera motions and visual effects, SF-based Higgsfield offers an easy way for creators and advertisers to produce cinematic short videos through text-based prompts. You guys already know this. Mahi says, "We fully admit that we pushed the envelope. We learned from what works on platforms like X and very explicitly, it's more controversial content that gets attention." So, that's translated into hockey stick revenue growth.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Last month, the startup claimed it doubled its annualized revenue to 200 million in just two weeks, driven largely by subscriptions from its 300,000 paying users. By early February, its annual run rate crossed 300 million. CEO Alex told Forbes that he hopes to reach 1 billion by the end of the year. After raising 80 million from firms like Excel and Menlo in mid-January, the startup is now in talks to raise funding again. But that rapid growth appears to be driven by aggressive, shocking, and sometimes misleading marketing tactics. Anyways, they're moving very quickly. It was interesting when we asked Alex about his margins, he kind of, he seemed kind of, he gave kind of a concerning response.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  He immediately was like...

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, when you're reselling a model, you are, you know, at risk there. At the same time, like with a different business model, with a different customer acquisition flow, it's possible to have good margins on top of models if it's deeply embedded. But I've actually been getting served a whole bunch of Higgsfield spawn con or like how-to videos that are amazing.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  A lot of them are testaments to the power of the underlying models like Nano Banana. I saw there's this cool video where this creator was talking about how hard it is to film yourself. Like, let's say you want to do one of those like cool, like I'm locked in videos, which I really enjoy. And you want the camera to be here, getting a profile shot of you and then flip around, go behind you, over your shoulder, then spin around, show your face, then go inside the keyboard. That can be a really, really hard shot to get. You might need like a automated camera or robot, like you need a Kuka robot arm to do that move. MKBHD has one, but they're very, very expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not every creator can afford one. And so he was basically showing this workflow where he will film himself on a tripod here,

• 42:14John Coogan?

  move the tripod, move the tripod, move the tripod, and then put in the start and end frames into Nano Banana Pro. And then it interpolates those and get and does the sweeping move. And because it's all in motion, there's motion blur and it has two reference frames of like Jordy's side and then Jordy's back. It actually looks perfect and it doesn't need to come up with as much imagination. So it delivers really well. And a lot of those have been sort of those like little like fun, like tools or like workflows have been promoted by influencers. And they'll say like, comment and I'll send you the prompts or I'll send you the workflow or I'll break it down. Or I have a course or something like that, info products on top of these things.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  And I haven't really jumped in, but I've seen those and been like, I would love to make that video of me or my dog or whatever, my car. It's like, it's a fun thing and for the right person, that's going to actually work as a marketing ad or work as content for them. Really quickly, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. Also, I gotta tell you about Eleven Reader, because I used it this morning in the car to read or dictate the Will Monitis essay, and I really enjoyed it. So shout out Eleven Reader.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  Can it do Will's voice yet?

• 43:31John Coogan?

  No.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  We should get Will to license his voice.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  We really should.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  Will the author.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  I had the option to pick a few different voices.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  You can clone your own voice, but you can't clone someone else's yet, because it makes you read like certain text.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  The, so, uh, the iconic voice collection, it's, it, it serves to you and says, do you want to do Michael Caine, who's a British icon, Burt Reynolds, the masculine iconic storyteller, Richard Feynman, raw genius, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Dr. Maya Angelou, and I picked Burt Reynolds, the masculine iconic storyteller. So he led me.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  Here's maybe where Higgsfield, uh, kind of crossed the line.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, they shared, they were sharing a Google Drive folder with creators that had, uh, popular children's characters like Shrek, Moana, and Mickey Mouse saying, saying things that are...

• 44:22John Coogan?

  You're on the show, but...

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  ...sound a little, uh, a little racist. Uh, and then non-consensual deepfakes of public figures like Sydney Sweeney and Zendaya and President Trump. So, yeah, the, the, the challenge here is like, companies like Higgsfield are competing with these Chinese open source models that have no rules. They'll generate whatever you want.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  And clearly, there's an insane amount of demand for video models that have no rules.

• 44:50John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, this isn't surprising, even though it's wrong.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, it goes back to the, the BitTorrent Napster analogy, where like, the demand for things that just can't be done legally is really, really high, and you have to, you can't, you can't view that as a business opportunity, because of course, you'll see really, really high demand for completely free music, if you're not paying anything, right?

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  You'll see really high demand for generate a Mickey Mouse character. The question is, the business question is, can you actually do the deal? License it. Make sure every, all the stakeholders and all the legal parties are represented and happy with the deal, and everyone's paying. Um, if, if, if you're just throwing out, you know, free IP violation, um, you're gonna see huge demand, but... It's probably unsustainable.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they did launch a program called Higgs Field Earn, which was basically like a clipping thing. You could make stuff, share it.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Depending on how much engagement it got, you'd earn some money.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  That led to them getting banned from X or their account shut down.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Whoa, I didn't realize that.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, we'll, we'll see how this nets out. I mean, Alex, I'm sure will, I would hope would adjust course.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he is, they're clearly very talented at a lot of things.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  It sounds like they've been blurring the line.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  I mean, for, for what it's worth, I still think that I, I don't know how fast you would get steamrolled uh, by the labs, but I do think that there's an interesting opportunity right now for like little bit of what CapCut's doing, plus Nano Banana Sora stuff where you have a lot of video generation, but then you also have the ability to lay over just actual text, actual motion graphics. And if you pair up some of the more deterministic tools, like basically tool use, like how, how ChatGPT can also do a math problem in Python and be a hundred percent accurate.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  You could imagine if you, if you want to just draw a rectangle on top of the, the video that you've generated or make it black and white, that's something that doesn't require a generative AI model. You can just call a tool that has the same functionality as Premiere Pro and then it'll just do that. Uh, but you have to actually wire all that up, make it all work together. And maybe that's where this goes. And then I don't really know how defensible that is, but we'll see.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just gonna say like, I mean, you're, you're kind of just describing like a, a rapper, right?

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  So like, at least in, in, in the, in the text field, like it seems like rappers, at least of late, like have not been.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  You know, people are much less bullish on rappers now than they were like a year and a half ago.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, especially the, the, the huge problem.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, SD kid, pretty good.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I like that. 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. The other really hard thing about the video wrapper, the video like app is that many, many video producers,

• 47:56John Coogan?

  they start fresh every day. Like we, when we edit Diet TBPN, our 30 minute cut down of the show, like the project is started from basically a clean slate. And so actually shifting from one software to another is really, really easy. I mean, you still have to learn the new tool. It has to be better. It has to have all the features. But it's not like, okay, well, there's all these networks of documents. There's a system of record. It's different if you're editing a movie over two years, you're probably not going to switch tools mid movie. But if you're a shorts editor, you can switch from CapCut to Instagram edits, like their video editing tool really quickly. You can go over to After Effects or Premiere and you can just be like, for this, for this video, we're using this.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Like this is, this happens to us all the time. Like we'll, we'll have a video editor on the team who's like, oh yeah, they use DaVinci Resolve. And it's like, it doesn't even matter to us because it's like, it's like, oh yeah, they just use that. And then they plug in and then they deliver a video file at the end. They render it out. Anyway.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  One more thing on Higgs field. I would expect that Disney comes after them too. They're generating Disney characters right now. Disney invested a billion dollars into OpenAI as part of this licensing deal. One year exclusive. There's they, I would expect that pressure to come soon.

• 49:12John Coogan?

  Let's move over to Bill Ackman, but first let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Bill Ackman makes a big bet on Meta. Pershing Square disclosed roughly $2 billion position in Meta.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman likes Mark Zuckerberg's chances in AI. Pershing Square revealed the stake at an annual meeting of one of its fund on Wednesday. The position amounted to 10% of the firm's capital at the end of 2025, or roughly $2 billion, based on past disclosures. Meta shares are down about 13% over the past six months, a decline that Pershing Square attributes to investor concerns about the sums the company is spending on AI.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  Capex.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Pershing's thesis revolves in part around AI boosting Meta's content recommendation and personalized ads and potentially unlocking new opportunities in wearables or AI digital assistance for businesses.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  Or Ben Thompson filled.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Keep, keep reading. I'm gonna pull up.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Meta's business model is one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI integration, Pershing Square said in its presentation. Ackman intends to concentrate his stock portfolio in a small number of high conviction bets. He only had 13 different positions at the end of 2025, including other big tech companies, Alphabet and Amazon. What did you say?

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  He just liked me for real. No, I.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  You quote tweeted this, right?

• 50:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a, I mean, I didn't like really anything. I just posted a Jeremy Giffon.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  You, you created this post and you photoshopped Jeremy's name on there because it was your idea. It came from you. What did Jeremy say?

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  I just want to give him credit.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  He said, "The idea that it's hard to beat the market is mostly trotted out by money managers. What they really mean is that it's hard to do when you manage other people's money because it's difficult to get paid for doing the obvious thing. I think it's substantially easier than most people think for the person solely running their own cash." So Ackman is charging 220 to own the Mag7. You love to see it. But a lot of people don't have diamond hands. He will diamond hands for you by, by holding Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, apparently. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway takes, automatically takes care of scaling monitoring and security.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of Meta, Ray Ban, maker Luxottica, says it more than tripled Meta AI glasses sales in 2025.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Takeoff.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  The French Italian Iowa brand said it sold over 7 million AI glasses last year, up from 2 million that the company sold in 2023 and 2024 combined.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  Wait, so, so, sorry, say that number again. How many did they sell last year?

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  7 million devices last year.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  I think I'm starting to see them. I mean, Ashley Vance came on the show and was wearing them for fun, but also for good content. And he's gonna actually include that content in the stuff that he makes. It's a video maker's tool, so it's a prosumer tool. He, of course, had a whole bunch of other nice cameras here, but that is another tool that you can't really replace. He doesn't want a GoPro strapped to his head. That doesn't make any sense. Then you have the extreme sports. I'm going skiing in a couple of weeks with a bunch of friends. I'm sure I'll see a pair of the Vanguard's out there on the slopes. And then you just have the funny people on Instagram reels saying, "Computer, give this guy a great day." Like, that comedy is great. Did you see that that guy ran into another creator that was doing this?

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yelling at him?

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. "Computer, computer, give this guy a bust down AP," something like that. It was just like very, very funny. And every time I see one on a truly viral Instagram reel, I'm like, okay, there's something here that's unlocking a different form of video, not unlike when we saw the first GoPro go out and we started seeing truly crazy first-person video of surfing, which was just impossible. Or like, I made, I would go scooby-doo.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  I went surfing with Rocco Basalisco.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Rocco's Basilisk, yes.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  The Luxottica exec and heir who led the project with Meta.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  He took out a new pair of the Oakleys.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  And we did lose them briefly, but we recovered them.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  They need Meta Crokeys, right? Isn't that what they're called?

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  Didn't have Crokeys.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need the Meta Crokeys. Let's get on that, Zuck.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, Bloomberg reported that Meta and Luxottica were discussing doubling production to at least 20 million by the end of this year to meet growing demand, so.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  I think they're gonna be popping.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  They're selling. They're selling. Gotta give them credit. Give Zuck some credit. And again, I saw somebody had effectively jail-broken their Meta rebans, and they hooked it up to a Mac Mini, and they were buying stuff. I've talked about this at least once on the show, but. Again, there's, um, that's, it's, it's funny to watch somebody jailbreak a device to do something that the device will obviously do, like in the relative near term.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  That's like the part of the entire thesis behind the device, but.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know, will, will it actually tell you when you get an iMessage in the next three years? Is that coming? I don't know. It might not. Uh, that, those wild gardens might hold for a while. Do you think the Meta Ray-Bans will outsell sunglasses broadly? Or is the TAM sunglass buyers? Everyone has one pair of sunglasses, so you sell one pair of these to all the people? Or is it, and some people just don't like sunglasses, so they don't wear them? Or are they like TAM expanding in some way?

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  They've gotta be, ah, that's a good question.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and I will give you, assume the next version, the version beyond that is like truly indistinguishable.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  Yes, so my, my framework has been that the immediate market of people, over a billion people, that just wear glasses daily so that they can read feels extremely in reach, right? Because you're wearing this all day long.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  Why not add some functionality to it?

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, certainly there'll be some Luddites that just want the analog magic of just a, a pair of plastic with some glasses in it. But, um, but then, yeah, I don't know. I, I've never, it's funny. I, I love the way sunglasses look, but I've never been a sunglasses guy.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  I just don't.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Really?

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I rarely, rarely wear them. I still, once or twice a year, will buy a pair and then I, because they look cool.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  And then I don't actually end up wearing them.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  I like sunglasses when it's bright out. I just like the functionality of them, but I do lose them constantly, so.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're one of those guys.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a sunglass loser. Uh, but the, uh, the, the, the question is like, uh, if you comp to the Apple Watch, like it feels like more people are wearing watches than before the Apple Watch, because watches were sort of like a niche. You had to be into watches to wear one, because everyone had the phone in their pocket and they were like, why do I need a watch? And then once the Apple Watch came out, a lot of people were like, well, I, I want a super watch on my wrist. I want a computer on my wrist. I want, uh, the, the iPhone.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Want a bust down computer.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Bust down Apple Watch, I think we're on to something. They're doing orange, they're doing Hermes orange, they're selling very well in China. The bust down, they did the gold, it was $10,000, do you remember this?

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  And it flops, right?

• 56:34John Coogan?

  The, the Apple Watch Edition, it was $10,000, gold plated, solid gold, something like that. I don't know if it flopped, they did discontinue it, but it, it.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  Getting roasted in the chat. I like sunglasses when it's bright out.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Jordan doesn't like sunglasses when it's bright out, that's a hot take.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  That's a bold statement. Heavy hitting analysis.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  But, um, I like, I like the idea of the, of the bust down Apple Watch, get it at 100K. Uh, the problem with the, the, the gold Apple Watch was that you buy this thing for $10,000 and it immediately loses all its value because it doesn't even run the latest software and it just stops working after like five years, which is ridiculous. Like if you buy, if you're spending $10,000 on a watch, you want it to be useful in 100 years. You want it to be around for a long time.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, should we read through Jeremy's actual?

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  Response?

• 57:23John Coogan?

  I, I, oh, did he post again? Cause I read his, oh, oh, okay. So he did talk about this. Really quickly, Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And yes.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy says, uh, responding to Ackman, charging 220 to own the Mag7. He owns Google, Amazon, and Meta. He says, "This is good capital allocation, but it requires permanent capital. People don't actually want the best returns. They want to feel clever and do some, some like weird little thing that makes them feel interesting or different or something. But sometimes you just gotta do the obvious thing and just be really strong on it. I always admire those managers who have been paid 220 for like 40 years to just own Berkshire. It's awesome because they were right, but they were, and they were providing a service. The service is that the LP does not have the personal confidence to own Berkshire on their own. So they actually need to pay a huge premium for someone else to give them the confidence to own Berkshire. It's just a tax that they pay for not having the conviction to do it themselves.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  And I think that that's great and solves a real problem for a lot of people."

• 58:26John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  We got one more post.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Before we bring in our first guest.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  We can pull this up. People are reacting to the men's luge doubles. They're saying, "It's one of the most baffling things I've ever watched." National champion speaker says, "How do you find out you're good at this? What's the conversation look like?" I really want to know. I didn't, I didn't know this.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Doubles is funny.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  I guess, I guess I may have seen this before. I remember as a kid watching singles.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  But this is baffling.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  There's also something called skeleton.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you?

• 59:11John Coogan?

  I think it's an evolution. I think it starts with like a toboggan and you have like a bunch of people essentially in like a rowboat. You know, in like a long, like if you're doing crew, you have like four or five people. And then you're just like, "Let's do one last. Let's do one less. Let's optimize and reduce weight." And then they're finally down to just two people and they're basically just on this like sled together. And yeah, I guess you get here. But very, very funny. What else is going on in the Olympics? Personal injury attorney in his 50s is on the cusp of becoming the oldest American Winter Olympian in history. All he needs is for one of his teammates to slip and fall. This guy is elite. Remember the last Olympics where there was that, that great meme that came out where it was like

• 59:55John Coogan?

  the one person with like all the gear and all this other stuff. And then the random guy, I think from Turkey who just showed up and was just like, and just like was, I think he won the gold or something. I don't know. That might've been too poetic. But modest proposals, it's incredible.

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  I feel like being a personal injury attorney is probably a great gig if you're in one of these kind of fringe Olympic sports. You know, you want to have some flexibility in your schedule. You want to be able to make enough to reinvest into the sport.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  This guy is clearly locked in.

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  This guy is amazing. Okay, so Rich Ruhoen is a 54-year-old personal injury attorney who plays an indispensable role for the US curling team. He cooks the players' omelets before important matches and grills steaks after huge wins. He handles the early morning grocery shopping so they can sleep in. What a team player. He chauffeurs them around in a rental minivan. He even pays for some of their flights and hotel rooms. But those aren't his only jobs. He is also the most unlikely curler at the Milan Cortina Games, where he could become the oldest American athlete. In Winter Olympics history, and just in case people don't believe that someone nearing retirement age could possibly be an Olympic athlete, Ruhanen answers the question on a

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  homemade T-shirt. "I'm not the dad and I'm not the coach," he says. But he is an American curling legend. Ruhanen first appeared in the national champion tournament in 1998. He's been doing it for over 20 years, maybe. Won it a decade later and has been a fixture in the sport since long before any of his teammates were born. What he had never done was curl under the sport's brightest lights. Ruhanen just missed qualifying for the Olympics several times. His most recent heartbreak came before the 2020 Olympic Games when the US trials mixed in doubles.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  2022.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  2022, sorry. When the US trials mixed in, mixed doubles came down to the last shot, Ruhanen decided to focus on his law practice in the senior circuit. At 50, he finally gave up on his Olympic aspirations. "I honestly thought it was over four years ago," he said. Well, I probably thought it was over eight years before that. Then he got an unexpected call.

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  The captain for one of the nation's up and coming teams was battling a rare autoimmune disease and needed a substitute. On paper, the Gen Xer wasn't the most natural fit. The other curlers were all in their mid 20s, roughly the same age as Ruhanen's children. He even has a few decades on Team USA's coach.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Few decades.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  But on ice, he blended right in. So when Skip Danny Casper recovered from his illness in return, Ruhanen stuck around as the alternate. Team Casper then qualified for the Olympics and became Team USA. Ruhanen says throwing the rock at the Olympics would be the single greatest moment of his entire life.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Rock. I like that.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  My kids know it and my wife knows it.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna start using, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put on curling at home and just start using some of the hardcore terminology. Just be like, ah. I can't, I can't.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  That, you know, that happened a couple of decades ago because on CNBC, which all the hedge funds watch, after the market closed, they would just roll over to NBC coverage when the two, when the two companies were together and they would show curling just because of the time change, that's what was on. And so all these Wall Street guys became obsessed with curling, got really into it, started playing some bets and stuff. It's a fun story.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder, how, how big is the like gambling and sports betting around the Olympics?

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I saw some numbers for the, for the Super Bowl. It was really, really big, but you have to imagine that the Olympics is also huge. While you look that up, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, service vector and full tech search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And our next guest is here. So we can come back to Olympics coverage after, but let's bring in Brian Johnson to the TBN Ultra Dump. I will tell you about VOD.co while he walks in. We're D to C companies, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. And you might be doing some advertising soon because there's a huge launch. How are you doing?

• 1:03:58Bryan Johnson?

  Hey, I brought you guys a gift.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Thank you. What'd you bring?

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  Are we doing shots?

• 1:04:01Bryan Johnson?

  We're doing shots.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 1:04:03Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Have you done a shot of olive oil?

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  I haven't.

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Take out our.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  I've never done, I've never done a shot of olive oil. What are the benefits? Break it down. Why would I do this? I like olive oil on a steak.

• 1:04:14Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Have you, is olive oil a part of your life?

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Um, only in the cooking context.

• 1:04:19Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  But I should just be drinking it?

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm not doing shots yet.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  No? What, what, yeah, what are the benefits? And what is this? Did you grow the olives? Is it cold pressed?

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Just this much? Should we not, should we not do a little bit more?

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. This is live TV. This is live TV.

• 1:04:35Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, this is, this is the precise dose, 15 ml.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  15 ml.

• 1:04:39Bryan Johnson?

  One tablespoon.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:40Bryan Johnson?

