AI Side Quests, Zaslav's Payday, SF Housing Market is Back | Shyam Sankar, Gili Raanan, Anna Patterson, Jake Loosararian, carried_no_interest

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:22) - AI Side Quests (18:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (41:12) - Jensen Huang on Going to Space (44:38) - Zaslav's Payday (48:21) - Carried No, an anonymous X user known for his distinctive profile picture, discusses the unfolding crisis in software private equity and private credit markets, highlighting the unsustainable financing structures that have led to a looming debt repayment cliff in 2028-2029. He emphasizes the role of AI disruption in accelerating these challenges, as enterprise customers shift to shorter contract terms due to technological uncertainties, thereby undermining the traditional stability of software investments. Carried No also critiques the slow adoption of AI strategies within private equity firms, suggesting that without integrating AI expertise into their operations, these firms risk obsolescence in an increasingly competitive landscape. (01:17:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:19:38) - SF Housing Market is Back (01:23:49) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:56) - Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Palantir Technologies, has been instrumental in transforming the company from a startup to a global leader in software and AI solutions. In the conversation, he discusses the urgent need to revitalize the American industrial base to enhance national defense capabilities, emphasizing the role of AI in empowering workers and streamlining manufacturing processes. Sankar also highlights the importance of fostering a culture of innovation and agency among individuals to drive meaningful change in the defense sector. (01:58:03) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:18) - Gili Raanan, founder of Cyberstarts and a prominent cybersecurity investor, discusses the rapid acceleration of technological advancements, noting that while the last technological doubling took 170 years, the next is expected within 25 years, leading to unprecedented changes. He emphasizes the need for proactive safeguards to manage emerging risks, particularly in artificial intelligence, to prevent scenarios reminiscent of science fiction dystopias. Raanan also highlights the importance of collaboration among cybersecurity leaders to address the expanding threat landscape and ensure a safer future. (02:15:17) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:22:36) - Anna Patterson, founder of Ceramic AI and former Google VP of Engineering, discusses her company's mission to reduce search costs to 5 cents per thousand queries, aligning them with inference costs. She explains that while inference costs have decreased to approximately 50 cents per thousand, search remains expensive at $5 to $15 per thousand queries, likening this disparity to the high cost of salsa compared to tacos. Patterson also highlights Ceramic AI's capabilities, including a 40-billion-page web search and proprietary systems, emphasizing their supervised generation approach to minimize hallucinations and enhance application affordability and speed. (02:31:09) - Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, discusses founding the company in 2013 to address critical infrastructure failures in industries like energy and defense. He highlights the development of wall-climbing robots equipped with advanced sensors to inspect and predict maintenance needs, enhancing safety and efficiency. Loosararian also shares his journey from bootstrapping the startup to achieving a valuation exceeding $1 billion, emphasizing the importance of perseverance and innovation in solving complex industrial challenges. (02:48:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Tuesday, March 17th. It's St. Patrick's Day. We are live from the TBP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  One place.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Let me also tell you about Shopify because that's why I have this green suit. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Happy St. Patrick's Day. We are not drinking Guinness.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  No.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Currently, but we hope that you are.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, enjoy it. Very exciting. I haven't seen a lot of, a lot of St. Patrick's Day posts on the timeline. What's going on? We got to step it up. I feel like, I feel like we should have planned, planned, you know, much, much more, but it seems like Tyler is in the St. Patrick's Day mood and is wearing a fantastic St. Patrick's Day hat.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm thinking my hat.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  How did you wind up here?

• 1:02John Coogan?

  That's a nice hat. Where did that come from? Did we just have that?

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  No, I had this.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Oh, you just have.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  You had it. Yeah, you had a handy.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  You just, you just daily drive that.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. It wasn't in your car?

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he wore it to the gym this morning.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, yeah. Cool. Yeah. Apparently got to wear green. George is going with a little bit of a darker green today, but we will still be. Let's, let's pull up the linear lineup, show you who we have on the show today. Carrie, no interest. The anonymous poster is coming on the show at 11:45. Then Shep Sankar from Palantir Technologies is coming for a massive book launch. We're very excited about that. And then we have a lightning round going through cybersecurity, ceramic AI. We have Gecko Robotics on the show. I don't know how familiar you are with Gecko Robotics, but it's a, it's a very, very interesting company where they crawl up oil and gas infrastructure, like literally like geckos and will like inspect everything. There's a lot more to the business.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  So like humans in Gecko outfits crawling around?

• 1:55John Coogan?

  No, robots.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Robots. Okay.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  They've been doing robots for a long time.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Well, linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. So in the news, the Wall Street Journal has an article about, this is a scoop from Berber Gin. We didn't have to break down the paywall because we get a copy of the Wall Street Journal every day. Although I don't know if this particular piece made it into the print edition today. It might be in the print edition tomorrow. But Berber Gin has a scoop, it says, OpenAI's Fijisimo told staff last week that the company could not afford to be distracted by side quests, main quest only. Main quest only, what is the main quest? Probably just scaling compute, but we'll get into that.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  So the, and there's a whole bunch of takes back and forth, said the company execs are actively looking at areas to deprioritize. Of course, throughout last year, OpenAI launched a ton of different initiatives across consumer hardware. And I think a lot of people were starting to say like, okay, like, do you want to be fighting a battle on all these different fronts? Or do you want to just really nail consumer, nail enterprise? And now that is what they are signaling internally. So from the Wall Street Journal article. OpenAI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a do everything all at once strategy has put them on the defensive. Fijisimo, OpenAI CEO of Applications, previewed the changes to employees at an all hands meeting,

• 3:24John Coogan?

  telling them that top leaders, including Sam Altman and Mark Chen, were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks. We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests. Side quests is the key term there. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front. I was listening to a podcast with the head of ChatGPT last night and there were a bunch of Nick Turley. Yeah, Nick Turley, just talking about like, it's such a weird product surface area because people come to it for all, from all these different reasons. So how you prioritize things within there, like. Images in chat GPT clearly very important. That was a separate app at one point. It got

• 4:05John Coogan?

  rolled in to good success. Nano Banana was also sort of like a, okay, everyone should download this particular app because you're going to get the best frontier image model for a while. Sora.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had talked about this a while back and it seems to be confirmed now that Sora's functionality will just end up in the main chat GPT app.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So last year, OpenAI announced a new, an array of new products, including the video generator Sora, a web browser called Atlas, a new hardware device and e-commerce features for chat GPT. Some of those are wildly different timelines for these things.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember during this time, that's when I started talking about viewing OpenAI's activities like they were a hyperscaler, right? When Google launches a new product, you don't have to assume that, hey, it's going to work every single time. And in fact, it's the exact opposite. A lot of these experiments don't end up going anywhere. It's fine. And OpenAI, like again, you have this massively scaling core business. You start to say like, hey, let's experiment in a bunch of these different areas. Some of them are going to work, some aren't. It's okay. But then ultimately, that creates a scenario where you're sort

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  of like opening up maybe too many fronts, right? To the competition, right? You're competing with Meta and social with Sora, you're competing with with Google in some ways, you're competing with even like the Microsofts of the world in other ways. And ultimately, this just feels like, hey, let's like narrow the fronts. And I think a lot of people expected something like this for the last few months.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  OTP in the chat is surfacing a very interesting old take from Ben Thompson about OpenAI should not be in the API business. And now, based on the way things look, it originally that was like, oh, well, maybe Microsoft will be able to handle and scale the API demand. But API demand has been so huge and it's allowed Anthropic to develop such a solid business there that it's undeniable that OpenAI should also be in the API business, especially.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other side of that is like they clearly need to be in the harness business too, which is why Codex is.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the hyperscaler, like your take of like, think about OpenAI as the new, is the new hyperscaler. I think that, I think the takes aged extremely well, especially with recent interviews with Dylan Patel and Dorkesh, Jensen just went on Surtakri. There's a whole bunch of new data points that show how compute constrained we are, how, how tricky it will be, how chips will be the, the key bottleneck. There's that interesting story that Tyler was recounting from Dylan Patel about how the TPU was developed by the TPU team. DeepMind didn't realize how important it was going to be, how compute constrained they were going to be. So the TPU went and sold it to Anthropic. And then DeepMind went back to them and was like, wait, wait, wait, we want those chips. Like,

• 7:06John Coogan?

  we need the chips. And so there's, there's this like, the hyperscaler phrase is, is really, really important in that it designates not just a big consumer company or a big business. It's particularly about the ability to marshal compute at hyperscale, right? And so I was interested to look at like, the history of side quests among Mag7 companies, among trillion dollar tech companies, because it's all over the place. And so it's very hard to paint with a broad brush. I think right now, there's a huge narrative around like, OpenAI was doing way too many side quests. They need to do zero side quests. And the reality is probably like, you know, we've seen this with Riley Walls joining

• 7:48John Coogan?

  the Labs team. Like, there will be small projects, there will be acquisitions, there will be a continuum of bets. There's just a level of refocusing that's going on right now.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  And, and reorganization, and this has happened at many, many.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think the bet with the OpenAI Labs team is you have a, a really small group of people that are focused on creating or being quick to new products.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  Like, approaches.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  And, but that can be, again, like, a two pizza team.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  And that type of experimentation is going to make more sense if the rest of the company needs to. Refocus on enterprise and the core business.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tyler, is that data point you shared earlier, like, public about the size of that particular team? I didn't want to mention it.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  The sort of team?

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I think it's, people know it.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Okay, people know the sort of team was small. It was like six people.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  But also, I was gonna say, I think now that you have so many Neo Labs doing these kind of like weird, like, kind of moonshot research projects, I think it also adds to this thing where like, maybe you don't actually need people internally doing those same things. You can just acquire them if they work.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah. We gotta get into that conspiracy theory later, but there's this idea of like, all the Neo Labs teaming up to marshal.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  We gotta dig into that. Anyway, history of side quests in tech. Can we paint with a broad brush here? You know, spoiler alert, I think the answer is no, but there are some fascinating stories. So, Google has a balloon internet play that's a serious company called Project Loon where they inflate balloons that go into the stratosphere, I believe. They go high up and then they deliver internet, sort of competitive Starlink. Some promising stuff there. They also have-

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  They have the fiber play, too.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Fiber play? Oh yeah, they just sold that.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  People are so upset about that because, like, dealing with your ISP is one of the roughest things ever. I've had such a bad time with various ISPs. Oftentimes, I would, running a small business, running a startup, I would put it on my personal account and then I would have like six lines for like different people and then one of them wouldn't get paid and I'd get sent to collections for like-

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  That happened to me, too. The only time I've ever had-

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Like some-

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, bad credit thing.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  ... related issue-

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  Was I returned the router-

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  And then, even though I still had an active account, there's another line with them. They were like, "You didn't return it. We billed you."

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  And somehow-

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Wait, Nick, are we still paying internet at the Jonathan Club or did we fix that? I sent you this.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  You did? But we haven't returned the equipment. Returned the equipment, okay.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  We're definitely, we're, we're.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  We're definitely getting, we're definitely getting fleeced, for sure. But, but, but that was the, that is the status quo. And it was awesome when Google was just handling it with Google level.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  But, hard to sell ads against.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Hard to sell ads against, so they divested, I guess. But, that's not even close to the weirdest thing. The weirdest Google side project that I found is they make a contact lens that will tell you how drunk you are. I'm not kidding about this. Google, they have a project. It, it, it, it does more than that. It's supposed to do biometrics and it can do a lot of different things. But, one of the things that it can measure, it can measure glucose in your tears. It can measure any sort of like biomarker that's in your tears, which apparently is like a rich source of data. But, one of them is blood alcohol level. So, you can put in this contact lens from Google and it will tell you how drunk.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Jarvis.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Am I drunk?

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Am I good?

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Am I good? Am I good to drive?

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  You're absolutely not, sir.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  He's like, "Sir, you should take a Waymo tonight. Would you like me to connect you?" See, this is all part of the plan. They're gonna stop people from drunk driving, give them Waymos, it works. Uh, so that was a weird one. Uh, they also briefly owned Boston Dynamics, but most importantly, they bought DeepMind, which was completely seen as like this wild card side project. How does that fit in? You know, it's a bunch of researchers and then it became like the, the most critical thing in.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Amazon has taken tons of shots at drone-related delivery and home security stuff. They also own Twitch, but they never really linked the site to live shopping and closed that loop.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Have you thought that that's weird?

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  And Jassy doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  He doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch. And, and a lot of the looks-maxing live streamers have decamped to a different platform.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Let me get some, uh, what do you, W's? Let me get some W's in the chat for, for this quarter.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  For this CapEx guide. Let me get some W's in the chat for the CapEx guide.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Apple.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Tried to build a car, then pulled out. Who knows where the Apple Vision Pro goes, although of course, I hope it continues. I'm hoping for another Apple Vision Pro. Apple Vision Air, just make it lighter, same screen. That's the trick. Make it like a thousand bucks, I think it'll sell. And they have a bunch of health moonshots. They've been working on non-invasive glucose monitoring, which is, there's some book about it called like, The White Whale of biotech or something. It's something that people have been working on for so long and they've never been able to crack it. They've worked on this. The best thing I think they have is that you can get a continuous glucose monitor. Thank you for the W's in the chat, by the way. There's a lot of W's in the chat. You can get a continuous glucose monitor that is invasive, meaning it is pricking you, it is measuring your

• 12:56John Coogan?

  blood and then calculating the amount of glucose in that. That's helpful for continuous glucose monitoring. There's a number of companies that do that in sort of a D to C realm, levels. There's a number of biotech companies that offer that as like a healthcare product. And you can, you can wirelessly connect that now to your Apple Watch, but they can't do it in the Apple Watch. There's always been the question about like, could you just shine a light through your skin and in, and detect the blood, the glucose in the blood. Very, very difficult to do. Potentially always possible. Everyone thought, oh, it doesn't break the laws of physics. Lots of money spent with little to show for it, at least so far. Meta is probably the most egregious side quest.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  They don't do side quests, they do full quests.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  They, they create side quests in, in VR. There's actually one of the popular games. It's all about doing side quests. And yeah, I mean, they bought Oculus, they bought a bunch of VR studios, they rolled everything up, they renamed the company, spent tens of billions of dollars on what is starting to feel like less of a side quest, but still is, is so early. You know, the Meta Ray-Bans are like a success, but to the tune of millions of units, not, you know, billions of units or anything like that, or hundreds of millions of units. I think the iPhone has an install base over a billion now. And the ramp from here to there on Meta Ray-Bans is going to be long. Tesla launched a premium tequila in a lightning bolt shaped bottle. So, you know, it comes from all different Mac 7 companies.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  That one's more of a stunt, but it truly like side quests come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just good for morale, like it's just fun. We do side quests here all day long. TBPN simulator, that's a side quest. What was the other simulator? Jeremy Giffon simulator? That was a side quest. You know, they're just fun. Some of them are good for marketing, good for attention, good for fun. Some are complete dumpster fires where you just pour money in and it just sucks all resources and you get nothing out. And then some reshape businesses entirely. DeepMind's a great example. And there's certainly others in the Mag7 that have really, really changed the business.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Cabe said, seems like the entire boring company is a side quest.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's technically a separate company, but Elon's, yeah, king of side quests.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like the company that gets the least amount of attention. That's not like on the critical path for many of the other projects.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah. Still a very cool idea. I mean, every time you're sitting in traffic, it's so like tangible to know, oh, like if we just had more.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Sitting there yearning for the mines, basically.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, but very, very difficult. And I mean, it's been, what, over a decade? And there's really like a very limited rollout of that technology. So, but it's still cooking. I think the business is still going and they're working on it. So some of OpenAI's teams come from very small teams with relatively tiny compute budgets. But they get a lot of attention, sometimes because of the particular product category. So SOAR is a great example. We're small team, not huge resource investment, probably a lot of inference and training cost. But relative to Codex 5.4, SPAR, I don't know. I don't actually know like how we're looking on the order of magnitude there.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a big part of it is like.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  But super viral, right?

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  And what percentage of the team, the overall team's energy is going towards a specific product, right?

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, but so the idea of experimenting quickly and then consolidating efforts even faster makes a ton of sense. Nano Banana was a big deal for Gemini, bringing image, video and audio generation together in a single chat GPT flow is clearly the next step. And so some of this is not, it's probably not going to take the form of like, stop doing the side quests. It's like, let's fold that into the main quest because. Clearly, the interaction pattern of ChatGPT is where people want to go. And so, once we've done the experiment, it works, put it all together. Dylan Patel and Dor Cash said the TAM for GPT 5.4 was north of $100 billion, which is crazy for a bunch of reasons. I mean, it's a huge market

• 17:00John Coogan?

  that was created in just a few years. The enterprise opportunity in general is crystal clear for anyone involved. At the same time, you still do need to experiment to make sure you are early to create the next breakout product experience. And so, with that backdrop, OpenAI Labs and being more efficient with the shots on goal makes a lot of sense. I still think that the overall narrative around AI, just in AI broadly this year, will be about the main quest, which I see as like compute scaling.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  And so, raise the money, do the deals, grow the capacity. I was thinking back to Travis on the show, saying, if you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. The key is, if money matters, which I think we say, we would say it does, especially in certain categories. He was probably thinking of ride sharing, where there was a capital war, and AI compute, where there's also a capital war. You need to be the best in the world at it.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, and I think, I think overall, there's real competition now.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  It's intense, right? You have, you have OpenAI, Anthropic.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  At the frontier, pushing very, very hard. But, the, the, the other side of this for OpenAI is like, all the, yes, there was a ton of stuff that was announced last year. There was, there was hardware, Sora, et cetera. But, Sam was running around doing all these different mega deals for the compute side.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  That now serve the main quest. And so, the positioning is actually great.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Let me tell you about Labelbox. RL Environments, Voice, Robotics, Eval's, and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And speaking of Google, Google Capital bloke, the longtime Google bull, says, so Anthropic and OpenAI are going to just give this consumer market to Google? And I don't know how, how, I mean, yes, they're like, like, OpenAI reportedly planning to shift the strategy to refocus around business users and vibe coders. There's a lot of stuff going on there.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Listening to some of the data around the retention curve of the various products, like, I don't think that they're giving up on consumer at all. That seems like sort of an odd read. It will be interesting to see the next iteration of Google's consumer surface area, because they have AI search overviews, AI mode, the Gemini app, it's in Gmail, but there's clearly some like UI fighting going on. I just, it's so funny when you're in Chrome and you have the ability to open one Ask Gemini panel in Chrome, and then you can open a second Ask Gemini panel in Gmail, the app. And so, both at the web layer and the browser layer, you have two, you have two chat boxes that look

• 19:47John Coogan?

  exactly the same and do the same thing. This feels like very much like a V1 of what they will do here. So, there's certainly an opportunity for Google to reintroduce the AI features, make them more tightly aligned with what people are actually doing. And you have to imagine that a lot of the progress they're making on agent encoding can then come to the Gemini surface area in consumer overall.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we can pull up this chart that Sam showed of Codex usage. This is like, again, this is like what I think is informing, like, the battle with Anthropic, as well as like this chart, is going to inform the strategy shift, which is like, hey, we can run, we can, we can take revenue into the hundreds of billions of dollars with the current products that we have. Let's focus on them and make the best possible products.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  Dean Ball is using Codex, is that what he's saying? Just hit a personal record for single coding agent session of a little under 10 hours. GPT-5.4X high in the Codex app, unsurprisingly. No flashy app, just really complicated economic research prompt. At this point, most of my prompts do not stress these agents all that much. To be clear, this is 10 hours of continuous work. I have meaningfully exceeded 10 hours if we include periods when the agent was waiting for jobs to complete. So what does this mean? Is he talking about like firing off one prompt and coming back 10 hours later, or just, or just going back and forth? Because he says agent session.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  I think he's saying- I think he's talking about firing off one 10-hour.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  I thought he meant he's in Codex, like the, you know, terminal, and he's in there for 10 hours.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Locked in. That's amazing.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is very interesting to see. I mean, Doug O'Laughlin was talking about how he moved a lot of his research. He wasn't building software.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  No, he's saying it's not a flashy app that he's building, just a really complicated economic research prompt. To be clear, this is 10 hours of continuous work. I have meaningfully exceeded 10.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  So I think what he's doing is he's asking like, okay, pull together all the census data about jobs. Now go and pull together all the economic indicators. Pull together all the inflation.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Somebody asked, how much time was back and forth was going on versus the agent spending time on its own? He said zero back and forth. So this is 10 hours of the agent just like cooking.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Wow, that's really crazy. What is this prompt? It must have been pretty long, I imagine? That's crazy. It fit within his current rate limits on the $200 OpenAI tier in the Codex app, where rate limits are currently higher than usual. To outperform expectations, the prompt was primarily about the political economy of central government transfers to Indian states/union territories. I think, I think honestly, this matched my expectations of what 5.4 can do when it's properly prompted. What did it get stuck on? It encountered a bunch of problems along the way, but doesn't appear to have gotten stuck for too long on any one thing. It was just a steppy process, so it just kept working. That is absolutely crazy.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  In other news, OpenAI is forming a joint venture with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield Asset Management.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  This is great news.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  To form a joint venture that would distribute its enterprise products across the firm's portfolio, companies, and beyond. The proposed deal has a free money valuation.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Bain Capital owns Fogo de Chao, the Brazilian steakhouse.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Maybe now they can take Apple Pay.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, we got cooked on that. That would be a good, I don't know, maybe they deliberately don't. I wonder, I wonder if Apple Pay is expensive for them and this is actually a cost consideration. Fiji CMO said, this news came out a little bit earlier than we planned. We're excited to be building a deployment arm and we'll share more details soon. Companies have a ton of urgency to deploy AI in their organizations and we're sprinting to meet that demand. More than one million businesses run on OpenAI products. Codex is now at two million weekly active users, up nearly four X since the start of the year. API usage jumped twenty percent in the week after GPT five point four watch. Launched in Frontier, which launched last month to help enterprises build, deploy and manage AI coworkers that can do real work. Has way more demand than we can handle. That's why we launched Frontier alliances.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  So we leverage our ecosystem of partners and scale and to scale. And that is also why we're launching a dedicated deployment arm tasked with embedding forward deployed engineers deeply inside enterprises. This project has been in the works with our investors and alliance partners since last December and we are grateful for them and their partnership. We're still early, but the speed of adoption is a clear signal of where this is headed. We're excited to not just be building these technologies, but also building many ways for companies to deploy them and get impact.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Interesting, because there was a big, there was a big talk for a long time about like the next gen private equity firm will, will buy businesses and like deploy AI inside them. And this feels like, well, maybe that works at the mid-market private equity level. But you don't necessarily need a new AI native private equity firm because Bain Capital.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what I've always said, like traditional private equity is not, it's not going to just be like, oh, we'll, we'll figure out AI in like twenty thirty. It's not really on our roadmap right now. They're working as hard as they can to implement it. Question is like, will, will traditional private equity be able to

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  basically like roll out and unlock the value of AI better than some of these like AI native, more like venture oriented rollups.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Okay, so five point four mini announced today, so.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Different sizes of models don't count as side quests. These are main quests, right? These are main quest aligned. But what is the pitch for a mini or a nano model?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so this is just like, I think someone ran some emails and the mini models are like equivalent to GPT-5 when that first came out. But it's just way cheaper, right? So if you're like non-sensitive, if you're running a ton, a ton of queries. Uh, but you, they don't need to be like the max, you know, intelligence and you just use this.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  So cheaper, but also faster?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yes, probably, yes.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  And potentially runs on older hardware?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Um, I think that's unclear.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  This is bullish for our vintage NeoCloud.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  The oldest GPUs.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was Trey's idea yesterday.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna run this on 1080 Ti's from my gaming.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  People love, people love classic cars, why not classic GPUs?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, doesn't, like, how small the model is doesn't actually like matter on what hardware.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine running your vintage NeoCloud with, with a wood-fired hearth.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Powering it all.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, uh, I mean, you have to imagine that, what, what, what's after Blackwell? What's the, well, the one that announced today?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Vera Rubin?

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Rubin, Rubin. Like, you have to imagine that, that there will be models that only run on Rubin and need to be sort of re-architected to run on Hopper, I would imagine.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Uh, sure. I mean, I, I think there, there's like small performance boost that you can get.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Or it might just be slower.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  But, but you can always, you can run any model on like any hardware. It's just like, it could be like way, way slower.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Way, way slower.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  If you're on like a fleet of A100s, when you could just be on like, like a smaller rack of Rubens. Uh, interesting. Uh, well, that's exciting. Um.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, CalShea came out with the $1 billion.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Before we talk about this, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So. What did Kalshi launch?

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Kalshi launched the $1 billion Perfect Bracket Challenge. $1 billion for a perfect March Madness bracket.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  So you can win $1 billion for entering this competition?

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  I haven't read the fine print, but it is positioned that way. Vinny says it would be hilarious if Citadel built out a team to attempt to financially impair their competitors.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Sig Parametrics from Susquehanna is basically like the financial backer for this promotion. So if Citadel can figure this out, they could leave their competitor with a $1 billion bill.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, trying to nail the perfect bracket is functionally impossible.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  So, yes, so there are nine quintillion possible brackets. So the odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9 quintillion. And I believe that they are capping entries.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  I like my odds.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  I like my odds.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  And I believe that they are capping entries at 10 million entries. So if you math that out and then you take some insurance out, like you should be able to, you know, hedge out any of the risk. If you are good and you don't suffer from any skill issues, you can basically, with strong basketball knowledge, if you have ball knowledge, apparently you can get the odds down to like 1 in 10 billion. And at that, you know, from 9 quintillion to 10 billion.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  If you have 9 quintillion, you can sort them by how likely they are. Take the top 10 million, that's, you know, maybe there's some kind of power law thing here where we actually.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yes, we get close, we get close. But I think if there's 10 million, if there's 10 million, like assume that there's 10 billion reasonable brackets. And out of the 9 quintillion, so you're discarding like all the craziest upsets to get to that 10 billion. You already ranked it and narrowed it down by like, what, 6 orders of magnitude or something? And then you're submitting the top 10 million of those 10 billion. Like your odds of winning are still 1 in 1,000.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  You can make it a thousand accounts.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  And that's a, no, no, no, no. I think that they are capping the entire campaign to 10, the first 10 million entries. So you have to be on Kalshi and you have.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  My open claw already submitted.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Nine quintillion.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  The SEC prepares proposal to eliminate quarterly reporting. If you liked earnings.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  I was thinking like, is this bad for us? We like earnings days, but it's not like our whole shtick. So I think we'll be okay. We will continue soldiering on.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Good Alexander says, finally, less transparency around financial results. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if this is going to be enough to, to make it easier to be a public company. It's certainly a burden, but the kind of shareholder lawsuit risk and all that other stuff feels like a much bigger burden. What this is just going to do is create more volatility, right? If you're only getting.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Updates, you know, twice a year, you can just see these like massive swings because it's like, hey, we haven't heard from this management team in, in a, in a formal capacity for six months. The, the business could have, you know, changed wildly, you know, growth rates fluctuating, et cetera. And so again, if you, if you, if you love volatility, you're probably going to love this.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  So it's good for the VIX. That's bullish for VIX investors out there. It, there is a world where, I mean, the, the typical like public versus private debate is that when you're private, you can think in multiple years, depending on who your investors are, maybe think in decades even. Whereas when you're in the public markets, you need to think in quarters. And so advancing that from quarterly to six months and you start putting management teams in, okay, what can we deliver that will show up in six months as opposed to what can we deliver that shows up in three months? That's twice as long. It feels like you could wind up with better run companies doing more ambitious things. I don't know. There is a bulk.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, you know, I mean, the other side of it is you just get more complacency. There's less of that. There's less of that. You're not like on the daily, the daily march. You know, you finish earnings and you're like, okay, 90 days, we got to do this again. Like there's no days off kind of thing.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  So are you, are you an advocate for monthly reporting?

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  Daily.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Daily earnings calls.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Potentially hourly.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Just put, I mean, this is the, this is the crypto folks. They're like, put it on the blockchain. I want to be able to see in real time, the revenues of this asset stream and how things are moving around. I want full transparency at all times as an investor. I don't know. I, I think that there is a, there's a potential for a good outcome here, but we will have to keep an eye on it and see what actually happens. Uh, this is just a proposal. It's just, the proposal isn't even, we are preparing for a proposal. So the proposal hasn't happened. We're preparing for the proposal.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  It's an advanced, it's an advanced idea.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  No, preliminary talk.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  It's an advanced idea.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  For a top, for early talks.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  For early talks.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Round of proposal.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Around a potential proposal.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  You know, the FDA actually works that way. ANPRMs. It's like advanced notice of proposed rulemaking. So they tell the industry, okay, we are thinking about making a rule.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Good luck. And then everyone's like, we're suing. Don't change the rules because I have set up my entire business for this particular set of rules. And if you change it, it's like completely over for me. Cause every business is like set up like this. So like narrowly thread to whatever regulation is there. Really quickly, let me tell you about vibe.co. We're D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies, advertising, streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on Meta. And let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Nvidia.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Nvidia.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  Announcing Nvidia DLSS 5 and AI powered breakthrough in visual fidelity for games coming this fall.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Video games are gonna get more realistic. Prepare. Over the next couple of decades, this is gonna be, this is, it's entirely possible this happens. Um, continue. Uh, let's pull up the video.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because when I, when I see the video.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  I want to see it big.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  When I see the video, I, my, my thought was, weren't video games already this realistic? But I haven't played video games besides Tetris on the dramatic.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  They, oh yeah.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Long time.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  So let's play GeForce RTX DLSS 5. DLSS of course stands for deep learning, super shading, something like that, DLSS. It uses deep learning. It's used AI for a long time. The whole pitch for DLSS. Super sampling. Has, has always been go from a 720p render to 4K. Upres, just interpolate the pixels. This is different. You can see that the, it's not just becoming higher resolution. It is becoming gen AI. Like, there is a world where you render that at higher res. The lighting is changing, the shading is changing, the makeup, the structure of that person's face is changing, but it's still driven by the underlying, why are you posting the bubbles? Because I'm ranting?

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  I want to see.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  You're not happy.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  DLSS 5 do this.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. But, but this is what we were talking about yesterday. We were like, what will it take to get TBPN simulator photo real? I think we should try and pipe it through DLSS 5. Although, who knows what this is going to run on because Nvidia is not shipping new graphics cards to gamers or something like that? They're delaying the next, the next gaming graphics card. But I think that looks better. I don't know. People are upset. There's a community note that has yet to be accepted, but the community notes are not happy. Like, one of the community notes is just AI slop. And it's like, yeah, like that's in the name. It's deep learning. Like, what do you think the DL stands for? And also, why are we on DLSS 5? Oh, because this is like a decade old technology?

• 35:43John Coogan?

  I don't know. People are, people are very upset. One of the community notes.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think the issue is.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Disasters affects on the environment. The majority of gamers did not ask for this, yeah.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  Is, is that the, are those the most photorealistic video games that we have today? And then they're showing how they're even getting more realistic?

• 35:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because they don't look, they don't look, they look like games that. Are kind of like animated characters that aren't trying to be photoreal.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  So, there's a range of games there that some of them have pretty outdated engines, pretty outdated rendering pipelines. Some of them are on the latest and greatest and look very high fidelity. There's also a whole bunch of trade offs in game development around the scale of what you're building and how, how many, you know, poker chips you want to put into great graphics. If you're making some moody first person shooter that's going to be dark and, and there's going to be lots of, you know, like blood splattering and aliens and stuff like, you could potentially make it ultra photoreal. But if you're trying to build like something like Minecraft, it's like this massive world

• 36:50John Coogan?

  that's interactive with a ton of different people, like by narrowing down the scope, like the beauty of Minecraft was that the whole thing's voxel based, which is like these little blocks. And so, the, so the computer can store like an entire world very efficiently because all it needs to say is just, there's a cube there and it's green. There's a cube there and it's black. There's a cube there and it's gray. Uh, what do you think?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  I was gonna say Minecraft is a good example of, of what this can improve, right?

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Go to the next post.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  This is what Minecraft could look like.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  This is what Minecraft could look like. Uh, there are, uh, there are drawbacks, obviously, because you're driving the, the style transfer from the particular images, from the shape. You're not reconstructing the entire image. You're just applying this like, you know, re-rendering on top of the underlying structure. And so, you can get really weird outcomes like this. Of course, you can, you can re-render the full scene, but if you're doing that on a per frame basis.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  That's powerful.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Uh, so right now.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  That's powerful stuff.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Basically what we're seeing with, uh, with DLSS is, is the best AI can do in

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Ten milliseconds, I think, or something like that, because it's it needs to do this. Basically, if you're running a game at sixty FPS, it needs to be able to do it sixty times per second. So you can't be waiting around for images in ChatGPT or Nano Banana to cook for a minute on each frame. It has to be real time.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  But also on consumer hardware, right?

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, on consumer hardware too.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Because this is not going to be like hosted in the cloud.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  The whole point is that it can run in your gaming PC.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  And and by that token, this feels this feels like it's not just four years behind. This feels like it's like one or two years behind in terms of the actual quality of the output. I'm I'm actually pretty impressed. If this was if this was going back to like Dolly two quality, I would have expected that because Dolly two is running on a fleet of A one hundreds, H one hundred, something.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Sure, but I mean, the underlying tech is very different, right? Because you have like a very clear ground truth.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Ground truth, yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Right, where you it's like, you know what's supposed to be there. There's this kind of up sampling.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Well, so the I mean, the the data pipeline here, the actual ground truth thing is a little bit harder for something like this. They have they probably have to use Image Gen to generate the high res versions to actually generate all that. Because previously, DLSS was really easy to train because you would just go and run the game at four K on great hardware and then go and run the exact same you would render it twice, like from the same exact game footage. So you'd have someone play the game and on one monitor it'd be seven twenty P, on one it would be four K. And then they would record both and they would say, these are exactly the same thing. Every frame is the same. Learn how to take the seven twenty P image and create the four K image.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Now they have to say, okay, well, we have a four K image. Let's run that through a Gen AI pipeline to make it like photo real. Do that a ton, probably on a fleet of GPUs that are not consumer hardware. Then you have your training data, then you go run the DLSS pipeline and get this like style transfer algorithm that can run sixty FPS. Anyway.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  But I mean, there have been like open source image models that have done like really good up sampling for a while now.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  But at this level, or wait, are you talking about up resing? Or are you talking about like, I would consider this like re-rendering using like something that feels like diffusion. Like this feels like, because if you look at if you look at any of these examples, it's very clear that they're not just increasing the pixel count, like the hair in that woman in that woman's image, like like the hair has a different shape after you turn DLSS on. It's not just higher resolution.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  So like, there has to be something like, like, that they're training on. But, and I think that there probably will be very small hallucinations still if you were like, to zoom in, whereas that wasn't really true with like the 720p to 4K pipeline. Like, you would get, like, like, whatever the cutout of that image was that you were up ressing would, would remain the same, whereas this is actually like re-rendering it, basically.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, none of this will matter when we have a billion GPUs in space. Let's head over to space.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted AI, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Take us to space, Jensen.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Let's listen to Jensen talking about data centers in space.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Courtesy, uh, Nick.

• 41:22Jensen Huang?

  I'll spend very little time on this this time. However, we're going to space. We've already been out in space. Uh, Thor is radiation approved, and, uh, we're in satellites. We do imaging from the, from satellites. In the future, we'll also build data centers in this, in, uh, in the, in space. Uh, obviously, very complicated to do so. We have, we're working with our partners on a new computer called Vera Rubin Space One, and it's gonna go out to space and start data centers out, out in space. Now, of course, in space, there's no conduction, there's no convection, there's just radiation. And so, we have to figure out how to, um, uh, cool these systems, uh, out in space. But we've got lots of great, I'll spend very little time on this.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Got lots of great engineers working on it. Uh, it was very funny listening to Dylan Patel talk about space data centers and saying that like, yeah, even if you solve everything, like, it's still hard to make chips. He's just like, it still comes back down to the chip bottleneck, uh, above, above all else.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is why you see Elon doing the TerraFab thing, right?