  And it's the, I think it's the superfood of superfoods.

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:45Bryan Johnson?

  It does, I mean, just like you look down the list of things it does.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:48Bryan Johnson?

  It's just good for almost everything.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:50Bryan Johnson?

  So.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Is it high calorie? How many calories?

• 1:04:52Bryan Johnson?

  120, 130 calories.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Calories don't scare you though?

• 1:04:55Bryan Johnson?

  No, I mean, it's 15% of my daily caloric intake. I consume more olive oil than any food.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How many, how many like shots is that roughly?

• 1:05:04Bryan Johnson?

  So 45, so three tablespoons a day, 45 ml, three shots a day.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:05:08Bryan Johnson?

  So one with every meal.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  One with every meal. Okay. Well, cheers.

• 1:05:11Bryan Johnson?

  Cheers.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  To Brian Johnson.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Cheers.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Down the hatch. Delicious. That is good.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Smooth.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Very smooth. No problem. I could do that.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  No bite. A little bit of bite.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  And so, and so, I just drank 15 milliliters of olive oil. And I'm going to live forever now, right?

• 1:05:34Bryan Johnson?

  Basically.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  So now I can go back to diet.

• 1:05:36Jordi Hays?

  One shot.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  And nicotine.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  One shot.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Steaks, right?

• 1:05:38Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Do you feel the sting now?

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  A little bit.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  I do. I do.

• 1:05:41Bryan Johnson?

  Like a little cough bubbling up?

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, perfect for broadcasting.

• 1:05:46Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, that's, it's a good sign of a good olive oil. So we sourced this in both hemispheres. It's always fresh.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:05:51Bryan Johnson?

  So it comes off.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Where, yeah, where, where more specifically?

• 1:05:55Bryan Johnson?

  This one's from chili.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Chili.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  And, and, and the brand is called Snake Oil.

• 1:06:01Bryan Johnson?

  That's right.

• 1:06:01John Coogan?

  Very funny.

• 1:06:02Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  Um, how does this fit into the overall blueprint? What do you call it? Empire at this point?

• 1:06:08Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, we, the whole thing on blueprint is we are trying to basically say, what is the evidence say for what you can do to be healthy? And we just went after the best foods, the best therapies. And what I've found is basically, most things don't work. Most things are bullshit. And so we've tried to narrow in to focus on the most narrow in the best things to do. And olive oil just stacks as like one of the very best things you can do in life.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Is part of why this isn't pushed more aggressively by the sort of health industry is that it's just kind of hard to deliver? A lot of people don't want to just be consuming oil. And that's kind of like the bit is that some people are selling, pushing snake oil.

• 1:06:47Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, that, yeah. I mean, yes, I mean, people I think have a natural aversion to fat still. There was that, there was a long period of time where fat was bad. And you saw marketing 30% less fat, 40% less fat. So people think olive oil fat, therefore bad.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Bryan Johnson?

  So there's like a hangover.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  I had a buddy that had internalized that so much that he was on an almost entirely fat-free diet. He got his labs done.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  He had like low, his test was in the low hundreds. All he did was add like an extra avocado a day. That was the only thing he changed. His tests like went up like, like by a pretty meaningful multiple.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  So walk me through, you know, average American might spend. I don't know, $10,000 a year on food. What does it look like to get into the blueprint ecosystem at that order of magnitude? Then what can people do at $100,000 a year? And then I want to hear about the million dollar a year?

• 1:07:39Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  All in plan.

• 1:07:41Bryan Johnson?

  Well, we announced that today.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:42Bryan Johnson?

  So it's called Immortals.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Immortals.

• 1:07:45Bryan Johnson?

  A million dollars a year.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:46Bryan Johnson?

  And it's my exact protocol.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  It's your exact protocol.

• 1:07:49Bryan Johnson?

  My doctors, my concierge team, all the testing infrastructure.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  So blood work too.

• 1:07:54Bryan Johnson?

  Everything, every test, every therapy. And so it's, I mean, this has been really hard to build.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Bryan Johnson?

  Because it hasn't existed. So you've just had to scour the evidence, build out the infrastructure globally. And this is basically when someone says.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Getting no feedback. Let's turn that speaker off. Sorry. We're, we're working on bringing the soundboard to life in the TVP and UltraDum. Sorry, continue.

• 1:08:15Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So the, I guess like if you look at it a few, three different frames, like one is we measure probably around 250 to 300 things that kill me.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  That will kill you actively.

• 1:08:28Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, that they actively kill you.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, everything in the gas station.

• 1:08:31Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, there, yes, basically. I mean, everything in modern, the modern world.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:34Bryan Johnson?

  And so if you look at it from like, don't die. Okay. So what things actually cause you to die? And then if you look at it from the positive things of what makes you live, that list is probably like 250 things that kill you and 250 things that make you live well. And if you take on that burden as an individual to say, I want to do all of these things that make me, avoid the things that make me die and do the things that do make me live well, that's a, like a Herculean task. So this program basically takes all of those things, makes it easy. So you just show up. It's like, what do I do? And the system tells you what to do.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what is the, what does the program look like more specifically? Like what, how, how is?

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Start with blood work.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  It's very, it's very, so you're doing three people, right?

• 1:09:15Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, three thoughts.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Three to start. What do their weeks, months, year look like?

• 1:09:21Bryan Johnson?

  So we'll do first, it depends on who the person is. So we're, we have an interview process because the person needs to be willing to work.

• 1:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Bryan Johnson?

  You can't just like show up and like, give me a pill. You have to put in probably around like.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  I was promised immortality with a single shot.

• 1:09:34Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  And you're telling me.

• 1:09:36Bryan Johnson?

  That's why it's called snake oil.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I got, you got the best.

• 1:09:39Bryan Johnson?

  So we have an interview process. We'll make sure the person's willing to put in the work, that they've got a pain tolerance, you know, they can like. You know, like, they have to be willing to do stuff.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Bryan Johnson?

  You know, sometimes therapy's hurt.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Bryan Johnson?

  Sometimes it hurts to be hungry. Sometimes like, so there's some discomfort. And then they will choose the three people and then we'll do a comprehensive baseline. So for me, over the past five years, we, we are counting yesterday, we have a few billion data points on me over the past five years.

• 1:10:09John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 1:10:10Bryan Johnson?

  And so then if you say, what of those few billion data points are usable? Probably a few hundred million.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Bryan Johnson?

  But still, we have a few hundred million data points. And so what we've done is to date, I guess, like years ago, we that existed in spreadsheets and files. We've now set up an AI system where we take this, we take all the context. And now we have this inference engine to say like, what relationships can you find in all this data?

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Bryan Johnson?

  And so what we're building is an AI, a Brian AI, that basically watches after you 24/7. So you start, you do a whole bunch of comprehensive baselines, where are you at in the world?

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Bryan Johnson?

  And then we start doing targeted protocols, like how do you isolate cardiovascular health and how do you look at, you know, so on and so forth. Then you're going to find issues as well, where the person may have a surprise finding. How do you address that? They'll have some, you know, anomaly. So then we just get after it and we just say like, how do you basically take the baseline measurements and make all of them better?

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Bryan Johnson?

  Do you want these people to be local? Can they be anywhere? Anywhere. Cool.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Are they all over the world or US-based? Is there advances?

• 1:11:07Bryan Johnson?

  We're open.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Open to everything?

• 1:11:08Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. How, how are you thinking about AI? When I think about a product like Snake Oil, I think not a lot of AI disruption risk, should not be sold off in this SaaS apocalypse. You're not going to vibe code an olive tree. The, the land exists, the tree exists, you have to select it, press it. There's probably a lot of people involved that there might be some automated ERP system at some point.

• 1:11:36Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  But how are you thinking about the impacts of AI on your business, your life? I know that that's a big piece of the don't die philosophy is that we are going to go through a change, but how are you processing the most up-to-date advances in AI?

• 1:11:49Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. You're exactly right. Is like this olive oil, we source from farmers all around the world that go through extensive screening. We test every single, every single molecule that we manufacture, we third-party test. So they're all very manual processes. And then on the other side, we have AI where you take all the data.

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Bryan Johnson?

  You do the inference engine, you try to find new insights that's never been found before. But we're this really weird mixture of like leading edge AI and like duct taped together of all the manual things like we'll go into someone's house, you measure for mold and toxins and water toxins and air toxins and you look at materials in the house. So it's it's still very manual and automated. So it's kind of a cool world where we're insulated to some extent in terms of software, you just stand it up, you're very vulnerable to speed where this one, you're dealing the physical world constraints, you have to bring together all these different disciplines.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's also this interesting break in that if you want to measure the change in someone over a year and you want to do a year long study, like even if you have a million Einsteins in a data center, like you have to wait a year to get those results. I'm sure there's more things that you can do digging up historical data, all the data that you have, but there is just this natural break on progress when you have to wait for results and then feed that back in.

• 1:13:03Bryan Johnson?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  You talked about testing. What are you finding in organic products? If something's organic, do you just automatically assume that that it's not going to kill you?

• 1:13:14Bryan Johnson?

  I assume it's worse than not organic. No, I'm serious.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  This is junkyard dog theory. I'm vindicated.

• 1:13:20Bryan Johnson?

  It's true. Like honestly, organic only looks at, you know, a certain subset of toxins. It's not all toxins. And then it's a very limited screening protocol. So it's really a marketing tactic. When we test organic, it typically performs worse than non-organic on many, many variables. So no, I think it's worthless. It really is as a marketing protocol. And I would say more broadly, I don't trust anyone. Like literally, I don't trust marketing. I don't trust brands.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Trust no one.

• 1:13:47Bryan Johnson?

  I don't trust technicians. I don't trust practitioners. Like when we go out there, honestly, it just, that's why this protocol is, we've built it in such a meticulous fashion. We don't trust, we don't trust ourselves. Just trust the data, do our protocols, see what it produces. But I, when I go out in the world and it's like, this is scary.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Where, where do you get things like produce, things that aren't, you know, you're not going to add apples to the blueprint website, right? If you want to eat an apple, what do you do?

• 1:14:12Bryan Johnson?

  It, so there's no safe place.

• 1:14:16Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Brian Johnson.

• 1:14:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  No safe place to eat an apple. No apple is safe.

• 1:14:21Bryan Johnson?

  Like we, you know, people identify like, like plant-based proteins have high toxins like because they isolate that because you can test it. But if you eat a carrot, it can have the same, if not more toxins.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Bryan Johnson?

  And so it's just that these, this fresh produce is not measured. So people freak out of what they can't measure. But if you, we've been testing fresh foods and packaged foods and like toxins are throughout.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Bryan Johnson?

  And so it's just a very skewed perception of where toxins are at. But you know, I typically buy with a farmer's market, we'll do, you know, airworm, do whole foods. When we test these fresh foods. So we do want to start growing our own. But even then it's hard because you're in.

• 1:14:57Jordi Hays?

  In LA, it's a little rough.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Bryan Johnson?

  And even those systems themselves, like someone will try to get an escape route and say like, well, I've got, you know, I have a cow and a pasture fred irrigated, whatever. Like they can't escape the toxins within the environment. So it's just very, very hard to create an isolated, non-toxic.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  So there's lots of, lots of toxins at risk out in the real world. Talk about other risks in the real world. Have you ever been frame mogged?

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  There are people who have tried.

• 1:15:26Bryan Johnson?

  You know, that is so good. We should put that on the list. That escaped our.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  For a million bucks, you've got to protect me from frame moggers. That's like the first thing that I want from a protocol.

• 1:15:37Bryan Johnson?

  Honestly, yeah. What a blind spot we had. We should have picked that one up.

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  Yes. How are you processing the looks maxing virality that's going on? It feels like very tangential in some ways. There's some, there's some overlap. I, I've seen, you know, the looks maxers say, don't worry about the macros or the micronutrients or the toxins at all. All that matters is how much protein you're getting because they, they have a very live fast, die young. But there's still some overlap in that they're trying to look good. We've talked about this before.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, in many ways, I feel like you've been, you've been looks maxing. You wouldn't necessarily call it that, but you can just see every now and then a photo will go viral where it's like you every six months. And people are like, wait, it's working.

• 1:16:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So in some ways it's kind of marketing. There's a lot of work kind of under the surface that's contributing to that. But at the same time, it's very clear, like people want you to look better every month, or they're going to say. Like, hey, can I really trust this guy?

• 1:16:33Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I mean, there's two things. One is, I'm like you guys, you're just positioned towards advertising.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Bryan Johnson?

  You know, it's like, yes, and?

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Bryan Johnson?

  Like, if someone's out there doing their thing, you know, like, more power to them.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:42Bryan Johnson?

  And like, whatever their jam is, if they're doing looks-macking, like, you know, do your, do your art.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Bryan Johnson?

  And be beautiful. That's great. And so, yeah, I'm very much a proponent of like, let humans be beautiful in their manifestation.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:53Bryan Johnson?

  Um, like, we're basically, we're saying that, you know, as, we all realize, like, something's happening in the world right now. It's big with AI.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Bryan Johnson?

  In some form or fashion, it's evolving the world, and our primary hypothesis is, as this evolves, the major shift is, humans are going to want life. Like, you know, if AI takes our jobs, or they take what we do, and we want to find new identity, there's going to be a major shift towards, don't die. And it's going to become the, probably the most dominant ideology in the world very quickly, because we're going to be pointing ourselves towards vibrant.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  That is, that is an interesting encapsulation, because it does feel a little bit like the, the two paths meme with the dark castle.

• 1:17:32Bryan Johnson?

  Yes.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  And the bright, uh, you know, palace, in the sense that a lot of the looks-maxers are saying, they're black-pilled, they don't believe that there will be a future, so health actually takes a backseat.

• 1:17:44Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  To looks, because that's what helps you get, get ahead this year, this month. And it's very short-termism, it's very short-term thinking. You've always framed it from day one around very long-term thinking. So, even though I think people might say, oh, well, like, he's trying to look good, that guy's trying to look good, they're similar. There's actually a huge divergence in the philosophy. At least it feels like that. I don't know, Jordy, what do you think?

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I had another question.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Please, take it down.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  So, you have this, you're starting with the ultra-premium product, the million dollars a year, and I can see all the justification for that. I imagine you want to go more and more, kind of like, down-market over time, so that somebody, if they have a million dollars, or a hundred thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars, or a thousand, or a hundred, can, can kind of benefit with the program.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  It feels like there would be an insane amount of demand for something like right today, a thousand dollar program, something that's effectively a PDF that somebody could pay for, download. And because they paid for it, we talked about this yesterday because Ty Lopez was in the news because of his whole like Radio Shack debacle. And I was saying, when I was probably 18 or 19, I paid for a PDF of a workout plan. And because I paid for it, I followed it really closely and I got a lot more value for my money. Whereas I feel like for you, the second that you launch like a traditional info product, you will be attacked even though, even though I think that at a thousand dollars, you could put something together that would provide somebody potentially tens of thousands, hundreds

• 1:19:22Jordi Hays?

  of thousands, right? Just because in the health game, if you, if you just buy a PDF and then that gets you to sleep an extra hour a night for the rest of your life, like the, the economic value creation or, or the, the money that you're not spending on hospital bills or things like that, um, uh, would be tremendous. Like, how, how are you thinking about that? Because I, again, like, I think that there would be value there. For me, under paying, paying again for that thousand dollar product that I could just kind of follow and learn something from, uh, the value would be there, but how are you thinking about it?

• 1:19:58Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, that, that's exactly what we're doing. And so the, the target audience we're after is those who want to say yes to health and we say, do this.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07Bryan Johnson?

  So we're not, if, if you, if you want to go out and find, source your own peptides, inject yourself, you know, and like do your own protocol, like do that, we are going to deliver autonomous health. And so like there's self-driving cars, there's self-writing software, this is autonomous health. So we're building AI that just says, do this. And so do you remember early on when Facebook? Did that study where they sent 300 likes on the platform and they could predict you better than your partner could. This was like the first time social media showed the power of prediction. And so there's like an equivalent question for us is, well, how much data do we need on your body, like of blood, of wearables, of whatever, to predict

• 1:20:48Bryan Johnson?

  you better than you can? And how do we stitch this together? So I think the free version is like some minimal viable amount of data that goes into our AI inference machine. And we then say, do this, and we can get higher yield than anything they could ever do themselves. And once that happens, and once you take away, Mo, you're like, I'm never getting into with a human driver ever again. Right? It's a very clear. So this will be the same thing where once you deal, once you deal with the mortals, the product, you'd be like, I'm in. Like, definitely this is a better control system than anything I could produce.

• 1:21:19Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about wearables? Most of the people that come on the show will be rocking an Apple Watch, or maybe a Whoop, or an Aura. It's very, very common. At the same time, it's missing visual. It's not like pulling in information. It's not like the health decisions that somebody makes every day is not, can't always be picked up here. It'd be great to have, be like, okay, what did this person eat? What time did they actually go to bed? All these different things. What do you think the future of health wearables is?

• 1:21:49Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So that's exactly, again, what we're building with this first three people and more immortals. Like, if you say, so my life over the past five years has generated a few billion data points, a few hundred million are useful, that has created a dimensional representation of a human that is higher fidelity than anything ever produced in history. And so we've taken that model, we can replicate it with others. And so we're going to try to basically cast this gigantic net of data capture. We'll bring it all in and say, where's the highest signal inputs? And then we'll scale those things. And so, like you're saying, like, we may find that lighting At bedtime.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Bryan Johnson?

  Is an incredibly important factor. And like, you know, right now, people don't really think about that. Or the lighting environment in the room and you can't do like specific photon accounts.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Bryan Johnson?

  And so we're going to try to tease out like, where are the little teeny tiny things that have this gigantic yield? But it's all about data collection. It's about the inference engine and it's about people who willing to say, yes, I'll follow the protocol because it's inherently better than what I would do myself. Whether it's guessing and then we'll have everything.

• 1:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever think about a program where an actual live human just follows around the person in the program? And is effectively there 24/7, kind of like effectively a nanny for the human? Because it's like, hey, like you say, you're doing everything right, but like right before bed you were, you had a phone just blasting light in your face. Uh, it, it feels like that's kind of what you can get to with wearables over time. And you can probably get there to get today, but I think a lot of people, even if they do a program, will still be kind of sneaking little things in throughout the day that are, that are working against them.

• 1:23:25Bryan Johnson?

  And they even forget, you know, they're like, I do everything you say. Like I, you know, I finished my final day four hours before bed and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  And like you are hiding, you are hiding bright lights before bedtime.

• 1:23:35Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. I can't sleep. Like, what do you do before bed? Well, I'm in my bed, like, you know, scrolling Tik Tok and okay, well, that, that could be the source.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Uh, what's the current thinking on peptides? There's a variety of them, uh, semaglutide, all the way down to retin, uh, what's the most up to date? The like evidence or benefits, costs that you've seen?

• 1:23:56Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, generally peptides are fantastic. They are drugs, drug equivalents, they're drug like FX sizes. And some peptides have done the clinical work like juzepotide and others. But then there's a whole bunch of the class of peptides that we have no human data on.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:24:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yes. So the, the thing.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  That people are taking a lot of, right?

• 1:24:12Bryan Johnson?

  A lot of, yeah.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  So we're going to get some human data.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  And is that, is that currently retin? Is that the one that's like not?

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about, I don't know about retin, but.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Or there's like even different ones, like that I'm not even thinking of.

• 1:24:22Bryan Johnson?

  There's a lot of, yeah.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Okay, there's a lot. There's like a long tail of like all sorts of slightly different, slight one molecule change or something.

• 1:24:28Bryan Johnson?

  And it's currently, and it's all the rage.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Bryan Johnson?

  Uh, the.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Chinese peptide thing is a whole meme in San Francisco.

• 1:24:34Bryan Johnson?

  It's a whole thing.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so my take on this is, is if you, if you do it, like, you know, be cautious because we do not have them characterized. Like, when, when you hear about a drug that does blood pressure control, you hear all the benefits and then you hear, like, in the commercial, you hear, like, this may cause death or kidney damage, or, like, you know, like, you hear all the side effects because it's been well characterized. So it's been, it's gone through clinical trials, you understand the pros and the cons, and you make that trade off. With peptides, you don't know.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Bryan Johnson?

  It's like, your, your bro buddy's like, it does this amazing thing, it fixed the point.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you're not, you're not getting, you're not getting the statement after the fact of like, hey, by the way, this could do this terrible thing.