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I really wanna know what his plan is for that, because has he put in an order for a tool, or is he gonna do Terra ASML?

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Like, because there's like, the supply chain is what, 10,000 companies?

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, historically, they've done, they've gone super, super early in the supply chain, right? They've done like, you know, mining stuff and...

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I don't know. Tool making is a special, special industry. Well, speaking of Dylan Patel, Semi Analysis was featured at Nvidia GTC. The inference king has been crowned. Nvidia won a massive belt and it looks like Jensen's holding it up. He is in fact, standing in front of a LED wall or projector. But a beautiful thing to see the Semi Analysis logo.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  It's all WWE. The entire world is WWE.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Nvidia Extreme co-design revolutionized token cost. The GB NBL 72 is the inference king with 50x higher performance per watt on inference X by Semi Analysis. 35x lower cost. Very, very exciting. And congrats to Jensen for becoming the inference king and winning the inference max award, or inference X as it's now known. Jensen is also confirming what we see in our GPU availability data. There is an epic scramble for compute. B200 basically unavailable availability for GH, Grace Hopper, 200, H200, and A100 also collapsing. Low availability means high demand.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  And people were, people were kind of going back joking about like, he, he said like 1 trillion of demand or something over some period of time and, and people were like, oh, so he's guiding down. It's like, I guess that's where we're at.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hard when you're doing, when you're doing cumulative revenue.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Well, let's move over to a much smaller deal for Netflix and Warner Brothers and the final deal, which went to Paramount, of course, and David Zaslav is in the Wall Street Journal. First, I will tell you about Vanta. Automated Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So, David Zaslav deal could, deal pay could top $800 million after last minute tax benefit. So, Warner Brothers Chief Executive David Zaslav could collect more than $800 million in severance and other payments after rival Paramount acquires the company. The sum of cash includes, the sum includes cash and payments for options and restricted stock holdings as well as a newly adopted tax reimbursement for Zaslav in a securities

• 45:05John Coogan?

  disclosure filed late Monday. The total doesn't include the more than 20 million he's likely to get for shares he owns outright, so he's been, he's been investing as well. About 504 million is due to Zaslav if the deal closes, the company said, while 47 million would be triggered if he is fired or leaves under circumstances within a year of the close. 116 million in equity has already vested, some 335 million would only kick in if other payments trigger a 20% federal excise tax on golden parachute severance payments he receives. The ultimate value of the payout is based on tax code rules that are expected to cause it to significantly decline with the passage of time, the company said in a filing. Without the tax payment, the total would be about 667 million.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Companies typically try to keep severance at or below three times salary and target annual bonus to avoid or minimize the tax, and investors often criticize companies for reimbursing or grossing up executives for the tax. The company said Zaslav wouldn't have to pay the excise tax if the deal closes in 2027, which would save the company costs of the tax gross up. So there's, there's been a lot of back and forth.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people are, are absolutely.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  Did he earn that?

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely pissed. And the reason that I think it is warranted from a business standpoint is when we were sitting here last year, talking with someone who won't be named in the, in the, in the media space, who has done deals, not at this scale, but in the, in the billions of dollars. He was sitting here telling us at this very table that he didn't think there would be any bidding process at all.

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  And it was just going to land with the Ellison's for a pretty predictable price.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  And Zaslav did his job as CEO to get the best possible price for shareholders.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  And it's remarkable.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  And that is why, you know, he was able to have outsized impact. He's getting, he's getting outsized compensation. He increased the enterprise value through his deal making by tens of billions of dollars. And he's getting a significant, but I think warranted payment. And if you, you don't like this, then you probably have, don't like the game of business very much either.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Or you think. Warner Brothers Discovery should have just used like OpenClaw on a Mac Mini or something like that to negotiate the sale. Put the whole company on eBay and let everyone bid.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Just do an auction.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  It's actually eBay's fees are pretty high. I think eBay takes like multiple percentage.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  They would take a higher fee.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  I think they would take a higher fee, actually. It's like a hundred billion dollar deal. Don't they take like 3%? So by that, I mean, maybe we're saving money using a human in this case. But of course, some of what he did, you know, between the dinners and the photos and all of these different negotiations and somehow continuing to get Paramount to make offers, but then say that it wasn't their best in final. I don't know how you do that. He's

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Multiple offers back to back that were not the best in final, but.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you everyone about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputer training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we have carried no interest, the anonymous X user with.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Most fantastic profile picture. How are you?

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  As always.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  No interest.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  No, pretty well.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  I'm going to repeat carried no interest as many times as possible so that I don't say your real name, carried.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Not gonna say your real name.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Good to have you here, carried. Thanks for taking the time to join the show. Why don't you tell us what's been on your mind lately?

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Well, it feels like the chickens are coming home to roost in old private credit software land and gonna take a little cheeky victory lap here and say.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Who could have predicted this?

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  No one could have predicted this except you. On December 12th of 2024, you wrote a post called the bubble in software private equity, private credit edition. And you did a deep dive on a ton of lending data and discovered, you said, some hilarious stuff. You said for a while, there have been rumors forming that a bubble in private credit related to private equity, I'm somewhat certain a mini bubble forming in software, private equity, private credit, and then you get into it. So what were you, what were you seeing back then that prompted the post?

• 49:39Speaker 04

  So what I was seeing, right, and it's wild that kind of a nameless private markets investor with a pitch book subscription, no one touch will advertise it for them just there, was able to pull this data and do it themselves, but anybody with a pitch book so could have done it. What prompted this is that I was simply being shown deals by investment bankers where the financing structure, I think, would make the average American kind of scratch their head, right? Like if you had told the average person on the street that you could take a business with a hundred million dollars in revenue and no profit and lever it up to buy it with no profit at all and have to repay a good chunk of it in four years, your average American would go, no way, that's not a thing that you're

• 50:21Speaker 04

  allowed to do, right? But depending on how good your relationship was with a certain subset of private credit lenders, that is certainly a thing that was allowed to do. And so what prompted the post was that I kept being shown deals with, with financing structures I could not believe, right, from very good sponsors historically who were excellent. And then I thought to myself, you know what, I'm just gonna pull this data from pitch book, do this thing myself. And what I found was this giant bar in the years 2028 and 2029, where a lot of my wonderful colleagues in software, private equity would have to pay a good chunk of that debt back. And it kind of terrified me because something else was happening at the same time that was somewhat scary, which was you could see on a, there are a bunch of different investment banks who have published this, Carl's Square,

• 51:06Speaker 04

  a bunch of the other ones that are software boutiques, you could see on a graph that the multiple on ARR was coming down in private market transactions. Let's not even talk about Publix, which now have become more relevant than ever. And I kind of looked at that graph and the graph of all the debt coming due and, you know, my stomach churned a little bit and then I wrote up.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so the sponsors, their idea was, hey, the debt's gonna come due in 2028 or 2029, but we're gonna roll it over and we'll just kick, kind of kick the can down the road. But then now with AI disruption and a lot of questions, people aren't gonna want to lend in the same way to these businesses.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  I mean, the irony is it all kicked off with interest rates back in like 2021 and 2022. And you can see in the post, right, from Carl's Square in 2021, right? The, the, a unprofitable growth software company in Carl's Square's own investment banking data traded at 9.1 times ARR. In 2022, I'm so excited to hear what sound you use next. In 2022, it was 3.4. So you went from 9 times. Yeah, there it is. That was very good. Very, very mature. You went from 9.1 times ARR down to 3.4 times ARR. And you can even.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  Like how much software M and A took place in 2020 and 2021 that was sponsored back was what? Who is in control of these deals?

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  I am sorry, I'll stop.

• 52:37Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. You're really good at that, man. You've got, you've got a lot of talent. And so it's kind of scary. Now we have, you know, 30% of sponsored bank transactions with software at one point. And everybody's been kind of kicking the can for a while and now everyone is noticing.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Okay, take us, take us back and explain. Like our, when I, when I think about these like software deals, take privates or buyouts of private companies. And there's debt involved. I go back to like the LBO boom, the Milken era, barbarians of the gate. Obviously, those were big deals. Is that the correct structure that I'm thinking of? It's just LBO, but instead of like a cigarette company or a food company or some other industrial company. It's a software company now. And, and then after some of that history, I want to know like, what is fundamentally different about these software deals? Because that LBO boom seemed to last for decades.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah. And so I think that it all comes down to the fact that they were borrowing against ARR and not EBITDA. Right? There's, there's very little profit to borrow against with a high growth, you know, enterprise software company. And so what do you do? You need to juice your IRR somehow, so you need to borrow. So you'll go to a bunch of private credit funds and you say, look, I've never lost money. I'm talking about a very specific firm right now. I've never lost money on a deal. You can't lose with me. Just let me borrow against the ARR. And before it comes due, you know me, I'm gonna sell it. And we're all gonna buy, you know, another Gulfstream and we're gonna laugh about this, you know, in four years. The problem was is that the liquidity just left, right?

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Both in terms of the most important person who could buy it, which was a strategic acquirer. Right? When stock prices fell and interest rates went up, you're just not as acquisitive. But now you lump in the fact that AI is creating all these existential questions for enterprise software companies.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  And you have to depress, uh, public valuations.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  You know, and you have no profit. So your recovery rate with your lender might even be low.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  You can't even, you can't even take the keys of this business and milk it for dividends.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  You have to do massive restructuring. That's a really scary proposition.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Did you, did you, did you see the, the, the AI disruption of enterprise software coming? Or did that hit you like a flashbang?

• 55:03Speaker 04

  I mean, I did, but I was also an AI or data scientist, as you know, for, for many years. So I thought it was somewhat inevitable.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Throwing flashbang.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, to, uh, almost said your name, carried's, uh, credit. This, this time last year, you were talking about, uh, a specific product category. You were saying, you know, 10 years ago to build a product in this space, I would have needed to raise 30 million dollars to build something competitive.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Now I can do it with 300 grand.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna go after it. You were working on some deal.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  At the time. And so I think you did, you know, uh, I don't know about on, on December 12th of 2024, but certainly at the very beginning of 2025, you were seeing that like, hey, a lot of these uh, companies that, that previously would have taken, you know, tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to like rebuild and actually be competitive with.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  And now do with, with, uh, much less capital.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  Oh, 100%. And I mean, I think that that is kind of, I think that, and here's maybe even a spicier take that I swear I'm gonna write a longer post on. I think a lot of the stuff around, you know, a really good enterprise software company is cooked because somebody's gonna vibe code it. I don't think that's gonna happen, right? I think that the scarier thing that's occurring now for private equity is actually, is actually that we're hearing rumors of customers that aren't signing three-year deals, right? The entire basis of software PE being some of like, one of the best private market categories, was that you had enterprise customers with three-year contracts.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  If every other enterprise customer says, actually, AI is just so amazing now, and we don't know where we're gonna be and what it's gonna look like, we're only doing one-year deals.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  That has like, much bigger implications than, you know, somebody vibe-coded a Notion clone on like, a Sunday, right? That's a big deal. And I think that the reason that, that they're doing that, and this is the bigger threat, I think, to a lot of these companies, is the adjacency within the market map. Like, if you look like Rippling, and you have a very talented, like, group of people like Rippling's, Rippling's employees, they can attack so many parts of the HR platform space now that they simply couldn't three years ago.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  And I think that's a lot scarier than the vibe coding to my colleagues in software private equity, than, you know, somebody just whipping one of these up and going out with a bunch of cold emails. It's the adjacency threats in the market map that's scary. Because now who's Rippling gonna go after?

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so you have like, previously, there was like, it's not an A, like a HR company, it's like, HR for hospital, or HR for golf courses, or some sort of narrow niche in a niche, and that, all of a sudden, has been pretty easily added to Rippling's TAM, for example.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Yep. And you know, and another thing that I'm seeing just when I talk to people in the industry, I don't know that there's a scarier seat right now than Atoma or Vista. Because the liquidity is just evaporating. The appetite in the public markets, gone. The ability for these mega, these mega technology companies to do splashy 15x ARR acquisitions for $15 billion, gone. That's a really scary seat.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, all your, you know, the hyperscalers want to put money into CapEx or like various like, you know, core AI bets. The public markets are going to put a massive discount because they don't know what you're going to be doing in 10 years or even three years. There's so much uncertainty. And who wants to buy these companies at at least the the marks that they've had over the last few years because of that same uncertainty? So it's like, where, where do these companies go? They, they, you know, the funds can continue to do continuation vehicles, but it's just like, everyone is just kind of kicking the can down the road forever.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a scary time in the asset class. I don't think that there's, you know, I, I think that there's going to be a massive kind of resurgence of super ops focused software funds that might even be far more AI focused than we could imagine, right? Where you have PE funds where 50% of management fees is going to AI professionals. I could see that very near term.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's weird on partnerships between the labs and the private equity firms? We've seen a bunch of those happening versus like starting a new private equity firm that is like quote unquote AI native.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, I think that, not to use the cliche, but like, it has to be like founder mode from the top. Like, you can't be trusting OpenAI to make your portfolios more money. I think that it needs to be very much from the top of the firm, really understanding what AI is capable of. Because I don't know how many times in history that it used to take five years to build a factory and now you can build it in two weeks. Right? That's the scenario. You probably want an expert in factory building at the top of the fund, right? Or near the top. And the rumors are that there's been a very slow adoption at some of these funds that were just used to ZIRK and they were, they were rolling in it, right? For 15 years. And I don't think the same.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  And when you say slow adoption, slow adoption for AI, like actually pushing AI first initiatives across the portfolio companies?

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Like not the deal teams, but the the actual operations teams. Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  So, so you know, you own, you know, six different businesses that are doing thirty million low end of ARR.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  How involved is your deal team in, I'm not even talking about AI adoption in the ops level. I'm saying full blown AI adoption across both product and ops. And I think that if you're not doing that, you're going to be in big trouble in like three or four years.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Jordan.

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the takeaway from Mark Leonard's, you know, kind of half retirement last year? It felt like in many ways, he, he like perfect, I don't know if he, he didn't, he didn't like, his exit didn't top ticket, but he bailed right as there was going to be kind of like infinite questions around the sustainability of the, the model that, that got them to that point, obviously built a, you know, fantastic collection of, of software companies.

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  Well, here's the trick, you know, Constellation never overpays. So like, they didn't do what, in my opinion, firms like Vista and some others did, which was borrow and pay large ARR multiples for unprofitable businesses. Like Constellation does not pay frequently more than six times even to hop for a software company.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  And price is like such a good insulation. So if you just assume, assume like a certain gross retention and you pay a certain price, Constellation is, is, is likely safe.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  I think that, I think that they, they face the same threat that others do in the adjacency of the market map. Right? But their risk is much lower simply because they never overpay. Right? So.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  How, how are you seeing like diffusion amongst these like sort of deeper in the economy, software companies where the small business that they sell to might not be tracking the latest frontier model development? Oh, five point four nano launch today, I can cut my costs. They're just like, yeah, my business is, is, you know, golf courses and I need to pay my employees. So I'm just on this particular. Platform and I don't even take calls from competitors because it's just so far down the stack. It's only 1% of my cost here. I don't think about it. Like, is there a world where because AI takes time to diffuse, there's a whole bunch of humans in the loop?

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  That some of these software companies are actually just stickier than we expect them to be, even though on principle, they should be disrupted faster?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  I 100% think that we are overestimating the rate of churn, right? I think that that is pure timeline nonsense. As somebody who sees, I was just gonna write this, like, because I was actually getting frustrated. I literally see these company financials, you know, I've seen them many times. I'm not seeing this alleged vibe code churn yet, right? It's just not showing up.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Horse carriage manufacturer says order flow looks great. We have a big backlog. There's no issues.

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  Sure, like, and maybe at some point you're gonna see, you know, every other, you know, middle market electronics distributor rolling their own ERP. But it's not happening right now. And so I try to keep like a check on my colleagues in other industries, right? That are non-tech and I literally like once a month, I just say, are you gonna roll your own ERP this month? And the answer is always no, right? And at some point that answer will start to shift and then one or two will do it. It will go horribly.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the, but, but people, people have, you know, VCs are still funding AI native ERPs. Like they're funding more ERPs. But I, so, so I don't think the question has ever been, I, I haven't seen anyone saying all, you know, you know, these like core system of record businesses are totally cooked. It's every other, it's the next, you know, 50 pieces of software that might integrate into said ERP that there's a big question mark around.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  So this actually circles back to, this actually circles back to what I was saying before, right? There's a reason I said like half of your, half of your like deal team, if you're in PE, should have some level of AI expertise because of that exact situation. That's actually what I'm talking about.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  And, and sorry, sorry. To clarify there, deal team, you mean evaluating the transaction, setting the price versus the operations team that's actually going to go and work with management, jump on the board?

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Great question. Depending on the size of the fund, those could be the same group or they could be separate. But no matter what, there should be a good amount of either AI-first developers or just like AI-first product people that are helping your portfolio companies compete as the VCs subsidize the CAC of the next wave of quote unquote AI-first replacements, right?