• 1:25:13Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so if you're doing it, proceed with caution, because they're not characterized, we don't know. It's not to say they couldn't have benefits, it's that you don't know. And that's the, the worst thing in health is the blind spots. You know, people want to chase the positives, but rarely adhere to, like, you know, there could be some downsides, so keep costly.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wasn't that the name of Marty Makary's book, Blind Spots, the new FDA commissioner? I'm pretty sure that's what he called it. Um, do you, do you have confidence in the FDA right now? Do you have confidence in the FDA's ability to actually collect all the data and make good recommendations? Because there's some things where, I totally agree with you, I'd much rather take the one that's gone through FDA trials, been approved, it tells me the downsides, but at the same time, people are like, but I also got all this sugar in my cereal for years, like, what were, did I sleep at the wheel back then? Like, what's going on?

• 1:25:58Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm guessing that we, like, the FDA has a very valuable purpose in society. They do, they do good work.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:06Bryan Johnson?

  Um, I'm guessing.

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  They stopped the literal snake oil, famously.

• 1:26:09Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly, yes, they did. Yeah, like, they've had, they've had a positive role.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Patent medicines.

• 1:26:12Bryan Johnson?

  I think that we will exceed them in value in many core areas.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:17Bryan Johnson?

  Because they, you, they can take, you know, well structured, well funded clinical trials.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Bryan Johnson?

  But then other things like peptides that are very promising.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:25Bryan Johnson?

  They're not going to have the clinical work, so what do you do? So if we could get, you know, a certain number of people on the platform who are doing peptides, great, and if they can start adding dimensionality to their, their bio collection, we could have the most valuable data set.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Bryan Johnson?

  So it's, it's Immortals is the product, that's the high end right now, but then also the free version we're building.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:41Bryan Johnson?

  And our goal is to create the world's largest data set.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Bryan Johnson?

  Uh, across all these sectors. And then you basically can create an ecosystem where the person could be paid for their data. So they collect the data, they're starting through the experimentation, companies come in and buy the data they give out, so we're trying to create this financially incentivized ecosystem where, like, in the world right now. You can't go anywhere without somebody or something trying to take advantage of you. Like it's, it's just everywhere. Like try to think of a company that genuinely acts in your best interest. Like unequivocally always shows up to act in your best interest.

• 1:27:17Jordi Hays?

  Diet Coke.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Always there when John needs it, except when, except when the flight attendant says, how about Pepsi?

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:27:25Bryan Johnson?

  We're going to try to stand in that role. We're like, we're like, we're also jaded because everyone's trying to take advantage of us. So we're going to try to stand in that role that you can unequivocally trust us. We will always act in your best interest. And if we do that, then like I'm willing to share my data. I'm willing to engage in the platform and do the exploration.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  So high bar. Uh, I want to run through a kind of a lightning round of questions. What have you learned from Ray Pete?

• 1:27:47Bryan Johnson?

  That there's a lot of repeaters on X.

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Bryan Johnson?

  And they really want.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  You to follow their.

• 1:27:54Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, they do.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  They want you to Pete out.

• 1:27:56Bryan Johnson?

  They do. Yeah. So they, they're definitely evangelists for, so Ray Pete, Ray Pete has a lot of evangelists.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Carrots underrated, overrated.

• 1:28:03Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Uh, carrots are a great food. You know, they, they're not benign. Like no food is benign. It has, yeah, pros and cons.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  What else you got, Jerry?

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  If, where would you live if you weren't a public figure? And you could just optimize for health.

• 1:28:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. You know, Kate's here. Hey, Kate.

• 1:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Hey, Kate.

• 1:28:24Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. We were just having this conversation. She's from Australia. Uh, we were just having this conversation, trying to figure that out. It's, it's really an interesting question.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:28:33Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Jordi Hays?

  LA is certainly not the place if you're purely optimizing for health.

• 1:28:37Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's very true. So like it has been top of mind for us and we are trying to figure out like what, if we did something, uh, next level, where would we go and how we do it? I wouldn't have an answer yet.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I think it's an important question. There's data on golf courses. I don't know if you've seen this.

• 1:28:53Bryan Johnson?

  I have.

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  If you live near a golf course, it like reduces your life expectancy because they use such heavy pesticides.

• 1:28:59Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  On the golf course because.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  How close to a golf course? There's one in my town.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  That's probably not great. These studies were done on like people that live in like a golf.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Oh, like right.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  So like you're living on the golf course and they're they're basically, you know, golfers just wanted to look pretty.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  They're not asking like, hey, what did you do to make it look so pretty?

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Jordi Hays?

  How are you? Uh, what are your health, long-term kind of concerns around the health of us being in this studio?

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Rubber smell? Yeah, you smell it?

• 1:29:29Bryan Johnson?

  Yes. So that is.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  I think it's these things.

• 1:29:31Bryan Johnson?

  Honestly, I love that question so much. I would love.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  And I've and I've thought about it a lot and I would love to work on this because like we have an LED light right here.

• 1:29:39Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  It's flashing in our head. I don't know about these lights.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Maybe you can consult on our next on our next video. We're moving soon, so.

• 1:29:45Bryan Johnson?

  I would love to come in here and do a comprehensive analysis.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:29:49Bryan Johnson?

  No, it would be so good.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  No, the air, the air quality. I mean, we spend a lot of time in here.

• 1:29:53Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  And we plan to spend a lot of time.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Brian's gonna come back and say, you guys have 10. We're gonna be like, 10 years? He'll be like, nine, eight, seven.

• 1:30:00Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, first of all, your CO2 levels for sure are too high. I can feel the CO2, right? Kate, do you feel the CO2?

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  We have a CO2 meter for sure.

• 1:30:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so the the space is too small.

• 1:30:11Jordi Hays?

  I have those in my, yeah, I have a meter in my house.

• 1:30:14Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  I'll move around to the different rooms to kind of track it and I've got a whole, like, I've done a bunch of work to the HVAC system.

• 1:30:21Bryan Johnson?

  And see, over a thousand is gonna impair your thinking.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:30:24Bryan Johnson?

  So by the end of the stream.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  That's obvious from the stream. You watch it, like, you're like, these guys take so like.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  I like sunglasses right now.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  What do you think? Uh, how are you thinking about parasites? There's tons of health influencers that will make parasites their whole thing. And that like every, the solution to every problem is like, gotta fix the parasites.

• 1:30:45Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how how are you thinking about them?

• 1:30:48Bryan Johnson?

  We, I've not done a deep dive into that. I don't know. So these are people who have parasites and they're trying to get rid of them.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  The the argument is everyone has them.

• 1:30:55Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Some amount are probably helpful.

• 1:30:59Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Cause they'll like eat heavy metals and then you'll eventually kind of.

• 1:31:03Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, release them, things like that. But you should do a deep dive on that.

• 1:31:07Bryan Johnson?

  Yep, noted.

• 1:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, do you think, uh, how do you cycle supplements? Right now I'm taking L-theanine, glycine, and a and a number of other things before bed. It's been super effective at getting REM and deep sleep up for me. But, uh, I'm curious when you find a supplement that is. Working and it's like measured in my case. How should you cycle it? How do you think about cycling it to make sure that you continue to get the benefit?

• 1:31:34Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, this is one of the questions we're asking the inference engine is because we've done a whole bunch of these different cycles. And the it's difficult because it's never truly a non confounded experiment, right? There's always some confound. And so when you're trying to tease out little tiny signal, you do need to be robust about the analysis. So we don't know. Like, you know, we have like some short term data on that, but it's not not strong enough that I think I'd express an opinion. So we're hoping hopeful that the bigger data sets will give us insight.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Same kind of question on fasting. I've started I inverted the fasting schedule because we do the show. We'll have like a big breakfast at 8am. We'll have I'll have a second meal at around 2:30 and then I won't eat until the next day at 8am. So typically somebody might start eating at 12, have another meal around dinner and then wait until the next day. So I flipped it. Any any learnings from that personally?

• 1:32:30Bryan Johnson?

  The the marker I would look for that probably is

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, part of part of the reason is I actually and there's a functional reason, which is that the way that we do the show, I need to be like

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  Powered up.

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  Fueled up to then podcast for three hours.

• 1:32:43Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  But then I also don't like being having a big dinner and going to bed.

• 1:32:49Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah. You guys work out in the morning together, is that right?

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  6:30.

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 6:30, huge meal.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Huge meal at 8.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  8.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  8 to 9.

• 1:32:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Lots more to talk about.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we could go all night, all day. Let me tell you about MongoDB.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll finish this at the end of the week.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. And without further ado, we have Matthew Zeitlin, the correspondent from Heat Map News in the restream waiting room.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for correspondence.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  I'll tell you about Sigma while we wait for him. 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 build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Tyler tested the CO2. We're at 790. We're at 810 right now. 810. And rising.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  You caught us on a low day.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  It's going up.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  He said 1,000. He said it was good if it's under 1,000.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  I was cool to see what it was at the end of the show.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, because we will add more CO2 as the show goes on.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Edge in the chat says Jordy has three days in one. He's figured out how to manipulate time.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  You are manipulating time. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream Writing Room. Let's bring him into the TBP in Altrudome. How are you doing? Sorry to keep you waiting.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:34:07Speaker 05

  I'm doing great, guys. Any opportunity to follow up Brian Johnson is one I will take.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  It is a fun story.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was your opener.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  I mean, you've clearly been doing a lot of looks-maxing. What's working for you?

• 1:34:18Speaker 05

  You know, I do have friends. Actually, John and I play a poker game with Ray Pete, Ray Pete acolyte. So I've been at least hearing about peating, you know, forever.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Early.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  I've been, I immediately resonated with the work of Ray Pete.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  Have followed a lot of it myself. I think it would absolutely astonish and scare Brian Johnson how much sugar I have. That's kind of the main, one of the main takeaways from Ray Pete's work is that sugar is not nearly as bad as many people would say and may be actually great in a lot of ways. So I've been running that experiment.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  We'll find out.

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  I have a two-year-old at home, so I can't eat cookies around him. No, I can't. It's a, it's, you know, then he starts asking for them and yeah, it's getting in the way of my peating, actually.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  I had a friend who had a bunch of kids and wound up just obsessed with dark chocolate because it was the only thing that was at all sweet that he could eat that the kids wouldn't immediately go for and consume all of.

• 1:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Now, the explaining to my four-year-old why I can have cookies before bed but he can't is not going well.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  That's a tough one.

• 1:35:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm still waiting for that level of cognitive development from my son. We're not really at the explaining stage yet.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, it's great, it's great to meet.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Good to have you on the show.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  We've, we've covered a bunch of your posts over the last six or 12 months and always, always enjoyed them. Why don't, why don't you give a quick intro on yourself and then, you know, we can talk about all the stuff that you talk about.

• 1:35:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, my name's Matt Zeitlin. I'm a reporter at Heat Map. We're a climate and energy focused newsroom. We report on climate and energy every day and I mostly write about, you know, energy policy, generation, a lot of data centers, you know. We've kind of really reoriented what we're doing around data centers. That's where all the demand is coming from.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, when did that reorientation actually kick off? Because it felt like it became a story sort of mid last year, but have you been tracking it longer? Like, when was the inflection point?

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  So I think around like summer of 2023, I wrote a story about how just load growth was coming. That we'd essentially had flat electricity demand for, since in the 21st century.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  And when I wrote the story, it was more about electrification of cars and home heating, you know, heat pumps, stuff like that.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Speaker 05

  Stuff that climate people are really interested in and then, and data centers to some extent, also factories or something I was really looking into as a big electricity demand. And then, yeah, it's, I mean, it was since the growth of, it was since the launch of GPT-3, it became pretty clear that data centers was, was where it was at as far as load growth story was.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then how, like, how widespread is the focus of AI data center energy consumption? Because it feels like if it's going up next to your house, you're going to be calling your representative. But for a lot of people, it's abstract. They maybe see an Instagram reel, some slop and they're like, I don't like it and I don't want my rates to go up.

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we've been, we've been kind of wrestling with this because in general, I think AI is very good. There's a lot to be excited about. I think that more intelligence, having, you know, people globally, being able to access intelligence, even if they're accessing a little bit of slop is like genuinely good.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, I understand the people that it's like, what's the, what's the benefit of having a data center in your backyard? It's like actually probably close to zero because, or negative because it doesn't, I don't need the data center in my backyard. It's not exactly pretty. We're not making them look like cathedrals yet. Uh, maybe we should. Uh, and I can just, if it, if it's out somewhere that I've never even been to, I can still get all the benefit of it. And so, um, so yeah, I think these are things that the whole industry is wrestling with, politicians are wrestling with and, and for good reason.

• 1:38:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, so the way we kind of, I like to look at electricity prices. That's kind of a nice, solid thing to focus on. And obviously they're, they've been up in a lot of parts of the country. You know, you guys are in California. I grew up there. I hope you don't have a pool at home, you know, uh, anything around heating or something like that, a pool or something like that. A disaster as far as prices go. Um, but no, where we've seen electricity prices.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  So we need, you're saying we gotta replace the pools with data centers.

• 1:38:39Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. You need, you need a, you need a blackwell rack.

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, or just a stack of Mac minis.

• 1:38:46Speaker 05

  Of course. Yeah. John, John can get you, John can send you over a Mac mini.

• 1:38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:50Speaker 05

  But no, um, where we've seen kind of electricity price increases, California has been a big one and the Northeast have been big. Those are not areas with lots of data center development. I think in part because the prices are so high. Um, where we have seen both data center development and price increases has been kind of in the mid Atlantic, uh, Midwest areas. This is Virginia. Uh, this is Ohio. This is Indiana. This is areas, um, where if they're all in one electricity market called the PJM interconnection.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  And the way this market works is that, um, these, uh, utilities have to procure capacity in advance. And that market, that capacity market and the, and the ability to get new generation online there has been completely messed up. And so we're seeing these auctions generate billions of dollars of revenue, uh, for the existing generators. And that is directing, that is translating pretty directly into higher prices. New Jersey has probably seen their prices, residential prices increase, you know, say 20%. And that's because they're in a system that is not incorporating the data center demand. That well, but there are other parts of the country where electricity prices, you know, haven't gone up as much.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  How have you been reacting to some of the big AI companies, some of the hyperscalers? Just start to put out statements saying that they will pay above market rates, subsidize energy. Do you think that that's going to be effective? Can you just do that and then keep the prices stable? Also, a little bit of grid history here would be helpful because it feels very intuitive, but I believe like we sort of have a common carrier rule where even if, if I'm doing, you know, research and you're watching Netflix, like we still pay the same price. We don't put like a moral weight that I'm aware of, but any of that would be helpful.

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, so typically, you know, residential users pay the same kind of kil- per kilowatt hour rate. Sometimes there's, you know, time of use differences, especially in a state like California. But to get to this point about, and then industrial users often pay as well. Those would be the data centers. What they mean when data centers say they're going to pay for their own electricity is not just like the literal electricity, the electrons they use, but when you bring on a gigawatt sized data center, and that's like putting a whole city, you know, on, on, a gigawatt can power 800,000 homes. So that's like putting a whole city on the grid. This requires a lot of upgrades to the whole system, a lot of new equipment you have to buy.

• 1:41:11Speaker 05

  And those typically system costs are spread out to everyone on the system. And this is how electricity utility regulation and pricing has worked for like over about 100 years. This guy Samuel Insal, who worked for Thomas Edison in Chicago, in I think the 20s, basically came up with a version of this idea. And so in theory, having new sources of demand over time should lower prices for everyone because you have a big electricity buyer that can deal with those kind of distributed system costs. But in the short run, you know, they're incurring lots of new costs and new infrastructure development to the system as a whole. And so I think what the Microsoft has made a commitment to this and Anthropic yesterday

• 1:41:56Speaker 05

  did, you know, you can't, you know, do a utility rate case in a press release, but what they are committing to, I think, is that in their electricity rate that they pay, they want to get all of those extra system costs that they're incurring to just be onto them.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  What about the other, the other, the other stories and pushback to data center build out? How did you process the, the whole water risk hype cycle? It feels like there was a lot of fear and then there were some more statements from Google, some studies. How has your community and you personally like processed that narrative?

• 1:42:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. So like water, this water issue is I think kind of a surprise for journalists covering this space. It is definitely something that, that people, especially people online are like really interested in. You know, it's actually pretty easy to track how data centers can affect electricity prices. How data centers can affect water usage in any kind of systemic, systemic sense. It doesn't really show up that much. The water usage isn't that great, but it's definitely something.

• 1:43:01Jordi Hays?

  But the numbers sound great. The numbers sound great.

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like we're using a hundred million gallons.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds like a lot.

• 1:43:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you know, the typical.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Golf course.

• 1:43:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, golf courses are extreme, but you know, household usage of water is huge, you know? And if people, individual households use their water over a year sounds really, really big. I think there's some issues around construction and water usage, but those are obviously more temporary. Yeah, but it's definitely something that people are concerned about. And so I think these hyperscalers are really going out of their way to kind of talk about being water positive. They're really kind of leaning in on the water aspect, but I think the electricity aspect is much more rubber meets the road. And they have to make some commitment. You know, a one gigawatt data center, people think costs about 50 billion, 50 billion ish dollars. Obviously the vast, vast majority of that is the chips, but you know, 10 to 15% of the lifetime cost of that is electricity.

• 1:43:56Speaker 05

  And you're paying all these extra grid costs. That means with like one of these really, really big data centers that all these companies are rolling out now. They're volunteering to incur what could be hundreds of millions, if not billions of quote unquote extra costs. But that just might be the price they have to pay to get approval from the state governments to build these facilities.

• 1:44:16Jordi Hays?

  Who, who have been some of the craziest beneficiaries of the general energy? The boom in, in sort of energy demand due to AI, anybody that was just kind of like sitting around? A few years ago, and then, you know, just kind of like tripped into making like a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars due to

• 1:44:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there's two great examples. There's two great examples of this that are kind of on the opposite ends of a kind of technological sophistication. One is Caterpillar, which we obviously associate with mining, construction. You know, anyone, I think, with boys at home probably has some Caterpillar toys.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:54Speaker 05

  They probably identify all the equipment they use. But they also have a business called Solar, which builds these kind of small turbines, small gas turbines. You know, the big gas turbine in a power plant is, you know, hundreds of, hundreds of megawatts of capacity. These are a few dozen, maybe, at the biggest. And they're kind of used for like remote power start, often in the oil and gas industry, or like, you know, compress on a turbine, pipeline or something. This business has gone huge. And they're now a huge supplier to data centers because they're so desperate for power. I mean, Elon Musk, XAI is the big innovator here of realizing that grid connection studies can last for years. But if you just kind of pile up these small inefficient turbines, you can get the power going really, really

• 1:45:38Speaker 05

  quickly. Caterpillar is a big supplier to Meta in Ohio. The Socrates Project, I think, is a few hundred megawatts. And Williams is actually a pipeline company is kind of assembling all these kind of turbines and reciprocating engines, essentially like giant car engines to power these data centers. And so that business has been doing incredibly well.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Car engines, do they run on gasoline? Diesel?

• 1:46:03Speaker 05

  Uh, natural gas.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  Natural gas, okay.

• 1:46:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:46:06Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what kind of environmental studies have been done if a data center sets up, you know, in your backyard, and they've got a bunch of these gas turbines and they're running? Is that like, you know, if you can, you move away? Or does it dissipate quickly? Do you, has, has there been any kind of significant

• 1:46:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean These turbines are less efficient and dirtier than, you know, a very large scale turbine system you would buy from a GE or Nova or a Siemens. I know with, with XAI, they were kind of really monkeying around with these rules about how you could only have it up for 364 days. They're, by the time the EPA certified it, they were already moving to Mississippi. I mean, these systems are not really designed to kind of be, to function as power plants in the same way that like a power plant is, but people are so desperate for power that they are going to be using them.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  I mean, it feels like there's going to be a variety of backlashes, a variety of pendulums swinging. The hyperscalers were very focused on net zero, clean energy. Now, it feels like they're trying to go as fast as possible. So there's a lot of natural gas, but then they're also still firing up nuclear projects, more wind, more solar. How do you see the mix like shifting over the next couple of years? Do you think there's any sort of white bill here?