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, because my, my, my, like default assumption would be, okay, yes, you need your deal team to be able to understand what moats are AI-resistant, what aren't, like reevaluate the, the prices in the AI era, but then the real AI expertise of selecting products, advancing software development workflows, figuring out the right structure of the team mix, like that's going to be much more on the operational side of the, of the folks that you deploy into these companies, the management teams that you hire.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Yes. Like an investment banker, no offense to my pals in investment banking, is not going to help your portcoves be like, you know, AI-first competitor-proof. That's not going to happen. That's your biggest existential threat, right? So, you know, I think you're going to see a reshuffling for the best firms that can see what is so clearly the future of ops around that to deal with all of these AI-first, you know, YC and, and venture-backed competitors. I, I think that's inevitable or you're, you're going to be in trouble. I think another side of it is, is I think that you're going to see a lot of point solutions not trading hands at good multiples, right? I think that you will see a big flight to pure mission-critical software in PE, whereas

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  I saw plenty of point solutions changing hands in 2023, 2024. Now... I I don't I don't see them trading and and I don't I think you can't underwrite that risk for your LPs. You you simply can't. If I can swap it out in 12 hours, I I don't think you can use your LP money on that. Your private equity.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  How how existential do you think? Everything that we're talking about is for like the big platform software PE funds. Like, do you think? Do you think they can, you know, uh, eventually figure out how to exit some of these businesses? They have some funds that that, you know, underperform or lose money. But then but then they're able to kind of reposition, or do you think it's it's just? It's over.

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  I I don't know, man. It it's not looking good. Like, I mean, you the public markets are are saying are telling us what the appetite is. For these late-stage software companies without massive AI tailwinds. And it's a very scary proposition. I I I don't see a shift barring interest rates going down and everybody jumping back into the casino. I don't I don't see it, but I've been wrong before, so.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, the good news is interest rates are going up. The last couple of years.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  Perfect. This is gonna be great for everybody. This is gonna be wonderful. Uh, but yeah, I think it's existential. I think there's no doubt about it. There's there's no seat I would want less than at one of the bigger software PE funds right now. Scary stuff. And the rumor is that a lot of people are are looking looking for the doors, so.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  What about uh, what what about other stuff that's like software adjacent, AI adjacent? Like, we've seen a lot of the the private credit funds do deals for, you know, large AI data centers. And that feels like a complete balance against, um, like, um, you know, people are people are worried about software. PE debt, but then if that firm has a, you know, some contract with Meta for some big data center. Like Meta seems like they're gonna be able to pay that bill.

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Well, it's funny you say that. I think it all comes down to recovery rate, right? Like, you know, i- i- if, if the recovery rates are poor enough, there will be nothing that, that Daddy Zuck can do to save them. Right? There's nothing he can do, right?

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  Well, he can keep paying his, his, uh, his, uh, data center bill on time.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Well, yes, there, there will be very little to hide from recovery rates are really real low. I, I don't know what those are gonna look like, right? And, and there's a whole new asset class coming, in my opinion.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  Of, of, of software special situations that's imminent, right? And you can think about a deal structure that that would look like. This is actually a really fun thought exercise, right? So you have a software PE fund that was over levered, right? And they, the private credit fund takes the keys and they're just trying to hope, they're hoping to get anything back.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  And you could see a special situations.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  John Zito saying like, I think, I think, you know, some of these deals, you're gonna be lucky if you get thirty, forty cents back.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  And is that, is that technically a bankruptcy or just like the shareholders get wiped? Like, like, would you be declaring bankruptcy in that scenario?

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  Equity's taking a zero almost undoubtedly, right? And depending on how the restructuring plans pans out, it certainly could end up that way. But you can see where a very, like, a bending spoons, like, entity might come in and say, you know, hey creditor, we're gonna help you out. We're gonna, we're gonna run this thing. We're gonna shift it to the constellation model.

• 1:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Help me help you.

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, help me help you, right? And we're gonna shift this to the constellation model. And you know what? We're not gonna focus on growth. And we're just gonna focus on dividends. And we're gonna try and get you out, right? Uh, that's something that, that, that a special situations investor might look at, right? And I think that's a much more reliable way to derive ROR than we're gonna turn around this thing that went flat and isn't profitable at all today. And I think AI enables some of these special situations a little bit more, and that's kind of the whole bending spoons thesis on some level, right? So I think there will be a new wave of software special sits people that come in and try to do something with these over levered software codes with the creditors in some form. Right.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so, I mean, you, you said that like software PE investors might be like heading for the door, but isn't it possible that they spin up a new fund that does special situations, like develop new expertise, like just reorient their strategy around, you know, curing log jams?

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, well, you're already seeing people leaving Constellation to pursue this, and I think that when LPs evaluate who's the better option, they're gonna go with the guy from Constellation, since then, somebody from, oh, Telva or TA or Mr.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  I was thinking about, I was thinking about like internal to.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  They're like, it was a special situation when I paid 50x ARR for this. It was quite special.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Look, you just didn't see my vision for this thing, okay?

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's your?

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  Go ahead.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  What's your take on, on Zuck's move with Manus? You were an early Manus.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Oh, he got a deal.

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  When, when I was, when I was kind of, when I saw that acquisition, I, I was thinking, hey, obviously a talented team that built a product that can get to real revenue, but I think there were some questions of like, is Zuck just gonna kind of wind down whatever they were doing and refocus on?

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  Talent acquisition.

• 1:12:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, was it a talent acquisition or a product acquisition? I was leaning more toward product acquisition. They seem to continue to be investing a lot in it, uh, which is kind of interesting because it's a product category that Meta doesn't, they obviously serve a bunch of small businesses, but Manus is being positioned now as like an agent that can help you with your business or a school project, and it just feels like, you know, obviously, hyper, hyper competitive, uh, but what, what's your read on, on their strategy with Manus and, and their odds to actually compete in productivity against OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, Microsoft, all these other players?

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  Zuck, if you're listening right now, you got a deal, man. That was good. That was a good deal. I love it. I think that Zuck looked and he saw an absolutely magical product that he could have, and he bought it, right? It it's magic. I have spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on Manus, and it was worth every penny. There are simply things that you can do with Manus that no other inference provider or product can do.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  And I would reveal them, but they're they're

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  It's Manus, by the way.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  Manus.

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Manus.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  It's an American company, yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like there's there's like literally things you can do with it. I'm sure you saw the same thing. Like, they figured out context, like L L M context in browser before anyone else in ways that no one else has yet to figure out. Right?

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  And I think that I think that if Anthropic had figured it out, they would have pushed it. I think if OpenAI could figure it out, they would have pushed it, and they simply haven't yet. And he saw a piece of magic.

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  And he said, what do we got to pay to get the magic? And I think it was right, because it's generational. Like I said, there's a lot. I've spent a lot of money on Manus. There's things Manus can do that no other inference provider can do. Um, and they benefit from open source. So there's another cheeky thing that Zuck realized.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Are you broadly an open source bull? I feel like a lot of people are saying like, all the money flows to the frontier. Uh, you know, everyone just wants to use the best model, the Opus four six, the G P T five point four. Codex Desktop can do a lot of these things. Have you have you actually tried the other harnesses and found like a real big delta?

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, I I am a Manus and Anthropic maxi, so those are my two favorites.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  So like, I use Manus for certain tasks and Anthropic for others.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  But like, I'm certain that what Zuck realized

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  is that I don't have to care about inference and who's giving it to me, because these guys figured out some really special stuff.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  Around how does an L L M process data in and around a web browser?

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  So he realized, okay, this is kind of inference provider proof. They figured out this piece of magic, this secret about L L M's using a browser. I'm going to pay whatever price I need to get it.

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  And now, if you've heard, he's already integrating it with like Ads Manager.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that that makes so much sense.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Manus, I want to grow my business. All right, give me every dollar in your bank account right now.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  What is?

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  And so.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  No, credit to Zach for kind of either knowingly or accidentally realizing that harnesses would be quite important.

• 1:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and like I said, there's a lot of stuff Manus can do that no other like AI related product can do for me.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  And it's just, it's just really special. So yeah, I think you got to steal, you pay whatever price you got to pay within like the re- like the history of M and A, right? I think it's a good bet. It's a great bet.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, especially for their scale and, and, and the compute that they have. Like there's a lot that they can deliver there that another buyer would not be able to, uh, just.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  I actually think Manus is like one of the most underrated AI products today.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I just downloaded, I'm going to, I'm going to try it out. Uh, we, we, we had, uh, our intern Tyler, uh, download it and give it a try, uh, yesterday. We'll get a review from him later on the show.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, uh, I'll read out one. Somebody in, uh, John in the YouTube chat says, would be interesting to have Jeremy Gaffon back on with carried no interest. Do a sort of round table style back and forth on here. I like carried's analysis so much feels up Jeremy's alley.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Oh, that'd be a cool.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  I totally agree. We should do that sometime.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  I've heard of that guy. I've heard of that guy before. Smart, smart cookie.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  He's a good dude. You're, you're both former TVP on guests. He's been on the show. Uh, well, we'd love to have you back. Let's, let, let, let's throw a smoke grenade and get him out of here.

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, do it.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you, Kerry.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  See you later.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  I'll get behind this production.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon. It's been an honor.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  And let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Midjourney's financials are crazy and underrated. This is from Amrit. Uh, did not raise anything, built things in-house, 200 million ARR as of late 2023 confirmed. $500 million in ARR as of 2025, maybe. I don't know. That sounds reasonable to me.

• 1:17:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is like, how was the, how was the meta deal structured, right? I assumed that meta was just like, we're going to give you a ton of money.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Every year for some period of time, so I'm sure that that that factors in.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they must be making a a fortune.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, John, I said yesterday, I wanted to order beef.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  Ranch with a live stream.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  To put to allow me to be.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, present.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Where where the cattle are.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Being raised. And this Indian startup lets you own a mango tree for a hundred and eleven dollars per season.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Allows you to rent a mango tree and enjoy the entire harvest.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  There are three types of trees you can rent. Base, you can get a base tree.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Base tree.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Standard tree.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Max tree.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  You can get thirty thirty kilograms to sixty kilograms of mango.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  That's a lot of mangoes. I love mangoes. We're going through them at my house.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  This company is operating in three states in India. You select your favorite tree, pay the money. You will get a dashboard with all the information about the tree you rented. Connecting farmers with direct customers who love chemical free fruits.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  This is awesome.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, yeah, we should definitely get a mango.

• 1:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, can you can you can you get us one mango tree on the max plan?

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  On the ma- the ma- mango max.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  I want the mango max plan, please.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  So so did you, Tyler, have you had a chance to fire off a a manis prompt and see what it's cooking?

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I I think, um. So far, maybe I'm just not creative enough, but it's felt very similar to like the cowork kind of thing.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  Essentially just like a wrapper around.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Cloud code.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  So we can do your desktop.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  It can interact with my desktop.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Interact with local files.

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  Um, I I haven't tried like using. Can do use yet, I'll do that now.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  I have like no local files anymore. I like everything's either in the cloud or camera roll or like I just I get a new computer. I don't even like transfer anything over. I just sign in to Gmail. I'm like, I'm good. It's it's a very, very thin client these days. Uh, but, uh, you know, if you do have a lot of files, I guess that makes sense. Uh, and and I still do like that that idea of like color grade every image off this off this uh, off this thing. And, uh, I mean, just there's a ton of different research things that you can do. Uh, anyway. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So, the AI boom has exploded the San Francisco housing market. I believe we will have an expert

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  coming on the show soon to discuss this.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Rohan Dar is going to be joining next week to talk about this.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  But the Wall Street Journal has a report today that we will read through some of it. At the Pacific Heights Open House in January, a line of people made their way up the steps of a two-bedroom, one-bath co-op. There were 85 of them. Steps, not people. Eight flights, no elevator. The property received 14 offers and sold for over 1.62 million, more than $400,000 over the asking price. While much of the US housing market has been stuck in a rut, slowly elevated by mortgage rates and slowed by elevated mortgage rates and home prices near record highs, pockets of San Francisco are rebounding in a big way. The AI boom, a new mayor, and other changes in municipal leadership have helped bring the city back, reversing a years-long slump that was compounded by the ripple effects of the

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  pandemic, crime, and persistent struggles with homelessness. Rents citywide were up 14% year-over-year in February. And this is what we dug into when we looked at Daniel Gross's AGI bets. He was saying, is San Francisco the new Detroit? And it was unclear if he meant the current Detroit. Is San Francisco going to be like the current Detroit or what Detroit was in its heyday as a boom town? Well, it certainly feels like the latter. An uptick in demand with the city's notorious lack of housing supply. They gotta build the cube. They gotta build some cubes. They gotta build some skyscrapers. This is the way.

• 1:21:13Jordi Hays?

  The Munger, Munger Dorm?

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you can ban that out to general apartments.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Windowless dorms.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  They should build one of those. They should tear down those houses. They call them like the painted ladies. You know, they should tear those down and build like the Munger Dorm with no windows. That would be ideal. Maybe, maybe BlackRock should start investing in San Francisco real estate. I feel like they would have a good financial opportunity here. Wow, everything's booming.

• 1:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Condo prices, which had been sluggish for years, grew 12% year-over-year as of February, ahead of the spring peak, according to real estate brokerage Compass. The median sale price was 1.23 million. Single-family homes prices are up 23% with the median price at 1.96 million.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  It's just skyrocketed.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  By comparison, the year-over-year median increase for existing home sales nationwide is just 0.3%. Last month, 16 homes in San Francisco sold for 5 million or more, a 220% year-over-year bump. "It's just skyrocketed," said Kelsey Carson, 34 years old, an attorney who is expecting her first child in June and has been house hunting with her husband since April. You're more likely to get outbid by an all-cash offer. Carlson was outside a packed open house for a three-bedroom, two-bath condo on Buchanan Street in Pacific Heights. The area, known for its breathtaking views and mix of mansions, Victorians, and pre-war apartment buildings, has long been sought after. Carlson and her husband have been outbid on four

• 1:22:35Jordi Hays?

  properties so far, brutal. Even a house in nearby Presidio Heights that needs hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. With AI, everyone's coming in with these huge salaries, she says. We just can't keep up the pace.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  There is some good news. There's a housing market that I think is potentially better than San Francisco, growing a lot slower. It's only up 4% this year, year-over-year, as opposed to San Francisco, which is up 12%. It's Alaska. And I would highly recommend, if you've made your money in AI, pick up, pick up a house in Anchorage. Average house price is up there, $400,000, doing very well. And you can throw a star link up there.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Let's move San Francisco.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  The locals will love that. The locals will absolutely love it.

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  John has a long history with Alaskans.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  I shouldn't even joke about it. I need to lock my account again. If you see me with a locked account, you know that I've, I've kicked the hornet's nest.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so we're gonna have Rohin, who is an SF Realtor and has 100,000 followers on X, just talking about investing and advising clients.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let's see what Adam Newman is up to, because he's in Miami and was featured in an Instagram reel, a TikTok collab with none other than Caleb Simpson? Caleb W. Simpson? Adam Newman?

• 1:24:05Speaker 05

  What's up, man? Nice to see you, Caleb. How much you pay for rent in Miami? In Miami, I don't rent, I develop. Okay.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  He's a developer.

• 1:24:11Speaker 05

  I come into the main lobby and I get cinnamon butter and coffee. What's going on over here, Adam?

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  You should do one of these in Alaska. I don't know why he's doing it in Miami.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  He's getting after it.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 05

  I've always wanted to do one of those classes. You can go as low as 2,000. Okay. What a view. Oh, my gosh.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Does 2,000 get you in Alaska?

• 1:24:33Speaker 05

  It's the important thing you talk. To safety and clean. After it's safe and clean, now we can talk about climate. And if you can put those three things together, you're starting to have a great experience. It was a company, the television show, but it was called WeWork, and it looked like this. Ah. Why are they doing that? Still got bits. Every room smells so good. That is so important. It smells so good.

• 1:24:58Speaker 05

  Yoga. Yoga. That coffee shop was downstairs. That's open, and even the public can come in. This is just for the residents. All these products are all Flow products done in the Flow kitchen. And there's a whole spread out there. Everything is fresh. And whatever one sell today will go to the residents at the end of the day. There are people working out in this gym all day long. I love Austin. I've lived here since I started, but I've lived in this building for about four years. He was here before we bought the building. He can see the building before and after. When I moved here, it was a great building, but it's turned out way better now.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  For the same price in Alaska, you can get a whole house.

• 1:25:34Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  But... Probably fly in only or there's limited road access.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Limited road access.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Limited road.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  How many square feet?

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  Uh, at least like two thousand square feet.

• 1:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, so, so, uh, I think, I think Adam will create a great apartment living experience.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  The question is how different is it from every other kind of apartment complex in Miami? How much do residents care about, you know, a cafe, differentiator, workout classes? A lot of, a lot of apartments have gyms, they have, you know, spas, things like that. So I just think, uh, yeah, ultimately, I think Adam will be successful with this. Purely because he has high energy, he cares a lot about customer experience. And then the question will like, uh, the question coming out of WeWork is like, can he keep the costs in control? Because it's, uh, if you don't want to make it, if you, if you don't care about making money, it's really easy to deliver, you know, the best, like apartment living experience in a given area.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  The question is like, can he, uh, can he deliver services and keep the margin? Because I think ultimately this time around, the business will be valued. Maybe there's some brand equity to the, to the Flow apartment platform, which is, which is the brand that he's doing this around. But ultimately, it will be valued based on earnings, uh, given, given enough time. So I think it'll just be a balancing act, but, uh, looks, looks nice.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, a Florida man, Florida man, sold his house in just five days after letting ChatGPT handle the entire process. Instead of a real estate agent, there's some community notes on this. Uh, he, he, he didn't go to ChatGPT and say, sell my home. He like, you, it's the same thing as the dog cancer story. He used ChatGPT to conduct market research.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Everybody wants to move the goalposts.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah. But you can just sell your house. That's good news. I was listening to Ryan Serhant talk about the opposite scenario, which he said he was working on, I think it was like a $50 million house sale. And they'd spent, he was like, our agents had spent like months getting these two buyers very educated about the value. They'd agreed to a price and then the seller went to ChatGPT and said like, this, should I sell or is the price too low? And ChatGPT said, you're absolutely right. It is too low. You should pull out. And then the buyer went like, is this a good deal or is the price too high? And ChatGPT said, you're absolutely right. The price is too high. And so they both walked away and Ryan Serhant was like, what the?

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Like now I gotta get these people to come back. This is like a funny thing.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, who knows?

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  I think they need to be in a shared chat window, going back and forth, arguing with the AI, the same AI.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The group. You can do that. Yeah.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that would be the correct way because then they can fire back and forth. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may Claude Code, Codex or a sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction with Figma. Reorg and the Copilot division of Microsoft. So company scraps divide between consumer and business app teams. AI chief Mustafa Suleman will focus on AI models. He's freed up apparently. So Microsoft is reorganizing the teams that work on the different versions of its flagship Copilot AI product. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Altering a strategy that some employees said created a disjointed user experience and consumer confusion.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  The software giant is unifying the teams that work on its Microsoft 365 Copilot productivity offerings and the consumer version of Copilot, according to a memo from Satya Nadella. Jacob Andreu, who leads product and growth for Microsoft AI.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  A man who has sat right here.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. He brought back Clippy. He's the man that brought back Clippy.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  He will become the executive vice president of Copilot, of just Copilot itself. That's the brand. And it's a great, it's a great brand name. I'm a big fan of Copilot.

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, these are prosumer tools.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Prosumer tools.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  There's, they kind of, they're just, they're going to be used in and out of people's work life.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  I think businesses everywhere kind of realizing that individual employees are bringing their own AI tools to work just because they're, help them do a better job.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  This is what happened with Apple. I mean, Apple was like a consumer company and then all of a sudden everyone was using Macs at, at work. And I think that's also a little bit of what's happening with the, the, the OpenAI story about like refocusing on business enterprise API. It's like, no, like there, Thibault is also saying he's going to put Codex in ChatGPT. So you're just going to be like, build me an app that does the thing that I want. There's a lot of times when you go to ChatGPT and you ask something to, hey, go, go transcribe this YouTube video. And like, it, it, within ChatGPT, it might not have that tool, but Codex could absolutely one-shot it. And so bringing that ability, whether it's cloud hosted or running on your computer, bring that over makes a ton of sense. And Microsoft should probably follow a similar strategy. So exciting news there.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And we have our next guest, Shyam Sankar from Palantir. He is the chief technology officer in the Rooster Way to Room. Let's bring him in. Let's do it, Shyam. Good to see you.

• 1:31:04Speaker 06

  Good to see you guys. How are you, Jordy?

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  Welcome back. It's been far too long. It's been like almost a year. You were one of our earliest guests, a huge moment for the show. Thank you so much for joining then, and thank you so much for joining today. How are you doing?

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Have a big day.

• 1:31:16Speaker 06

  I'm doing great. I'm pumped to be back on St. Patrick's Day, but more importantly, on the book, the book launch day on, on Mobilize.

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the Straussian read of the?

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  You sent us a green package.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Should we open this? Can we open this?

• 1:31:29Speaker 06

  You gotta open it. Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:30Jordi Hays?

  You sent us a green package because you knew it was, it was going to be on St. Patrick's Day. Look at this thing.

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  This is a real piece of hardware.

• 1:31:45Speaker 06

  It's an actual US Army ammo box. It held 20mm electrically primed munitions. And now it holds Mobilize.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  It's got the book, it's got some schwag.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  You've outdone yourself. So cool. You can move that.

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, so, I mean, you've been working at Palantir for a long time. Has it been almost two decades now?

• 1:32:12Speaker 06

  It'll be 20 years this Friday.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  Wow, this Friday. Congratulations. Amazing. So, when did you, when did you feel like, okay, now's the time to write the book? What was the thesis? What was the, what was the moment where you were like, okay, it makes sense to actually take all that experience and distill it down into something that can be instantiated in an actual book?

• 1:32:35Speaker 06

  Well, the book is the long-form version of the 18 theses. So I put the Defense Reformation out there in October of 2024. And that was kind of the welling up of all these feelings I had, working more or less in the bowels of the Department of War for 18 years. Watching deterrence slowly erode, seeing that we had a problem. You go back in time and you say, we had the annexation of Crimea in 14. We had the militarization of the Spratly Islands in 15. Breakout capability for Iran to get the bomb in 17. We've had a pogrom in Israel, the invasion of Ukraine, conflict with the Houthis.

• 1:33:07Speaker 06

  What's going on here? Like, we're spending a trillion dollars a year. Where's our deterrence? And that's one piece of it. And you look at what's looming with China. Then you look at the other side of this and you really look at history and you say, like, what, what gave us deterrence in World War II and the Cold War? How did this stuff work? You recognize how much the industrial base that won World War II and the Cold War is not the industrial base we have today. You know, the astonishing statistic is that only 6% of major weapon systems were built by defense specialists in 89, when the Berlin Wall still stood. So 94% of spending went to companies that were what I call dual-purpose. Chrysler was the prime on the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

• 1:33:47Speaker 06

  So Chrysler made missiles and minivans. Ford made satellites. General Mills, a cereal company, made torpedoes. We had an economy that was equally invested in freedom and prosperity. But the corporate story is not enough. So that's a precondition. You could kind of say, well, what were these companies like? You know, because we think about it today as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, but it was Glenn Martin, it was Jack Northrop, it was Leroy Grumman. It's something that your audience would understand. Foundationally, it was founders. You know, our entire industrial base was made up of founders. What's happened? You know, at the end of the Cold War, we had this enormous financialization of defense. These companies became run by like third, fourth generation. Buybacks, dividends, financial engineering over real engineering. And by the way, that's not specific to defense.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  The same thing happened to Intel, the same thing happened to a lot of great American companies. The rejuvenation of our economy comes from the heretics. And then I started researching a lot about the, the history of innovation in defense. It's like, nothing worked because of the system. Everything that worked, worked despite the system. You look at Andrew Higgins, this Scots Irishman in Louisiana who built the boat that won the war. Ninety-two percent of all boats in World War II were Higgins boats. But the Navy didn't let him compete. Then when they finally let them compete and he won, they stole his designs and failed to copy it successfully. In the end, after all these things, they're like, fine, we'll buy the fricking boat. And the boys in Normandy landed on Higgins boats.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:35:07Speaker 06

  You go story after stories.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Speaker 06

  Hyman Rickover, who built the nuclear navy, his first office was a women's restroom. And I think part of documenting these stories of the heresy, because of course the Navy wanted to humiliate him into quitting. And, and then think about the chutzpah, like Oppenheimer told him, this is not going to work. You're not going to be able to build a nuclear powered submarine. And in the face of Oppie telling you this, you're like, no, you're wrong. I'm going to do it.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  That's bold.

• 1:35:29Speaker 06

  No?

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:30Speaker 06

  Bold.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  Bold. Have you heard the story of Ball Corporation? They make mason jars? You know, you know, there's mason jars, also a defense contractor.

• 1:35:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  I, I think they eventually sold it to B A Systems in 2024. But for a long time, the company that made the mason jars that are in every like hipster millennial burger joint in America was also making like satellites and sensors and all sorts of stuff. And so there's just endless stories about that of, of reindustrialization. I'm wondering, like, there's a huge boom in new startups that are saying, we're going to build boats from scratch. We're going to build missile systems from scratch. We're going to build satellites from scratch. But is there some underrated industrial capacity in America where we haven't actually gone to Chrysler and said, what can you do these days? I know Chrysler might be a bad example because it's an older company.

• 1:36:17Speaker 06

  They're a great example.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Is there still some, is there still some latent industrial capacity where in the worst case scenario, like, America can actually adapt?

• 1:36:26Speaker 06

  Well, that's the important part of the book is we're telling the story that it's not the facile version of the story where we flipped a switch in World War II and then bam, the automotive industry started making munitions. It was actually a journey. It took 18 months to retool and rebuild factories to produce war materiel. And so you really want to get moving early. Now, we have a lot of this latent capacity. You think about GM produces a new Escalade every 90 seconds. You know, right about now, we need some SM6s, SM3s and tomahawks rolling off the line every 90 seconds, too. And so how do we take the kind of exquisite artisanal approach to a low number of munitions we built and start scaling that out? And you're gonna need a breadth of approaches. You're gonna need the new entrants building entirely new classes of things and you're

• 1:37:09Speaker 06

  gonna need to make the exquisite things much more quickly. What makes this stark is we have eight days of weapons on hand for a major fight with China. Nobody thinks that's deterrence. Nobody thinks that's enough, right? We need 800 days. How do we really fire up the arsenal of freedom here and get serious about building? And we're gonna have to build those things in new ways. And a lot of that skill exists in El Segundo. It exists in the modern American manufacturing economy.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm always reminded of this Palmer Lucky take about like the younger generation throughout the 2000s got obsessed with building consumer software, ad platforms. We love ads, but I take the point. Is there something similar going on right now with AI? Because AI can be important for the military, but also you see there's only a few caterpillars or electricians and they're working on data centers. If that doesn't become critical to the defense and deterrence of the nation, it actually just winds up being more just juice for the economy, which is probably good, but at the

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  same time, it's, it might be sucking capital, sucking human talent out of true industrialization efforts.

• 1:38:21Speaker 06

  Well, I think so. Like, I think with AI, we have to remember that we have huge human agency. AI doesn't do X or Y. Humans use AI to do X or Y. Let's pick intelligently. Let's pick things that are in the national interest, that give the American people prosperity, that actually propel civilization forward and aren't AI slop and, you know, AI slot machines.

• 1:38:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Speaker 06

  And I think that the promise in front of us is that AI is an opportunity to give the American worker superpowers. How do you make the American worker 50 times more productive than any other worker anywhere in the world? And that solves the math equation of like, how do we re-industrialize economically? If this is actually.

• 1:38:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you, uh, how do you rate the current re-industrialization process? There's a lot of founders, you mentioned, in places like El Segundo that are working as hard as they possibly can. But, but is, are we 10% of the way there for what you want to see? Are we 20% of the way there? Are we 5%? Like, where, where do we stand right now, given all the effort that has already started? But we're still, you know, early in this process.

• 1:39:23Speaker 06

  Well, I'd say, three years ago, at the first re-industrialize, there was an aspirational aspect to it. Now, I think we're closer to 5%. Like, this is happening. We're in the early innings of it, but it's happening.

• 1:39:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33Speaker 06

  Uh, and I think people are starting, you know, one of the amazing things about the American spirit is people just roll up their sleeves and get busy trying things. You know, and I'm, I'm working with people on the factory floor every day who are using AI to change how they do production. One of our submarine parts manufacturers actually added a third shift. They were able to use AI to automate the planning process, which meant instead of having to have tools down while they did planning and quoting, they were actually able to get that done in 10 minutes. They needed to hire a third shift because there was more work to do. And these are the sort of narrative violations that aren't being reported. And I think the underlying phenomenon is that we are listening. So, these revolutions are always tools-driven revolutions, not concept revolutions. Uh, and it, the, the impact of the revolution is determined by the people who wield the technology, not the people who invented it.

• 1:40:18Speaker 06

  Galileo did not invent the telescope. He used the telescope to discover the planets in planetary motion. The microscope, the power loom, the personal computer, thing after thing, it's the wielder of the technology that determined its impact on society. Today, we are way over index on listening to the inventors of AI. They're very smart, but just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence. And the future of AI is going to be written by the the American worker.

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. How do you think AI interfaces with the reindustrialization effort? There's there's also like, yes, use AI in the factory, but I imagine that retraining is a really underrated opportunity. I've already heard just years ago, I was talking to Chris Power about from Hadrian about how he was able to hire someone and just get them forklift certified and teach them how to use those things. And reskilling has always been happening, but it feels like we're going through an acceleratory phase of reskilling. But what are you seeing on the reskilling side related to AI?

• 1:41:14Speaker 06

  Well, enormous thing. So I mean, I think Chris has really led the way with Hadrian here. He's gonna have a huge factory opening on Friday. Hopefully you guys get a chance to cover that. Factory four. The Panasonic Energy, I work with them. So they're located in Sparks, Nevada, inside the Giga Factory. They make every cell for the Giga Factory for Tesla.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:41:32Speaker 06

  The the population, your employee base, there are prior casino workers. And this is high end exquisite Japanese equipment. It used to take three years of apprenticeship to learn how to be a battery technician for this equipment. With AI, it now takes three months. So that's a very concrete example of the reskilling. More profoundly, I'd say, you know, the one of the things we cover in the book is the story of Colonel Kukor, the the father of Maven. And it's one of it's the newest heretic. He's a contemporary. He's alive today and, you know, obviously. And what I think is is really compelling about that story is that this is actually the most consequential AI system in the world today. But because it exists in the Department of War, it's not something that broadly the valley interacts with or thinks about. And I think one of the reasons it's so consequential

• 1:42:15Speaker 06

  is the stakes are existential. People are not, they don't have lame goals like, how do I get 10% more efficient or, you know, reduce headcount by X or Y? It's really like, how do I have complete dominance and overmatch? And as a as a result of this, The people who are building it are not just formally trained computer scientists over here, but it's become a platform that the vocational expert, the Intel warrant officer, the fires officer is able to really encode their knowledge, build agents that are their kind of team working with them to get things done. And so the efficiency, the speed, the scale of what's going on, like really, we're learning more from those users today than we are anywhere else.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you, how are you thinking about the role of the forward deployed engineer in the AI boom? It feels like there's the capability overhang, an incredible amount of, you know, genius intelligence from the machines. And yet, there's so many processes that are still manual. I went to the doctor recently and I had to fill out a paper form. And so in many ways, like there's still a capability overhang just from like HTML web forms. And it feels like as amazing as the AI is getting and has, we're seeing so much progress there, there's still something that needs to fall into place to actually get systems deployed.

• 1:43:30Speaker 06

  I think that's right. There's a huge, I mean, I, in air quotes, mockingly, I'll call it the last mile problem. You know, everyone's, the first 80% of the problem was building the genius technology. The second 80%, it turns out is actually how do you implement it for economic value?

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Speaker 06

  And that's where we're, that's kind of our jam. So we do for, and I think it's never been more fun to be a forward deployed engineer than right now, because the speed at which you can take new product ideas that you're learning, systematize them, generalize them, it's crazy. And I know Ted's talked about this, but like we have to reinvent forward deployed engineering as we go right now. Things that we used to think would take four weeks, take four hours. And so the amount that you can get done, how you go to market with that, it's like, let's just sit in a room with the customer that there's no sales meeting. It's sit in the room, let's go build agents that are automating actual workflows today. By tomorrow, you've died.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  How do you think about advice for young people? I imagine that you'd say, you know, come work with you, but also it seems like there's some potential alpha in being a young person that goes to a Chrysler and says, I'm going to be the AI czar. I'm going to be the forward deployed engineer, fully foil deployed, because I'm just going to work at this company. Where, where are the opportunities for young people in during this like tumultuous AI revolution?

• 1:44:43Speaker 06

  So I'll give you two answers to that. The first is, what would I tell my children? Like, what should they learn right now?

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Speaker 06

  And really, what I would want to cultivate in them is agency, extreme agency. Like, I think all the other skills you've got to figure out as you go, but, you know, do you really believe that your human effort can make a dent on the planet? And how do you experience that and live that? Then, where would you spend time? I think Palantir is an amazing platform to have impact on the world. The things that you do in the commercial sector impact the government and vice versa. And, you know, you have access to the problems. You're in it. But second to that, it's like when you're thinking about being inside of a company, I think AI is going to be the antidote to the managerial revolution of the 20th century. All this power that was sucked away from the frontline worker who actually knew what they were doing to an amorphous blob of middle managers. And even actually, they sucked power away from the senior leadership. That's being reversed because all of the bureaucracy is getting cut.

• 1:45:33Speaker 06

  The agency that someone has, I was thinking about this because I, in the military, I'm seeing incredible AI application developers who are not formally trained computer scientists. And I was like, what happened? I've been doing this for 20 years. This feels like a discontinuity. Where do these people come from? And I realized, like, oh, they've always been there. The thing is, like, what would this guy have done 10 years ago? Make a PowerPoint, try to convince some program manager that his ideas were good, only to be told they weren't? Knowing full, you know, he's too smart for that. He's not going to waste his time. Now he just goes away in a corner for two weeks and builds it. And he's arguing about something that's empirical. And the commander's like, shit, this works. Let's go. You know?

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's like the most underappreciated part of this moment. I mean, we've been covering, we covered a story yesterday of a guy in Australia who's gone on like a year journey to try to cure his dog's cancer. And he had experience building in AI and ML, but didn't have any experience in, you know, biology or pharma or any of these things. And he, and just by leveraging the models, he was able to kind of figure out the right path to go down, figure out, like, even he took a recommendation from ChatGPT of like, which professor to go to in their sort of local university system to get help with the problem that he was working on. And he ultimately has been able to show like real results on this sort of experimental vaccine.

• 1:46:53Jordi Hays?

  And you apply that to that type of, that, that sort of... Nationwide realization that like you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have gone to school for a certain thing. You don't need to be a software engineer to build software. You don't need to be an electrician to start figuring out how this stuff works. And I think that that that unlock across the entire world where just like bringing down the kind of like knowledge boundary around so many different tasks is going to dramatically transform huge parts of the economy.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 06

  I couldn't agree more. I mean, and talk about an example of agency. Like, he couldn't have started that unless he thought, I can do this.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Speaker 06

  It's gonna work.

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like you said, it wasn't, it wasn't like it wasn't like he just one shot at anything. And that's the point. That's what people need to realize. It's like, if you just want AI to one shot everything, that's like saying like, I want results in life and I don't want to have to work. And it's like anybody throughout all human history, if you want results and you're not willing to put in the work, you're gonna have a bad time.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  But like now, there's never been a better moment in history to want to build something, to do something and have a better shot at actually achieving that or learning how to do that than right now. And so again, it's all, it all comes down to agency. I guess the question is like, can you teach agency? Or is it, is it, is it innate? You know, I find like if I'm talking with somebody about their career, sometimes it's like, you know, in your head, like all the different moves that you should make in order to achieve the outcome. And yet some people just think, okay, I'm just gonna go back to like submitting, you know, resumes that never get answered because that's like the straightforward path. So anyways, we're gonna find out.