• 1:47:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the biggest hyperscalers, your Googles and your Microsofts especially, and, and Meta and Amazon do have these sustainability commitments, these 100% renewable power commitments. They still are procuring lots of clean energy. Google bought a clean energy developer pattern for four and a half billion dollars at the end of last year. And what they do is that, you know, in some cases they get the natural gas turbines and they also buy, say, solar projects in a similar area. That's what Meta is right, doing right now in Ohio. But yeah, I mean, they do these, they do these reports and say Microsoft's emissions have gone up a lot because they're just consuming a lot more power. And they've gotten way more adventurous

• 1:48:07Speaker 05

  in the stuff they're willing to invest in because the scale of their power needs have really changed. So I think all four of the biggest hyperscalers have nuclear projects going on. Google's a big investor in enhanced geothermal.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  We just talked to Jeff Lawson yesterday. He raised, what, $450 million to do not nuclear fission, traditional nuclear, but, but fusion, which is...

• 1:48:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's doing, he's doing the lasers.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, lasers, which is, you know, he said there's no science risk and I hope that there's not, but it feels like, you know, it hasn't really produced energy on the grid just yet. So it is, you know, very forward looking, but Google Ventures is one of the investors because they're, and they also have a deal with Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a bunch of nuclear projects as well. Yeah, that's fascinating. What can you tell me about? The nature of the pushback politically against data centers. I was looking at this data center watch stat, 55% Republican, 45% Democrats in affected districts. So it feels like I don't want a data center in my backyard is not a left or right wing issue, but

• 1:49:12Speaker 05

  No, no, it's a fusion. It's one of these kind of fusion issues. We've done a lot of great reporting at this. We have a pro service called Heat Map Pro that really focuses on this stuff.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:22Speaker 05

  And what we found is that, yeah, it's like, it's, it's anyone who's kind of distrustful of institutions in general will tend to really not like a data center

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:33Speaker 05

  in their community. Also, people who, it also brings together Democrats and Republicans, because people who oppose renewable energy projects, which at Heat Map is what we were kind of born to start tracking

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:44Speaker 05

  was local opposition to renewables.

• 1:49:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:47Speaker 05

  The same people are opposing the data centers and they're using the same techniques. They're opposing, say, rezoning agricultural land into industrial land. Something really common with solar panels, same things going on with data centers, same type of people are opposing it. And it's interesting because at the, at the highest levels of politics, you know, the administration right now is very pro the data center AI build out. You know, they have, you know, they have Sam Altman at the White House announcing, you know, multi-billion dollar investments in this stuff.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:18Speaker 05

  And yet, a lot of data centers are built in Republican areas. That's typically where there's enough space. They tend to kind of be in exurban areas. And yeah, they get a lot of local opposition. There's been a lot of local opposition in Indiana, been a lot of local opposition in Kentucky.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:32Speaker 05

  Virginia, this is really kind of transforming the politics around there as well.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  So OpenAI has a PAC now, Anthropic has a PAC now. I think for the drama heads in the chat, we hope that they're just going to fight with each other endlessly and make content for us. But assuming that they want to bring about support, broad support for their data center build out efforts, what would you recommend? What's the playbook for an AI lab that wants to build a gigawatt data center somewhere in America? Where are they going? What promises are they making? What promises can they keep? What would you recommend?

• 1:51:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we see this in the kind of renewable and nuclear space a lot is essentially you do a lot of kind of expensive, extensive, long-lasting, local engagement with the community. And like, look, if you're a data center developer, you're gonna end up, you know, building a lot of high school gyms. You're gonna really have to get the local people there on board with their project. Because typically, the state level, you actually, governors like data centers, you know, they provide tax revenue. Unions like data centers, the I D W, the International Brotherhood, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, very pro data center, and they're pro data center for us in Democratic Party. But oftentimes, these decisions are made at these kind of community board meetings, zoning meetings.

• 1:51:55Speaker 05

  And for them, you really have to convince that you're providing something on the ground. Because what Jordy was saying at the very, very beginning, there's no benefit in terms of what the data center produces to having it near you.

• 1:52:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's no local AI movement. I want my

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  Speak for yourself. I want low latency inference. I want it in my backyard. I'm a Yimby. Give me a massive data center. I was hearing bad stuff about living next to a golf course. T up the one gigawatt data center right there. I'm good to go.

• 1:52:20Jordi Hays?

  I want my locally

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  I like the idea

• 1:52:22Jordi Hays?

  locally grown inference.

• 1:52:23John Coogan?

  I like the idea of showing up to the local T-ball league and being like, why is the team called the Core Weavers? Something like that.

• 1:52:31Speaker 05

  So nuclear power plants famously do this.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:52:34Speaker 05

  I mean, The Simpsons parodied it, you know, you have the isotopes or whatever.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, the isotopes.

• 1:52:38Speaker 05

  And you do see this in communities of nuclear power plants. But the thing about data centers, they don't provide very many jobs after they're constructed.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:45Speaker 05

  So that, that part is very difficult to get over.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I have the solution. Sorry to interrupt. The solution is you get, they have the data center, and then there's just a big room with a bunch of Pelotons, and you can just go in there and just generate energy for the data center, and you get paid that way. So we get a gym, jobs, and a data center in one space.

• 1:53:09Speaker 05

  I mean, I think I think Brian Johnson, for one, might support that, although, you know, as we know with the 49ers, they don't like being by an electrical substation when they practice because they're worried about the injuries from the EMF. So that might be it. That might be a tough sell. Yikes.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  Demystify New York for me. What's it like living there?

• 1:53:28Speaker 05

  Oh, I love it. I've, you know, I've been here for over, for over a decade, you know, it's back. It's too cold right now. There's too much snow, which is quite weird. I cover climate change. Where is this so-called global warming right now? Who knows? But no, it's it's it's great. People are on the subway again. Really nothing to complain about, you know, apparently bonuses on Wall Street were great in last year. Our projected budget deficit almost got cut in half magically in a few weeks. So what could you complain about?

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  There you go. What was your review of Davos from an energy perspective? From a tech perspective, it felt like, oh, like Davos is like a real place that needs to be taken seriously. Like, every company should be figuring out their Davos strategy for next year, whereas like previous years were sort of quiet.

• 1:54:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, Davos used to be the place where they would, you would, you would hear the most bogus sustainability commitments, you know, and for better or worse, they kind of stopped doing that. I think as it's gotten more serious, they've, they've stopped, you know, you know, you're not hearing that you're going to own nothing or be and be happy anymore. So it's just the more, it just seems more serious. And, you know, as a, as obviously as a newsroom and a reporter that's focused on climate change, like I have a point of view on this, but also like I just like seeing people deal in reality.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:51Speaker 05

  And I think Davos is more of a reality-based place now, which I, as a reporter, it sounds is great.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  That's good. Yeah. Jordy, you have something?

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  You said something which is funny because you cover you cover climate change like professionally, but you said there's snow out, which is like we're supposed to have climate change. Doesn't feel like we have climate change. But like, how how is kind of the broader clean energy industry even processing? Like, how are they processing that? Because that that is kind of like more like the average viewpoint of Americans. Like, it's cold this winter. No climate change here. And that's obvious, like, you know, you can have, you know, different spikes and and your kind of like lived experience is not necessarily entirely representative of kind of

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  But it might inform who you vote for, what you vote for.

• 1:55:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, one of the great ironies of climate policy in the United States is that some of the strictest decarbonization standards and rules and restrictions are in the Northeast. Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont. They're really into decarbonization. They're really into preventing climate change. And then in Florida, they don't really seem to care that much at all. And obviously, that's the place that's most at risk in the United States from high temperatures and rising sea levels. So, yeah, I mean, just an issue where, I mean, this is something that people in the industry complain about a lot. Well, now they're complaining about it. This stuff is super politicized. And, you know, I think a lot of people in the industry are, when a Republican is president, really want to say like, oh, this is not about politics. It's not about climate change. This is about clean, fast, cheap energy.

• 1:56:28Speaker 05

  You know, solar is the thing we can get on the grid the quickest, solar and storage, what we can get on the grid the quickest. But, yeah, I mean, it's funny, the biggest, the most successful green tech entrepreneur and the biggest solar maxi in human history is Elon Musk. He's also the second or third biggest Republican donor of all time. The Republican Party has tried to dismantle a lot of tax benefits and programs that benefit Tesla, and he doesn't seem to care that much. So, yeah, I mean, people's politics are really kind of often override everything else. And that's that's not, obviously, that's not something unique to climate change, but it's a huge challenge for these businesses.

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are you tracking on the solar panel manufacturing supply chain? We we talked to the CEO of T1 Energy. Seems like there's some green shoots, but even his optimistic case was, oh, maybe we get to like 1% production and relative to China.

• 1:57:23Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah, China has solar and batteries. The amount of kind of time, energy and money that has been devoted to that has been immense. And every time, it's a big balloon squeezing effort, too. I'm sure T1 and First Solar is the other big American solar manufacturer can talk about this. We try to, you know, put tariffs on Chinese-made solar. These factories start popping up everywhere. They pop up Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia. And then we start putting tariffs on those factories because they're owned by China. But it's tough. I mean, they're the cheapest, they're the cheapest panels. They get done fastest. And yeah, these domestic solar manufacturers are really similar to the car companies, ex Tesla. They're very dependent on government policy.

• 1:58:06Speaker 05

  You know, the developers, if they could, would just buy Chinese solar panels. But, um, you know, there's a lot of political reasons why they're being encouraged and now because of these tariffs to buy American ones.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have a friend, Casey Hamer, who says like, hey, look, if they're going to be subsidized and then we need to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy every solar panel we can. And really, that's one choice.

• 1:58:29Speaker 05

  I talked to Casey for stories, too. And he is a mind-expanding person to talk to. I mean, yeah, but it's, it's true because it's just tough. You know, if you're trying to get everything onto solar and batteries, you don't want to then disemploy an American supply chain, especially because with energy right now, American energy is largely domestically produced, which is a huge change from, you know, 10 to, from, you know, 15 or so years ago. And so if you're trying to have a climate policy that encourages solar, you don't want to then also disemploy, you know, lots of people.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Zoom out a little bit for me and, and tell me your prediction or feeling around like long-term energy production capacity in America. It's been flat, it's growing very low rates, nowhere near the rollout of phones or electric cars or compute. Like, everything else is growing exponentially. It feels like you're, you're going to watch a, you know, a sharply exponential line crash into a linear line. What is your feeling around this idea that we might actually start seeing 10% growth rates in energy production nationally?

• 1:59:44Speaker 05

  I mean, just look at how hard it is to build a data center, which is just a warehouse with computers in it. And then think about building power plants on that same scale. I mean, people have a lot of trouble building solar power, which is zero emissions and it's fine. It just looks weird. Imagine trying to do that with gas, with gas power plants. So.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  But what if I have a billion AI lawyers in my top? Just suing everyone left and right.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  I show up into town, I sue everyone, make friends.

• 2:00:13Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, this is a serious concern, you know, litigation risk is a huge issue with energy projects. And one can only imagine what Harvey could do with filing with, you know, gumming up the NEPO process for infrastructure.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 2:00:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think it's more like we're kind of growing at half a percent a year. Maybe two, maybe five percent some years and would be tough.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Okay, well, that's the next bottleneck after the chip bottleneck.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have something, so your friend, John Palmer, is also our friend. We read his fantastic piece. To me, it was more impactful than something big is coming, something little is coming.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  It hit me like a ton of bricks.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  It really hit, it really hit us hard, but he just announced that Stripe is acquiring his company.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Party Dow, so I wanted to ask him, we hit the gong with you for our friend, John.

• 2:01:03Speaker 05

  Oh, this would be an honor.

• 2:01:07Speaker 05

  Congratulations, congratulations, John. This means you have to start buying in bigger, more frequently.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:17Speaker 05

  You have to call my, you have to call my worst bets. No more excuses.

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, poker game, Texas Hold'em?

• 2:01:24Speaker 05

  No limit Texas Hold'em.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  No limit Texas.

• 2:01:26Speaker 05

  We were actually thinking that maybe the guys, we could get together and start a podcast. I think we could call it All In.

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, kind of like a poker themed little, talk about a little business, a little politics, a little tech, energy geopolitics. I think, I think you guys would have something there.

• 2:01:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, we'd wear expensive sweaters and yeah, it'd be great.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  I would, I would be the first one to subscribe.

• 2:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, it's so, so great to finally have you on. Come back on when you, when you're going to publish your next story.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:01:56Speaker 05

  Thanks so much.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connected in bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending with now with AI. Is there any other breaking news, Jordy? Anything we need to talk about?

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm super excited for John Palmer and the Party Dow team. It's funny, John and I didn't meet until last year. But we used to kind of have this like tension because I had a company called Party Round. He had Party Dow.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  You were doing some crypto stuff.

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  We're both in that 2021 era. I was doing.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Sort of a team of rival situation.

• 2:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Crypto kind of stunts with Party Round. He was, he was getting quite a lot of attention. We both raised from Andreessen.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay.

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  But now we're, now we're, now we're buddies and very happy for the whole team.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Turned business partner.

• 2:02:47Jordi Hays?

  And very bullish for Stripe Crypto.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  For sure. And that's why he's probably in cloud nine, writing long form jokes, which is great. Like, oh yeah.

• 2:02:57Jordi Hays?

  Shocking the internet.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Shocking the.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Well, you know what time it is. It's time for the lightning round, the Lambda Lightning Round. That's right. Bring down the second gong mallet. Fire up the Lambda Lightning Round.

• 2:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring in.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  I'm going to tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And we will bring in June Park, the co-founder and CEO of Simile. Welcome to the show, June. How are you doing?

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  What up?

• 2:03:24Speaker 06

  Hi, everyone. Great to be here.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:03:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, you're, you mean serious business because look at this whiteboard.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  I love the whiteboard.

• 2:03:32Speaker 06

  We are a big fan.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Incredibly detailed. Please, first time on the show, introduce yourself, introduce the company.

• 2:03:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. So really excited to be here. I'm June. I'm the CEO of Simile. Simile is a company that is building foundational model of human behavior. They can simulate our society from ground up at the level of individuals and populations and predict its outcomes. We use that technology to create products that enable people to talk to millions of similes. We call agents.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:59Speaker 06

  That represent real people.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm super excited about this.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:03Jordi Hays?

  When we were working to get you on the show, I was thinking about it. There's been so many times in my career where I was doing something like launching a product or launching a campaign or talking with a founder that was doing one of those things. And like oftentimes, you have a really strong sense of how something will do after you've built up some intuition. But I've always thought it was crazy that for some, you know, think of like a physical product company, like you have to spend a year and all this time and money and then just like launch it and be like, well, I hope, I hope people like it. And it feels like with enough data and maybe a model like you're building it similarly, you could get to the point where like you can get a much more accurate read on how

• 2:04:46Jordi Hays?

  society or a niche will respond to something without having to actually make the thing.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the first thing you built for the company?

• 2:04:56Speaker 06

  So for the company, we work with vendors that actually connect us with real human subjects. So we actually partner with people and get their data. And what we found was if we have rich data about individuals in our community, we can actually create really high fidelity simulation of these people. This was on the basis of the research that we've done at Stanford where we led agents and simulations based research. And what we are now finding is that this technology can actually create insights for our decision makers. So our core product basically is one that allows our Fortune 500 customers to actually interact with and talk to these agents that represent these real people that we collected and basically provide insights. So that's the platform that we're creating.

• 2:05:38John Coogan?

  What's your thought on game engines as a piece of simulation? I've seen some economic research that maybe used Unreal Engine, but is there a role for simulated worlds or deterministic worlds that are then puppeteered by agents in any of this or is that just like a different fork of research entirely?

• 2:05:58Speaker 06

  No, I think it's all connected. In fact, we actually started our research when we published the generative agents paper, which introduced the idea of creating simulations in agents. We actually demoed this in a game town. One, because we thought it was so visceral and so fun, but also at the same time, if you want to create a simulation of our entire world and how our society might get shaped in the coming decades, then you really ought to be modeling not just people, but also the environment and the model as a whole. So there's absolutely a place for these kind of game simulation-like characteristics to this field. Basically, the idea here is down the line, can we actually create simulations of the entire market, entire nation? That's where we're headed.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  So yeah, what are some of the case studies that you've seen with large companies? Is it something as granular as should they charge $2 or $2.50 for a particular product? Or is it more broad, like if we do a Super Bowl ad, will it convert or, you know?

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Super Bowl ads are such a good example where you're spending maybe a million, eight million on the buy, you know, half a million on creative, all this stuff. And then it'll either get people to hate you or love you. But we should be able to predict these things better. And obviously, historically, there's focus groups, you could try to get a reaction, but we're still at this point where sometimes you just need to do something to see.

• 2:07:23Speaker 06

  Indeed. In fact, as somebody who's running this company, I actually simulated how today's conversation might go.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:07:31Speaker 06

  Because a few of you are so well-known online that we could actually get in a fan to actually see how conversations like this one actually might pan out. So I could be better prepared to talk about some of the topics that we wanted to cover. So core use cases today actually does cover things like, so we work with Fortune 500 companies that have earnings call. Many of them have come to us and said, can you actually create simulations of, let's say, earnings call that's going to happen? And there, basically, the idea here is can we simulate the each analyst who might actually ask questions during these earnings call, all the way to how CEO and CFO might be able to respond to these questions. That's a common ask. So these are the kind of simulations that we create for that particular use case.

• 2:08:13Speaker 06

  And what we find is we can actually predict eight out of 10 questions on average for these earnings call, like the actual questions that will be asked. And we can actually simulate how the conversation might flow from that point on. So you can test out different strategies. But beyond that, one of our sort of customers right now is CBS. CBS, of course, a large retailer. And there CBS has been working with Simly to create simulations of hundreds of thousands of their customers. What they want to know is, let's say CBS has new product, they have new store layout, they have new concepts they want to test. These are the kind of things that CBS today might go to a large human panels, but instead they can now work with Simly to get insights that's much more granular and that's much faster to gain.

• 2:08:55Speaker 06

  Now, another example here, Gallup, a sort of a long-standing polling company, has been working with Simly to create digital panels of their human panel members. So if they want to ask questions to that panel, but for whatever reason they are not reachable, then you can actually come to Simly to create simulations of that panel.

• 2:09:12John Coogan?

  What's the moat? How do you think about, like, in the earnings call example, a lot of earnings health transcripts are already in pre-training corpuses and you could dump them in and sort of do a quick fine tune or even just throw in the context window. And if you're a public company CEO, you could probably just ask any of the frontier models, what do you think the analysts are going to ask? And is it that that strategy only yields two accurate questions and you're at a higher benchmark rate? Or do you think that there's a different piece of your business that the big labs won't go after?

• 2:09:48Speaker 06

  So fundamentally, the model that we're trying to create is different than what big labs might be interested in today.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:53Speaker 06

  That we are less interested in creating intelligence that's superhuman, that's super rational. But instead, what we are interested in creating are models that actually model people's irrational half of their brain. These are people's values, preferences, taste. And the way we go about doing this is a true combination of modeling and product frontier. So Simul is unique in that we as a team actually is composed of both of those talents. So myself and my co-founders, Michael Bernstein and Percy Liang, are all researchers who have been making contributions at the frontier of AI, ranging from generative agents to generative AI and foundation models. And there, the core mode here is what are the best kind of data that we can collect?

• 2:10:38Speaker 06

  And then using that data to create the most high fidelity agents that represent the people we have interviewed, collected data from. And then we overlay that on top of amazing product. So here, one of the amazing parts about the models that actually map people's values and preferences is the better model immediately means better insights for customers like CBS and Gallup. So that there's an amazing alignment between the modeling frontier and product frontier, which is not something that we see every day. So it's a true combination of those two things coming together that makes Simul special.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you see progress scale with more? Are you compute constrained or is it much more about data constraints?

• 2:11:22Speaker 06

  So we are charting the frontier on both front. So down the line, so today we model hundreds of thousands of people who signed up to participate in these studies. And then our customers, of course, are, they have appetite to down the line simulate millions. Our goal eventually is to ask ourselves, what would it mean if we can create simulations of eight billion people, the entire earth? That's the future that we are headed. So there, certainly there's a question around what is a data? But also, how do we compute these kind of simulations efficiently?

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Are you worried about getting too accurate, that life just becomes boring?

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Is Free Wheel, is Free Wheel real? Do we have Free Wheel? Are we living in a simulation?

• 2:12:08Jordi Hays?

  It's like you went to the end of the book and you read the last page and you're just like, ah.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  Like.

• 2:12:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's something fun about actually this discussion. Um, so I don't know if you all have watched The Matrix, or I don't know how many of the audience actually have watched The Matrix. I love The Matrix. Amazing.

• 2:12:26Jordi Hays?

  I have seen that one.

• 2:12:27Speaker 06

  You have seen that one. Jordi hasn't seen a lot of movies, but he's seen The Matrix. There's actually a quote that I actually like quite a bit, that I think is actually quite profound. It's something that the Oracle says, which basically is, "You're not necessarily here to make a decision. You've already made a decision. You're here to understand the decision and why you made that." And that sort of captures essence of simulation, right? The models that we're creating isn't merely trying to predict the future, although we are good at that and that is one of the core capability. But what to me is more important is understanding why we made the decision that we created. And creating this kind of bottom-up simulation, where we can actually go back and actually trace through the audit logs of how society might unfold,

• 2:13:11Speaker 06

  is actually an amazing way to gain that interpretability layer of our reality. So that is, to me, the best way to shape the future, right? If we want to shape new policies, new product, that would actually serve the people that is in our society, the best way is actually to understand those people and then actually communicating with them at a scalable way to basically create those policies. So that's how we view things. How much did you raise?

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Before that, the chat wants to know, do you think if you worked with Clavicular, the live streamer, you would be able to predict whether or not he would get frame-mogged if he went to different, you know, locations or maybe universities? Like, maybe you could have said, "Don't go to ASU. Just don't. Just don't."

• 2:13:58Speaker 06

  How much did you raise? So we raised $100 million from Index and other participants.

• 2:14:09Speaker 06

  We're also really excited to invite angels such as Andrew Carthy, the very excited.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Big dogs.

• 2:14:17Speaker 06

  But ultimately, what we are excited about is that there is a vision that I think is extremely compelling, that this is a vision that this particular team, having worked in towards for the past five years, that we can create with the technology that we have today, really high fidelity simulation that can actually provide insights to create better society.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the massive round and all the progress.

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Great. Great to meet you. Very exciting.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Keep doing good stuff. Keep tearing through the 4500.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Don't be afraid to send us some alpha if you're predicting anything about us. Let us know. And I like this. I think you're starting a new meta. Somebody in the chat said it's kind of the Jensen, Steve Jobs combo effect with the outfit.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  I like it. Looks good.

• 2:15:01Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Up next, we have David Risher. He's the CEO of Lyft. And we're going to ask him about the Ferrari Luce. Ferrari Luce, yes or no? Is it the ideal Lyft mobile? Yes? You like the Johnny Drive, the Johnny Ive inspired interior? You're down?

• 2:15:33David Risher?

  I am down. I mean, I like innovation. I like cool new stuff. So why not? Give it a try. I've not been in one, though, to be clear.

• 2:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't think anyone has. I mean, they did a PR, you know, a day. They didn't show the exterior of the car, but they did let some journalists come and twist the knobs and hear the click clacks.

• 2:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm with you. I like that there's some fresh ideas in there, and I hope the other manufacturers adapt as well.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  What's the freshest idea you have for 2026 for Lyft? What's happening? What's happening in your world?

• 2:16:04David Risher?

  Oh dude, a lot. Well, so we just announced earnings, which is always kind of an interesting time.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09David Risher?

  So, record bookings, which is great and accelerating. Record profits, which is nice as a business. Over a billion dollars in cash generated, which again is nice as a business. And the only reason I start there is because to me it says like, this is customer obsession driving profitable growth, right? Like, I took this job maybe almost three years ago now. Actually, fun fact, I was sort of convinced to do it on Valentine's Day three years ago. So it's coming up right on that magic moment. My wife and I had such a romantic evening talking about Lyft that night. But anyway, so the point is like-

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:16:44David Risher?

  It was, it was a thing of beauty. But anyway, so, um, yeah, and so here we are, super well positioned for 2026. Why? Because international expansion, that's a fresh thing, that's a big deal for us. Autonomous vehicles, self-driving vehicles, that's a super, super big deal for us. So we've got a couple of big, what we call, uh, growth vectors in the business.

• 2:17:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the biggest, uh, what, what's the market internationally that's still ripe for ride sharing to come?

• 2:17:11David Risher?

  Yeah, so it's really interesting. You know, Europe, uh, is, is an established rideshare market, of course, but there's still a huge, huge taxi market in Europe. And it's really interesting, like, if you look at the total mobility, like, outside of people driving their own cars in Europe, still a ton of people every day pick up the phone and super old school, you know, call the phone number and get a taxi to their house and stuff like that. So that's actually a big transition thing that's happening that we're really, uh, kind of helping powers that kind of moving from offline to online. And then just like all over the world, I mean, self-driving cars are going to be a big deal for all of us. And, you know, I look, you know, three, five, 10 years, you know, it'll be 5% and then 10% and then 20% and then 50% and then that's going to be huge. Um, oh, and bikes are always big in Europe too, even bigger than the US.

• 2:17:55Jordi Hays?

  How are your conversations like with other public company CEOs right now? We're in this period of insane volatility and it seems like no matter what management team says on an earnings call, you're going to have some massive volatility. But yeah, what are those conversations like? I'm curious. Do you guys have a little group chat where you're like, "I'm going in, I'm going in."

• 2:18:21David Risher?

  I'm going in, wish me luck. What's going to happen here? You know what? We don't actually have those conversations that much just because they're kind of boring. You know what I mean? It's sort of like, everyone has the same level of frustration, of course, where it's sort of like, "Oh my God, you know, everything seems so volatile." And it's so weird, I was actually just thinking about this yesterday. I mean, what happens right now, I don't know if you guys know this, but what happens is you come out with earnings and then, like for example, again, we had so record bookings, record rise, record profits, you know, good, good, good, good, good. Okay, so for like the first 30 seconds, headlines say, you know, whatever, Lyft beats on profits or Lyft, you know, highest rides ever, something like this. And then there's some market reaction. Now, the market reaction might have something to do with some totally different thing, you

• 2:19:06David Risher?

  know, some weird accrual thing that some bot, remember it happens after hours, so some bot picks up some weird accrual thing that doesn't fit in the model and then all of a sudden, you know, starts selling shares and then, you know, the sentiment turns. And this is all after hours stuff, super thinly traded. Okay, so then the headlines get rewritten in real time by other bots who are not reacting to the news of the earnings, they're reacting to the reaction of the news.

• 2:19:28Jordi Hays?

  And then they're creating, so they see the stock price move and then they're creating a written narrative of why it's happening that then gets turned into an article that then other people are reading.

• 2:19:40David Risher?

  Hundred percent. And remember, a lot of people don't read much beyond the first paragraph and so they'll just see this headline, which used to say, you know, Lyft beats on profit or Lyft beats on whatever, and now, you know, Lyft shares down, you know, 10% or whatever it is. And so it's such an interesting thing. Anyway, it's a little bit of a meta point, but like right now as a society, it's like we're almost reacting to the reaction more than to the thing itself, which is a little bit mind-bending.

• 2:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's... Yeah, that's super fascinating. We're reacting, we're, we're, we're letting the bots react and then deciding how we feel based on, based on that.

• 2:20:13David Risher?

  That's, that's exactly right. And the funny thing is, the, the bots are reacting for their own algorithmic reasons that might not particularly be well-plugged into any reality. Anyway, you can go on in this for hours, but it's a little, like at the sort of super, like, species level, we're kind of like, we're kind of like letting the machines take over a little bit. We're not forming our own opinions, we're letting them tell us what our opinions should be, and then reinforcing that, which is a little bit, a little counterintuitive. But anyway, like, of course, some version that's gone on for a long time is just sort of exaggerated now. I remember this is something I worked for, as you guys know, Jeff Bezos for a long time. And, you know, Amazon, for example, back in the 2000s was, you know, $6 stock or something like this. And people would ask him, like, how do you stay, you know, sort of, sort of focused?

• 2:20:57David Risher?

  He's like, the good news is, like, I know the data. And this is how I feel, too. Like, I was in a meeting yesterday about our self-driving car initiative. It's amazing. And I was in another meeting yesterday about our Super Bowl performance. It was amazing. We were up 13% year-on-year. We picked people up faster. And we took, we were down 20% in surge pricing. In other words, our prices were 20% better than they would have been if we'd had our surge pricing algorithm from last year, which is great because it means that we're able to do this at a lower cost to customers. So like, I see the data and I see how well-positioned we are right now. So my last thought on this is, this is now my, my new favorite CEO tool. Back to your point. You know what these are? Noise-canceling headphones.

• 2:21:37David Risher?

  Yeah. I was canceling them.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Can you unpack a little bit more of the Waymo partnership? Talk about how that's progressing and just broad rollout, your plans, where you, how, how fast do you see that becoming meaningful and growing?

• 2:21:51David Risher?

  For sure. So I'm going to zoom out one click and, you know, just to sort of remind everyone. So I'm super bullish on AVs, autonomous vehicles, entering the rideshare space. And the reason I'm so bullish is because they're market expanding. You know, and we see this in market after market. When AVs come in, people take more rides overall because it's cool. It's a cool new product. It's kind of fun. It's sort of futuristic. It's reliable. So it expands beyond the current, you know, population of people who take rideshare today. And then the cost over time will become lower. You know, for example, insurance costs are lower. That'll be pretty obvious. So it's nice when the market expands and when your cost of doing business goes lower. Okay, so then you ask about Waymo. Waymo, of course, is the leader here in the United States, no question.

• 2:22:35David Risher?

  And we have a very specific partnership with them announced in Nashville. That was literally one of the meetings I was in yesterday. We were talking about all of these different ways where we're integrating across the two platforms. Everything from fleet management to demand generation. And, you know, if we get a ride, are we going to, you know, ask Waymo to take it? Or is a human driver going to give it? Like all these different, you know, sort of details that you have to work out when you're doing a deep partnership, which we expect to go live later this year. The expectation of that partner certainly that we have, and I believe that Waymo has as well, is that this will scale, you know, beyond just Nashville. But Nashville is very much our focus right now. I'll tell you one last thing. Takeda, who's the CEO of Waymo, was just on a show yesterday. And she was asked about this partnership too.

• 2:23:19David Risher?

  And she was, it was nice to see her also being very enthusiastic about it and saying, you know, the thing that I think should be obvious to many people, which is even if Waymo wants to go it alone in some markets, like they're doing here in San Francisco, it's really helpful for them to have a demand gen fleet management partner like us in a place like Nashville and hopefully elsewhere as well. Because it allows them to really focus on what they want to do well, which is, you know, create the world's safest driver. That's the way they call it. And not have to worry about all the other details of riding, of a rideshare network. So anyway, it's, you know, stay tuned. We've actually, you know, broken ground on the big depot. I mean, we're doing all this sort of work. And in the next couple of months, we'll start to roll rides out in Nashville.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  What is, talk about, I'm super curious to actually understand, like, what does the depot look like? Like, what is, what is the process? What are all the things that goes into it? What are, what are the jobs? That kind of thing.

• 2:24:08David Risher?

  Yeah. So first thing is, it's big. It's, you know, it takes some space. Because you have to think, I mean, you're talking about hundreds, it's something that has to be able to. Clean, maintain, charge, tune up, all these different things, repair in some cases, you know, couples, hundreds of cars, hundreds of hundreds of cars. And, you know, like at two o'clock in the morning, you know, these cars are not necessarily going to be out on the road. So you've got to have a place for, you know, hundreds of cars to sort of go through the cycle when the, when the demand is low. There'll be real jobs there. And actually, we're hoping, and we have a, we have something called Flex Drive there, which is our own fleet management subsidiary. And that's kind of is the basis of this thing that we're kind of building it around, let's say.

• 2:24:51David Risher?

  And so some of the folks working at Flex Drive, you know, will transition into doing this A B stuff. We'll also frankly end up hiring some drivers in the community who kind of want extra money and know a lot about cars and so forth. But yeah, I mean, think of it as sort of a big, very kind of modern, you know, kind of, let's say, there are also some pit stops around the, around the town that just do charging. But think of it as sort of charging and maintenance, but done for kind of, you know, 2026 and beyond instead of.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, yeah, that was going to be my next question is, is do you have, for a city like Nashville, you have one major depot, you have some charging stations, would you ever break out the depot, basically having like multiple spaces for storage, or is like one, for a Nashville sized city, is like one facility going to be enough to kind of like properly operate?

• 2:25:38David Risher?

  I know what you mean. I think, you know, one big central and then a couple of satellites is probably right. It's, it's sort of tricky to cite these things because if you put them too far outside of town, the good news is it's cheap, but the bad news is they've got what we call deadhead miles, so just miles going back and forth with probably no rider in them. So, you know, you, so you have to find a place that's kind of the right, you know, ours is kind of near the airport, all this sort of stuff. And then, and then you want a couple, and it's got to have a lot of power too, like literally electricity, like we work with the utility to figure out what's the place that can support a fairly big power load. And then, so anyway, that becomes your central thing and then you have a couple of satellites around them.

• 2:26:14John Coogan?

  How do you think about the scaling and rollout of self-driving vehicles just broadly in America? I think a lot of people lean back on what the AI systems can do, incidents per mile, and there's a lot of smooth curves there. But we, in a lot of AI world, we're running into the real world. Is there enough energy for this data center? Is there enough, are there enough chips for this new model or this new training run? At a certain point, how are you feeling about the ability of the OEM market, the car production, supply chain, even things like regulation? Like, how do you see all of that playing together? What's the most important thing to focus on?

• 2:26:59David Risher?

  I mean, you're literally laying it out. Like, think of this whole thing. You've got, first of all, you've got to have great tech that works at scale without a driver in it that can go, you know, for a long time with no incidents. So that's a very, very important thing. Then you have to have an OEM, right? And that OEM has to be willing to make an investment, right? Because it's not just like, cool, let's just take the same lines and just, you know, throw some AV stuff on at the end. It's like, you want to design production lines that build that AV. And think about what, you know, you can see this with Waymo, right? Like, Waymo literally is receiving, and I'm talking about the Jaguar platform that they use mostly so far. You know, they're literally like receiving these kind of half-built cars and then kind of disassembling them and reassembling them. It's very complex. So you want to be able to build that in a very cost-efficient way. So OEMs have to be willing to make a big investment there.

• 2:27:44David Risher?

  Then you've got to have the regulations line up. And that's a city-by-city, state-by-state thing, right? So we just signed an agreement, this is outside the US, we just signed an agreement with Hamburg, Germany. That'll be the first city in Germany, and one of the first in Europe, to say, yeah, we welcome AVs onto our roads, here's the kind of framework we have to use. Anyway, so that's got to line up. Then someone's got to buy these things and finance these things. So it's got to be financing. By the way, these things might last 300,000 or 400,000 miles, but unlike the normal used car, they'll have zero value at the end, right? Zero value. No one's going to buy a used AV that's been on the road for 400,000 miles and uses old tech. So, okay, that's a whole financing model that people have to figure out. Then there's got to be all this stuff that we were just talking about, all the fleet management stuff. And that's physical world stuff, right? That's like, who's going to charge these things? Who's going to reboot them when they need rebooting?

• 2:28:28David Risher?

  Who's going to clean them when someone, you know, throws up in the car? All these things. And then I was going to maintain them. And then you have to have all the demand, you know, management and so forth that we've we're pretty good at. So I think your analogy is a good one, which is that, and it's why you see so many tiny pilots, which are all kind of hand-built and artisanally done. But when you think about scale, it really is going to be years and years and years until all of these things line up in market after market after market. Um, yeah, I don't know if that exactly answers the question.

• 2:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Do you track, do you track the EV AV rollout in China? Like, what's the timeline for manufacturers to just be, you know, BYD that can just plug into a platform, a Chinese equivalent platform like Lyft and just like start earning autonomously?

• 2:29:16David Risher?

  I mean, I will say this is an area where it's just flat out China is ahead. Flat out China is ahead. I mean, this may be slightly different from the question you're asking, but when I talk to AV, so if you're, if you're in the business of, of producing AV technology, uh, you know, it could be a mobile eye, it could be a wave, it could be, you know, any number of people who are producing this technology, independent of the OEM. When you talk to them, their biggest frustration, I'm actually going to quote one of them right now, is saying, we talked to, quote, "Western manufacturers," and, and it really doesn't matter whether you're talking about VW or Stellantis or Ford or whatever, just Western manufacturers. And, and then you talk to Chinese manufacturers. And, and in China, they're talking one to two years.

• 2:30:01David Risher?

  And then that same conversation with a Western manufacturer is a five-year conversation. You know, it's a, it's a 2032 conversation instead of like a 2027, 2028 conversation. So the short answer is, you know, there's good AV tech from a lot of places, but frankly, the OEMs are in very, very different positions in terms of their ability to, to, to spin up quickly and, and, um, uh, yeah, and get, and get a platform out that actually works.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  And fantastic shirt, by the way.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  We love the shirt.

• 2:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Coming in strong.

• 2:30:34David Risher?

  Well, thank you, gentlemen. It means a lot coming from two fashion guys.

• 2:30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, in the plain white shirt. I'm really taking a risk today.

• 2:30:42David Risher?

  I mean, you're bold. It's part, it's, it's on brand for you. You're, you're bold.

• 2:30:46John Coogan?

  Yes. In, in a world of, uh, you know, plain black T-shirts of tech, the

• 2:30:50David Risher?

  White collar shirt goes a long way.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  It does kinda stand out. So, thank you.

• 2:30:53David Risher?

  I appreciate it. Hey, and congrats to you guys on all your progress and your Super Bowl ad. That was amazing.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  That was a lot of fun. It was a good time.

• 2:30:59David Risher?

  A lot of fun. Slightly smaller ad than yours, but we're working our way up.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  We're getting there.

• 2:31:03David Risher?

  No, dude, you gotta start, you know, step by step by step by step. I will tell you, I did zoom in on all the logos there. I was looking for the Lyft logo. It must have been hidden. I don't think I saw it, but anyway, it was a small oversight. Somebody's getting fired.

• 2:31:14John Coogan?

  Tyler is looking into it right now. We're gonna send you evidence if it's in there, if we, but we might've made a mistake. It's possible. Also, there were a few that were behind certain letters and so they got something glanced.

• 2:31:23David Risher?

  And that was it. I looked very closely. I'm pretty sure it was hidden. It's no problem at all. I'm not holding it against you.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  We'll figure it out.

• 2:31:28David Risher?

  Uh, we take, we're taking it personally.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  Good thing the Super Bowl happens every year.

• 2:31:31David Risher?

  Yeah. There we go. At 61, it's just around the corner.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:31:34David Risher?

  Great to see you, David.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:37David Risher?

  Cheers.

• 2:31:38John Coogan?

  Thank you. 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. And without further ado, Todd McKinnon from Okta is in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the TV can alter him. Todd, how are you doing?

• 2:31:53Speaker 03

  What's happening? I'm excellent today. Thank you so much for having me on.

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  Thanks for, thanks for joining. First time on the show. Please kick us off with an introduction.

• 2:32:01Speaker 03

  I'm Todd McKinnon. I'm the founder and CEO of Okta.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah, I'm excited to be here, coming from the office in San Francisco. And I feel like

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:09Speaker 03

  my hair is not nearly good enough to be on the show.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  It looks fantastic. What are you talking about?

• 2:32:14David Risher?

  Uh, come on.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  I mean, since it's the first time, would you mind going back and telling us the, the, a little bit of the history, the story, the, I, I love these like founder journeys. So, uh, you can give it, you can take as long as you want or as short as you want, but whatever, whatever you haven't gotten sick of talking to people about.

• 2:32:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's a lot, there's a lot of echoes in what's going on today with AI.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:34Speaker 03

  But 17 years ago, I started Okta the same year Steph Curry, the same year Steph Curry was drafted. So

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:32:42Speaker 03

  I don't know if that makes it seem like a long time ago or not that much time ago, but 17 years ago.

• 2:32:46David Risher?

  Okta really is the Steph Curry of the enterprise.

• 2:32:48John Coogan?

  It is. I've always said that. Yeah. I've always said that. Lots of people.

• 2:32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it needs better supporting cast around him maybe, but I'll take it.

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, how did you even come up with the idea? I think a lot of people started a company. They think like, I'm gonna build something for myself. I'll go consumer because that's hot and trendy. Like, what was the inciting element, like the problem that you identified?

• 2:33:10Speaker 03

  Well, I was running engineering at Salesforce and I was working with all these customers that were adopting Salesforce. And then I looked around and I said, hey, AWS is launching, Google Apps for domains. What was called back at the time is launching. I said, hey, you know, there's really gonna be a cloud version of everything in IT. And it's probably a great time to go out and start something new and build something that would be needed in that world. And we settled on this platform for identity management, which seems maybe pedestrian or incremental. But at the time, people were, had these applications like Box and Salesforce and didn't really work well with their Windows login and Windows PC. And that was our wedge to get started to what now is a $3 billion a year company, 6,000 people and a really important part of the world.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Was this in the sweet spot of venture capitalists during that time? I mean, Salesforce pedigree, it feels obvious in hindsight, but what was the pitching process like?

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  Well, it was very different world because we were in the aftermath of the financial crash. And venture capitalists were, you know, where's our capital calls gonna be returned? Are we gonna be money? Like, are we gonna be, so people were very reticent. We actually were the first company to raise money from Andreessen Horowitz.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  No way. You were the very first company?

• 2:34:24Speaker 03

  Very first, yeah.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Wow. And on the first investment, it's Okta? That's insane. I mean, congrats to you, but also Andreessen. A lot of, a lot of people are like, yeah, the first investment I made was not great. Public company. Wow.

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm sure they made plenty of personal. The first fund has Slack and.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a great fund. Yeah.

• 2:34:42Speaker 03

  And Isera is in there. And then Skype, wasn't Skype in the first one?

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but Skype's a weird one because it was like a take private and then a IPO or something or sell.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember like talking to my friends and they're like, oh yeah, you raised Andreessen Horowitz. That sounds great. They, the company did that weird Skype thing where they bought it eBay and took it and worked out okay.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:02Speaker 03

  But at the time, you know, it was, it was, people thought, oh, it was not, maybe it's not big enough. They said, oh, you're providing a single sign on for cloud apps to your. You know, Windows domain, is it big enough? And it's like for the last seventeen years, it's like, you know, i- is it a big enough market? Is, and every four or five years, more cloud and then mobile and then what happened with the really focus on security? And how important identity management and passwords are to security? And now what's happening with AI, COVID, remote work, identity just becomes more and more and more important. And now with AI, we're on this precipice of the, and a huge catalyst for identity. That's why we're so popped up and excited about what's going on.

• 2:35:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so let, let's get right into it. You, Okta Powers, identity for biggest companies in the world. And right, we're at this inflection point right now where people are adding, effectively adding, uh, thing, adding, adding, uh, agents to their workforce and oftentimes those agents are, are, uh, playing the role of, of humans in some way, functioning with different applications, working across the company. Like, how are all those conversations going? Uh, how are, how are organizations adapting and, and how are you guys, um, fitting into it all?

• 2:36:15Speaker 03

  Well, on a personal level, I've never seen anything like it, the level of interest. The uniformity of the interest from customers in every vertical industry, in every size company. They want to do something with AI and they want to invest in agents and it's, it's quite a tidal wave of interest. I think now what really gets exciting is, is how we turn that, continue to turn that interest into actual revenue and actual usage of the new products. But the precondition is there, people are definitely interested. I think what's happening is, it's not a huge shock. Every, you know, boards of directors and CEOs, they all read X. They know how excited everyone is about this and they're like, oh, give me some of that, right? Come on, come.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  I'll take one million agents, please.

• 2:36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, yeah. And then, and then the poor, the poor people put together these prototypes and these demos and, and we're kind of like hacked together and they had access to every piece of data in the whole company and they're like, that's awesome, put it in production. And the developer are like, wait a minute. I don't care, put it in production. I told my board I was gonna have an agent and this is an agent, go, go, go. And so what we're trying to do is trying to help them manage that and help them, hey, track these things, make sure. Whatever these agents are connecting to, you know how it's connecting and lock it down, make it secure. So when they go into production, it'll actually work.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:27Jordi Hays?

  What kind of general horror stories have you heard at companies? Is it, yeah, is it an agent that can effectively go and pull data somewhere that they shouldn't be able to?

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  Prompt injection, like, give me a refund.

• 2:37:39Jordi Hays?

  There's so many, there's so many different risk vectors that are, that are, you know, I would say, most of the time when, when this happens at a company, hopefully it's just internal and like you can correct it quickly. But it doesn't feel like we're that far off from, you know, a company not being ahead on this kind of stuff. And, you know, having an agent that can just query their own internal data and, and having some type of bigger leak. But obviously you're working to prevent that.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  It's very, it's very simple. It's, it's the, the agent was hooked up to multiple data sources. And to get access to more data than you wanted, you just need to ask the agent. I mean, prompt injection, prompt injection sounds, you know, it's something cyber people say to convince software engineers. It's a, you know, maybe a, a hard thing to prevent, but we're talking about simple cases where the agent has too much access. And by a couple, couple prompts, you can get it to tell you the customer information of a different customer. So it's, we're, and luckily I think if you zoom, sometimes in Silicon Valley, we're so obsessed with the latest and greatest. We, we think that everyone has fully agentic customer support and fully agentic everything. But the reality is most, most companies are very early.

• 2:38:50Speaker 03

  So it's a good time to layer in some maybe controls and some visibility into what these agents can connect to and the data they can access. So we can avoid some of the really bad mess ups going forward.

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  Do you think that Claude Bot, now Open Claw, sort of Mac mini agent, personal, open source story is useful in concretizing what is going to happen in the enterprise over the next 12 months? For you, has, has it been a reference point in discussions with leaders that you work with?

• 2:39:25Speaker 03

  I think it's, it is, it's another catalyzing event because I think in some cases, people are a little bit behind on the power and the business value that could be delivered from these agentic systems. And I think when they can, I was just at my kid's soccer game the other day, and they were talking about Clawbot. They were talking about, you know, just, these weren't tech people, they're on the sideline. And I think they were talking about how powerful it was and how they're going to get restaurant reservations. And I think that catalyzes the side of the equation, which is go, go, go. And I think unfortunately, you're also going to see more security issues and more connections that were exposed and Mac Mini with personal data. It wasn't a new Mac Mini. It was like your family Mac Mini. And now your family Mac Mini is, you

• 2:40:10Speaker 03

  know, the details are all over the web. You're going to see some of that. And so we have to get both right. We have to get the business value and get people headed in the right direction and then also put the right controls in place.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  How do you think business models evolve in a world of, you know, potentially millions of agents? Companies aren't really used to running payroll for millions of people, identity for millions of people. Some people are, but how do you think all of that changes going forward?

• 2:40:35Speaker 03

  Well, I have a bunch of super strong thoughts on this, some of them which are maybe counterintuitive. I think, first of all, I think in five years, there's going to be way more software engineers than there are today.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:48Speaker 03

  And it's a little bit of a trick answer because I, mainly because I think there's going to be way more software.

• 2:40:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:54Speaker 03

  And, you know, they'll be more productive, but you'll have more software engineers. I guarantee you, all these companies, Meta, Amazon, Google, Anthropic, they'll all have more software engineers in five years than they do today.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  And double clicking on that, do you think it's that we're going to see more computer science degrees become software engineers in the traditional sense? Or that designer that you have, that PM, that business leader, maybe even your CFO, all of a sudden is a software engineer or is creating software?

• 2:41:24Speaker 03

  I think, so I think what a software engineer does, but I'm not trying to cop out and say, "All people are going to be vibe coding and that's my software engineer count." I mean, people building and architecting software and knowing internals of how it works. They're not going to be writing as much code clearly, but I'll give you a secret. For the last 30 years, we've had integrated development environments that are helping us write code more efficiently. This is a whole nother level, but it's not a new thing to get better tools to help us make software. So there's going to be more software engineers, but there's going to be even more than the increase in software engineers. There's going to be way more software, which is super exciting and super, super daunting. Now, back now, if you layer on, you know, are people going to build all their own software or buy software for vendors?

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  I, I think that is unequivocally, they're going to buy more software from vendors, for sure.

• 2:42:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:12Speaker 03

  Now, the tricky part-

• 2:42:13Jordi Hays?

  People have to, people that are just bearish on enterprise software have to remember that there's been open source equivalents of like almost every major platform forever. It's like you could just pick it off the shelf and run it, maintain it, and- It's easy, right?

• 2:42:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think kind of like there's going to be, this kind of goes back with my first thing I said about more software engineers. There's going to be more software. So there's going to be more packaged software. There's going to be more custom-built software. Like, for example, there'll be a lot of, I think, people use, companies using these software development tools to build the applications that have to span the multiple silos and the multiple systems. Right now, you, these companies have a very hard time of building something that goes from SAP to content management to Salesforce in an end-to-end process. And maybe there'll be more some, more customization and more vibe coding and more, you know, people doing Claude coding to build that. But the core vendors and all of the core data sources and the core business logic and processes,

• 2:43:15Speaker 03

  that's going to get bigger and bigger. And I'm 100% convinced of that, which is dangerous. You should never be 100% convinced of anything. I'm trying to make a point here dramatically.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  No, I love it.

• 2:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Last year, last year and continuing into this year was all about coding agents. Do you have, based on the conversations you have with, with, you know, Fortune 500 companies and, and, and things like that, that are maybe out slightly outside of, of just like San Francisco tech. Like what other forms of agents are you most kind of bullish on, uh, for this year?

• 2:43:46John Coogan?

  Orchestrators or orchestration?

• 2:43:48Speaker 03

  I, I think, I think it's so back to my, what I was talking about before. Now, by the way, I, I don't, I don't think that the vendor lineup of established software companies is not going to change. Just because I think there's going to be more and more vended software sold. It doesn't mean that the people that are leading all the categories right now are going to be leading. I think one of the most exciting things about what's, I mean, this is an amazing time in our industry and personally it's super motivating for me and for our team. But the most amazing thing is every leadership category is kind of up for grabs. You have, I mean, how crazy is this? Five, 10 years ago thinking, oh, AWS might not be the number one infrastructure provider.

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:26Speaker 03

  I mean, that's crazy. You thought that was locked in, but you see Google and Oracle and these companies, that's up for grabs. You see, and I think the same thing is true for all of the categories. So it's not like there's no potential for disruption. I mean, in our world, it's very possible that if you look in cyber, that in five or 10 years, the biggest category in cyber is identity.

• 2:44:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:46Speaker 03

  I mean, that's pretty exciting. Right now it's, you know, firewalls and SOC and endpoint, but it could be identity and that, and everyone sees this. You pile all the networks sees this and ServiceNow sees this, they're doing acquisitions and that's exciting. But anyways, back to my point was, um, is that it's exciting and things could change. And the real exciting agentic or the new type of software, I think, is the type of software that crosses all these silos. If you think about it, that's what people were uniquely good at doing. They were uniquely good at doing, okay, I'm going to look in this system and I know about this little corner case in this other content management system and I can. Apply some intelligence on that and go back to update. That was very hard to do for packaged application vendors because they're inherently in their own silo

• 2:45:30Speaker 03

  and they have to make things comply to their own business rules and database. And it's very hard. I mean, I worked in enterprise software for all the years before I started Okta. It's very hard for an HR company to think about end to end or a Salesforce automation company to think about end to end. So I think this agentic systems that can cross these silos is a very, very exciting opportunity.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Last question from me. Is 2026 the best year to move to San Francisco in history?

• 2:45:57Speaker 03

  Oh, now you've got me. You're getting me really worked up now. My strong conviction. I love San Francisco and I think all of these people that said San Francisco is dead and it's a mess was totally overblown. San Francisco is an amazing, beautiful place and no matter, you know, is the government perfect? No, is any government perfect? No, but it's an amazing place and all the people still want to come here.

• 2:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:20Speaker 03

  Look at, I mean, how many people moved to Miami are now coming back? I mean, where are the great new companies being started?

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  I think.

• 2:46:25Speaker 03

  So I love San Francisco. Do I have a sign behind me that says San Francisco? Yeah.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got a bridge.

• 2:46:31Jordi Hays?

  You got a bridge. Hey, we think somebody, we think somebody should.

• 2:46:34Speaker 03

  It's literally gold. The Golden Gate is not really gold.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:37Speaker 03

  It's red, but whatever.

• 2:46:38John Coogan?

  But your gate is gold.

• 2:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, we think you should, you should sponsor, you should pitch the city to sponsor the Golden Gate Bridge.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:44Jordi Hays?

  It's wide, it's wide open. Let's put an Okta sign.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  It is, it's a big metaphor.

• 2:46:49Jordi Hays?

  Hanging under it.

• 2:46:50John Coogan?

  For.

• 2:46:50Jordi Hays?

  Okta connects.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Your identity as you go into the city. This is great.

• 2:46:54Speaker 03

  We can connect Marin to Fort Point, yeah.

• 2:46:57John Coogan?

  Yes, this is integration. This is fantastic. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on the show.

• 2:47:02John Coogan?

  Come hang out. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Come back soon.

• 2:47:04John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:47:05John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Dr.

• 2:47:18Jordi Hays?

  We got it.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  Alex Zdowski from the Biological Computing Company finishing out our Lambda Lightning round.

• 2:47:24Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  How you doing, doctor? Hey, guys, what's going on? It's good. Good to see you.

• 2:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Lot of whiteboards today.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I, I'll ask you to explain that shortly. Well, first, give us an introduction on yourself since it's the first time on the show.

• 2:47:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I'm a neurosurgeon, a neuroscientist. I've been growing neurons on electrodes for about 20 years.

• 2:47:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:47:48Speaker 08

  I spent the bulk of my career studying how neurons in brains process information. First in humans by implanting electrodes in the laboratory by growing neurons, as I mentioned, on electrodes.

• 2:47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:00Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:48:00John Coogan?

  Really quickly, when you say, when you say growing neurons on electrodes, does that look like a Petri dish? Is that organic? Is that meat space? Or is this a digital representation of the neuron?

• 2:48:14Speaker 08

  So there's no neurons on this, but this is the dish that we grow them on.

• 2:48:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:18Speaker 08

  You can see it here.

• 2:48:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:20Speaker 08

  That little, that little box in the middle has about 5,000 electrodes.

• 2:48:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:25Speaker 08

  And yeah, and we grow them on there. They're alive and we use them to process information as computers.

• 2:48:29John Coogan?

  They're biological. These are cells that are all connected to create the neuron. Fantastic. What can you do with it? I feel like a lot of people are pretty happy with their Nvidia GPUs. What do I need a biological computer for?

• 2:48:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. So first, first of all, neurons and brains are extremely more energy efficient than silicon. It's, it's well known. And our first application is to help solve this energy, this looming energy crisis that's happening. You know, second of all, neurons can change the way they're connected to each other. So as you all know, current hardware is rigid. It doesn't change.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:05Speaker 08

  Whereas as, you know, you're learning about our products and our company today, your brain is changing the way they're connected to each other. So we're leveraging all of that for compute.

• 2:49:18John Coogan?

  How much of this is a science project? How long will you be in R and D? What is your timeline? I mean, we're no, we're, we're not afraid of science projects here. We talk to folks all the time that are, give us timelines like we're going to be live in 2035. And we love that, but it feels like you're making some pretty advanced progress. So talk to us about how the business shapes up when you see this going into production, what the milestones are.

• 2:49:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I have like a big note here, sticky note on my monitor. Uh, this is not science fiction. This is not research. You know, if, if I was gonna get anything across, that would be the thing, right? We're doing this now. We're, we're deploying it.

• 2:49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:59Speaker 08

  Um, so far our products are twofold run. We're using the biological network to create a software layer that plugs directly into A N N's, artificial neural networks now, to make them better, better fist best, better, faster, cheaper.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:13Speaker 08

  Um, so that's currently happening. In addition, and you asked about what this thing is. This is what we call our algorithm discovery platform. So we're using real brain cells to identify what's coming after the transformers. So what we do that is we build state of the art models in-house. Um, we parameterize them. Uh, we ultimately use the biological network to understand neuroscience principles and define the neuroscience principles that can be plugged into these state of the art models, and we do this in a loop. Um, and in the end, um, uh, these plugins improve them and make them better, faster, cheaper.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  Do, do you have any reflections on the shortcomings of current A I. Models, why they differ? There's that sort of famous quote of like, you don't need, like a, like a teenager can just learn to drive a car in like a month of, you know, a couple hours in the seat and yes, we're able to train Waymos, but on an energy and time perspective, like on an apples to apples basis, you're effectively, you know, doing like a million hours of training and you don't have to give a human a million hours of training to drive a car. So what is different about the current structure of A I. Systems versus the way humans actually learn?

• 2:51:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. So that's a bit of a history lesson. Um, so, you know, going back to the nineteen fifties, where we had the first perceptron, we call it Pitt's neuron. That was actually based on how we understood, at least at the time, how neurons function. Fast forward to the nineteen eighties, uh, backpropagation won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago. Uh, that's when a divergence happened. At that point, as backpropagation is not a real neuroscience principle. Um, and that's when this divergence happened. And ultimately, since then, uh, software and hardware became very unbiological in the sense that again, it's rigid, uh, in the way it processes information. At the same time, though, interestingly, around the 1980s, neuroscience flourished. We started to be able to grow brain cells in a dish.

• 2:52:14Speaker 08

  We started to understand what the neural signals coming from a brain actually means. This is the basis for a lot of the brain-computer interface companies that are currently out there. And so, three years ago, when we started the company, we said, okay, well, you know, now we're going to take a 2026 approach in understanding of how neurons process information. We're going to apply it towards novel AI systems.

• 2:52:38Jordi Hays?

  How do you keep the neurons alive? What do you feed them?

• 2:52:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, so they live in a media. It's got proteins, it's got sugar in it. It's actually relatively simple.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  It's Pete, it's Ray Pete. It's on the Pete diet. It's got sugar. Jordy, you're going to prove this. This is great.

• 2:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Superfood.

• 2:52:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, these techniques have been kind of perfected over the years. Again, this is one of the things that allows us to do this. We can buy it for over a year.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:06Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:53:07John Coogan?

  Sugar, protein, any olive oil, any fats? We got some Brian Johnson's snake oil right here. You can put that in there.

• 2:53:15Speaker 08

  Definitely some olive oil. We'll try it out.

• 2:53:18Jordi Hays?

  What, yeah, coming like, fast forward to the end of this year. What have you done that allows you to feel comfortable taking like, you know, Christmas off or New Year's Eve, something like that?

• 2:53:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's a great question. So customers, collaborations, design partnerships. You know, right now, the adapter product that we have plugs into video generation models. And so, you know, we are open to working with any foundational model lab that's compute constrained. And so, we can make the models more efficient.

• 2:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is every lab.

• 2:53:59Speaker 08

  That's right. I mean, similarly, as I mentioned earlier, with our algorithm discovery platform, we're looking for partnerships with the hyperscalers. I mean, you know, they have research arms that are interested in what's coming after transformers, right? And so, we'll take the holidays off if, you know, once we're working with them as well.

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  Well, you raised some money. How much did you raise?

• 2:54:24Speaker 08

  I'm very happy to say, so we raised a $25 million seed.

• 2:54:28John Coogan?

  Seed! Not bad!

• 2:54:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go, that's, what's after a mango seed? What's bigger than a mango seed? Because I think of a mango seed as like eight? This is like a watermelon?

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:39Jordi Hays?

  Watermelon?

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  No, watermelon has small seeds. Watermelon, big fruit, small seeds, doesn't apply. Mango is the biggest seed. It's just the end of the road. After that, you just go, just go giant AI seed round. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us.

• 2:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back, uh, like as you guys have breakthroughs and things like that, come back on. You don't need to have fundraising news to come on and talk about biological computing.

• 2:55:03Speaker 08

  You guys, you guys come to the lab.

• 2:55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be awesome.

• 2:55:06Speaker 08

  We're in San Francisco and Mission Bay. You guys are always welcome to come.

• 2:55:09John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:55:09Speaker 08

  See some brains.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We'll see you soon.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Graphite. It's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, Andrew Huberman is the founder of Huberman Lab. He's here in the TVP in Ultra Dome. Welcome to the show.

• 2:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 2:55:31Speaker 09

  Cheers, guys.

• 2:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Podcast in a can.

• 2:55:34Speaker 09

  Can you hear me?

• 2:55:35John Coogan?

  Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. Uh, give us the latest on Matteina Yerba Mate.

• 2:55:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, zero sugar cold brew yerba mate. I'm half Argentine, so I've been drinking mate since I was a kid.

• 2:55:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:46Speaker 09

  It's got caffeine, um, and it's a super smooth arc of caffeine. That's why I love it.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:51Speaker 09

  But, uh, the zero sugar cold brew, yeah, we made five different flavors. It's organic, BPA, BPS, PFAS free cans, because a lot of people worry about that stuff.

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:01Speaker 09

  Nobody wants the credit cards worth of microplastics in their brains, testicle and ovaries. And, um, it's free of all that and it's awesome. I'm, I have very high caffeine tolerance, so I drink, no joke, like four to six of them a day. But most people do just fine with one or two.

• 2:56:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm right, I'm right with you.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:56:17Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. So, so we have like such a regimented schedule that my caffeine intake during the week as I wake up. I don't follow your protocol around waiting. I get right into the yerba mate. I actually have AB tested it. I noticed, I personally noticed no difference whether I get started.

• 2:56:34John Coogan?

  So you have one in the car before the gym?

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  I have one in the car on the way to the gym.

• 2:56:37John Coogan?

  Caffeine before the gym is such a hack and I, I don't do it and I need to get back into it. I don't know.

• 2:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes it's tough.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  How underrated is caffeine as a performance enhancing drug in the gym? I feel like that's, it's good.

• 2:56:49Speaker 09

  Well, look, if you have anxiety issues, you should be careful with caffeine. But if you don't, caffeine's great. It's definitely a performance enhancer, so much so that, you know, the people that regulate this stuff in sport set an upper limit on the milligrams of caffeine that you can ingest. But what I cut off the caffeine intake at about 2:00 PM. But I, listen, I also drink caffeine first thing in the morning if I'm going to work out in the first two hours of the day. And that's about three, four days a week I do that. Other times I, you know, I wait a little while. So it's really an option. But I love yerba. I also drink coffee. I'll have a couple double espresso. And I love it. I mean, but like you

• 2:57:28Speaker 09

  guys, I'm get up, hydrate, electrolytes, caffeine, family, work, work, work, work out, work, work, work. And then by 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock, if you cut the caffeine out earlier, you're going to crash on a steep cliff. And it feels great as you fall asleep easily.

• 2:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I always, I always stop at, I always stop basically when the show ends. That's when I'm having my last caffeine for the day. I sleep amazing and then get it started again. Yeah, the challenge is on the weekend because in the week, our, our schedule is so regimented. And then on the weekend, it's a little more flexible. And I'll start feeling if I haven't had my fourth yerba by like 1:00 PM.

• 2:58:05John Coogan?

  My fridge at home is filled with mate. Because if I don't, I'm like, not a good dad.

• 2:58:08Speaker 09

  I mean, in South America, you'll see people drinking yerba after meals because it helps with digestion. It's a mild appetite suppressant. So if you, like, I like to work out fasted. It's not going to kill your appetite, which is good because, you know, we still need to eat. Everyone's like trying to eat less these days, it seems, but still need to get the nutrients. And then it's high in antioxidants. It's got a lot of positive benefits. And it's not necessarily an alternative to coffee. You could do both. But it's not an energy drink, quote unquote, in the sense it, it doesn't have alpha GPC, taurine, all those things that a lot of energy drinks have. Not, not to knock on those things, but You know, I think yerba, coffee.

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge is is making traditional energy drinks a habit. You're like supplementing a bunch of things that you don't necessarily like you're you. You have to understand you're signing yourself up to be like constantly dosing supplements that a lot of people just aren't fully aware of because they they just look at it. They're looking how much caffeine does this have and not not really paying attention to the other stuff.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  How is the business? Oh, sorry.

• 2:59:12Speaker 09

  No, go ahead.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  I was just curious about the the the state of the business distribution. The the I mean, you have a massive audience, so the logical place to start is direct to consumer, but the final boss of almost every consumer product is retail. How are you thinking about the rollout of the product?

• 2:59:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's going great. I mean, we partnered with Matina, so I'm a partial owner with SciCom. You guys know Rob and the rest of the guys at SciCom, Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:59:36Speaker 09

  And we are available online through Matina, through Amazon. We launched in Whole Foods, in Costco Canada, and in Sprouts Markets just recently. And pretty soon it will likely be everywhere you look. So and people love it. You know, I'm very happy when people say they love it. It's delicious. You know, 90% of the world's adults drink caffeine every single day. It's the most popular drug in the world, and most people need it to function pretty pretty well. But recent studies showed they looked at coffee, but a couple of cups of caffeinated coffee per day, it seems like it can offset some of the dementia risk. Now, there I mean, it was with a study like that, there there are a bunch of, you know, issues. It's not necessarily causal, right?

• 3:00:20Speaker 09

  People are drinking caffeine, probably working more, focusing more, more cognitively engaged, et cetera, et cetera. But as long as it doesn't send you into a spiral of anxiety, you know, caffeine is is quite good for you. That's very clear.

• 3:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Sort of random, but do you have any insight into what what different groups of Olympic athletes are doing? There's when I've seen some, I've heard some stories like there's such a range with these athletes where you might have like a Olympic snowboarder who's like, you know, hardly sleeping and just like having some energy drinks and heading out there. And then you have like. The guy that's doing like curling is like, you know, the most regimented or whatever. Obviously, everybody's different, but what do you think the, what do you think the best athletes in the world are doing this Olympics? Like, what's, what's cutting edge that maybe normal people aren't thinking about?

• 3:01:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, so, I mean, this also showed up in the NFL a little while ago, but people are taking vasodilators, you know, Viagra and Tadalfil, commonly goes by Cialis. You know, Tadalfil is a vasodilator, lowers blood pressure, and, you know, people know of it as Cialis for erectile dysfunction, right? But it was originally developed as a drug to improve prostate health because when you vasodilate, when you dilate the vasculature, you get more perfusion of, of the prostate, and you need perfusion of the prostate, avoid infections, but other things as well. So it, the basic takeaway is that most every male 40 and older should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and 5mg of Tadalfil, not necessarily

• 3:02:01Speaker 09

  for erectile function, although it will augment that as well, but to lower blood pressure and to improve vasodilation for the brain, for the prostate. And I'm not saying this as a biohacker or a podcaster. We had our head of male sexual health from Stanford, his name is Mike Eisenberg, he's an MD, PhD, he is best in class in terms of male sexual health, endocrinology, etc. And that's his recommendation, and it's one that most every male, maybe 35, but at least 40, 40 and older should take, just as a preventative, you know, strokes.

• 3:02:35Jordi Hays?

  So you don't think that'll, people are taking it, athletes are taking it as effectively some type of performance?

• 3:02:42Speaker 09

  Yep, to lower, to lower anxiety pre-game, to, because it lowers your blood pressure a little bit. They think it might be a performance enhancer by delivering more blood to the muscles. You know, you have to look at what's on the banned list, and there's obviously lots of things on the banned list. And then there are going to be the things that people are going to use because they're not on the banned list, and they'll be banned for the next Olympics. That's often how it goes. So I pay a lot of attention to this over the years. If you looked in the 90s, you saw things like bromocryptine. Morphine, things that people who know those names will augment acetylcholine, dopamine, in order to improve fast transmission of neurons and alertness and focus for getting quickest out the blocks in sprinting, for instance. Those drugs are now banned, okay?

• 3:03:25Speaker 09

  You'll see in sports where staying calm is an advantage, any shooting sport, for instance. Most of the banned drugs are things that lower heart rate. Imagine skiing up to a target, picking up your gun and shooting. The less you're shaking, the better. So there's a bunch of banned drugs, and then there are all the things that people will take to lower their blood pressure, and some of those are not banned, and this is kind of how the cycle goes. We heard about the skiers injecting their penises in order to expand their bulge size, I guess it were, in order to get a little more air resistance, in order to perhaps capture a little more air time. That was, I hit the press mostly because it's kind of humorous when we think about it.

• 3:04:04Jordi Hays?

  That was real.

• 3:04:05Speaker 09

  If you look at any sport, you're gonna see this. You're gonna see peptides like BPC157, I believe is banned, but that's a naturally occurring gut peptide, very hard to test for, because you have tons of it circulating, and the synthetic versions may or may not differ from that version so much that you can detect it.

• 3:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 3:04:26John Coogan?

  You have a question about peptides broadly?

• 3:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would love, I would love like an update since we last talked. Probably tens of millions of Americans have jumped into the fray.

• 3:04:37John Coogan?

  It's taken over San Francisco. Chinese peptides is like a whole meme in tech, and I think everyone's wondering Faustian bargain, at what level should they be experimenting with these things, what type of research they should be doing? What is the, what is the current thinking around peptides broadly?

• 3:04:55Speaker 09

  Okay, I'll hit the key bullet points here for the novices and for the aficionados. So a peptide is a short chain of amino acids, you know, so insulin's a peptide. So when people say peptides, they're generally referring to things that people take by injection or orally in order to augment some effect, healing, growth hormone release, et cetera. Just as when we hear the word steroids, I mean estrogen's a steroid hormone, but when we hear about steroids, we're typically thinking about androgenic steroids, testosterone, et cetera. Okay, so when it comes to peptides... Some are FDA approved, right? Some are made by drug companies, have passed through their patent. Many of the so-called growth hormone secretagogues, tesamorelin, ipamorelin, these are things

• 3:05:38Speaker 09

  that cause the pituitary to release more growth hormone. These have been tested, FDA approved. Most people are not getting them from drug companies. They're getting them from either compounding pharmacies, which are a lower-cost alternative that there isn't as much stringency in terms of purity, so they varies by compounding pharmacy, or from what we call gray or black market sources. So when you say Chinese peptides, what you're talking about is you can go online and buy peptides that are listed or labeled as for research purposes only, and that's what a lot of people are injecting, and that is a concern. And I, you know, I'm not saying this because of my relationship to Stanford or anything like that, but I'll just say, I do not think anyone should inject peptides that are labeled

• 3:06:21Speaker 09

  as for research purposes only because, even if it says 99% purity, the 1% is likely to be something called LPS, lipopolysaccharide, which can cause inflammation. It's not a good thing to be injecting. Maybe one injection doesn't do anything, but when you're injecting every day for five, you know, five days a week and for a month, you can start running into some issues, autoimmune effects and so, and so on. That said, let's just acknowledge what people are doing. And there's some peptides that have very impressive results, for which there's essentially no human, good human data, lots of animal data, and lots of anic data out there. For instance, people will claim, although there's no really good clinical trial, that

• 3:07:00Speaker 09

  BPC157, which is a synthetic version of a gut peptide, can accelerate their wound healing. What's the problem? We don't have a control experiment. It acts systemically, so I can't inject it in one elbow, not the other, if I have two elbow injuries and say, okay, it worked better for this one, not the other. People claim, it could be placebo, but people claim that it helps them-

• 3:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Study where they break both of your arms.

• 3:07:21Speaker 09

  Well-

• 3:07:22Jordi Hays?

  But it, but it, but the issue is that it goes through your whole body.

• 3:07:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, you know, and it increases vascular growth, it increases nerve growth, it increases cartilage regrowth. From the animal studies, we know that. So the logical backbone is there. People are using it like crazy. The lethal dose is very, very high. I don't even know if anyone's achieved a lethal dose. The one study that was done in humans looked at, believe it or not, BPC enemas at very, very high doses for a gut, like a colitis issue, I believe it was. Listen, I think you have to just decide what your margin for risk is. The other one that's very interesting that not a lot of people are talking about is pinealine, which I've tried it, I don't take it any longer. I tried it for a little while and it doubled my REM sleep. I was getting close to three hours of REM sleep per night. It's thought to increase regeneration or the health of pinealocytes, the pinealine,

• 3:08:11Speaker 09

  which make melatonin, and so on and so forth. But the big one, the peptides that's gonna change everything.

• 3:08:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I think I tried that, the one you just mentioned. Last week, I was hanging out with David Senra and a friend of ours had it and I was in a, I think it was in a capsule form. I expected it not to work very well. Friend said it works fine. Tried it, no effect on my data. Is that, is that, how do you think about different form factors?

• 3:08:44Speaker 09

  Injectable only and on an empty stomach, not having, meaning not having eaten in the previous two hours, 30 minutes before.

• 3:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Because that's an issue, that's an issue because it's a gray market right now. People will just be like, "Yeah, I'll sell you a peptide in this capsule." Technically, it's what I'm saying it is, but I'm giving you it in a form factor that doesn't actually work and so it's all placebo. But I just looked at the data and I was like, "I tried this two nights in a row, it had zero effect." And I don't think a lot of people want it.

• 3:09:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, I doubt it was pinealine. It might have, and sometimes they'll throw some melatonin in there so you feel quote unquote "an effective" for some people. You gotta get it from a compounding pharmacy or a reliable source. I'm not suggesting people do it. I actually stopped taking it because, and this is not a promotional, but I take AGZ, which is their sleep formula. I helped design it. My sleep on AGZ is amazing, amazing. I'm getting two and a half hours of REM sleep per night. I get tons of deep sleep. I feel great, so I don't need pinealine. But the peptide that's gonna change everything, and this is more up your guys' alley because this gets right into the business sphere, is Lilly has a patent, Eli Lilly has a patent on a peptide called retitrutide. Retitrutide is sometimes referred to as GLP-3.

• 3:09:53Speaker 09

  It's a triple agonist of the GLP-1, which we're all familiar with, glucagon, and something called GIP, I believe. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me, of course. The, the interesting thing here is that in a phase three clinical trial in humans, it caused up to one-third loss of body weight. So a loss of one-third of body weight in about six months' time. And it seems like there's some degree of muscle sparing. It works phenomenally well for weight loss. The bodybuilding community has been on to this for a long time, right? Bodybuilders always get there first. Then what happens is, in Florida and the United States, doctors who know, who work out in gyms with people who know how to gain muscle and lose fat quickly, start experimenting.

• 3:10:37Speaker 09

  Then it goes into their high-level clients. Then it shows up in Hollywood. Everyone lies or avoids answering the question of how they got so jacked. They talk about eating chicken breasts and they're actually taking growth hormone and Cypionate and Winstrol and Retutitide, Retutitide, excuse me.

• 3:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:52Speaker 09

  And then, and then everyone hears about it and they start, you know, whatever, looks maxing it, and then it's a big, giant mess out there. Here's the deal. We are looking at a potential change in the laws around peptides such that buying peptides would become illegal. I actually think this is a terrible idea, but the, the motivation behind this is largely because Lilly owns the patent. People are already injecting Retutitide. They can buy it out there. They're taking it, maybe a third of the dose that's recommended in the trial, and they are seeing phenomenal results at fat loss. Not a week goes by where I don't get 100 questions about Retutitide to my phone, my personal phone, let alone email and et cetera.

• 3:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:11:33Speaker 09

  So, the reason why peptides might soon become illegal to purchase through even compounding pharmacies, let alone gray market, is because Lilly would like to protect the domain over that patent. This is going to be a trillion-dollar drug. Trillion-dollar. But people are already taking it. I've never tried it, but people I know who have taken it said it works phenomenally well at a fraction of the dose. So today I looked at-

• 3:11:57Jordi Hays?

  What are, what are, what are some benefits that, outside of weight loss? Are there secondary?

• 3:12:02Speaker 09

  Reduced alcohol appetite, appetite, reduced impulsivity, perhaps. Remember that the receptors for these things are all over the brain and body. And, you know, the other GLP agonists have been looked at for alcohol use disorder, for binge eating disorder, and for a lot of, you know, behavioral and impulse control disorders, because a lot of the receptors are rooted in the hypothalamus, which controls a lot of impulsivity-type behaviors and anxiety-related behaviors. So-

• 3:12:29Speaker 09

  You know, my stance on things is, you know, do as you wish, but know what you're doing. But with the important caveat that if you are an adult and your body is fully formed, you are in a completely different landscape than if you're 14, 18, 20. You know, I worry very much, we're hearing more and more about young people, especially women in the past, but now also young guys, who are thinking, "Oh, you know, they've got to take TRT." That's crazy. You know, I've talked about the fact that at 45, I'm 50 now, 45 years old, I started taking a microdose of cypionate, microdose. But micro, so I maintain fertility, I've checked that, I take HCG, etc. Never in a million years would I suggest anyone else do that in their 20s or 30s unless they have a serious issue.

• 3:13:11Speaker 09

  With peptides, there's the risk of where you're getting it from purity, right? But there's also the risk that if you're augmenting growth hormone in your teens, your 20s, you can really mess up your hypothalamic-pituitary body axis, all the organs of your body, in major ways. You know, shut down fertility, you get, if you come off these things, you, you may revert to a state of, you know, a depression, etc. I, I just think the whole looks-maxing phenomenon is really, really dangerous and foolish, especially in people younger than 40, right? It's just...

• 3:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, especially because there's a way to looks-max without hitting your face with a hammer. Sleep, diet, exercise. You know, taking steroids. Get you 99% of the way there.

• 3:13:55Speaker 09

  Also, see, you need to evaluate, kind of where you are at the very end of puberty. Puberty is a very protracted thing, you know? I hit puberty when I was 14. I didn't shave till I was 20. I swear my head and face changed shape, you know, over time. You've got to let your, as people develop over a long period of time. If you introduce exogenous hormones, or you start blunting estrogen, or you start, you know, because guys will say, "Oh, they have too much estrogen," or something, where they, they start taking peptides, I mean, you can really throw off the trajectory of your physiology. And then you're the person in your 40s and 50s, often, who looks much older. This is the thing that people don't realize, that there's always a dynamic tension between the things that give you vitality and the things that extend your life. For instance, if you take growth hormone, you'll feel more vital, you'll...

• 3:14:40Speaker 09

  Gain muscle more easily, recover from injury more easily, you'll lose visceral and body fat. Guess what? You'll also age more quickly. The reason bigger dogs die earlier than smaller dogs is they have a higher dosing of growth hormone and IGF-1. It's well established. So, you get vitality, but you lose time. With testosterone, you have to ask yourself, what are you gaining, what are you losing? If you can go from, you know, having no energy whatsoever to the ability to work and exercise, increase libido, etc., well then you're probably gaining years if you're doing those things. But I'm very concerned about people just, you know, trying to get a, whatever, an angled jawline, you know, abs, etc. I mean, it's because of phones, right? Of people taking photos themselves. I mean, I'm old

• 3:15:23Speaker 09

  school, so I feel like if you're a guy taking pictures of your abs and posting it online, like, like, need to invest the money in a psychologist, not in it's peptide. But that's just, you know, that's a generational thing, right? I think I'm more impressed by what people can do with their physicality, trying to hit it, some numbers, some lifts, some running, some hiking, some rucking. And then, but this overemphasis on appearance on social media, I think is going to cause a lot of destruction for people that try and chase that.

• 3:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you get questions from parents who have teenagers that are, and they're considering giving their teenagers HGH?

• 3:16:05Speaker 09

  All the time. So, people who have kids that are much shorter than their peers, nowadays, often, I'm not suggesting doing this, will delay puberty in their kids. They'll sometimes give them growth hormone. We know that some of the drugs, the prescription drugs that help with ADHD can blunt growth at high dosages. There's actually a very interesting drug that's went through phase three, or is at the end of phase three now, which was designed, excuse me, designed for excessive daytime sleepiness called Sunosi, which is kind of a dirtier hit of the dopamine and epinephrine and a little bit serotonin

• 3:16:46Speaker 09

  receptors that is promising for ADHD. That's a non-amphetamine ADHD drug. That's very interesting. That might be a good alternative to some of the Adderall, Vivance, etc. Of course, you need a doctor's prescription for these things. I'll just throw out a name. I have no formal affiliation to him, but there's a YouTube channel, a guy, we had him on the podcast, Dr. John Kruse, K-R-U. E who has covered every aspect of adult and child ADHD from behavioral tools to the different drugs, the amphetamine based drugs, sunosie and all of those, modafinil, very, very high information content, short videos, 10 to 15 minutes, nothing like mine. You know, mine will cure insomnia. His will help people.

• 3:17:30Speaker 09

  So I, I send parents there. And look, I can say, what are you doing giving your kid growth hormone? But like, I don't know, I was never the tallest in my class. I was never the shortest. I'm, you know, six, one, if I stand up straight, you know, five, 11, if I, if I slouch. And so I, I do understand why people feel like they need to do this for their kids based on what you hear out there. But when you start playing at home endocrinologist, and now it's very easy to find a physician that'll work with you on these things, you are, you're, you know, you're, you're playing a dice game and you're playing, so you have to think real carefully about when, when and if to do these things. But ultimately, you know, parents decide and kids decide.

• 3:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears, I want to talk about cannabis.

• 3:18:15John Coogan?

  About to ask.

• 3:18:16Speaker 09

  Yeah. Are you guys fans? Be honest.

• 3:18:19John Coogan?

  No. I'm not a fan.

• 3:18:21Jordi Hays?

  No. I mean, I grew up in, I grew up in Northern California. So it was always, it's funny, wine country is like cannabis country, you know, it's less visible than, you know, the vineyards and things like that.

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  It used to be expensive, difficult to obtain, laced with oregano. Now it's like industrialized, available at the push of a button. And, and I mean, the New York Times is writing that you see these charts, like the number of hospitalizations, that was never a thing in the nineties that I remember. And it feels like we're on the cusp of really just re-discussing this as a society on, are we in an epidemic? Do we need to have a more national conversation? But what are you seeing in the research and in your world about how big the problem is?

• 3:19:08Speaker 09

  Yeah. Well, as a personal stance, I'm, I'm largely for legal but regulated. That just says my personal stance. I want to just throw that out. That's just me personally.

• 3:19:18Speaker 09

  I've hosted two guests, one clinician, one scientist about this, and I did a solo episode. I did the solo episode, and in addition to making some small errors in there about receptor affinities and things like that, I made a statement, which was based on the literature I was seeing, which is that there is a population of people, especially young males, who have a predisposition to schizophrenia or bipolar, meaning they have a first relative with those conditions, that are very high risk for cannabis-induced psychosis, some of which doesn't reverse, which is really scary. I got accused of misinformation by traditional media. Not, you know, not like being off misinformation, and I'm gonna keep my hands under the table, because my response to that, I think they can understand.

• 3:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:02Speaker 09

  So, misinformation. Those are the data. Journal of American Medical.

• 3:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I witnessed a close friend. And at this point, yeah, everyone has the anecdotal data. Experiences as a kid. Yeah, me too.

• 3:20:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, now the pendulum has swung back, and those same publications are saying, it can cause psychosis. Okay, look, so there's more data now. I get it, right? And the media game is a whole discussion into itself. So, I had one guest come on, very thoughtful guest, researcher from Canada, who explained that the psychosis is often caused by an over-ingestion of too much THC. And in his words, just to be fair to him, because he's a serious researcher, a serious scientist, said that when people smoke, so if they inhale it by vape or smoking, they tend to hit a plane of high that's not excessive, and the risk for psychotic episode is lower. Then the clinician I brought on said that he's not observing that. He's a clinician, Keith Humphries, from Stanford. He's not observing

• 3:20:56Speaker 09

  that. He's an expert in addiction of all kinds. And so what we do know for sure is that THC concentrations are very high. It's very easy to over ingest through an edible versus through an inhalation. Look, I think that the issue is how often and how much, and on what genetic background is somebody doing this. Now, the problem is...

• 3:21:17Speaker 09

  You don't want to be part of the experiment. You don't want to be the person that discovers that you have a predisposition to psychosis by smoking high THC weed. We see the same thing with kratom. So with kratom, you've got kratom products that people will say, oh, you know, kratom helped them get off opioids, and I don't deny that, right? You've got activist groups that are pro kratom. You also have people who will say they took so-called kratom products, which are isolates of the molecule. This is what we tend to do in this country. We find an interesting plant that has some psychoactive properties, and then, I don't know, maybe pull the nicotine out of tobacco, concentrate it. Next thing you know, they're making money and you're putting in, you know, five pouches a day. They'll take kratom, the plant, which is chewed, the leaves are chewed.

• 3:22:00Speaker 09

  People will say, oh, it's kind of a balance between alertness and calm. Great, they'll isolate kratom, then they'll do kratom isolates, and now you're getting people who are having opioid-like addiction to kratom isolate, to synthetics. Likewise with THC, you had a balance between THC and CBD in the plant, different strains, et cetera, et cetera. It was a kind of a community for a long time. This has, you know, it even has religious uses, et cetera, and, and cultural, you know, relationships. And then all of a sudden, it's like, no, we've got really high THC concentrates that you can buy at the convenience store, and then people with a predisposition are having psychotic episodes. Here are a couple of things. I'll say one thing facetious and then a couple of things serious. One, I really love to compete with people who like cannabis.

• 3:22:43Speaker 09

  Because unless they're a martial artist or a creative, like a musician, you're gonna blast past them. So, you know, it's kind of like recommending a great Netflix series to your competitors, right?

• 3:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or remote work. I recommend.

• 3:22:58Speaker 09

  You're gonna work. Okay. Now, that's the facetious side. The serious side is, you know, a couple of guys or friends, gals, two getting together and smoking some weed, and one person's like, oh, this really calms my anxiety, makes, makes them feel as if they can engage socially. And the next thing you know, they're losing motivation for a bunch of other things, layered on top of. Social media, the challenges of life, as they always existed, but also nowadays. And the next thing you know, you've got somebody with some serious mental health issues and a full-blown addiction. I do know that my colleagues that work on addiction, Dr. Anna Lemke, who's an MD, who wrote Dopamine Nation, Keith Humphries at Stanford, they'll tell you that many, many more people are coming to them, of all ages, saying they struggle with cannabis.

• 3:23:40Speaker 09

  I will also say that you're not going to get REM sleep if you are ingesting cannabis, certainly within a few hours of sleep. Anyone that quits cannabis will tell you that their REM sleep, their dreams are, just comes back like crazy for many months, if not years. And you need REM sleep to offload the emotional load of prior day experiences. So, I get it. And then the last thing is that there's always the comparison to alcohol. I actually did a post about this on X, but it's crazy, right? I mean, I've talked about alcohol before. Zero is better than any, two per week are probably fine. If you're going to drink more, do more things for it to, you know, support your lifestyle. I'm not a teetotaler, do as you want, but know what you're doing. But people always say it's better than alcohol, as if you had to pick one. And maybe you do. Maybe in order to socialize, people feel like they have to pick one.

• 3:24:25Speaker 09

  I don't know. I've always been able to say whatever the heck is on my mind without any alcohol or drugs. So, you don't want to be around me if I were drunk, because I'll tell everyone everything, you know? But no, I do it anyway. And I think it's just an issue of, I get it, in your teens and twenties, late teens and twenties, college, thirties, when you go to a bar, you don't want to sit around and necessarily sober. I get it. So, what are you going to do? You're going to have a couple of drinks or weed. Which one is better? It really depends on who you are. And the comparison is just a kind of a fool's errand. You're never going to solve what's better. But there are many, many more people smoking or ingesting high THC cannabis, and you have examples of people who are extremely successful, extremely ambitious, who use cannabis.

• 3:25:10Speaker 09

  But those people probably need it to not go over the the the peak of anxiety from their from their ambition. They're using it to stay in a healthy zone, whereas people that are, you know, have more apathy, they're less motivated, um, they should stay away from cannabis, in my opinion, if they want to make something of their life.

• 3:25:27John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 3:25:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, that is so, yeah. Hard to fit into a post on that.

• 3:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so, uh, there's been a lot of studies on the impact of social media on people's mental health, right, young people, teenagers. What about, uh, and then right now, one of the most popular words in the world is, or phrases, brain rot, right? Uh, are there any large scale studies being done on the impact of consuming an hour or two hours a day of short form video? Like, what are you tracking? Uh, cause if you just look at the data, YouTube has, I forget the exact number, but the average person in the world is watching like a meaningful amount of shorts every day. So some people are watching hundreds and hundreds, others are watching zero or or maybe a few, uh, but there's a range.

• 3:26:17Speaker 09

  Yeah. Well, I'll just offer a tool that I think is very useful. I mean, I don't have problems with behavioral restraint, but I, but I do have a lockbox for my social media phone. So I took my, an old phone, I put social media on that phone so that if people text me social media links, I can't open them. It also means that when I take out that phone, I'm posting or commenting or or doing that. And I keep it in this lockbox, which is like a supermax prison. You can't even code out of it. It has a no code out setting and I'll leave it in there about 20 plus hours a day and it's just great. It's just great. I mean, your productivity will go through the roof. I mean, it's getting very easy to blow past your peers now, just by avoiding being on social media a little bit more. I mean, David Goggins said this, it's like, it's easier than ever now to to

• 3:27:00Speaker 09

  be successful. You just don't do certain things. Whereas in the past, it was like, what do I have to do to be successful? Like, the shortest productivity self-help book will be, you know, lock your social media phone in a, in a box for 23 hours a day. And then I do think that, so I'm not aware of any studies looking at one to two hours per day. I do think that when you approach social media or you're getting online, I think it's important to realize that The brain has an absolutely insatiable appetite for short-form video. But its appetite for long-form audio is also very high. This is why podcasts continue to grow in their reach. People don't want to hear audio turning over quickly unless there's video associated with it.

• 3:27:43Speaker 09

  So I try to get on social media at least once a day, maybe half hour, forty-five minutes at the most. But I'm posting and commenting. I think at the moment where you forget time and you're just like, and it's sucking you in, is the time where it needs to go back in the lockbox. Back in the box. Joe, I listen to you guys. I listen to news on social media and I think that's the world we're in. I think that some people also can be on social media and experience some distance from it. Other people are more kind of pulled in emotionally to what's going on. It depends if you're a creator and people are, you know, commenting about you or you're actively engaged in the conversations or if you're simply an observer. But I think an hour and a half a day should be the upper limit for anyone

• 3:28:26Speaker 09

  that actually wants to accomplish something in life and probably more like forty-five minutes to an hour. Unless you're watching news, if you're learning. How do you know if you're learning? What we know from neuroplasticity studies is that if you reflect on something the next day, you're likely to not forget it. It sounds sort of trivial, but most of learning is anti-forgetting. In fact, there was a beautiful study done where they have people read some, a passage once, twice, three times or four times versus reading it just once and then self-testing on it in their mind at some point later. And the self-testing in your mind, what do I remember? What don't I remember? Ah, I forget that part. Extended the memory of what was in that passage out six months to a year in some cases. So the reflection on what you saw is the key.

• 3:29:10Speaker 09

  So if you think, okay, what did you see yesterday that was of interest? Where you actually learned something of value? Then you're actually learning from social media or a podcast. But if you're just getting inundated with sensory information, forget it. That's called entertainment. You're just, you're just numbing out or they're rage baiting you. And you know, I mean, between what happened, between like the Minnesota stuff, right?

• 3:29:33Speaker 09

  Then the Epstein thing, and then, you know, the next political whatever, you know, the amygdala is just getting hammered. And we know when the amygdala is activated, you're getting many more sort of bits of memory stored. So, but you're just getting the peak of that information, you're kind of getting a summary. So, look, your, your brain real estate is your most valuable real estate. What are you going to put in there? What, what are you learning? And so I would say, take a walk and ask yourself, what did I learn on social media today or yesterday? And there's actually some learning to be had. Like, I've reflected on what I've seen in this Epstein thing. There were a lot of scientists there. There were a lot of people that were, that buried his offenses so that he could come out as this kind of like, science, finance liaison, various, I mean, it was

• 3:30:17Speaker 09

  wild, how this could happen, right? After a conviction. And so there's some, some consideration to be had, but you need to get away from the content in order to think about that. And then return to it in a way that's, that's more, I think, nuanced and that can serve you as opposed to just getting, you know, rage baited into it all.

• 3:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Never get rage baited. What excites you about AI? Anything?

• 3:30:41Speaker 09

  Yeah. I'll tell you where I'm using AI. I've wrapped my book, I'm doing edits on it right now. And I didn't use AI to write my book. But what I think AI is great for is for designing little exams for yourself, for exactly what I just described. So I will have, I like Claude, so I'll just ask Claude to say, to test me on, give me a 20 question, multiple choice test on the microbiome as it relates to the solo episode that I did, plus, you know, some recent work from my colleague, Justin Sonnenberg, for instance, at Stanford, perhaps the best researcher on the human microbiome in the world. And Claude will give me questions and I'll go, oh, that's cool. I remember that. Oh, wait,

• 3:31:23Speaker 09

  that's where my knowledge falls off. What percentage of the vagus nerve is, is motor descending? Okay, those things like are important to me, maybe not you. And so I'm trying to, I'm using it to consolidate information that I've learned prior, that I might otherwise forget, and update my knowledge. And then I'll go to the papers, make sure the papers are actually what's linked there, because, you know, as we know, AI can hallucinate. I think that's fantastic. So it's a teacher. I'm using it to self-test, which I know, based on a lot of literature, can help stamp down memories. So that's one way that I'm using it. I think- I love the AI that's woven into Eight Sleep. That is now, I'm no longer adjusting the temperatures. It's doing it for me. Love that. Awesome. I'm giving it my blood tests.

• 3:32:07Speaker 09

  And it's helping me navigate that. I mean, I had a blood lipid issue that was very slight, but I wanted to keep it in range. And so I started taking nattokinase. I have no relationship to any company that sells it. Boom, right back into range. And AI helped me understand what nattokinase, what sort of shifts can occur. I love Claude and I don't, you know, I mean, I'd love to work with them, but I don't, I don't have any relationship to them now. So, love, love, love what they're doing. And, and I just think it's super exciting. I'm not afraid of AI, but I'm, listen, I'm born and raised in Palo Alto. So, like, heretical to say you don't, you know, I'm excited about the most recent tech.

• 3:32:42John Coogan?

  Last question for me, and we'll let you get out of here. Tell us about the fish behind you.

• 3:32:48Speaker 09

  Oh yeah. So those are my discus fish. They're freshwater discus. And next to me on either side, it was octopus on this side, and there'll be another octopus on that side. Octopus died after two years. They lay eggs, they die. That's just what they do. It was very dramatic. Cannibalized her tentacles, everything. They're big drama.

• 3:33:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. They remind me of some online influencers who are always trying to call attention to themselves, but in the end, it's self-destruct.

• 3:33:13John Coogan?

  It self-destructs. Is it just relaxing to you? Is there, tell me more about why fish?

• 3:33:19Speaker 09

  So I've long been a fan of Aquaria since I was a kid. And it's just the goal of setting up an ecosystem that's really in balance. And it's, it's made me very tranquil. I've always had them in my office in my lab. And then, some years ago, I discovered a guy named Takashi Imano, who unfortunately passed away some years ago, but he developed this thing of aquascaping where it's really emphasizing the plants and the fish and the lighting. So we built these black box rooms. I'm living, so I moved into an art gallery. I converted a three-story art gallery into a living space. I have a gym, my fish tanks, octopuses, a loft upstairs. And then in my basement is a no phone, no electronics zone where I draw, do illustrations, and I prepare for podcasts. And I have it set up with these warm incandescent red lights. My girlfriend and I like to go down

• 3:34:02Speaker 09

  there and listen to music and just hang, like get totally away from the world. And I'm, I just love the feeling of kind of being underwater a little bit. And they, it relaxes me. And I've got a bulldog puppy that was born a week ago, and he's gonna be here soon. More flora, more fauna is always good.

• 3:34:22Speaker 02

  Gong for the bulldog.

• 3:34:26Speaker 02

  Name? Got a name yet?

• 3:34:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, Strummer, after the great Joe Strummer from The Clash. I went to the, uh, to New York last weekend. My girlfriend and I went to go see Meet the Breeds, 140 purebred dogs, everything from the little teacup ones to the bullmastiffs that look like Burt Kreischer and everything in between. And after we left, we just looked at each other and we're like, muddied bulldog, which is what I had before. Um, I love all the different breeds. Uh, they teach you a lot about nervous systems and temperaments and, uh, bullmastiff is the perfect dog for Bert. I think he's got a couple of them, but for me, it's always going to be the muddied bulldogs. Um, I don't think I'll ever deviate.

• 3:35:04John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:35:05Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 3:35:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 3:35:06Speaker 02

  Great to see you. Great to catch up.

• 3:35:08Speaker 09

  Great to see you guys. Thanks. Congrats on the, um, on the Super Bowl.

• 3:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:12Speaker 09

  I hope to see you in the Olympics.

• 3:35:13John Coogan?

  We will be.

• 3:35:14Speaker 02

  We are.

• 3:35:15John Coogan?

  We are.

• 3:35:15Speaker 02

  We are.

• 3:35:16John Coogan?

  We're gonna be in the Olympics.

• 3:35:17Speaker 09

  Amazing.

• 3:35:18John Coogan?

  And so Mataina's logo will be in there, right?

• 3:35:21Speaker 09

  Yeah. Awesome.

• 3:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:35:22Speaker 09

  Maybe we gotta get Mata, uh, Mataina into the Olympics. I gotta talk to Rob.

• 3:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:26Speaker 09

  I have an idea a minute, but Rob's the one.

• 3:35:28Speaker 02

  The whole team's, the whole team's holding up.

• 3:35:30John Coogan?

  Look, the whole team has it.

• 3:35:30Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 3:35:31John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 3:35:32Speaker 09

  Love it.

• 3:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we opened the show. You're watching TVPN with these every day. Thank you so much.

• 3:35:38Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate you.

• 3:35:39John Coogan?

  Have a very nice day.

• 3:35:40Speaker 09

  So soon. Take care.

• 3:35:41John Coogan?

  Goodbye. And with that, we do have to jump on with Tokyo. So is there, are there any posts?

• 3:35:49Speaker 02

  Any other news, Tyler? Did we miss anything?

• 3:35:50John Coogan?

  Andrew Reid said literally everyone's capitulated on the AI trade. There's definitely no bubble. Surely now is the perfect time to declare victory.

• 3:36:00Speaker 02

  Claude Code is growing 100% month over month.

• 3:36:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:36:03Speaker 02

  2.5 billion run rate.

• 3:36:04John Coogan?

  A hundred, a hundred.

• 3:36:06Speaker 02

  Is that good?

• 3:36:07John Coogan?

  Month over, is that good? Yeah.

• 3:36:09Speaker 02

  There's also the, uh, the Codex Spark came out today. That's like, uh, the first.

• 3:36:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:36:13Speaker 02

  Open AI model running on Cerebras.

• 3:36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:15Speaker 02

  I tried it out. It's extremely fast.

• 3:36:17John Coogan?

  You got it working? So you're on the pro account? Is that the $200 a month?

• 3:36:20Speaker 02

  Pro, yeah. $200 a month.

• 3:36:22John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm on that.

• 3:36:22Speaker 02

  5.3 Spark.

• 3:36:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:36:24Speaker 02

  Um, I was on X High, which is like the highest, you know, they have all the reasoning tiers.

• 3:36:29John Coogan?

  Okay, I think I need to hit the update button.

• 3:36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's super fast. It's like so much better than, um.

• 3:36:33John Coogan?

  Really?

• 3:36:34Speaker 02

  Like I, I tried.

• 3:36:35John Coogan?

  Codex Spark, here it is. Extra high.

• 3:36:37Speaker 02

  I think I tried 5.3 in, in Codex like maybe a week ago. That was the last time I used it. It's like unbelievably, it's so much faster.

• 3:36:43John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay.

• 3:36:45Jordi Hays?

  So this is apparently what they had internally. I think Ruin posted about this a couple of weeks ago.

• 3:36:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he was really baiting it because he was like, "It's slow, it's slow." Like, you know, "This could take us years to figure out," and then it ships a week later. Classic, I love it. Uh, well, Tyler, build me an app, an amazing app. The best app ever.

• 3:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Right now.

• 3:37:04John Coogan?

  One that will win awards and make me a legend in Silicon Valley. That's my prompt. And I'm waiting for Codex 5.3 Spark Extra High to one-shot it for me. We'll, we'll check in with that tomorrow. Anyway, thanks for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TVPN newsletter at tvpn.com. And we'll be back tomorrow for a Friday show.

• 3:37:30Jordi Hays?

  I gotta press it twice, the bomb's still going. Uh, we love you guys. Thanks for hanging out with us. Can't wait for tomorrow.

• 3:37:38John Coogan?

  Great show.

• 3:37:38Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 3:37:39John Coogan?

  It has.

• 3:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Have the best evening of your entire life.

• 3:37:42John Coogan?

  Yes, and we'll see you tomorrow, Friday. Goodbye.