• 1:48:36Speaker 06

  He wanted to go back in, remember? You know, he wanted to eat his baked steak.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41Speaker 06

  And I think you, look, obviously there's a part of it that's innate, but there's a part of it that you can cultivate.

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I was, I was talking to my wife about my five year old last night and was talking about AI and sort of like. What he might do for a job and how it is nervous. It's nerve wracking. It's like, okay, what like what if I try to predict and set him up for success in some particular career? Like, how is that tractable at all? And then I was reflecting in my own career and I was like, well, for like 10 years, I sold things online. And when I was born, e-commerce literally didn't exist because I was born before amazon.com and before Webvan. So it was not fathomable to

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  click a button on the internet. You would have been a door to door protein salesman.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Exactly. And now I have a live stream, which was not a thing before the internet. And so like, every career opportunity that I've had has been adjacent to other things. People sold things before, but or then they talked on, you know, TV before, but the actual shape of the career has been wildly different. And so I felt very relaxed at the end of this conversation, but it is nerve wracking if you really do want to just think, okay, yes, like, doctor, lawyer, merchant chief forever, and it will never change. But even the lawyer's role has changed a ton with the with the electronic revolution, the information revolution. But yeah, it's just a fascinating time. Where should we go next, Jordy?

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  Any other, any other stories that stand out? And you can give kind of like a trailer so that, you know, we want people to go and buy the book. So just give us, give us, you know, give us another trailer.

• 1:50:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we can talk about Colonel Kukor a little bit more. You think about, so you have this marine colonel who's just the, I call them heroes and heretics.

• 1:50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 06

  You know, because that it is somehow their rebellion that gets all these things started. So he had this seminal experience where he was on a helicopter waiting to land on Mount Sankar to evacuate the Yazadi who were fleeing ISIS.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:50:36Speaker 06

  And there was a young marine who thought he saw a rocket propelled grenade.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:43Speaker 06

  And because of this misidentification, this human error, they waved off the landing. It was obviously unsafe. And you have order of a thousand people who are raped, tortured, and enslaved from this small little decision. And so this is the sort of thing that he was like, there has to be a better way of doing this. And that kind of set him up on this crusade to go figure out how to bring AI to the department. What I think is interesting we document is how everyone tried to kill him in doing this. I mean, up to the point, you know, the services were threatened by it, the bureaucracy was threatened by it, people filed IG investigations, people claimed he was housing Iranians in his basement. Here you have this devout Mormon with four daughters, living in a 1,400 square foot home that has no basement. They actually sent investigators out to go do this. But just through that, never giving up. And that's what you see consistently.

• 1:51:27Speaker 06

  When you see Rickover, you know, you see in his memoirs that the humiliation of the women's bathroom, all these slights, it's not that they didn't get to him. You know, he documents how much they did hurt. But despite that, he would push through and get all these things done. And perhaps one of the greatest heretics, Billy Mitchell, who's the father of the Air Force, he didn't even live to see the creation of the Air Force. But his little rogue act of rebellion was the Navy was trying to sink a ship at this, they call it a sinkex, an exercise to do it. And they were failing to sink this stationary ship. And he's like, you know, I'm just gonna drop a bomb from a plane. And there was no permission, there was no rules. And, you know, you get this like feisty, he sunk the ship. But before then, people thought air power was about sending messages back and forth across the front line. Nobody thought about actually using these as weapons of war. It's

• 1:52:10Speaker 06

  totally crazy. And so I think hearing these stories, what I really hope is both the heretics inside and outside the building are inspired, because your country needs your heresy right now. And every one of these wars, it really comes down to Churchill and the tank. You know, as the head of the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill funded and built a landship. He could only build ships, of course. That's the tank. Because the British Army was like, we got horses, we're good, dude. No thanks. You know, and so you start discovering these stories, and you get emboldened to say like, I gotta pursue what I think is right here. And you go back to World War II, we built 154 different airframes, different types of aircraft. I think 10 really mattered. But just, you know, in the sense of like,

• 1:52:53Speaker 06

  the American free market system, like, obviously, you can't know. You need a market for competition. And that's, that's part of what makes defense really hard. It's a monopsony, there's a single buyer, people have a penchant for control. I like to quip that, you know, everyone's given up on communism, including Russia and China, except for Cuba and the DOD. You know, we have this deeply centralized planning approach that we thought would Provide for what we needed to win wars and it's just not the case.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  That's a good hot take. Do you think that the next batch of defense tech companies should go public earlier? Like, what advice do you have for the current crop of private defense tech companies? It seems like there is appetite in the capital markets. Palantir's obviously done very well in the capital markets. At the same time, the private markets seem to be able to find any amount of money in the couch cushions, especially if there's AI attached to the narrative. But how are you talking to leaders of private defense tech companies right now about the markets broadly?

• 1:53:51Speaker 06

  My advice to them is all the same. I think one of the hardest things about doing the defense tech thing is you need to hold two contradictory ideas in your head. One is like you need to run towards the pain. Like, you know, you need to run towards proving real results operationally. But that's not your buyer. And so, you know, you could say there ought to be a mark-to-market moment right now. Who's in the fight today in Iran?

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:15Speaker 06

  Where have these companies started bending the curve? What are the opportunities to prove this capability? You know, I'm hearing about incredible things Shields doing in Ukraine right now.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:24Speaker 06

  That's really important. You're not going to get paid for that. But that's the validation you need. And then you have to figure out how to get programs of record, all those sorts of things. But if you just focus on the programs of record, if you just focus on treating the Defense Department as a buyer, you'll lose the magic. You'll lose your own heresy that leads to the innovation.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a little bit of that in the space economy where we saw there was pretty quickly a bifurcation between space companies that were doing a lot of interesting work and signing deals. And then other space companies that were like, they got on the rocket and they went to space. And I feel like that was like an important binary. I don't know how, you know, the binary is sort of coming down now as more companies get to space. But it felt like, you know, actual deployment where the rubber meets the road. It's always important in startups, but it feels especially important in this scenario.

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  What about stories from history around copying what works? Does anything stand out? And the reason I ask is because, one, it was somewhat surprising seeing that we have American-made versions of the Shehad drone. And I feel like America has always prided itself on being inventors, you know, these sort of like zero-to-one. Zero to one projects, right? You said a hundred something, you know, airplanes created or airframes created during World War II. And yet here it felt like the smart decision was like, hey, this is like a battle-tested form factor, like we can just make the thing that is delivering results on the battlefield.

• 1:55:57Jordi Hays?

  But are there any other kind of stories that stood out around America kind of swallowing its pride and saying like, hey, this thing has worked? Fast follow. Let's fast follow.

• 1:56:05Speaker 06

  The best one that also speaks to the importance of founders and people, the primacy of people, is Operation Paperclip. You know, as the Nazis were losing, we started, we actually had two competing programs. We had Fiat and Paperclip. Fiat's theory of the case was, we don't need these people, these dirty Nazis. We're going to go steal all the technical papers and we're just going to be able to figure it out just by having all the papers. That was an abominable failure. It did not work at all. Instead, what worked was you go get the founders. You get Wernher Von Braun, you get the people who actually know, because there's something more three-dimensional to the knowledge than what's on the just the 2D paper. And I think that's a huge swallowing of pride. It's like we had to really hold our nose to these Nazis and recognize that actually it delivered ICBMs, it delivered the space program, it delivered a fundamental offset

• 1:56:50Speaker 06

  against the Soviets. But we did that other times as well. I think probably the most famous one is there was a North Korean defector. I don't have the dates exactly right. He flew out of North Korea on his MiG. The MiGs were killing Korean War. He flew out on his MiG, you know, they tried to shoot him down, he escaped. Fortunately, we didn't shoot him down, we figured out he was defecting. So we reverse engineered the MiG and built our own. I'm forgetting, was it the F-86 or the, something like that? And that actually helped us restore air dominance once again. So, you know. It is the primacy of winning, whatever it takes to win.

• 1:57:31Speaker 06

  You know, you don't want to be like, hey, I didn't steal anything from the adversary, but I died nobly.

• 1:57:36John Coogan?

  No, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on launching the book.

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't wait. I can't wait to get into it. We're gonna have to, we'll share our copy.

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  We will.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll fight over it, but we maybe got to.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  But thank you so much.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congratulations on the launch.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:57:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And let me also tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. The timeline is in turmoil.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Doug O'Laughlin at Fabricated Knowledge is going back and forth with Buco Capital Bloke over Google. So Fabricated Knowledge says, people keep thinking that their distribution, think Microsoft or CRM, is bigger than the technology AI. But the fact that people are buying Macs to mess around with Claude Code and other coding agents, they're also good machines, tells me that this technology is much bigger than any distribution this time. Like whatever distribution is there, if you're willing to go to the Apple Store, buy a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini, wire it up, install Open Claw on it, verify everything, like you're willing to jump over the default of the distribution.

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think another question here is how many small businesses in America don't pay for any AI products directly? And yet their employees are bringing the product to work.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Jordi Hays?

  And it's just not appearing on the actual.

• 1:59:08John Coogan?

  But Buco Capital Bloke fires back. He says, these people are dweebs. It's like 0.000001% of the market that's buying Mac Minis, in his opinion. Distribution does matter. It will always matter. It doesn't mean the incumbents will win, but it certainly gives them an advantage. Just look at the sentiment shift on Google in one year. That's a good point. Doug fires back. He says, I am going to just put the distribution friction is the only thing that matters if we are going to be software brain. I do not, I do understand and appreciate it, but I do think this is a big thing and making it all about distribution is such a technology loser way to look at it. Lots of great tech companies with awesome distribution

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  lost, like IBM had CTO relationships with every company. Alameo. Buco says, yup, I am not pounding the table for Salesforce, but they're not dead yet. The long game. Also IBM beat QQQ over the last five years by a lot. I had no idea.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for international business.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  And they keep going back and forth, but let's give it up for IBM and let's give it up for our guest from Cyberstarts.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in to the TBP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:00:26Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Great to meet you.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Help me pronounce your name. I don't want to get it wrong.

• 2:00:30Speaker 08

  Gili. Hey John, hey Georgie.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. How are you doing?

• 2:00:35Speaker 08

  I'm doing great. I'm speaking with you from Miami. We just finished the first day of our annual conference, Cyber Sparks.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:45Speaker 08

  Had a lot of fun, lots of terrific guests and speakers. We just had Nikesh Aurora from Palo Alto Networks, Joe Kurz, CEO of CrowdStrike.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  We love George.

• 2:01:00Speaker 08

  My friend from Sequoia Capital.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Royal flush.

• 2:01:05Speaker 08

  The founders of Wiz, a small company that you might have heard of, completed a tiny acquisition last week.

• 2:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations to you on that one.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  Great, great outcome. Yeah, what is, what are people talking about? What is, what is top of mind for everybody at the event?

• 2:01:29Speaker 08

  Well, the whole idea of Cyber Sparks is to bring together the top three hundred leaders in cybersecurity. So you've got here about a hundred executives, you know, CEOs and founders of the top cybersecurity companies in the world. And the top practitioners, you know, chief information security officers of Fortune 500 companies. And the whole idea is to work together and talk about what's next and how we can work together in order to deal with what's upcoming. And there's lots of risk and, you know, an expanding threat vector.

• 2:02:10Speaker 08

  You probably talk a lot about artificial intelligence and the new capabilities that it brings in your show. But with every technology wave, you know, think about internet, think about cloud, there are new risks introduced. So we kind of spent a couple of days together to talk about, you know, the future of cybersecurity.

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Is there, do you think there's more, more fear or excitement around the technology shift? Because there's obviously this new kind of new threat vector, but at the same time, that creates opportunity for the industry, for product expansion. And so it's go time from a business standpoint to kind of meet, meet the threat. But also, I'm sure some people in the room are a little bit scared of what's coming.

• 2:03:02Speaker 08

  I think there's mostly uncertainty about where this thing is going. You know, what we've seen in the past 12 months is accelerating. And there's, there are so many things that we simply don't know. You know, I wish I could stand here and give you all the answers, but in the room, we had A lot of conversation around the uncertainty on one hand, and the pressing need to make some decisions about safeguards to make sure that, you know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movie, you know, doesn't become a mild, a mild, uh, story relative to the reality in ten years.

• 2:03:46Speaker 08

  And I think that what we are going through right now, we call it, or I call it technological doubling. You know, if you think about technology used by us as SRA, as human, you know, and you think about, you know, what we have today as the hundred, the 100%, and let's say the zero is the invention of writing like four thousand years ago, when we lived in caves and started to write in order to accumulate knowledge so we can build tools. Then the 50% is probably at the point in time of the invention of the steam engine,

• 2:04:30Speaker 08

  which allow us to build machines that would perform tasks too difficult for men. So the last doubling took 170 years. The next doubling would take place in the next 25 years. That means that all of us, all the three of us and everybody who listened to or watched the show are the first people that would witness technology doubling within their lifespan. That never happened. That's the acceleration. No living person have seen doubling of technology. And you know what? When you just follow the curve, you know, the curve I just described to you, that means that in

• 2:05:13Speaker 08

  You know, twenty five years will be at two hundred percents, but in a hundred years will be at two thousand percents. This is just math. It's it's not a prediction. This is this is just following the math, meaning that people that would live a hundred years from now would look at our technology in a very same perspective. We look at the technology used by our ancestors, living in a cave, drawing something on the wall. That's exactly the same. So we are going through a a radical change in technology that we have never experienced,

• 2:05:50Speaker 08

  and that would require dramatically different type of thinking about, you know, safeguarding the new capabilities. So because this is enormous opportunity ahead of us, you know, AI would change everything about healthcare. It would change everything about education. So there's an enormous opportunity conditioning, under the condition that we can control it and that we are not losing control. So that was the core of the conversation.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very cool. What is, what is the shape of the cybersecurity threat landscape right now? It feels like there's entirely new capabilities. When I think about like a phishing attack with a deep faked voice on the phone, that's like, you could, I guess you could get an impersonator, but it's a it's it's sort of a new threat area. But then there's also just like hammering a coding model to spam a whole bunch of like SQL queries or SQL injections, like all the old stuff, but just multiplied. Like, where where are you seeing the biggest new threats emerge? Or what are people discussing on on that front?

• 2:07:01Speaker 08

  It's all over the map, just because of what you said, because it it becomes very asymmetric, even more asymmetric than we used to see, because the guys on the offense, you know, threat actors, they have a huge advantage, because they can simply take a

• 2:07:20Speaker 08

  Claude and and just apply it for new attacks.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Speaker 08

  While the pace of adoption of AI tools and machines within for defenders within large organizations, within the enterprise is significantly slower. So that makes, you know, that puts AI in the hands of the bad guys much faster than it puts it in the hands of the of the good guys.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:46Speaker 08

  And if that's if that would be the case for long, then the bad guys would win. And the bad guys today are really bad, you know, you look at state sponsors attack and, you know, everything that's going on in the world. And that's that's a real risk.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  Is there a bit of like a white pill here in the sense that because there's a lag between open source capabilities and proprietary systems? And then you also have the big frontier labs, DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic. Like, they're definitely running agents over their user bases and their APIs to know, hey, this person just spent $5 million on our API and it's all cyber attack related prompts. Like, let's maybe turn them off or figure out what's going on over there. They have a huge incentive to sort of, you know, control their customer base so that their customer base is not using these tools maliciously. The hackers sort of wind up on the lagging edge, not on the frontier.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  But all of the cybersecurity companies like Palo Alto Networks, like CrowdStrike, like the folks that you've had at your conference, they maintain access to the frontier. And so they're always fighting with a bigger weapon. I is that sort of the equilibrium we should expect here?

• 2:09:04Speaker 08

  That's a great question. And and by the way, we did have today the two the two top cybersecurity experts at Anthropic.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:14Speaker 08

  You know, the head of security and the head of product security.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:17Speaker 08

  You know, sharing the roadmap and thoughts about about the upcoming capabilities of Anthropic and and and other, you know, platforms. I think the answer to that is our continuous.

• 2:09:34Speaker 08

  Investment in innovation in the space, we, you know, it's not just about we's that I mentioned, or Sierra, you know, those are large, you know, established startups. Yeah. But we, we did, we did have one company going out of stealth last week, Onyx Security. All they do is agent security. We had today a major launch out of stealth for another company, Surf AI, which takes care of, you know, leverages AI to, to complete tasks much faster for organizations.

• 2:10:13Speaker 08

  So there's definitely, there'll be a battle between machines, machines that are used by threat actors and machines that are used by the good guys. And we obviously, our job in this world is to identify the best teams, the best talent, and help them build and utilize AI. So we live in a, in a, in a safer, better world and, and that's, that's the plan.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the general sentiment from guests around the actual competitive threat of the labs releasing various agents and security focused products? Obviously, they feel threatened when they announce new products because they tend to send the, the stock price down, or they have over the last month. But is there a real sense that this is a threat? The labs could threaten their business models? Or is it more just kind of frustration with, with how the market perceives the threat?

• 2:11:15Speaker 08

  We always overestimate the impact of disruption in the short term and we always underestimate it on the long term. So I, I think that what we would see here is that in the next two years, the frontier guys, you know, they have different focus and different priorities. So their impact on cybersecurity companies would relatively be low. But in five, seven years, I, I, I think that they, they are, they have a chance to, to take over. And, and I think that we would see three cohorts, three groups of.

• 2:11:54Speaker 08

  Competitors, you'd see the traditional cybersecurity platforms, you know, the Palo Alto, the Wiz, the CrowdStrike of the world. You'd see the cloud providers, you know, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. And there'll be a third group, which is the AI platforms. And, you know, we shall see who would hold keys for cybersecurity. And, you know, that's, you know, if you, if you ask me the same question 12 months ago, I would not even mention the third, the third group. So it's really hard when technology moves a deep space. It's really hard to make predictions.

• 2:12:37Speaker 08

  And I, I, I'm not afraid of making a fool of myself. I, I do that almost every day. But, but making predictions right now is, is guaranteed to make fool of yourself.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  I was just gonna ask you for another prediction, but I guess I'll table it for next time. Uh, thank you so much.

• 2:12:56Speaker 08

  I can share, I can share with you the predictions I made today in, in a closed room.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:13:03Speaker 08

  But the, you know, maybe I'll start with the predictions I made 12 months ago. You know, 12 months ago, I told the room that my prediction, and, and keep in mind, it was really pre the big wave of AI. I, I told them that I, I expect to see a million dollar ARR company, a million dollars in revenues company with a single employee within two years.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:29Speaker 08

  And I told them that I expect to see a hundred million dollar revenue company with less than a hundred employees within two years. I was wrong twice because those two things materialized in less than 12 months. You know, we've seen, we've seen base 44 with. Uh, one founder.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:49Speaker 08

  Who reached uh three and a half million dollars ARR before acquired by Wix. And we have seen Cursor reaching a hundred million dollar of ARR with less than twenty employees. So things are accelerating and and and therefore the predictions I made today were uh that I anticipate that uh we would see Fortune one hundred company uh with a security, a cybersecurity group of less than ten employees. Keep in mind that today those companies employ thousands of employees.

• 2:14:25Speaker 08

  So I believe that we would see AI uh making huge impact on cybersecurity and would turn cybersecurity from a profession into function. That would be a major shift in the market.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well, uh, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us and we will talk to you soon.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to see how these predictions play out.

• 2:14:52Speaker 08

  My pleasure.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  We will. We will make predictions all day long.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Risking, risking, you're risking it all to.

• 2:14:57John Coogan?

  We're, we're in the random prediction, off the cuff business and uh I completely agree with you. It's, it's uh, it's extremely hard to make predictions that uh hold for any amount of time right now, but it's an exciting time.

• 2:15:09Speaker 08

  I love it. It's entertaining. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, give our, give our best to everybody at the event. Great to hang.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:15:16Speaker 08

  Take care.

• 2:15:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Built intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. And let me also tell you about Gusto. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses.

• 2:15:33Jordi Hays?

  All right. Uh, someone in the chat shared this earlier, but it is important to the Manus deal.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:39Jordi Hays?

  In the New York Times, China ramps up scrutiny of a Meta AI deal. The country appears to be cracking down on people linked to the acquisition of Manus.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  Singapore company with Chinese roots.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  My.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  As President Trump prepares to visit Beijing. Chinese government is taking actions to penalize people linked to Meta's two billion dollar acquisition of Manus. Uh, in an apparent effort to discourage Chinese AI executives from moving businesses offshore. Sounds like they want to make an example of them. Officials at China's National Development and Reform Commission, a high-level ministry that oversees economic planning, including AI. Called in Meta and Manus executives for a meeting late last week to express concerns about the deal, which was announced in December, said the people who declined to be named publicly. The scope of the Chinese government actions remain unclear, but appears to include an effort to restrict Manus executives from departing China for Singapore.

• 2:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Beijing has issued exit bans in the past for corporate executives who are under scrutiny. The transaction complied fully with applicable law, said Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman. Said in a statement, the outstanding team at Manus is now deeply integrated into Meta. He added, we anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry. Manus did not respond, but they are owned by Meta and Meta did. So anyways, not surprised to see China frustrated that one of their great AI teams just kind of bounced, poached, poached by the Zuck.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  Zuck is global poking.

• 2:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Who hasn't been poached? Had, had, if you haven't had somebody poached from Zuck.

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  You haven't had Zuck come to town?

• 2:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Work harder.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  Not doing something good, yeah.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Work harder.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Exactly. Shyamath Palapati had chimed in on the timeline. He said, what if AI doesn't need to show an immediate ROI, but is instead, is, but instead is the plausible deniability companies use to riff 50% of the workforce they already knew did nothing? And Axpat Nan says, the real question here is, why is an allegedly cutthroat hypercapitalist economy with every large white collar firm maintained by a workforce 3X the size that actually needs to run it, run its operations? Why would they stop now and not before? And that is a good question, like, like private equity has been, you know, trying to find the right size for every company for a long time. I think there's like natural bloat that, that happens.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  We were talking about the, the question of like, you are an AI company, if your revenues are accelerating, it would be very interesting to see what companies ramp up hiring this year, obviously like the startups and high growth companies are. But of the, you know, older school economy, what management teams are guiding towards more human capital needs? That should tell you a lot about where that management team sees the, the business and economy going in the AI era.

• 2:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great story here.

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone, eighty year old billionaire, was badly beaten up in a brutal mugging outside of his Knightbridge office last month. I believe this is a, this is certainly a historical piece, but undeterred, he allowed his bruised face, complete with an impressive black eye, to be used in an ad for an exclusive Hublot brand of Swiss watches last week with the slogan, "See what people will do for a Hublot."

• 2:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 2:19:04Jordi Hays?

  Gnarly.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  Bernie Ecclestone, his reaction was, "How can I turn this unfortunate event into money?" That's remarkable. Yeah, there's a, there's a very, there's a number of crazy Bernie Ecclestone stories. Uh, the F1 acquired episode goes into a lot of Bernie Ecclestone's history and stories there. Uh, it's, it's a remarkable episode. You should go take a listen to. Uh, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Noah Smith is sharing some unfortunate news. We certainly hit the gong when the GDP numbers came out in Q4 of 2025. Uh, but the AI productivity boom story is gone, at least for now, according to Noah. Instead, it's all just AI capex. Data centers are the only thing keeping our economy afloat. Uh, of course, the other thing keeping our economy afloat is all the economic activity that is still there.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Despite a lack of excessive growth.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, certainly data centers are making the overall, uh, picture a little bit rosier.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, Tyler, have you had a chance to fire up Manus again? Take it for another spin?

• 2:20:30Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I, I had organized my desktop.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  Okay. Was it effective?

• 2:20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did a good job, but like.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Cause you look like a man with an organized desktop now.

• 2:20:40Speaker 02

  With a suit like that.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:42Speaker 02

  Can't afford not to have an

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  What is, what is a good benchmark these days? We need, we need a ben, a new benchmark like our comedy bench, like our, uh, uh, what, what is it? Uh, the

• 2:20:53Speaker 02

  Shrimp fried rice?

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  Shrimp fried rice bench. We need a benchmark for a desktop, something with a very disorganized desktop that, uh, would be difficult.

• 2:21:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I feel like that's not a good benchmark because that's like not.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, arbitrary.

• 2:21:05Speaker 02

  You don't need to use that very often, but it's something like interacting with actual applications. Like can you open Premiere and edit a file? That's a great computer use benchmark.

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, when I was

• 2:21:14Speaker 02

  We're, we're very far away from that.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, when, when I was thinking about, um, I was thinking like, I would like to be able to pick a song and then have it go and find stock footage, AI footage, uh, movie clips and cut together a vibral to the beat. Uh, like I see on Instagram from just a prop. If I just have an idea of, oh, I like this song. I would imagine that this song with this footage would go really well together. That's like several hours of work. Uh, I could make a lot more of those videos, have a lot of fun with those. Um, Meta Vibes is a little bit of that because you, you pick a song and then you can generate one mid journey image and do some light animation on top, but it's not truly finding iconic footage from around the internet.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  And that feels like something you could do in Open Claw. You could do with a, with a, with a cowork product or, or Manus.

• 2:22:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause I mean, you can just use like FFmpeg and you can cut videos down from the terminal.

• 2:22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  They could do it without even using computer use technically.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  Well, the, the models could do that. Is that what you're saying?

• 2:22:16Speaker 02

  Well, I'm saying like Claude Code could do that, right?

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:18Speaker 02

  You can tell Claude Code to edit a file.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  And edit a video from this

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  And it should download FFmpeg, do it, but who knows how good it is yet? That, okay, that's our new benchmark. Uh, music video driven by this. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Um, and without further ado, we have Anna Patterson from Ceramic AI here.

• 2:22:47Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  How are you doing, Anna? Good to meet you.

• 2:22:50Speaker 02

  Great to meet you.

• 2:22:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, you too.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 2:22:52Speaker 09

  How are you guys? Yeah, are you guys having a good St. Patrick's Day?

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  I am. Yes, we're very.

• 2:22:58Jordi Hays?

  We're greened up.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  Yes, we have these bright green suits from a show we did on Black Friday about Shopify. And I thought certainly I will not be using that until next Black Friday, but here I am.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Well, happy St. Patty's Day to you. Since this is the first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:23:19Speaker 09

  Hi, I'm Anna Patterson. I'm a founder of Ceramic AI. I was a longtime Google engineer. I started in 2004 and I'm best known for building large search engines.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  That's amazing. So yeah, give me the pitch for Ceramic AI.

• 2:23:36Speaker 09

  So Ceramic brings the cost of search in line with the cost of inference. As you know, inference costs have been going down and down and actually inference is faster and faster. But search is $5 to $15 per 1,000 searches, but inference is maybe 50 cents per 1,000 searches. So the kind of analogy I like to use is tacos and salsa, right? Tacos is kind of the meat, the meal, and that's kind of what inference is. It's the thing that's really delivering intelligence to your application. But salsa kind of makes it better, right?

• 2:24:16Speaker 09

  But search is now the dominant cost in tacos and salsa. You're adding search, but it's $5 to $15 per 1,000 queries. So it's really kind of time to bring salsa in line with tacos. So Ceramic is 5 cents per 1,000 queries.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:24:38Jordi Hays?

  Right, so you're saying this historically, it was like you were getting a taco and it costs you $5, but then they were like, well, if you want salsa, it's going to cost you an extra like, you know, $500. And you're like, well, I don't, not sure I really want the salsa.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  Weird, weird.

• 2:24:53Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  So help me define, help me understand what search means, because search can mean over the internet that's already sort of baked into LLMs. It can mean web, active web search, like in a proprietary database or just the open web. How are you thinking about the surface area of search?

• 2:25:12Speaker 09

  Yes, so we do have a forty billion page web search. And that is the open web. And then we've built proprietary systems as well. So one of the things that we're announcing is this idea of supervised generation. That as the model is generating, it's double checking what it's saying with search. And it's also double checking with search, what else should I say to make a comprehensive topic? And so that way you can really enable new applications with ten X fewer hallucinations. But also make the whole product affordable and fast.

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so who, who do you sell? I, it sounds super valuable. Who do you sell this to? Is this gonna be maybe similar to kind of like the data labeling market? Where there's like five customers that like really matter and you wanna get all of them? Or are there a bunch of other applications that you wanna actually sell to vertical specific? You know, AI applications that can vend you in, in like kind of in line with their LLM products?

• 2:26:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think there are kind of two strategies there. You mentioned one of getting all the big players. That definitely would be nice. But we also have a self-serve, every agentic workflow. We have one startup, their agentic workflows do eleven hundred searches. So this, our search engine responds in fifty milliseconds. So it's both affordable and more real time than the other search engines. So we see a number of agentic workflows happening. But to your idea of a custom index or a custom application, we see that as well.

• 2:27:03Speaker 09

  Because let's say you're a pharmaceutical company or some banks are very privacy centric. They don't want their searches going out and they don't even want their searches to models going out. So they kind of host their own copy of a model. And here they'd host their own copy of search as well. So that they get their own proprietary environment for all their agentic flows inside their enterprise.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Talk about just how the open web is changing in the age of AI. I've seen some crazy stats about how much more of the internet Google bot sees because everyone has been indexing and been very friendly to Google for a very long time. Other publishers are getting more closed off. How easy is it to actually search the internet broadly these days?

• 2:27:54Speaker 09

  So the 40 billion pages that we have are available on the open web. We do not disobey, or I should say, we obey robots.txt. So we don't actually crawl new sources that have blocked us, but we are in active talks to make deals to them and to have a proprietary API that costs more, but also reflects back revenue to those proprietary sources.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Cool. Are you, is there any value in having, like, I've always been interested in the flip side of Google searches is Google Alerts, where the search is happening internally and then, and then the information's actually getting pushed to you. That product is like, probably like 0.0001% as important to Google as search, but it's always been interesting to me. Is that interesting to you? Is that relevant in the age of AI? Does anything change about that ratio going forward?

• 2:28:55Speaker 09

  Well, one of the interesting things is that inference, a lot of times with these MOE models, inference has a lot of spare compute because it's memory bound. And so with that, it means that it could be thinking. So as it's inferencing, it could be getting a stream of search results, searching all the time and actually bringing you, sort of like alerts, only the most interesting information or information that it doesn't think that you already know by looking at your history. So I think it's going to enable a lot of new applications.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Wildcard question. How long until we see ads in Gemini? There's been some reporting this week, obviously, Demis had come out and said, you know, why would we put ads in?

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  For the record, on this show, we are extremely pro ads.

• 2:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Extremely pro ads.

• 2:29:54John Coogan?

  We love it.

• 2:29:54Speaker 09

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:29:56Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I, we both expect ads to be in Gemini. I would say this year is my guess, but.

• 2:30:05Speaker 09

  That's probably been my guess as well, before the end of 26, yeah.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Cool. That gives me a lot of hope.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  We're gonna be very excited.

• 2:30:12Jordi Hays?

  And excitement.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Faith in humanity restored.

• 2:30:16Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's the story of the, the pink guitar on the wall there?

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:21Speaker 09

  Um, well, if you want to do something really humbling, learn an instrument from your children.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:30:28Speaker 09

  They're, they, um, they're absolutely brutal with telling you to practice, everything you're doing wrong.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:35Speaker 09

  And, uh, and so I kept borrowing my daughter's, um, electric guitar after she taught me acoustic guitar and so, uh, she decided to get me my own.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:30:45Speaker 09

  Because, um, she saw her guitar like laying on my couch and she said a guitar should be hanging on the wall and I said, I think I've been told to clean up my room by my child.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:30:58Speaker 09

  So my work here is done.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:31:00John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Excited to follow ceramic and, uh, we'll talk to you soon, Anna.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:08Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Speaking of ads, let me tell you about app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we have our final guest of the lightning round, Jake from Gecko Robotics. Jake, how you doing?

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Doing great.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time. Uh, I don't believe we've met, but I, I've heard about Gecko for a long time. I think Trey, uh, introduced me to it when I was at Founder's Fund, uh, but since this is the first time on the show, I'd love a little bit backstory, like how'd you get into the industry? How'd you start the company? And then we can kind of get up to speed on what's happening today.

• 2:31:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, well Trey's awesome and I'm so glad he originally spoke so highly of us. I'm sure. So I founded the company about 13 years ago out of a college dorm in western Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I was studying electrical engineering, really wanted to figure out how things like energy was created. And so I went to a power plant in Franklin City, Pennsylvania. For those history nerds out there, it was like that was where the first commercial oil rig was drilled and got to see a power plant, how it was made. And I dove in headfirst through this little manhole that I could barely fit through and got to see what a boiler was. And so that was like a football field sized room that was completely covered wall to wall with these steel tubes. And this whole job with this boiler was just to get really, really hot.

• 2:32:27Speaker 07

  And so, you know, shot water through it, got really hot. Anyway, this boiler kept on having failures. 30% of the year, it was shut down because of catastrophic failure. That was occurring because the pressure vessels would keep exploding. And the only way to stop it from exploding was a guy in a robe 100 feet up in the air, you know, trying to figure out like where the next explosion was going to happen. And that just wasn't working. And that guy actually died that year before doing the job of gathering data sets by hand in the real world. And so I was like, my gosh, like where is where is the tech innovation like for these guys that are making making sure that our homes stay heated? And, you know, just began to look more and more at just like how we understand the health of the built world. And also, what kind of technology exists for these sorts of heroes that are, you know, that are hidden behind the scenes, if you will, whether they're a poor engineer

• 2:33:11Speaker 07

  or they're a boiler, they're boiler engineer and folks that are just like helping us, helping us do all this stuff. And Silicon Valley, for the most part, forgot about them. And I decided to build a company that was specifically dedicated to helping these guys out.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, I'm imagining a big vertical tank, sort of like what you might see at a brewery with, but instead of filled with beer, it's water, it's boiling. Why not just fly a drone up and use video camera and, you know, just be close? Why did you choose this? Like, what, what decisions did you make technically? And why did you make those decisions?

• 2:33:46Speaker 07

  Basically, if you're diagnosing the health of built structures, whether it's a boiler, a pipeline, a bridge, whatever it is, side of a ship, you gotta actually get close to it, just like you would for a sonogram. So you use jelly, and then you use ultrasound to see inside of a belly, for the pregnancy example.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:01Speaker 07

  Same kind of idea. Use ultrasonics is one way of gathering information, data sets. In this case, you know, what you're seeing is some of the electromagnetics that we developed into the sensors. And the robots are just the vehicles by which we get sensors around places that are typically hard to reach.

• 2:34:13John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:34:14Speaker 07

  And then also localizing and seeing like where, you know, to track that year to year to year to understand how do you predict into the future. I mean, this idea of creating the Minority Report, you know, for the built world was kind of this idea of predicting, you know, what death or catastrophe is going to happen for like built structures before it did. And the pre-cocks, in this case, are these robots.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:30Speaker 07

  You know, but all the data is being collected and then like fed into the central source of truth, which is, it was a cantilever. And then we sell cantilever, you know, as our way of predicting and preventing catastrophic failures for, you know, the built world.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what's the shape of the business? It feels incredibly dual-use. I mean, we just saw a video of the robot crawling along, looked like an aircraft carrier or battleship. But I imagine that the oil and gas industry, the industrials industry, like there's huge demand for this. What's the mix of the business and what's, what are the best practices for working with both the government and private businesses?

• 2:35:04Speaker 07

  Yes, we started in the energy sector, in those power plants. Actually bootstrapped for three years and then was down a hundred bucks to the name.

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:35:12Speaker 07

  And I know, it was bad. I was like homeless, living with a best friend, sleeping on the floors.

• 2:35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:17Speaker 07

  Really roughing it. And, you know, I was out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Like, there's no VCs out here.

• 2:35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:22Speaker 07

  And so then, then before, I got an acquisition offer and then, you know, and then the folks over at YC in 2016 were just like, you're gonna build a huge trillion dollar company and like this is, you're having incredible success. Come out and do that.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:35:34Speaker 07

  And so I was like, I'm already poor. I wanted, this is an amazing business. I already know what the worst feels like, you know what I mean? So it's like, what could be worse than this? And so, you know, just decided to do that, got one to California. And yeah, we're in this YC batch, it's like really, you know, just like black sheep with a batch, you know, working in energy and robotics space in Pittsburgh, first time founder. So you know what I mean? It was just like, it was kind of, kind of wild and crazy. Then we came out like one of the top companies. But we started in the energy sector because that was what we knew.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  What was the actual first company? Because like, energy sector could be, you know,

• 2:36:06Speaker 07

  Power.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Oh, meeting with the CEO of Exxon? Or it could be like, the local guy who just, you know, wants to buy these as like a prosumer tool almost? Or something like, what was that actual deal like?

• 2:36:17Speaker 07

  It was, it was this group of power producers called IPPs.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:20Speaker 07

  Independent power producers. So these guys were just like, they actually don't have these like massive contracts utilities have, that they can just like rest and just like pass all their losses down to me and you to pay more bills if our like, if things just like blow up and don't work.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:32Speaker 07

  And so these, these folks like actually have to be making sure that they make stuff. And so in PA, there's a lot of them actually in the tri-state area. And so we actually get a lot of access, you know, so the first three years I was bootstrapping, I was every single day at a power plant for the most part, like trying to build the robot, like actually in the environment. And that was a really core thesis and core principle for the company. And we kind of still hold that today of build technology in the, in the real world, not in the labs. Actually, one of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley said, don't, don't leave, throw this in the lab, make it autonomous and then launch. I was like, that's fucking stupid, that's so bad, dumb idea. And today is like, you know, top three investor in the world, you know, saying what the company's worth, you know, like 10 plus billion. I was like, me and my co-founder.

• 2:37:10Jordi Hays?

  Just one-shot it. Don't, don't iterate, don't, don't, don't pursue a path of trial and error, just one-shot it in the lab.

• 2:37:18Speaker 07

  So, so anyway, so Power Man, it was like, we, I moved back to Pittsburgh because it was close to these customers. And so that was like the core, the core ethos of the company was build tech, you know, for the people in the environment.

• 2:37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:29Speaker 07

  And so that's, that led us to oil and gas. Then next, we could apply the same kind of technology, diagnose the health of structures that make the oil and gas assets go. And then I was mining and metal, metal manufacturing. And then I began to get into things like building. And manufacturing for building ships or submarines, injecting the same kind of tech and robotics and software, you know, there because we were one of the, we have the most data about the health of and the material science of the world. And so applying it, you know, for actually building and welding and then then the Navy side, you know, what we were doing there is helping to achieve readiness. Eighty percent readiness is the Secretary of Finance's objective. And, you know, right now it's about, you know, two out of five ships are stuck in dry dock somewhere. That's a global issue.

• 2:38:13Speaker 07

  And so our technology allows for us to be able to make up that difference by getting as so much information, you know, in some cases, two to, you know, two, three, four months faster to be able to get these ships out of dry dock in time. And then begin to plan it for the future. It's just like idea of if you always had a living, breathing, understanding of the health of these, these sorts of assets. My goodness, like maybe you'd never have to shut down. You know, that's, that's the thing that I'm trying to build. And, you know, these, you can see now like some really large energy companies, like the ones that we work with, are beginning to adopt this like, you know, the data doesn't exist. In order for the data to be able to drive AI models to actually be impactful, we actually have to go out and gather information and data sets. And oh, by the way, maybe one day, maybe not into the distant future,

• 2:38:54Speaker 07

  you can actually begin to augment these, you know, these very commoditized sectors and industries that are very capital intensive, you know, with robotics native, AI native approaches and operating systems that make commoditized industries less and less commoditized. And so that's the kind of vision that we're trying to build, you know, being the company that's, you know, that's very pragmatic and its results and, you know, aren't just promising in five or 10 years all this impact, but like actually delivering the thing today, you know?

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  Where are you, are you, I'm assuming the same kind of VC that told you to just one shot the product in the lab, make it autonomous and then go to market would also ask you, are you doing anything in data centers? Can you, can you get any, are there any tailwinds there? I can imagine, I can imagine one of your robots just crawling around a data center. But what are you seeing on that front?

• 2:39:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, it's a good question. You know, what ended up happening was we ended up really putting a lot of effort and energy into customers where when things weren't working, it was extremely painful and expensive. You know, so think of oil and gas when you're down for a day, it could be thirty million bucks you're losing, or if you're down, you know, if your ship isn't patrolling, you know, the certain places in the Pacific or Atlantic, you know, that's really expensive and harmful, too. So that's where we focus. But what's happening now is like, all the attention on AI infrastructure is actually put a lot of attention on how efficient can you run your power plants, in this case, a lot of natural gas. And then also, how reliable are those assets? And also, the assets that were depreciated, not invested in for ten, twenty, thirty years because banks wouldn't fund continuation of, you know, putting capital into coal facilities or even natural

• 2:40:28Speaker 07

  gas facilities because of these carbon, these carbon strangleholds on these companies. It ended up creating this really interesting opportunity for companies that are really good at understanding the health and the value of assets and can convert them into something really much more valuable, something that we're taking a very close look at. So anyway, power and the ability to make a power plant run more efficiently and also more reliably is core competency of Gecko for a long time. And so we're putting, you know, a lot of efforts into that. You'll have a big launch, you know, in the, in the middle of, for the 250th anniversary and coming out on July 4th on the power production side. So it's, you know, we've got something that's, you know, if we pull off what our, what our, you

• 2:41:09Speaker 07

  know, six or so trials have proved, we might be able to, in the thermal fleet, be able to increase by fifteen to twenty gigawatts, the amount of power in the US without even building a new, a new power plant. Whoa. It's this kind of efficiency, man, that is possible. No. Yeah, it's all right. You said thirty to fifty gigawatts. We have seventy-one million dollar. I know, let's hit the gong. Let's freaking go. Where's the mallet?

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  That's a big number.

• 2:41:40Speaker 07

  Hit hard. Oh my god, I feel the vibrations over here.

• 2:41:44Jordi Hays?

  I know, we're feeling it. I wish, I wish you were here.

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  For, for a much dumber question. How, how do you actually stick a robot to the, to a vertical surface? I mean Gecko, I imagine suckers, but are magnets involved? Like, I imagine that there's some surfaces where a suction cup won't work. Because maybe it's like stuck out or something like. Do you have multiple tools in your toolbox? Like, talk me through that.

• 2:42:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, good question. Well, I really was desiring to use nano fibers, just like a Gecko we use. Unfortunately, we can't live up to the, to the biology. And so we, we actually use.

• 2:42:18Jordi Hays?

  Why not just get hundreds of Gecko, actual Geckos?

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:23Speaker 07

  A chariot of Geckos?

• 2:42:24Jordi Hays?

  It's a biotech company, actually.

• 2:42:25Speaker 07

  I actually, that's a great idea.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  So you use, so you use rare earth magnets, is that right?

• 2:42:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we put them in a, in a hallbacher egg instead of wheels to optimize, you know, pull force. So magnetic force into the, typically like most of our infrastructure is.

• 2:42:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:38Speaker 07

  Is carbon steel, so it's magnetic. If it's not, if it's concrete or if it's over stainless, then we'll use. The best adhesion is actually suction for non-ferrous materials. Like, you were right.

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:42:48Speaker 07

  So it's actually just like creating a really great, a really, a really great.

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  Like a vacuum.

• 2:42:53Speaker 07

  Vacuum, yeah. And, and so that can actually.

• 2:42:56John Coogan?

  So you have a little air pump that's sucking in air and, and creating that like.

• 2:42:59Speaker 07

  Little, yeah, literally just a Dyson vacuum, like, you know, head. And, and then you create like a nice chamber, you know, for, for, you know, for you to be able to stick. Unfortunately, it's like, it's not great for dusty environments, but like, you know, you can. So, so it's like, it's less applicable, but also there's less, less cases. Like, so it's for the food and beverage space, a lot of stainless steel. And so there's, there's not much dust there either, and so you can actually apply tools there.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 2:43:22Speaker 07

  But it's the same kind of concept too, which is like, you don't want to crack. You don't want a failure to occur.

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  And you don't want to damage the material that you're inspecting with some crazy, you know, rock climbing shoe with spikes on it. You're not going to be ice climbing up the side of something that's gonna.

• 2:43:34Speaker 07

  Totally. So actually, funny, a really, a really like geeky, cool, like thing that we built for the Navy was, you typically have, like, you know, when, when Maverick lands his, like, fighter jet onto the plane, onto the, onto the aircraft carrier, he's landing on this, like, um, um, this, this coating, this non-skin is what it's called, it's like really rough and grainy. You have to actually remove all that stuff every like three years or so to be able to evaluate how healthy, you know, is the platform, is the flight deck itself.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  Cause there might be a crack underneath that and you gotta take all that off. Got it.

• 2:44:03Speaker 07

  Totally. And so just to even know like, you know, how healthy the structure is underneath it.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:07Speaker 07

  So we've developed technology that actually, you know, uses electromagnetics to excite the surface. You can actually measure how healthy things are underneath the, uh, the non-skid.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:17Speaker 07

  You know, it's like things like this where you're just like, you just remove this like, you know, this, this orthodox way of thinking about how do you figure out like what's wrong, what to fix, how much budget to put to use? And where does the supply chain, um, you know, how's the supply chain meet my need in terms of what, what things I need to fix? And get the ship, you know, back, back patrolling and deterred conflict.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:34Speaker 07

  It's like this kind of stuff that we, we, you know, have just like built, you know, such an expertise and now models around, you know, uh, uh, and sharing that we get all this information, data set. So it really is like, you know, it's going from like a three to four month process to, to now click a button and you know exactly like where to make all the repairs and, and the next time to do it, you know, you, you spend a lot less time in, in the, in the, in the dry dock and you should do this stuff more and more, just like as this, as this like, you know, patrolling and on duty. So like robots, you know, specialized robots that can be like on these ships. That's like, that's the, that's what we want to work towards.

• 2:45:06John Coogan?

  In the, in the basic example of like, there's a boiler, the Gecko robot climbs up, finds the crack, let's say, I don't know exactly what happens, but,

• 2:45:14Speaker 07

  Erosion, corrosion.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  Erosion, corrosion. Are you thinking about an act two where you're actually doing repair as well? Are you already doing repair or is that something where it's like, oh, that's a two, uh, that, that's a big technological challenge?

• 2:45:27Speaker 07

  It's a great question and, and it's something we're working on right now on the manufacturing side. But I think the key was, was the first idea was like, what if you could own the health data of the world's most critical piece of infrastructure?

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:36Speaker 07

  That, that'd be cool. That seems like a pretty interesting, you know, thing to do. And then, you know, then like you begin to get into, if you can understand the health of things, then you begin, you know, then like you can just pull in existing information, time series data sets. Like these are kind of things that we pull in now. And so, you know, if you're a power, if you're a power plant or you're a refinery and you want to, you want to really capitalize on the fact that, you know, oil, oil barrels per day is a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks right now. And so you want to maybe increase production. Well, you don't know if you can. This is where like the consultant with software and AI companies really have a hard time. It's because you don't know if you push the asset, will it like break down and not work and explode? So that's where the missing data set that never existed for that atoms to bits side of the robots allows for us to be able to make these operational changes now.

• 2:46:21Speaker 07

  And which is a lot more valuable than actually fixing the problem right then and there. So we're going after these big, these big like value propositions. And if you think about the ability to run functional, uh, uh, finite, uh, uh, element analyses. So like these like Ansys type of like, you know, uh, models. Like these are sorts of things that Gekko is working on because we have this unfair data advantage that we've been collecting for 13 years on, you know, half a million assets now inside a cantilever. And so

• 2:46:47Speaker 07

  So what we're trying to get to, man, is like, you're, you're totally right in like where the, where to go. Like you want to find the problem, fix it right then and there. Using these tools. And so you want to build towards that, but you know, you want to be really smart on like the best techniques, the best kinds of approaches and ways to fix things and solve the most valuable thing first. Then, you know, keep on solving more problems that your customers offer you. But man, I think the future is really going to be, it's going to be interesting because these like capital intensive industries, you know, that can adopt technology like we're talking about here really, really quickly are going to be so unfairly advantaged. And this is like where, and we're, we're like in those rooms, creating the strategies, you know, for the top, you know, top 10, top 15, like, you know, large oil and gas companies in the world, helping them with like, how do we make and optimize this future?

• 2:47:31Speaker 07

  Because, you know, the future is going to really belong to folks that can figure out how to, you know, run the stuff unfairly.

• 2:47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, the chat absolutely loves you.

• 2:47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:41Jordi Hays?

  So come back soon. This was really, this was really fun. Congrats, congrats to the whole team on the new contract. And I'm so glad you started this company 14 years ago. You're not coming on, uh, just pitching, pitching the concept, but you've actually done the, the heavy lifting to figure this stuff out and, and, uh, yeah, the opportunity, uh, the scale of it is just insane.

• 2:48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:03Speaker 07

  Thanks. I appreciate it. Nice to you.

• 2:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang, Jake.

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  Thank you. Happy St. Patrick's Day. We'll talk to you soon and I will tell everyone about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Uh, we have some good news. For just 3.9 million dollars, you can fly private to every race, every, every F1 race on the calendar this year. It's called the ultimate experience. All 24 races, 3,911,100 dollars per person. So don't think, oh, they're flying me. I'll just have my buddies tag along. You're going to have to put your buddies in a really large suitcase.

• 2:48:44Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because you, for some people, they would have to pay them 3, 3.9 million dollars to go to all 24 races. Cause, cause it's not just, if you're really doing this on a fixed schedule, it's like at least four days a week, 20, 24 times a year.

• 2:49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  And this feels like a full-time job.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Also.

• 2:49:05Jordi Hays?

  There's some AI researchers out there that would just say like, I can make.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's a wrinkle here. They, they, they're saying, hey, flat price for private jet to all the races. And they're like, well, like even if you're based in Paris, like there's a race over there, you know, you're based in Miami, there's a flight over there. They haven't considered the fact that if I live off-grid in Alaska, it's going to cost them 10 million dollars to flies the, the private jet to some remote landing strip that I've constructed outside of Nome, Alaska.

• 2:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is there, is there like a SaaS company that could take advantage of this? Basically being like, we know we've got a bunch of buyers here. We're going to take our top rep.

• 2:49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:44Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to have him jet set around the world, 24 strike missions.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:49Jordi Hays?

  Make it math out.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  If you're selling bigger deals.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  Spend it in a conference room, pitch in doing demos the whole weekend.

• 2:49:56Jordi Hays?

  The whole time.

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:57Jordi Hays?

  Demos and the paddock.

• 2:49:57John Coogan?

  And then hop back on the jet. Somehow I think that if you price these flights individually, it would be cheaper. But it is very funny.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Not by much, you're talking about going, it depends on the jet.

• 2:50:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of, it's a lot of travel, a lot of miles, a lot of hours. But $4 million is a lot of money and I think it gets you a lot of flights.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  This, this 20, going to all 24 races, if you're not a driver or working, does not sound fun.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Also, they didn't, they just said private jet travel between every race on the calendar. They didn't tell you how many other people are on this private jet.

• 2:50:31Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Imagine you hop on and then there's 17 stops while they pick up other people.

• 2:50:35Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, standing room only.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of a Southwest vibe.

• 2:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:39John Coogan?

  You know?

• 2:50:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:40John Coogan?

  Anything could happen, anything could happen. But we'll let you decide whether or not you want to spend $3.9 million to fly private to every F1 race on the calendar. If you do, let us know, give us a review, send us a message. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com, then email us when we email you the newsletter and tell us how the private jet experience was, the ultimate experience.

• 2:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Last but not least, the new Roadster is apparently going to be unveiled next month.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully.

• 2:51:09John Coogan?

  If Elon puts hopefully in a tweet, I'm very worried.

• 2:51:12Jordi Hays?

  It will be, it will be a banger next level.

• 2:51:14John Coogan?

  I'm very excited. And Travis Kalanick said, "When I've run into people who are in the know, I inquire, they tell me nothing, but their eyebrows raise and their eyes widen in a way that can only mean something of sorcery and magic is coming. Hopefully it's a flying car." And I hope that it is revealed in April. He should, he should unveil it in April 1st, everyone would be so confused, it'd be very funny. If not, I can wait till May. I can wait till May, but I'm, I'm very, I'm very excited for the next Roadster. Expectations are incredibly high, there have been so many electric supercars, a lot of depreciation, not a lot that have filled that like special territory. Even the electric sports cars have not done well, the Boxer.

• 2:51:56Jordi Hays?

  My sense is like, it's not going to be like a true supercar.

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:00Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be a Turbo S, the kind of thing that people are going to just daily.

• 2:52:03John Coogan?

  Daily, okay.

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  And it's super fast.

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:05Jordi Hays?

  It's fun.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  But it probably, I mean, I would expect that it's.

• 2:52:09Jordi Hays?

  Keep like with low miles, because you expect it to appreciate.

• 2:52:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I would basically expect like a Remozz Navara. Like which is like a $2 million car, but at like a $200,000 price point. Everyone's like, it goes 0 to 60 in 1.6 seconds or something like that. Like this, it's going to have some headline stat that everyone debates and is like, oh, well, technically it wasn't this, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it will be like shocking in its own way, and I'm sure people will have a lot of fun with it. So excited to track that story. Well, thank you for tuning in to TVPN today. We will see you tomorrow.

• 2:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Go have.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  The best.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Maybe have a Guinness.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  Five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:52:45Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  Why don't you throw that flashbang? Boing flashbang. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:52:50Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye.