Davos Prints Cash, Private Credit Exits, Capital One Acquires Brex | Cathie Wood, Keller Cliffton, Jake Cooper, Joe Weisenthal, Coldhealing, Pedro Franceschi, Delian Asparouhov

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:40) - How Davos Makes Half a Billion in Revenue (10:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (31:18) - Private-Credit Investors Cash Out (34:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (45:08) - Apple to Rebuild Siri (59:51) - Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, CEO and co-founder of Zipline, announced the company's recent $600 million funding round, elevating its valuation to $7.6 billion, and plans to expand autonomous delivery services to Houston and Phoenix in early 2026. He highlighted Zipline's rapid growth, with U. S. deliveries increasing approximately 15% week over week for the past seven months, and the company's milestone of surpassing two million commercial deliveries. Cliffton also discussed the development of Zipline's next-generation aircraft, EV3, which offers significant performance improvements at half the cost, and emphasized the company's commitment to integrating autonomous logistics into everyday life across diverse climates and urban environments. (01:17:10) - Jake Cooper, CEO of Railway, a software deployment platform, discusses the company's recent $100 million funding round aimed at building data centers and simplifying software development. He highlights the evolving role of developers, emphasizing that advancements are enabling a broader range of individuals, including designers and managers, to ship code efficiently. Cooper also shares insights on internal organizational changes, noting that enhanced tools have significantly accelerated project development, leading to what he terms "Agent Speed" within the company. (01:33:31) - Joe Weisenthal is an American journalist and podcaster, serving as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands and co-hosting the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, he discusses Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Carney declared the old world order is "not coming back" and emphasized that "middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu." Weisenthal also explores China's economic strategies, noting their ambition to move beyond being the world's factory by increasing domestic consumption and addressing global concerns about their manufacturing dominance. (02:01:47) - Coldhealing is a TikTok anthropologist and self-described "dark statistician" based in New York City. In the conversation, he discusses his approach to curating and sharing emerging internet culture, particularly on TikTok, emphasizing the importance of documenting online trends that traditional institutions may overlook. He also reflects on the evolution of "Day in the Life" videos, noting a shift from aspirational portrayals to more mundane representations, and shares his experiences with generative AI content, observing its growing presence on platforms like Instagram Reels and its varying reception among audiences. (02:23:37) - Capital One Goes Big on Brex (02:27:30) - Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Invest, is renowned for her focus on disruptive innovation in sectors like AI, robotics, and blockchain. In the conversation, she emphasizes AI as a major catalyst for innovation, discusses ARK's unique research approach centered on converging technologies, and highlights the importance of proactive AI integration for enterprises to remain competitive. (03:03:29) - Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic at The New York Times and co-host of the "Popcast" podcast, discusses the integration of AI in music production, noting its increasing use in songwriting and vocal processing. He draws parallels to historical technological shifts in music, such as Bob Dylan's transition to electric guitar and the adoption of Auto-Tune, suggesting that initial resistance to AI may diminish over time. Caramanica also expresses concern that AI-generated music could lead to more passive listening habits, as audiences might become less attentive to the authenticity and creativity of the music they consume. (03:18:21) - Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex, announced a historic $5.15 billion merger between Brex and Capital One, highlighting the synergy between Brex's innovative financial services platform and Capital One's extensive scale and resources. He emphasized that the partnership aims to accelerate growth and product development, while maintaining Brex's operational independence to continue delivering cutting-edge solutions to businesses. Franceschi also expressed his commitment to leading Brex through this new phase, underscoring the shared vision and ambition of both founder-led companies. (03:29:09) - Delian Asparouhov, a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder of Varda Space Industries, discusses the cultural differences between Ramp and Brex, emphasizing how early company decisions shape long-term focus and success. He highlights Ramp's commitment to saving customers time and money through product innovation, contrasting it with Brex's initial emphasis on rapid market expansion. Asparouhov also underscores the importance of maintaining focus to build a monopoly, noting that the current market conditions present Ramp with a unique opportunity to dominate the enterprise corporate spend sector. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Okta - https://www.okta.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today's Thursday, January 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN trough, the temple of technology, the trough of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. Thank you again to R. Karazian for coming on the show yesterday, breaking it down for us. That was a lot of fun.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  And thank you to Mark Benioff.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Benioff. We have acquired a one of one. Truly, he says aloha.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  One of one, master puppets, record, signed, signed by Hawaii resident.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  He was keeping us guessing. When we had him on the show, we were like, can you send that to us? And he was like, no way.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  It's incredible. Look at this thing. Look at this thing. This is going in the business Hall of Fame.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Museum of Business of TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Let's pull up the linear run of show. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and you should be too. We're going to take you through the story, talk about Davos, talk about a whole bunch of news in the timeline. Then we have Keller from ZipLine coming on, Jake from Railway. Joe Weisenthal is returning.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  We're very excited to get a whole bunch of.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look at, look at the range here today.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  We're going with cold healing, the Exanon is coming on.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Kathy Wood.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Kathy Woods.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  John Karamica.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  John is coming on.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Brother Joe.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Time. So.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Jake announcing a big round.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  First, Davos is winding down. We're finally getting like the final, you know, surprise guest. Elon is the big one.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Elon had to come in.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  He had to come in.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Last buzzer beater, jester max.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  How do you think that works? Like, how do you think that Elon, do you think he just has like an open invite and then he makes the call like a few hours before and just says, oh, it's going well, I'll be there? And then they just throw him on? Or do you think he, he said, he said yes a week ago and then?

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  I think Elon, I think Elon calls up J Cal.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Says, hey, save me a seat.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Save me a seat.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  And then they figured out from there.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think when you're tracking to be the world's first teen air.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  You got, you got an opening.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  They just have a stage set up.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Say come.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Apparently, the, the, the, the, the events go really, really long. Some of the interviews go at 10 p.m. Some start. It's like a full, full tilt a- across multiple, uh, multiple event spaces. There's different houses. All in was doing something at the Freedom House. Uh, they had a really cool interview with Satya Nadella that I watched. Tech was out in full force, and that's what I wrote about today in the TBPN newsletter. Uh, before we go through a little bit of this, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So, um, fun fact, Davos makes half a billion dollars a year in revenue. Uh, you think of, yes, Tyler's clapping. It's good news. Um, it, it's a nonprofit, an NGO, a think tank.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  But you think of what I'm thinking, Jordy? For-profit conversion.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Let's make it happen.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Let's make it happen. Um, but, uh, you know, uh, it's a, you know, old, old organization. Klaus Schwab, who you probably know as the face of it, he, he was the founder. He started the, he started Davos in, uh, 1971, the World Economic Forum. It was called.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  And he was pushed out last year.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it's been on the ropes. I, my thesis is that Davos is back. It was a really good year. I think tech is going to double down on this. Um, but the first decade, it just sounded like it was an amazing party. Uh, one person in 1981 told Time Magazine that the forum offers a delightful vacation on the expense account. What a great, what a great line. Time was really doing great reporting. Um, also Time owned by Marc Benioff, friend of the show. So it's been a rough decade for Davos. Liz Hoffman teased the concept of an inverse Davos index in Semaphore, which I thought was kind of sort of funny. And she sort of wrapped up a few times when the consensus at Davos wound up being like woefully wrong. And so she went through a few things. First was that, uh, everyone got together at Davos.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  There was an economist who went on stage in 2008 and said, it is inconceivable, repeat, inconceivable, to get a world recession. It's like the one thing, like not mincing words, not hedging at all, just like, my prediction is that we will never see a world recession. And then, of course, we did. Um, the, the, the Davos crew, they also missed Brexit and Ma- and the rise of MAGA. And then in 2020, they had a forum that Davos in 2020, it's always in January in 2020, it was January 21st to 24th. And there was really no talk of a global pandemic or being worried

• 4:39John Coogan?

  about that. There was one panel about about sort of risks from antibiotics or something, but they certainly weren't talking about the coronavirus. And just a week later, Bology posted that famous going viral post on January 30th, saying like, hey, I'm tracking this. I've been tracking this for a while. And this seems really serious. And a lot of people in tech were already tracking it. So there was this disconnect between like, like you go to Davos and you hear like, the number one thing this year is the metaverse. Apparently, they did a big metaverse push. And then the year plays out and it's a wildly different story. I personally stand behind the idea of Davos in the metaverse. I would love a the all of the global elites coming together to create the ultimate VR simulator.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  Has anybody built the World Economic Forum in Roblox?

• 5:25John Coogan?

  They should.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Or Minecraft, something like that, you know, one to one replica?

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would be good. There's been a bunch of interesting like behind the scenes videos because obviously, the big, the big tent pole media groups Bloomberg is there, CNBC is there. But then there's also a few just folks I follow on Instagram who went and are doing sort of walk and talk vlogs. And that honestly gives you more of like the lay of the land, like what it's like getting around. Pretty interesting. But before I continue, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it seems like there may be moving the internet. I certainly wouldn't say the internet has forgotten about the iconic line, you'll own nothing and be happy. But I haven't seen it so much over the last week. A lot more focus on.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. That line was all about just financialization and was really

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  I like to think it was about enterprise software.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. We're moving away from box software.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  To SaaS.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna own nothing.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't own this particular version of TurboPuffer. You pay for consumption.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  That's what it was about, anyway. TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, tenx cheaper and extremely scalable. So, this feels like, this year feels like a big turnaround. Dario Amade, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, all their interviews have been going viral on the timeline. In California, there's been a bunch of articles written about what they've said at Davos and there isn't, there hasn't necessarily been a huge reversal in the positions of these tech leaders. They're saying things that they've been saying for a year or two, sometimes more, but there's some feeling, like when you say a line like, "We could have

• 7:20John Coogan?

  20% unemployment in two years," it just sounds different when you say it directly to a bunch of world leaders, a bunch of global elites, a bunch of international executives, than when you say it on a tech podcast that's a little more insider-y, a little more inside baseball. So, it just, it just hits different. And then it's also an interesting reflection to hear, like, the Satya Nadella all-in interview had, had an interesting, like, almost like high-low aspect to it, where Satya was talking about very specific details of copilot implementation, what the future of the workstation could look like, whether people will be running, you know, sidecar.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  He's a product guy.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, so he's going in a lot of detail there. And then he's also zooming out and reiterating what he told other business leaders just about the general wave of AI adoption that's still pretty early on the global stage. And so it's felt like there's two different conferences going on. We've read this from a this take from a couple of different people where tech leaders are talking about research progress, employment impacts, sovereign AI data center build outs, and then the politicians are talking about Greenland, Venezuela and trade deals. But even though there's like this two, this bifurcated vibe going on, it still feels like a win-win because the tech industry is getting their messages into the global stage now where in in an

• 8:45John Coogan?

  audience that will ultimately determine how quickly this technology rolls out and how it will be regulated. And I imagine that the tech industry is driving a lot of growth for the World Economic Forum because every company, you've seen the Palantir House, there's a lot of different tech companies that have really gone big on sponsorship, gone big on their presence, and I imagine this will get bigger. OpenAI was sort of notably notably absent, or not absent, but didn't didn't take over the stage. And you would imagine that next year, given the vibes around this one, that there will be more of a presence from basically all the big tech companies.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had a we had an opportunity to have a presence there and and we didn't think that it fully made sense for this year, just given historical.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Travel and stuff.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, travel was a big factor, but.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I did like the fact that Demis and Dario presented this like friendly and cooperative united front for what American AI progress looks like. It was particularly in stark contrast to last week when there was this incredibly messy AI drama, the opposite of cooperation between Elon and Sam Altman. And so last week, we were like, oh, no one

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  Or between thinking machines and.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  With the talent mix up.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  That's been a big drama story. And and then you see you see Demis and Dario sort of hanging out, talking about how how friendly they are and how much they want to work together. And it feels a little bit like faith and humanity restored. It's very, it really captures the spirit of this like global cooperation, which I think is good.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  And so I think Davos is back. I think it's time to ski and congratulations to everyone that's been having fun and making waves in Davos. There's a whole bunch of videos that we should go through. First, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Did you want to watch this clip from Midnight Capital? Jensen

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Hold it up.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Wong is Midnight Capital. He's given us some instructions. He says, or they say, listen to this, then watch the second video.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  And this host over at Fox Business has given us a run for our money in the costume department.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Maria Bartiromo knows how to dress. This is fantastic outfit. Let's play Jensen Wong in Davos.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Is the space getting more competitive for you today? Our space is incredibly competitive. I've got a lot of competitors. It's hard to imagine. Google's been here for a while and they're excellent AI company for a very long time and they're incredible company. But we have competition from all sides. And? Well, we just have to run fast, you know. Nvidia is the only You're doing and trying to compete.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  And then Midnight Capital says, watch the second

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  You know a company has an insane monopoly if they're trying to convince you that

• 11:34John Coogan?

  I think that's where we're going with this. You're giving away the punchline. Play the TL clip at the London School of Economics.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I didn't even know we had a

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Scroll down. It's right here. This is the whole one-two punch that Midnight Capital's serving up for us. Here we go.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them and the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have them. And so it gets kind of confusing. If you're Google, you will never say that you're a search engine. You will say you're a technology company, which and technology is this vast, incredibly competitive space. If you're in a completely competitive business, let's say you're trying to open a restaurant in London and you will say, well, this is totally different from any other restaurant. It will be the only British Nepalese fusion cuisine within a five-block radius of the LSE. The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them and the people who don't have monopolies

• 12:23John Coogan?

  This is a very, very good point.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  I studied. I studied.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jensen studied and said, you know what, I'm incredible. It's incredibly competitive. Of course, he's also going through an acquisition with Grok. And it's it seems like the Grok deal will go through, but

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  It's like I have so much competition, I had to spend $20 billion on a team.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And yeah, please define my market as also including CPU and also including ASICs and also including like everything else that could possibly compete with Nvidia.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Journal had a good summary of kind of some of Jensen's points of view.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, what'd he say?

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  At Indavos, Nvidia CEO says AI needs more investment in defiance of bubble fears.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Jensen called for higher investments to further spread the technology across developed and emerging economies. Speaking at the Indavos, Huang described AI as a five-layer cake consisting of energy chips, cloud infrastructure, models and application. He said AI's applications, how the technology is used in a specific industry is the most critical layer of that cake as it is where the economic benefits lie. Sectors like energy or semis, both key to developing and harnessing the technology are already growing thanks to AI. But he said more investments are needed to ensure that benefits of the technology spread to more industries across both developed and emerging economies. The AI bubble comes about because the investments are large and the investments are large because we have to build the infrastructure

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  necessary for all of the AI layers. I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary and everybody ought to get involved.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  It's open for business, folks.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the on the topic of just just do we need more investment, there was an interesting detail in the TSMC earnings this this week that Ben Thompson highlighted. Basically, TSMC, they had this they had this earnings call and they announced the planned capital expenditure of $52 billion to $56 billion, up 27 to 37% from last year. And there was and there was some pushback from an analyst. So I'm not sure that coming in at the top of the predicted range qualifies as, quote, "higher level of capex spending." An analyst

• 14:39John Coogan?

  pushed CEO C.C. Way on this point, noting that TSMC's revenue has grown 50% since 2022, but capex has only grown 10%. There weren't many answers, there weren't too many answers from TSMC about this, which is understandable, given that they won't announce next year's CapEx numbers until next quarter. And so Ben is sort of pointing out that TSMC is potentially the biggest bottleneck. TSMC has reiterated this, that we're not bottlenecked on energy, we're bottlenecked on chip production, we're going to scale up, but at the same time, they don't want to be caught holding the bag. So Ben Thompson says, "The implication of cloud service providers showing huge financial gains from AI now, combined with the admission that there is insufficient supply of silicon,

• 15:23John Coogan?

  is that foregone revenue isn't a theoretical risk, it's being foregone right now." And you've heard this from all the labs, if we had more chips, we could actually deliver more services, charge more, make more money. We are bottlenecked on compute. And yet, at the same time, notice that Wei led his answer, admitting to his fear. TSMC doesn't want to get stuck holding the bag, spending billions of dollars for demand that might disappear. This is a legitimate concern for TSMC, but it's a big problem for TSMC's customers. The only way they're going to overcome that fear is by helping bring competition to bear, such that TSMC worries more about losing business than they do about investing too much. And so who will be the competition?

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Maybe it's Intel, maybe Samsung, there's a number of other foundries that could potentially ramp up and put the screws to TSMC. But the Nvidia TPU, the, not Grok, but Cerebrus, and a few other of the chipmakers are all sort of still constrained by TSMC. And so there's still some worry that if we don't expand just raw fab capacity, that that will be a bottleneck for AI. But anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses. Let's go to, who is this?

• 16:46John Coogan?

  We have a clip here from, well, Philip Johnson's having fun at Davos, but before we do that, let's head over to David Phillips. "Me defending my vibe-coded CRM I made in one shot with GPT-4O." Sometimes it's too slow, for sure, and needs to be reformed, for sure.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  But which is predictable, loyal. Sometimes.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  You're very loyal.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  He's on a.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  That's a great speech.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  He is on one right now.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, what was the story behind the glasses? Somebody, I saw some meme that I think he suffered an injury or something. And some people would say do an eye patch, but he went with the sunglasses.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic. Like a rock star.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, he looks like a rock star. Elon Musk has, has hit the timeline on Davos.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  I love how, I love how Philip is just like.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  In the front row of.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  With his phone camera.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  It's incredible, incredible citizen journalism here. Let's play this clip from Elon Musk at Davos. What's he saying? Why did he go to Davos? What is his message? What is he going to talk about?

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Is that the lowest cost placed to put AI will be space. And that'll be true within two years, maybe three, three at the latest.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  So looking 10 or 20 years out, how would you describe success?

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Three at the latest.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Three at the latest. That's an aggressive timeline.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  For that. Blue Origin launched satellite internet to rival SpaceX and specifically to rival Starlink. Bezos backed Blue Origin is launching a satellite network for enterprise data center and government customers. Terrawave, the company, the company aims to begin deploying the first of 5,408 satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027. So a little over, a little under two years. The service will compete with Starlink and it will also compete with Amazon operated Leo, which is interesting. I guess they'll maybe work together at some point. The network called Terrawave is targeted for enterprise data center and government users. The company said it will provide speeds of up to six terabits per second from satellites

• 18:54John Coogan?

  positioned in Leo and medium earth orbit, regions of space that are between 100 miles and 21,000 miles from earth's surface. Blue Origin says it expects deploying the constellation in the fourth quarter of 2027. Bezos is entering an increasingly crowded satellite internet market. That's currently dominated by Starlink. Starlink has more than 9,000 satellites in orbit and roughly nine million customers. Amazon, which Bezos founded in 1994, is also ramped up its own offering. That service recently rebranded from Project Copier to Leo. The company has set up 180 satellites since last April through a series of rocket launches handled by partners such as ULA and actually SpaceX. Several future deployments are expected to be handled by Blue Origin. Amazon aims to build a constellation of

• 19:39John Coogan?

  3,236 low earth satellites that will serve business, governments, and consumers. Last November, the company opened up an enterprise preview to select users ahead of a broader commercial launch. Bezos predicted in 2024 that Blue Origin would one day be a bigger company than Amazon. That's a wild prediction. He founded Blue Origin in 2000, and Dave Limb, Amazon's former device boss, serves as CEO. Quote, "I think it's going to be the best business I've ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while." He said a deal, Buck, in 2024. Blue Origin is primarily a rocket launch company, flying tourists and research to the edge of space on short trips. Last January, the startup notched

• 20:20John Coogan?

  a major milestone when it successfully launched its towering New Glenn rocket for the first time, though it was unable to return the rocket booster back to a barge for reuse. They nailed the landing of the New Glenn rocket last November, following a successful launch of a pair of NASA spacecrafts. So, good progress over there at Blue Origin.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do some more research on the Chinese Starlink equivalents. They have Guo Wang, which is their state-led effort, trying to get to 13,000 satellites by 2030. Currently, they have around 150. And then there's Qianfan, which currently has around 100, also trying to get, they're trying to get to 15,000 by 2030, and they're more commercial-focused. So, interesting to track.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  And you would, you would think that the Blue Origin news, the news that Starlink has a second competitor, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, major players, well, what does that do for AST Space Mobile? The stock is up 14% today and it's up 24% over the last five days, 35% over the last month.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  AST Space Mobile can't keep going, there's no way.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  Over the last six months. It's at all time highs. It is at all time highs and the market cap is now $42 billion. I have some friends who are obsessed with AST Space Mobile and fascinating run. They keep, they keep running. Anyway, moving on. Elon also gave some timelines for Optimus humanoid robots at the World Economic Forum. He said, "By the end of next year, we will be selling humanoid robots to the public, to the public, not just enterprises. You're going to be able to just buy one of these the way you buy a Cybertruck or a Model S Plaid or anything else." That is a very, very aggressive timeline, but he does, he has been buying the parts to actually manufacture them.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  And, you know, what is selling to the public mean? Does it mean a thousand deliveries, 10,000 deliveries? I don't know, but he's, he's definitely pushing that project forward.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Having, having an Optimus that is just on, on staff here that can just go hit, like if I can hit a button and have the Optimus hit the gong physically, that would be fantastic.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, priceless really.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, priceless. There's really no, no amount of money that we wouldn't pay to be able to get that kind of experience here in the Ultradome.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm excited. I mean, the, we, we, we've seen like the, you know, Boston dynamics, we've seen with the, the Chinese humanoid companies. There's like, you can do cool things with these, with 1X and whatnot, even if it's teleoperated, even if it's prescribeded. Like there, there are, the technology does work. It's more just like, how impactful will it be? How expensive is it? How reliable is it? Is the battery one hour or more?

• 23:16Jordi Hays?

  Has he, has he spoken about teleoperation?

• 23:18John Coogan?

  No, I don't.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Seems like he'd just be generally against it.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  On principle.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  I know that, don't the Tesla robotaxis do some tele-operation? I think in the test zones, there was like the ability to take over on that early demo. So I don't think he's dogmatic about it, but he certainly is. You know, if you're against LIDAR, you gotta be against.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  Tragically sane says, robots replacing humans hitting the gong. Okay, never mind, shut it down.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  I'm full LIDAR now.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Don't, don't worry. That will be the last job.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  That will be.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  In the studio, hitting the gong.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Uh, let's move on to this clip from Satya Nadella at the All In AI Summit in Davos. First, let me tell you about vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. So, um, uh, let's play this clip from Satya Nadella explaining how he's thinking about.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Jobs had the best line, I would say for PCs or computers was to say if you, it's a bicycle for the mind. Uh, Bill had a line which I liked as well, which was it's information at your fingertips. We kind of need now a new concept metaphor for how we use computers in the AI age. You have one? And the one I like actually came from the CEO of Notion, which I like, you know, that manager of. Incredible product. Yeah. You haven't bought it yet.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  But the, it's both even management of, you know, basically, um, a manager of infinite minds. That's a nice way to think about it, right? If you remember, you know, Jobs had the best line, I would say for a PC.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  So the manager of infinite minds. That is, uh, I, that is a good framing. I like that and it's, it's nice to.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  How many minds are you managing, Tyler?

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Right now.

• 25:00Speaker 05

  Right now, it's probably like four, cause I have every, every L M.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Actively running.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get those numbers up.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I'm not, I, I've never really used multiple Claude instances yet.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Okay. But yeah, good framing and good to see. Yeah, it's interesting. Like, the manager of infinite minds concept, obviously, that essay from Ivan, CEO of Notion, it went viral over the holidays. I think a lot of people in tech read it, but it did not necessarily break through to like the Davos community. And so having Satya Nadella there just further popularized that concept, bake it down into a repeatable phrase that can prepare people for what's coming, adapt. That is valuable, and that's what we're seeing here. Anyway.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  Every, it'll feel like you're playing Starcraft now.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  I like the Starcraft analogy.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  The Starcraft analogy is real. Zerg army. Let's pull up this video that was posted by the New York Times PopCast. John Karamica posted this video yesterday. Somebody sent it to me. Actually, Leaf at Public sent it to me.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  And I was so confused because there's only about 100 of these rugby's out in the world.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  And we kind of knew, we kind of, like, everybody on the team, like, kind of sent them out.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  So I was, I first thought this video was AI-generated.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  It did, and it's about AI, so let's play the video.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  And I think we maybe don't want to do sound.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, it's about Bruno Mars and, and if we, if, I don't know if we can scroll back to the beginning. Is that possible on Instagram reels? If you repost? But yeah, if you zoom in here, he's dancing, and the dancing, this part, I was like, maybe this part's AI. But then when he sits down, you can see that he has a microphone, a lav mic clipped to his collar. And so everything about this says this is not AI-generated. This is real, and the hand motions are so accurate, and they're including.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  And he just looks extremely cool.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  And so he goes on to talk and we're gonna have him on the show later.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so, so Dylan messaged John and we figure out that John accidentally purchased fake TVP N merch online.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Be careful.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  But at least he's still looking great.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it works.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Silver lining.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, our saga to battle the fraudulent merch, the knockoff merch has been incredible. This site popped up and we assumed, okay, they're not gonna take payments, certainly. They're definitely not gonna print and ship anything and we'll be able to get this taken down in two seconds. And we, I actually sent them an email saying like, hey, hey, like, I assume you're a fan. Like, just so you know, like, we don't want this out there. Like, I'd be happy to talk to you about maybe working together or something, but can you please just not use our brand and our trademarks and all this stuff out there on the internet without, without talking to us first? Like, let's have a conversation about this. Did not get a response.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Not a fan.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  And I think some other people on the team were like, yeah, John, that was never gonna work. And they were right.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  You tried to go golden retriever mode.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  I did, I did. I was like, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna assume the best. I'm just gonna assume that's an overeager fan or someone who just is entrepreneurial, a kid who's just trying to just make.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  No, this is a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  We know it's a Canadian.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  This is a Canadian.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, anything could happen up there.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  We need to, Dodd in the chat says, you guys have a good line at Shopify. I assume most of them are hosted there. No, it's not hosted on Shopify.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not. And at one point.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  We've already gotten them taken down from.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  From a number of platforms where we know the CEOs and will say, hey, we have this fake site, can you take this down? They will, and they'll pop up on a different site. And so it's been a true game of whack-a-mole. We've sent a number of like, you know, sort of, you know, demand letters at this point. We've really pushed it a lot, but they, they keep finding a way. And at this point, they are, in fact, taking people's money and shipping fake product now and, and fooling people that are discerning.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  And apparently it smells kinda funny.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Uh oh.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Which is a big, which is an issue. The real merch is coming.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  The real merch is coming.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  We've been sampling a bunch of different stuff.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Of course, Shopify.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  We need to put out like a Maduro style bounty.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  Shopify, of course, is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Trey says Mark Carney is selling fake TVPN merch. Crazy.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  He heard, he, he saw your post about him.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  His cortisol spiking?

• 29:43John Coogan?

  His cortisol spiking, and he was like, you know what? I'm not doing anything about this. Canadians, it's.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  It's really concerning the number of people that didn't understand that my post was a joke.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  You're very online and you're very early to a lot of these things. You were trying to make Aura happen back like over a year ago.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Q1 of last year.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Didn't happen.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  It was flopping.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  A long time. Then you try to make motion happen. I still think people are just waking up to motion. Uh, this is, this will happen, but you gotta, you gotta let it simmer. I mean, I've seen this, I've seen this multiple times.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  But I just, the, the idea of like processing Davos as though it's like a bunch of kick streamers.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  It is, it is very funny to, you know, look at the aesthetics and the whole kick, like clipping economy is crazy. I, I, I found one of those clips and then I went and looked at the account and it's like, like dozens of posts that are the same format where it's like, they have a word in all caps and then they have an emoji and then they have this and it's like very sensationalist. It feels like paparazzi on top of a kick stream or something. Very, very odd phenomenon.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  The, the thing that is real is the drama that's going on at Davos is not that different.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  It's not.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  You see, uh, you know, Besant taking shots.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  There might be some cortisol spikes.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're definitely spiking each other's cortisol, getting each other to crash out.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  I still don't even, I just don't even know what cortisol spiking means. Is it just like getting angry? What does it actually mean?

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you get into any type of, you know, verbal, physical altercation.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  It's like a fight or flight mechanic?

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Cortisol floods your brain and just makes you, okay.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Well, yeah.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  Gets your.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, private credit investors cortisol has been spiking because they are cashing out in droves. Redemptions by individual investors in funds soared at the end of 2025 after performance declined, reviving questions about suitability. This is from Matt Wors in the Wall Street Journal. Uh, he says, "For the first time since the start of the private credit boom, large numbers of individual investors are trying to get their money out. Several of the big funds eligible to wealthy individuals receive requests from about 5% of shareholders to cash out at the end of last year, well above the normal volume, according to the SEC." One managed by Blue Owl got redemptions for about 15% of its shares. This was something where, you know, people were nervous about the data center buildout and private credit, you know, the expansion here.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Apparently what's driving it primarily was Asian clients asking for redemptions from Blue Owl specifically. The rising redemptions come in an awkward time for private credit fund managers for the Trump and for the Trump administration as they push for new rules that would democratize private markets by encouraging their inclusion in 401k retirement plans for all Americans. Private fund managers, including Apollo Global and Blue Owl, blame fear mongering about a recent spate of corporate bankruptcies. This is the whole cockroaches back and forth with Jamie Dimon and some of the, some of the folks in the private credit world, Blackstone, Apollo, Blue Owl. And because there was an automotive supplier that went bankrupt, First Brands we talked about. Yep. And there was a surge of withdrawals. Analysts say there could be a simpler explanation.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Individual investors are falling into a similar pattern, a familiar pattern of selling out when an asset class underperforms expectations. These investors got really surprised when their dividends went down, said Robert Dodd, an analyst at Raymond James. BDCs, the business development companies, they typically make high interest loans to midsize corporations with junk credit ratings, using the interest income from those loans to pay dividends. A handful of these funds have cut dividends because the yield on their loans are falling in lockstep with benchmark interest rates. For more dividend reductions will follow, Dodd said, likely prompting more redemptions. Total returns from five of the largest private credit funds aimed at individual investors

• 33:34John Coogan?

  declined to an average of about 6.22% in the first nine months of 2025, compared with 8.76% in the same period 2024. And back in 2023, if you were in these funds, you were making 11.4%. Not bad. Money managed by BDCs has tripled since 2020 to about 450 billion. So there's been a big growth. And the funds still took in more new money from new investors than they paid out in their most recent quarter, a sign that they are still popular among investments, investors and advisors. Let's move on, but first let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  The Kobe S E. Letter breaking SpaceX is set to hire Bank of America Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan, Morgan Stanley to lead its IPO. That's a whole host, a murderer of

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Got them all.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  The IPO is expected to be valued as as much as 1.5 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history. But the community notes put it in the truth zone because Saudi Ramco's IPO in 2019 sported a valuation of 1.7 trillion. Interesting.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they raised 25 billion, 25.6 billion.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, obviously Elon targeting more than that on a actual dollar basis.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Well, there's other news about Anthropic. The revenue run rate for the end of 2025 was 9 billion, up from 4 billion in July 2025. What incredible growth iconic Lightspeed and Menlo are set to join the new funding round from Tech Meme here and Bloomberg reporting. This is maybe a deceleration. I was debating this with Tyler. I mean, they went from 100 million to 1 billion. They 10x'd. Then they were going to 10x it again. So everyone was expecting 10 billion.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  And 10x it again.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  And they landed at 9 on run rate.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was trying to find.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  I'm seeing deceleration.

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  Did they, did they predict 10 billion?

• 35:37John Coogan?

  I don't know. I actually don't know the exact quote. I think Dario like was pretty loose about it. He was just saying that like we've seen.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  He was saying order magnitude.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was saying, he was saying, we went a full order of magnitude from 100 to a billion. We're going to do a full order magnitude again. Is it a full order magnitude to go from 1 to 9?

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  And he said he only expects like.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  You got around.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Three or four more, you know, 10x's.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  He said that?

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  No, no, I specifically remember him saying like, like, we cannot keep that level of growth going.

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  He said, it's like, he said it would be pretty crazy if that.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  I don't think he said we can't.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Oh, OK. He said it would be pretty crazy.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  OK, well, uh, obviously.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  He said if that continues, then like you're really in the, you know, the biggest companies in the world are on that scale.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, at a certain point, like, there's no company that's doing a trillion dollars a year in revenue, and you're only two orders of magnitude away from that, so, uh, we'll see, we'll see. But obviously Anthropic's been on a tear, and the new round, it seems to be coming together nicely. Uh, there is other news from the information. Amir says that Anthropic's inference costs on Google and Amazon servers were 23% higher than the company, uh, projected. Of course, when you're growing so fast, you're probably willing to pay more for inference just to make sure that everything stays online.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  Better to, better to service the demand and not, and not get that frustration.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  You know, people hitting rate limits, et cetera.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, uh, later in the summer, there were, there's a lot of news about how the, the Anthropic API is like always down.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  There's issues.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was that, and then there was, there were also some like FUDs-type articles about negative gross margins, about, you know, margins being really, really bad at these labs, like who's, where's the real, where's the value accruing? Is it all going to accrue to Nvidia? Uh, last month, uh, Anthropic projected it would generate around 40% gross margins from selling AI to businesses and application developers. Um, but I think that gross margin came in a little bit lower. Um, but, you know, there's so much more that they can do to optimize. They're buying TPUs now, they're going to build new data centers. Uh, and also, there's, it, it does feel like we're going to enter a world where inference is load-balanced across a variety of semiconductor stacks.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  And so for really fast things, you might be going to a Grok or a Cerebras, or, you know, you might, for more basic stuff, you might be going to a legacy model that's cheaper to inference, and all of that might be blended together into something that's, uh, more profitable. And then also, you know, the, the dynamic of the, of the equilibrium in the ecosystem could just be higher prices if it's delivering a lot of value. People are really happy with the value that they're getting from.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Beth Jaiso has posted a real picture of Dario.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Fact-check true.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that you can pull up here.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Dario AmagDA.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Jawline is crazy on this. AI is good.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  Claude's gonna be able to do this to people.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  No, no, Claude will not. They're not launching an image model. Claude will have to.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm just saying you're gonna be able to just talk to Claude and say like, turn me into a, uh, into a mogger.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  In real life.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  It will, you know, orchestrate the jaw.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Okay, got it. Got it. The double jaw surgery.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Leg lengthening.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Surgeries.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  They'll purchase it all for you and just create a schedule for you.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, call the Waymo to take you to the, you know, to the dentist or whatever to do the surgery.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Well, if you're in San Francisco on February 3rd, you need to call Waymo and head over to the Cisco AI Summit. It's bringing together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be livestreamed and we'll be there for a big stream.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Hope to see you there. Apparently, Google DeepMind is signing a licensing deal. It really is a licensing deal economy that we're in. Last year was the press release economy.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  This year, very, very much the licensing deal economy. Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces. And they're gonna hire CEO Alan Cohen and seven of their engineers.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Is this the same, uh, GoShip story that we've, that we've seen so many times before? It's essentially an acquisition? Is that what we're, we're reading this or?

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, that's.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Major licensing?

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's, yeah, the CEO is joining DeepMind, uh, so.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  I, I, I never thought of, uh, of Google as particularly behind in voice interfaces. It doesn't, I'm, I'm wondering what else is going on here.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  I mean, certainly it's an important part of the stack if you have an app that people are chatting with and talking to. Obviously Notebook LM was sort of a viral success, but I do really wonder about the longevity and the, and the retention. It feels like they were maybe like, I don't know, 80 or 90% there in terms of people. Maybe, maybe it's just a speed thing. Maybe it's the actual cadence. I've talked to some people that have been.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  Didn't that team leave and start their own?

• 40:36John Coogan?

  They did, they did. But I mean, you gotta be able to backfill that if you're, if you're Google and DeepMind. Like, you have a great product with a lot of people talking about Notebook LM very positively. I think a lot of the Notebook LM functionality eventually got baked into the Gemini app. And so, um, but this, but there, there still is just, it feels like when you have a latency step, where you ask a question, okay, prepare a deep research report and turn it into a podcast, read it to me on the Roman Empire. And you have the option to just go to YouTube and just find a video of, or pull up Hardcore History or something and just listen to it. And as soon as you click, it just starts playing versus you have to wait. That's gonna induce churn, that's gonna.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  I, I always thought Notebook LM was the, the product that I wanted to cram for college exams.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I did that. I remember like. My three final. Yeah, I, there's so many moments in college where I was like riding my bike to an exam.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  I could really use these 15 minutes to learn about.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  Write a paper on it.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  But at the same time, for probably 99% of high school exams, the, the, the, the topic is well studied and there's already like Spark Notes. When I went to high school, like Spark Notes existed. And if you were, if you were doing a book report on The Odyssey, there was already a pre-written summary of it. You didn't need an LLM. Like, LLMs are particularly good, Notebook LM is particularly good, when you need to generate a report or an essay or a deep dive or a podcast about something that no one has ever made a podcast about before.

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  But if you're just looking for an hour of really thoughtful content on, you know, peptides, like the Huberman Lab podcast exists and has created a very polished product around that.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  Opinionated.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Opinionated as well, which I think people want. But even just in terms of, in terms of just facts, like, like the facts are already polished. And the most important thing is that it's there, just one click to start that video. So I'm sure that, you know, a lot of, a lot of high school students are pulling up YouTube videos that summarize the topics that are going into their calculus exam or whatever they're about to walk into. There's plenty of.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you didn't have streaming video on the internet when you were going through college, right?

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Uh, a little bit. It was YouTube. YouTube was there, but the library, YouTube videos.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  The catalog value was.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  It was truly like, hey, come in this dorm room. Let me show you the three YouTube videos that I know about.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  Like, it's a great sign of my culture and respect to show you, like, the greatest YouTube videos that are, like, viral in my world. Uh, anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, more news from Sam Altman.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  He shared today, we have added more than 1 billion of ARR in the last month, just from our API business. People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, we saw they just did this huge deal with, uh, ServiceNow. Like, they're definitely cooking. They've been cooking for a long time. They have a, they have an enterprise go-to-market motion that's definitely, uh, working and, and somewhat disconnected from, like, whatever the hot story of the week is.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  People are, people are pretty funny in the comments going, brother, 1 billion of ARR at a 5 billion valuation, you're gonna need to make that MRR.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, this person misread, which is a added 1 billion in the last month.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  That's pretty good.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  So, of course, uh, I would imagine their plan is to continue doing that and actually scale that.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, uh, Bubble Boy is sharing.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  I love Bubble Boy, but I, I, I do not believe his rumors. I don't, I don't go too in for rumors necessarily, but I don't know. A lot of likes on this. Maybe it's real. There's no, there's no community note. What's the rumor from Bubble Boy?

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  The rumor.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Google is spinning out the TPU team into a separate entity under Alphabet, Umbrella, to sell hardware to third parties directly.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it could happen.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Someone calls it a cross-chain atomic swap. That's funny. Uh, anyway, uh, would they even need to do that? I don't know.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you can see they, they, uh, Waymo, it's like, did they need to raise money at the Waymo level, right? Sometimes it's helpful for, you know, a company to be. Have its own.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Alphabet structuring and how they report out earnings and whatnot. Anyway, staying in the big tech world, let's head over to Mark Gurman's latest report.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  The Gurminator.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Apple is revamping Siri as a built-in iPhone, Mac, and chatbot to fend off OpenAI. And there's an image here. What is this? The Gemini, Google Gemini AI chatbot on a Galaxy S25 Ultra smartphone. So, Apple plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company's first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google. The chatbot, codenamed Kempos, will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now, by speaking

• 45:53John Coogan?

  the Siri command or holding down the side button of their iPhone or iPad. The new approach will go well beyond the capabilities of current Siri for even a long-promised update that's coming earlier in 2026. Today.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  John, say Siri again really loudly and clearly for anybody that's watching on their TV at home or in their office.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, the feature is a central piece of Apple's turnaround plan for the AI market, where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers. The Apple intelligence platform had a rocky rollout in 2024 with features that were underwhelming or slow to arrive. Shares of Apple gained on the chatbot news, climbing as much as 1.7%. The previously-promised non-chatbot update to Siri, retaining the current interface as planned for iOS 26.4 due in the coming months. The idea that, the idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It will also be better at searching the web. Chatbots' capabilities will come later in the year, according to people who asked not to be identified. The company plans

• 46:57John Coogan?

  to unveil that technology in June at WWU C. Kempos, which will have both voice and typing-based models. Tyler, what's that sound like?

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Typing, you're gonna be able to type to Siri.

• 47:10Speaker 05

  An app?

• 47:10John Coogan?

  On app, let's go.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  Wait, you can, can't you type to Siri?

• 47:14John Coogan?

  No.

• 47:14Speaker 05

  Right now, you can't?

• 47:15John Coogan?

  I don't, oh, maybe, but you don't have an app. You, you don't have a place to store all your conversations, which was my take.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  Okay, cool. But I, I still care about, I, I still care about the model being implemented way more than I care about.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Like where, where, where are, I mean, they're like, the model's gonna be good. Like, they're using Gemini. We, we know that, but like, what, like, what specifically are you looking for on the?

• 47:35Speaker 05

  Jimmy Boy's.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Jimmy Boy's.

• 47:38Speaker 05

  Jimmy Boy's.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Tim Cook's a Jimmy Boy.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  But where, where are you, uh, like, what are you worried about them not implementing correctly?

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Like, you want like an agentic harness so it can do like Claude code style work? Like, for a long time on your phone directly?

• 47:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know, there's just like, like, the current Apple intelligence is so bad.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 05

  I just like have very low, like, I, I, it's, I think there's a real possibility that they just like, make it so every time you have to talk to Siri, you have to like press an extra button or something. Like, there's just like random stuff like that.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, but what if, what, what if it's just you press and hold the button? And then you're just submitting a Gemini prompt? And then it just returns exactly what Gemini would have returned? That's like not implementation, that's just like normal.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, but like why, I mean, they could have already done that.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  You think they might?

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Like an open source model, they, like, they could have done that.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  No, they needed a deal, they, they, they can't just, Apple can't just go and implement anything. I, I, I think it's, I think it's gonna be tricky for them, like specifically.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  But I'm, yeah, that would be good.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  So specifically, Llama, uh, has, in the, in the Terms of Service, like, you cannot use this? It's open source unless you have more than like 800 million users or something like that. Like, there's some specific carve out for other big tech.

• 48:54Speaker 05

  Opening I trained their open source model for like $5 million. Like, Apple could do it for 100 million.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people always talk about how amazing the open source model is.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Okay, it's way better than the current Apple intelligence.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  That's true, that's true. Yeah, okay.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  Like, open source models are pretty solid.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying you want Apple to make the phone with Foxconn and run DeepSeek?

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, come on. They're not doing that. They're not putting DeepSeek on there. Other than the chatbot interface, the operating systems aren't getting a big, aren't getting big changes this year. Of course, we got Liquid Glass, so Apple is more focused on improving performance and fixing bugs. Last year, it rolled out a major design overhaul, unifying the look and feel of its operating systems. Internally, Apple is testing the chatbot technology as a standalone Siri app. Let's go. Similar to the ChatGPT and Gemini options available on the App Store, the company doesn't plan to offer that version to customers, though, so we might not get an app. I'm on a roller coaster here. Instead, it will integrate the software across its operating systems like the Siri of today. I still think they need an app, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit it, I'm gonna ask it a question, I'm gonna wanna come back to it. How am I gonna do that? So, I don't know.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  Hey Siri, go back to the recent.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, maybe. But it's gotta be good. Then it is, then the implementation has to be good. Because even in Gemini and ChatGPT, there are often times when I will, I will fire off a query, it will come back with like thousands of words, and if I search a keyword in the search box of previous chats, I have so many previous chats that I can't necessarily find the exact one that I'm thinking of.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  Okay, so one implementation thing that I think is important is like, if it's super long, if the response is super long, and it reads it out to you, like, you should be able to pause or something like that. Like, in Claude, you can't do that right now.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can't even fast forward five.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  Like, that is an important thing that materially affects how good it is to you.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. Embracing the chatbot approach represents a strategic shift for Apple, which has long downplayed the conversational AI tools popularized by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Executives have argued that users. Prefer having AI woven directly into features, something Apple has done with its writing tools, Genmoji emoji generator and notification summaries, rather than standalone standalone chat experiences. That's not, that's not an unreasonable take. I, I, I do, I do, I do see why they landed there. And in the long term, I, I wouldn't be surprised if that's, if that's, if the, if the AI woven in the features, like the AI that's in the Photos app is better than, okay, I gotta open up the chat app and ask it to edit this photo and import the photo from my photo. Like, no, you

• 51:25John Coogan?

  just want to be able to go into the Photos app, have the, you know, change the color temperature, change the brightness, draw on it, add text, and then also have AI features in there, I would imagine. So I, I am bullish on Apple diffusing AI into all the other apps, but it's taking a while. Yeah. What do you think?

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I just, I just hope the team specifically that designed the new version of the Photos app from the ground up takes the lead on Apple intelligence.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  Because you know what I'm saying? I, it's been getting better. It's not perfect, but it has been getting better. I've been, I've been learning how to do it. I know there, I, I know the quirks.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Is it getting better or are you getting better?

• 52:00John Coogan?

  I'm getting better. I'm getting better. It can't hold me back.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  It was just a skill it.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  You're, it's a skill issue.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  They should have just come out and said, hey, we hear that you guys don't like the Photo app. Skill issue.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Billboard campaign.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Skill issue. Let's do it.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the Apple Photos icon and then just the text, skill issue.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Skill issue. Stop complaining. Anyway, Graphite, it's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  Germinator had more news.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, tell me.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he says, uh, just now, Apple quietly gave hardware chief John Turnus oversight over the company's hardware and software design teams at the end of last year, marking the first evidence he is being groomed for the eventual Apple CEO role.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  I like Turnus. I'm a Turnus fan. I'm a Turnus head.

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  And I think.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  I'm bullish. I hope he gets it. I don't know. It feels like it's still very up in the air, very rumor based, but he's been putting out good vibes. He's been delivering. I don't know. I I'm I whoever that whoever that source that was I never made a hard decision.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  We should make a we should start making edits of him talking during Apple keynote.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Yes, we need to get a turnus vibrio up for sure. Start the prime the pump, prime the pump. If he doesn't get it, and we've been pumping turnus and going becoming turnus heads, it would be it would be a big L for us. We'd see. We will see. Let's see. We we already talked enough about the the thinking machines drama. The New York Times is reporting on the internet on the internal drama of thinking machines now. Who who wrote this? Was this from?

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  From Mike Isaac? Ooh, seven minute article. Okay, defection, secret conversations, deal talks that fizzled, and a battle for control. And the and the quote from Andrew Curran that he pulls out says, but in less than a year, Mr. Zof, Mr. Metz, and Mr. Schoenholz had become deeply unhappy with the startup's direction. I wish they'd unpacked that more. The the these these pieces have not gone deep enough into the nature of the dispute around the technical direction. I would really like more more answers there because like they like what specifically are they unhappy about? Because just, you know, the like B to B fine tuning that seems like a good business, like opening eyes, having a lot of success with it, has thinking machines, is it go to market problem? Has it been implementation problem? Has it been?

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall, there's nothing that kills motivation like having to show up to work every day and believing that the company is moving in the wrong direction.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But what but what specifically?

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure the team at OpenAI has maybe a rough idea. And that was, again, part of part of what Mira, it sounds like, was frustrated with.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Thinking machines lagged OpenAI and other rivals in releasing products and was struggling to raise new funding at an eye popping 50 billion valuation. The men had urged Maroti to strike a deal with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, had discussed buying Thinking Machines, and Ms. Maroti had developed closer ties with the chief executive of Anthropic, a leading AI company, but no traction had resulted. At the meeting, the men lobbied for Mr. Zof, Thinking Machine's chief technology officer, to oversee decisions.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  And this is just a strange. This has been

• 55:08John Coogan?

  It's a weird line. It's a very, very weird line.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, why would the CTO not be overseeing decisions about the company's technical direction?

• 55:15John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. Maybe job title inflation or something. It happens sometimes. People give funny, funny joke jobs. You, you give some random intern the chief CIO officer, CIO title, and then

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  What are you trying to say?

• 55:30John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm just saying that, you know, many people might see your title and think that you're the chief information officer or the chief investment officer. And, and then you might come around and say, hey, why am I not in charge of investments? Why am I not in charge of all the information here? Anyway, cognition, they are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Elon Musk has essentially confirmed SpaceX is going public this year and will use the funds to build solar panel AI satellites scaling to one hundreds, hundreds of terawatts in three years. And Elon Musk replies to Nick, he says, no, the probable case 50th percentile

• 56:10John Coogan?

  guess is reaching an annualized rate of 100 gigawatts of year, a year of space AI satellites launched from Earth in three to four years. 100 terawatts a year requires manufacturing satellites on the moon at massive scale that are shot into deep space with a mass driver, which is 10 years away. Worth noting that average US electricity consumption is only half a terawatt. So that would mean launching 200 times the current electricity output of Earth.

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  Next response here?

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  Scroll down.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  I love that. Elon's just like, Nick, Nick, you're too bullish on me. You're too bullish.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  Relax.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Let's dial it back. I, I am going to deliver something incredible very quickly, but it's going to take longer to get to the truly unfathomable scale. Anyway, OpenAI CFO, we could take a cut of customer revenue from AI aided inventions. Is it fantasy? Asks Amir from the information. Maybe, but scientists have been going gaga for LLMs as idea synthesizers and research collaborators. And OpenAI is actively trying to license proprietary biology slash pharma and data for training.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  AI discoveries. So you would think that this would happen in in sort of like a joint venture or some sort of investment. Obviously, OpenAI has the the OpenAI Startup Fund and so and they have made investments. So there's a world where if they're particularly bullish on a biotech company, they could participate in an early round and then participate in the upside. This is sort of framed as more of like they will they will just randomly be taking revenue if you sign an enterprise contract that feels like.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really rough headline, but I'm sure they'll like work on clarifying this. Obviously, I saw some people getting really upset about it immediately. Of course, I don't I think it's too early for that. You know, they definitely need to clarify, right? It's like, you know, if you were working on a startup and you use Google search to do some research and then, you know, Google said, hey, hey, we see your search history. We know. We know that you've looked up Restream, John. We know that you wanted a live stream.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  And we played a pretty big part in that.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. I'll tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. They should implement tipping. They added a billion dollars in in enterprise revenue. You get your enterprise API bill. Well, throw a little turn the iPad around 15, 20, 25%. Throw a little tip in. Why not? You know, hey, if you cure cancer.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Adding tipping to your consumer SaaS product is a great way.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Enterprise SaaS.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  And enterprise is a great way to test product market fit.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  I completely agree. I completely agree. Staying in OpenAI world, Sheeran has a scoop here in Bloomberg. Sam Altman met with investors in the United Arab Emirates recently to discuss new a new funding round, targeting around 50 billion at a 750 to 830 billion valuation. I think the 750 was pre, 830 was maybe post. Talks are early.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for early talks.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Well, fortunately, our next guest is beyond the early talks phase. He has some amazing news announcing here today. We have Keller from ZipLine in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him in as soon as I 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 without further ado, we will bring in Keller from ZipLine out of the Restream waiting room and into the TBP and UltraDump. Keller, how are you doing?

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 59:58Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Hey, you guys, how are you?

• 1:00:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic, but not as good as you. Give us the news, what happened?

• 1:00:05Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  So yesterday, yeah, yesterday we had some big announcements. I mean, first of all, you know, the company just raised more than $600 million to fund US and global expansion.

• 1:00:16Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Got to go with the gong. But even even cooler, I mean, you guys know, like on X, ZipLine is constantly, you know, kind of celebrating how fast the system has been growing. It's been growing about 15% week over week over the last year. But we are finally announcing new metros. So we announced Houston and Phoenix as the metros that we're going to be launching over the next couple of months. And then every quarter that passes now, we'll be announcing new major metros that we're bringing autonomous delivery to.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  Talk to me about what it takes to launch your metro. Is that the the mayor's calling you, you're calling the mayor? Is there a form that you're filling out? Like, how, what's the process? Do you have sales reps going? Do you set up an office? Like, do you do tests? What's involved?

• 1:00:56Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  In the main thing, you know, this is different. People think of hyperscalers and people adding metros, you know, with some of, you know, the rideshare companies, for example, where you were just hiring people who already live there. I mean, ZipLine is building infrastructure in these cities. It looks a little bit more maybe like how Tesla was building superchargers. We are actually building superchargers, but for airplanes rather than for cars. And and so we're going in, we're building maintenance depots. We're creating a lot of high paying jobs for both maintenance as well as as well as all the people who are doing, you know, community engagement, government affairs, permitting. There's a lot of complexity for each metro that we launch, but, you know, the

• 1:01:38Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  The reality is that we're trying to scale, I mean 50% week over week growth is really hard to keep up with and so we're trying to add, you know, we'll add multiple metros every quarter as we go here, as we accelerate.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  What makes, what makes for a metro area that's exciting to zipline?

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Both of those don't seem very snowy. Is that important?

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and I know you're going to be announcing a lot more in the future, but for people listening that are excited to have zipline in their area, I feel like if you kind of describe the sort of ideal metro, maybe people can kind of start figuring it out.

• 1:02:17Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Yeah, I mean ultimately, we're going to be in every metro in the US in the next couple of years. One thing that we just did that, you know, I was posting some cool stuff on X, we just launched a brand new test site in the Cascades, which is in Oregon. We have a team that is operating there in insane snow, insane ice, insane sleeting conditions, day in and day out. All of Zipline's test sites operate 24/7 by the way. So, why are we doing that? We're doing that so that we can be ready by the end of this year to start launching cities in a wide variety of climates across the US and then eventually across the world. So, it just takes time to basically validate all the different technology, aircraft,

• 1:02:58Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  ground infrastructure across these different conditions. And you really want to do it comprehensively and test before you then operate, you know, over tens of millions of people's heads.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the hardware lifecycle like? Is there a, like a V2, V3 that comes and gets rolled out to all the metros? Is there testing? Like, are there new innovations that are happening deeper in the supply chain that you're excited about implementing? What, what needs to happen or what are you excited about on the development of the actual platform?

• 1:03:33Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Well, you know, funny you should ask. So basically, right behind me, so I'm standing in a new part of the manufacturing facility. ZipLine's manufacturing facility tripled in size in the last two months.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Two months?

• 1:03:45Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  This was all, this was all nothing.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:03:48Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Actually, I don't know if you realize, but like 15%, people don't put it together. We just had a board meeting last week where we started the board meeting by being like, oh yeah, you know, flight volumes and revenue tripled since the last board meeting three months ago. So the manufacturing growth is pretty much in line with the business growth. But, you know, this space was all empty a month ago. And it is now the new line for our next generation aircraft. It's called EV3. The advantages of this next generation, I mean, right now ZipLine is rapidly cycling through hardware, software, plus all the operational improvements we need to make, you know, to continue to advance the technology. But the, you know, EV3 has a huge number of performance improvements relative to the system that we've been operating over the last year.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  And it's half the cost. So, you know, there's giant, you know, steps being made, improvements possible because the technology is so early. It's 12:01 a.m. when it comes to automated logistics. This facility where I'm standing will be capable of building 20,000 aircraft a year. It's the largest autonomous aircraft factory in the United States.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  How do you get something like a 50% cost reduction? Is that automation or buying bigger purchase orders deeper in your supply chain? Or is there just like a cost curve that's coming down and the price of motors is just dropping and you're just a beneficiary of that? Like, what's driving cost savings on the vehicle?

• 1:05:12Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  And there are a lot of things. I mean, first of all, the best part is the, is no part, the part that you delete. And we were able to delete a lot of parts on this aircraft relative to the previous version. We, you know, we've been able to

• 1:05:26Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Yeah, deleting things is the best way to, you know, the most reliable part, the part that never breaks is the one that isn't on the aircraft at all. We've also been able to redesign a lot of parts and fundamental subassemblies on the aircraft to make them easier to manufacture or just less expensive from a component perspective. And then finally, ZipLine now has enough scale with a lot of these suppliers that, as you said, you can get much better deals on a lot of these key components. And so all of those things add up to just a vehicle that's significantly less expensive.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Are they also getting quieter over time? I've seen some incredible demos of drone rotors and propellers that they're shaped in a certain way and they're way quieter. Is there progress there? Is that happening in like physics labs and then it gets implemented? Are you doing the research? What's going on acoustically?

• 1:06:14Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  So, yeah, ZipLine, I mean, we've always had this attitude that like this technology can only scale if it is quieter, more serene for neighborhoods than the traditional delivery mechanisms of cars. And so ZipLine has a big team of aerodynamics engineers and aerodynamics, aeroacoustics engineers who have been focusing on this question of like, how do you design something that's really, really quiet for the last five years? And by the way, you can't, planes aren't like cars, you can just put a muffler on the back of it and make it quieter. Like the design of the aircraft has to be from the ground up, made with aeroacoustics in mind. ZipLine is, despite the fact that we operate bigger, more complex vehicles, ZipLine is

• 1:06:56Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  six times quieter than the next closest competitor when we're making a delivery to someone's home. And we'll actually make significant improvements to the aerodynamic, aeroacoustic profile of the vehicle this year. We actually think we're going to get about another eight decibels of improvement this year, which for non-engineers, you know, think of eight decibels as being like about half as loud to the human ear. So having, again, yeah.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  That's awesome. What about congestion as you scale? How much of the routing is proprietary software, maybe on your network, sort of your own flight control, interfacing with more national level flight control? Or even just like on the actual drone, just cameras saying, oh, there's some random object over there that I need to steer away from?

• 1:07:50Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  I mean, all of these, you know, ZipLine has a huge autonomy team that is responsible for not just how these vehicles route themselves to go and make deliveries, how they navigate the physical world, because we're flying at about 400 feet, but also how we detect and avoid other air traffic. And there are many different layers of ZipLine's air traffic control, well, detect and avoid system. We work closely with air traffic control. We build, we're essentially building in partnership with the FAA, a new version. It's called unmanned traffic management, or how you manage thousands, soon to be tens of thousands of vehicles. But in the long run, you know, we're already used to our cities being full of these like loud, dangerous, polluting vehicles, creating tons of traffic, driving

• 1:08:35Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  around in our neighborhoods. Small 50-pound vehicles that are silent and electric are going to be way better for neighborhoods. They're way less, you know, they're less like obtrusive. People generally don't notice them. I mean, we do a lot of deliveries to people's homes where they didn't even realize the delivery happened.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Do you have a timeline for me or you actually getting into an eVTOL and the true flying car vision? Maybe it's not like, like, let's say Waymo level adoption of a human in a, in a vertical takeoff and landing, not a helicopter, not a single rotor, not a plane, but something like that. Are we five years away from that? Longer? Is there something fundamental? Because this has been something that's been promised and I've been excited about my entire life. And it feels like there's a lot of serious companies working on it, but we're not quite there yet. How are you thinking about that market generally?

• 1:09:33Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  I'm also really excited, and it's a question that I'm very interested in. I think that

• 1:09:40Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  I think a lot of the technology has made probably faster progress than people realize. Like these, you know, you can build vehicles that achieve, that are electric, vertical takeoff and landing fixed wing hybrids that like achieve a lot of the core performance characteristics. I think two challenges that I would point out, one is on the autonomy side. Like those companies are still putting human pilots in the cockpit. And it's not going to be like Uber if you have to hire an FAA certified pilot to come do your Uber ride to get you to work in the morning. Like that's, doesn't scale, it's a little too expensive.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  So I think from an autonomy perspective, who is going to design that autonomy layer? It's always seemed kind of obvious to me that the company that does that is going to do billions of autonomous deliveries, delivering non-human things before you want to carry humans. I think humans will be more comfortable with that. The other thing I would kind of point out is a huge part of this actually has to do with like integration, which is like, you can totally do the flight. There are vehicles, again, flying those kinds of mission profiles today, but where are you landing? I mean, there are no heliports in cities, they are getting shut down rather than built. And I think that it's all about, it's all about integration. You know, if you want to get, design a vehicle that is more than just like a, an electric

• 1:10:57Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  version of a helicopter that can do like 20% of missions that a normal helicopter can do, I think if you're really talking about flying car, the key is to solve the integration problem. Like, can you actually get picked up directly from your home and delivered directly to your office for your daily commute? That's the core question.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. At what point do you think courier, like having a courier feature will make sense? This is top of mind. I, I left my laptop at home Monday and I felt that it was super silly that I just like, I was, I ended up having to like use Uber courier. Yeah, and you're using like a huge car for just one tiny laptop. Made no sense. I was, I was thinking about you guys. It feels like an edge case, it's like not really. It's not a big market. It's not a big market. Yeah, what's the thinking around it?

• 1:11:41Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Well, I think you might be surprised. I mean, similar for what I just said with flying cars, integration is the thing that ZipLine is most focused on. We're launching all these amazing new partners. I mean, a lot of the statistics that we're seeing in the cities, if you look at Dallas, I mean, there are municipalities in Dallas where more than 50% of homes are ordering from ZipLine. We had an all-time new record on Sunday. We blew away the previous record by 25%, which had been set a week previously. And we had 10% of all homes in a municipality place an order with ZipLine on Sunday.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Was that football? Is that like, does that spike with like, football?

• 1:12:21Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  It was a holiday weekend, but you know, these are like shocking statistics. I mean, we have, you know, a lot of the restaurants that we serve, ZipLine is a huge percentage and a majority of deliveries happening from those restaurants today. And so I think that the usage is way different than what we were originally expecting. And the key is integration. We want to be able to add so many different, and this is why we announced zipping points, this really simple new kind of ground infrastructure that we can install for free next to any partner, whether it's a hospital, health facility, retailer, restaurant, or even eventually someone's home. You can almost just think of it like a new kind of mailbox for autonomous logistics.

• 1:13:04John Coogan?

  Do you think you'll be able to put a camera on them such that you can scan an ID so that you can deliver alcohol?

• 1:13:13Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  We will do that. You don't need a camera on the vehicle. What you actually need is, you just, you need a camera on the person's phone. That's the way that a lot of this delivery works today. They'll basically be able to place an order, they'll be able to use their phone to upload a picture of their ID, and we can deliver, and then you can basically require a signature on the phone itself. In the exact same way that it works for UPS or FedEx, we can deliver, you know, I mean, today, from a lot of our partners, we deliver over 100,000 SKUs. I mean, people are ordering Legos and like, weird little nozzles for a gardening hose, and birthday cakes, and rotisserie chickens, and prescriptions.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  That's a crazy one.

• 1:13:47Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  It's everything.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  I don't trust a normal delivery, a human delivery driver with a birthday cake. That could go disastrously wrong. So, yeah, the flights to Billy is key.

• 1:13:56Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Yeah, exactly. Look, automated systems aren't going to eat significant percentage of the food, you know, before it's delivered to. There's also... There's also way less safety risk.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  I think it's very similar to Waymo where a young woman who like suddenly looks up from her phone in a, you know, in a rideshare and is like, where the heck did my driver just drive me to?

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  You know, people have similar, similar experiences with delivery where it's like someone's looking over your shoulder like, are you home alone tonight? A lot of these like service, a lot of these kinds of services, it is much safer to have automated systems that are supervised by humans, you know, serving, serving people. And, um, you know, by the way, what, what we are observing is it's like, there really is no comparable. Like when we look at the frequency of customer ordering right now, uh, you know, you, there are lots of, lots of people ordering from ZipLine every single day.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  And so I think it's, this is not something that you see with traditional instant logistics. You see it once you make it 10 times faster, half the cost and zero mission.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't, every time you come on, I can't wait for more people to experience it because given, given the, you know, how focused you are in, in, you know, places like Dallas, it's, I think it's one of those things like Waymo where you have to experience it until you can really, uh, realize that the future is here. So, congrats.

• 1:15:16Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  All right, but you guys.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  I have a surprise for you.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:15:19Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Someone's here auditing.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  One way.

• 1:15:21Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  One of your guys' sponsors is here.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Hey!

• 1:15:24Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  It's a lot of impact.

• 1:15:26Speaker 07

  A year-long sponsorship for TBPN. I'm telling them about the oral farming benefits.

• 1:15:31Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Let's go.

• 1:15:32Speaker 07

  Full TBPN top-tier sponsorship.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Cloud is there. Cut to the Lambda lightning round.

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Wrong angle.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Oh no. The Lambda cloud.

• 1:15:45Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Taylor's close there.

• 1:15:47Speaker 07

  Eastern Lambda and he's, uh, and, and, uh, and he's, he's really, we're just been grinding it out in the hardware founders, complex coordination business and we just punch people in the face.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you delivering?

• 1:16:00Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Steven said he was so pleased with this interview that he's going to be. quadrupling down on the partnership.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:16:08Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Of their advertising.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  Good to see you guys.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  Teleportation is a service.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, are you getting, hopefully you're getting, if those GPUs need to get to the data centers faster, hopefully they're flying in zip lines.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  That's right. And you know, we'll eventually turn them into distributed.

• 1:16:25Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Distributed compute.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:16:27Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Tesla's doing, maybe a zip line will do this with Lambda. We have GPUs in all the aircraft.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations again.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Have fun. Wish we were there.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  The awesome performance. Overnight success. You gotta hit him with the overnight success. Every time he comes on, this man spent a decade.

• 1:16:44Keller Rinaudo Cliffton?

  Ten years in the making.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Ten years in the making, and now he's growing every day and doubling the business with incredible speed.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, guys.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we will continue our Lambda Lightning round and bring in Jake Cooper from Railway. He's the co-founder and CEO, also a TV sponsor.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Jake, good to see you. How you doing?

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Get that dong ready.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  So stoked to finally have you on the show.

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, great to have you here. Give us the update. What happened?

• 1:17:27Speaker 08

  Cool. Yeah, I mean, we raised a bunch of money. So we raised a hundred million dollar round

• 1:17:35Speaker 08

  and make software just way easier to use because the definition of a developer is melting before our very eyes.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  It's melting.

• 1:17:41Speaker 08

  It's melting, you know. So anybody can ship code, which is crazy. We're making it trivially easy for anybody to go and do that. So it's a really exciting time to be, you know, in the business and also just, you know, on the planet.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, uh, how is that actually playing out? We've talked to some folks about how there are designers that there's one idea that AI will create, will take a 1X engineer and turn them into a 10X engineer. And that's probably true, uh, but there's also this idea that-

• 1:18:08Speaker 08

  Oh, it's gonna be like a 10,000X engineer.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  10,000X engineer.

• 1:18:10Speaker 08

  Like, we have people internally moving so, so quickly. I've like rebuilt a bunch of the internal organizations-

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 08

  So we can move at, when I'm calling, it's super cringe, but I'm calling it agent speed.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:18:21Speaker 08

  Because people are just moving way, way faster now.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:23Speaker 08

  Um, so like, you get a 10,000X engineer.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 08

  But yeah, sorry.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  But then, but then there's also the zero to 1X engineer where you take a designer and then they're able to actually ship production code or a manager or a sales development representative. Anyone can build a tool. Uh, which one is more of, more central to the current railway pitch when you're talking to customers?

• 1:18:44Speaker 08

  I, I think there's like resonance across the entire space. So we have like larger companies who are, you know, they're spending six figures. They're, they're building something like of deep consequence, like critical, critical, critical for their business, right? And then you have like teams of, you know, a thousand essentially, all kind of like vibe coding and they're building like really, really kind of smaller things. Um, but they're really, really important either for client infrastructure or internal tools or anything else like that. Um, and you know, we've got everybody internally now on like a Claude cod- uh, Claude code subscription.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:13Speaker 08

  Um, you know, in, including our recruiting, our operations, et cetera. Um, there's just, the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply kind of reevaluated just with how good these tools are getting. Um, and we're excited to-

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your personal framework internally and kind of like guidance? Or how, how are you and the team thinking about like when it makes like, uh, cause, cause right now I feel like there's this obviously so much excitement. You can build, you know, an internal tool in an hour or something like that. But every time you build a tool, you're creating like some type of like ongoing, uh, maintenance burden or something like that.

• 1:19:48Speaker 08

  Tech debt, tech debt and stuff like that.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tech, tech debt. So, but yeah, so what, what's your framework of like, hey, this should be something that, uh, that we just should build versus, you know, finding a point solution or, or even using something as like a Google sheet or, uh, at the, at the, uh, kind of low end.

• 1:20:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we use Notion a lot internally and I think lots of deeply flexible tools are going to be really, really key because now that the agent can kind of go in, almost like orchestrate these things in general, you can kind of compartmentalize very, very flexible tools together, right? And so I think that when you're thinking about kind of the build versus buy boundary, right, it's a lot on kind of pushing the context into the tool so that you can access a lot of the context and take advantage of it, right? So I think the burden for almost buy goes up a lot because the ambitions and the capability of you being able to build something that's purpose-built internally is actually so trivial now, right? Like historically, I've built a lot of internal tooling to allow us to do project management, releases, etc.

• 1:20:50Speaker 08

  And now I can actually just kind of push the boundary on a lot of those things. One of my hot takes is that, like, you know ERP software, right? Yeah, of course. Right?

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  We love ERP software.

• 1:21:00Speaker 08

  I was born in ERP software. ERP software, right? Only useful at scale to build an organization to manage resources or whatever, right? Now you can kind of build those like organizational structures way way earlier, right? So the way that railway runs has historically been different than organizations. And so I think what you're going to see is almost this Cambrian explosion of various different ways that you can run your organization, which I think is super, super cool. So unfortunately, like I'm an engineer, so I have engineering brain damage. I think everybody should be building kind of their own stuff, you know? So, yeah.

• 1:21:31Jordi Hays?

  How is your thinking on product management evolved over the last year?

• 1:21:35Speaker 08

  Oh, man. Um, yeah, I had this tweet that I was like, oh, yeah, engineers are going to turn into PMs like faster than, you know, PMs can turn into engineers. And I think like a week ago, I was like, that's completely wrong. You know, like...

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  I like that you're willing to just be like, yep, bad take.

• 1:21:51Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you gotta take your lumps too, right? Like, I don't mind, like, your take can be awful, but if you're going to stand behind it, just like, almost like go down with the ship and be like, alright, the take was awful. You know, we're going down. You know, don't delete the tweet. So, yeah. But yeah, I think, I think the, there's only three things essentially left if you assume that the agents are going to kind of be able to do pretty much anything, right? It's taste, agency, and structure, right? So when you think about almost anything that you can go and build, those PMs have a lot of that context, right? And so you don't need to be a Rust engineer to write Rust anymore. You don't need to be a JavaScript engineer. You don't even have to be an engineer, right? Like, we're almost doing this like...

• 1:22:31Speaker 08

  Like double shift right, where you have like knowledge workers, programmers, engineers, architects, and scientists, right? Based on how nebulous your work is, right? And I think that if you're a knowledge worker, you should probably actually just be like, "Yeah, I can just engineer things now."

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:46Speaker 08

  What it takes is kind of a bit of critical thinking, a bit of kind of like, "Okay, how will this system kind of roughly fail?" And now you can do it in kind of a lower stakes environment. What we hope to provide with Railway is actually those kind of like bleeding edge industry best practices, like really annoying stuff like VPC peering, like, you know, versioned infrastructure so that you can move quickly but also safely and build these kind of bigger and bigger structures over time. So I think, I think the role of the PM evolves a lot and, and you're going to see a lot of these kind of almost like merging or melting of these kind of roles together, right? Like, software engineers will have to become PMs because now it is completely trivial to just go and, and write code, right? Like, I wrote like 5,000 lines of, of code yesterday, right?

• 1:23:31Speaker 08

  And I spent most of my, yeah, I mean, and this is like between meetings, right? And I spent most of the time not actually like auditing the code itself, but auditing a lot of the logic, going in, working, talking about the architecture, all of those other things, right? So I think, again, the burdens or the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply pushed. And so if we at Railway can kind of almost unburden the developer so that they can think about those bigger and bigger things, our hope is that you can build those kind of almost like massive, massive structures, right? Like, if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge, in this current day and age, my first kind of response is like, "How do we build that thing? It's so big and so impressive, right?" And so now you actually have these wonderful tools that push the boundary of that.

• 1:24:15Speaker 08

  So you can build these massive things, right? And it's super exciting to just, you know, you know, I was telling this to an investor, which is probably the wrong thing to tell to an investor, but I was like, "Even if we get schmucked here, like, what a time to be alive." And they were like, "Cool dude, alright, sick, we're gonna pass."

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  That's wild. How are you thinking about it?

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  No, I do, I do think that, like, I mean, obviously, you know, play to win and, and, you know, but, but it's very, it's very refreshing versus the, "I know exactly how the next five to 10 years will unfold day by day." It's like, no, no one knows. Like, the space is moving so quickly, you need to really deeply understand, like, who's signing up for your product? Who loves your product? Why do they love your product? How do you? You know, expand your product and continue to be, you know, critical infrastructure for those customers. So.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  We have some questions from the chat. Uh, yeah, yeah. Sorry. What were you about to say?

• 1:25:06Speaker 08

  I was just gonna say, yeah, like I think like during this period, you should kind of take those risks, right? Like it's it's almost a deeply almost like risk by default period, right? And and I think that, you know, um, there's like, uh, like, what does Elon know that that probably other people don't know? Right. And I think you've heard like Peter Thiel talk about this too. And and it's almost the calculus of risk is not, it's not just purely there, right? Uh, risk is less risky than you you actually think, right? So I think people should kind of push those boundaries. And if we can kind of create those safety nets for people in general, um, I think we can, we can build wonderful, wonderful things. And as a side note, I think we've made, uh, risk and failure a bit too expensive in our current society. And if we can re like rewind that essentially, we can open people up to like sweet success and a bit of bitter failure.

• 1:25:49Speaker 08

  Cause when you take risks, some sometimes things don't work out, but that forms a baseline experience that allows you to kind of drive these unique kind of tastes forward. So to the chat.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  To the chat, uh, we have to ask you about your bike.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Your, and Coon says, uh, your motorcycle liability clause on your term sheet.

• 1:26:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, we have key man insurance. Um, yeah, I'm I'm kind of like, you know, I'm counting the days until somebody really asks me to like go up and give up the bike. And it's funny because people, people ask me like, oh, my God, you ride a motorcycle like I I feel like I should get into that. I was like, my answer is like, absolutely not. Do not do that. Like I I've been riding dirt bikes since I was like 13, basically. Uh, and so, and so like I've had, I've had a bike for a while and I've kind of worked my way up, right? Um, you know, uh, yeah, don't, just don't be stupid.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  No, no, no, you gotta play the history. The riskiest thing you can do is not take any risk. Get on the motorcycle.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Sunday ride.

• 1:26:37Speaker 08

  My Sunday ride is, uh, basically, I I live near the inner Richmond, so I basically just like go up and drive through the Presidio, maybe in the marina. There's that like nice, uh, coffee, uh, like truck, basically. Um, I I go to the gym in the marina. Um, they've got a sauna. It's wonderful. So I just kind of.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever try to find like a super steep, you know, classic SF hill and go a little too fast on the way up?

• 1:26:58Speaker 08

  No, I I those, those days are like behind me, uh, because, uh, yeah, I I I promised the investors that like I wouldn't do anything stupid. So the unfortunate thing about the bike is like it's a, it's a nice bike in general. It's like the bike I wanted growing up, but I don't ride it like, like it should be.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  What bike? What bike?

• 1:27:12Speaker 08

  It's a, it's a Ducati, like the Panigale.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  We have another question from the chat. Everyone's loving the bookshelf behind you. Give us some book recommendations. What's on the shelf?

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's the most underrated book on the shelf?

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  What's the favorite book? What's the one with the most highlights and notes in it?

• 1:27:29Speaker 08

  Well, this is actually my wife's side of the bookshelf. So I'll go off things that are maybe not on there. I know I do see the, I think the Steve Jobs book is somewhere up there, which I don't know, it's pretty good. One of my favorite books actually is Getting to Yes. I don't know if you all have kind of read it.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  I think so. It's about like a sales negotiation?

• 1:27:46Speaker 08

  It's a book essentially on compromise, right? And so essentially it allows you to break down problems in a way that is not kind of me versus you, but it's me versus the problem, right? And so one of my favorite analogies in there is like, you know, we're splitting an orange, right? We could split it down the middle essentially and, you know, I could, like you could have half and I could have half in general, or we could figure out what we care about in general, right? And maybe I'm making mixed drinks and maybe you're taking your kid to the soccer game, right? Or anything else like that. And so in essence, I want the peel and you want the whole orange, right? We can both come out on top roughly, right? And I think that figuring out ways that you can almost like have a solid compromise with people is deeply, deeply important, you know, on that one. So I like that book.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Uh, back to, back to AI and how it's changing software development, database selection, database migration, switching something is ingrained in an organization as a database has historically been very difficult. Are AI agents making it easier? Are you actually seeing companies move around from one database to another? Maybe based on cost, maybe based on features. Is, is the, is the fact that a particular LLM is in love with a Redis or a MongoDB? Like, is that going to be relevant in the future?

• 1:28:59Speaker 08

  So I'm unfortunately a little bit like too Dario-pilled in terms of like the, the fundamental laws of physics, right? And so I think it's, it's actually probably the hardest thing to change about your, your system is the database roughly, right? Because you have that storage, you have all of those other things, right? Like this is fundamentally also why we build data centers, right? One, you need more production roughly in the world and we can start with data centers and that's, that's wonderful. But two, it's actually a really, really solid mode in terms of, you know, you can't just will into existence a data center, right? Like, and at some point, potentially down the line, like those things will get more and more expensive just because of the cost of labor, but like the cost of capital is decreasing, right? And so I think the similar thing kind of applies roughly with data centers if you kind of move roughly up the stack. And so we actually started building, or sorry, databases.

• 1:29:44Speaker 08

  We actually started building databases, like we were originally just a, you know, click a button, get a Postgres instance or Redis instance or anything else like that. And we've slowly worked worked our way back up, right, up to building, you know, web apps, you know, launch a CDN at some point in the future, stuff like that. So I, I think that when you look at that lens of like fundamental law of physics, I think the database is like a very, very important part of your, your kind of rough calculus. And I think the agents are making it easier to go and almost manage those migrations. But you know, when I was talking about those 5,000 lines of code, you have to think about kind of what you are roughly building, right? And so you're still going to need to audit it. And that's sort of why I say, you know, moving from engineers to like architects, right? Where you're thinking about that kind of bigger, bigger vision.

• 1:30:26Speaker 08

  And so, you know, as Jordi said earlier, like, I don't think anybody can roughly pick, predict the, the future for a lot of these things. But I do still think that fundamentally there are going to be requirements for how do you integrate the things that exist in the physical realm? So roughly around those databases to storage to data centers. And with, with kind of your expected reality, basically, right? And the hope over time is, is that Railway can actually help you do that, right? So we do this on a software level and we've built tooling internally to help build data centers. And so we've actually virtualized a bunch of those racks. So now you can almost drag and drop those servers into them. And at some point, we can get to a point where we're working directly with the Super Micro API. You can drag and say, hey, I want this data center of this size in general.

• 1:31:11Speaker 08

  You'll create POs for that, that and say, okay, cool. Hit a button, it'll cost you 25 mil or something like that.

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  One click, one click checkout for data centers.

• 1:31:20Speaker 08

  One click checkout for data centers and stuff like that. And, and moving towards a world where you can almost, because it's easier to build things on the internet, right? Like it's just, it's a fundamental like fact, right? If you can simulate it and simulate that small section of it and you can create almost APIs to reconcile. Like this is what Terraform did really, really well, like expected state versus desired state. And if we can do that with your intention as you kind of move through time and give you those safe kind of primitives to say, okay, cool. Like I want to make this change, let me fork my entire environment, you know, get copy on write storage for, for everything, make some small change. I make it in production, it merges and you deploy it instantly. Then you're kind of moving at agent speed, right? And that's, that's what we think a lot about in terms of building the next fundamental layer of, of software development and then physical production beyond that.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  You were at Bloomberg. Did you get to work directly on the terminal?

• 1:32:09Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, a little bit. Um, I bounced around a bit at Bloomberg. I was only there for about six months. Um, but it was, it was a really, really, uh, cool, cool time to kind of work on stuff like that. Um, I was working on a bit of the internal tooling. Um, so I got a couple commits that I think are probably still inside.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Powering the Odd Lots podcast, making Joe Weisenthal's job easier. We love to see it.

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  Putting Joe Weisenthal in agent mode.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Yes, hopefully. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:32:35Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations to the whole team. Uh, the chat loves you. Come back on again soon.

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, love to. And, and thanks for, thanks for having us as sponsors. Like we're just, we're big proponents of like rich taste and like we, we believe that TVPN has a rich taste that y'all are sharing with the world and we're just happy to be here. So have me on anytime. Love to, to join and, and hang out.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Thank you for making this possible.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you on for the C very soon, I'm sure.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Jake.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  And in case you've been living under a data center, Railway, Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. We're very happy to be partnered with Railway. Um, we have Joe Weisenthal coming in to the.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  He said he was running five minutes behind, uh, so we can get back to the timeline.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about 11 Labs.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we got him.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And we do have Joe Weisenthal in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TVPN Ultra Room. Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Brother Joe.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  How are you doing? It has been, it has been eons. It's been far too long. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:33:44Joe Weisenthal?

  I missed you guys too. And it has been far too long. It probably hasn't even been that much time, but probably like, there's just been so much that's happened since the last time we connected. It feels year, it feels like years.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  There, there has been.

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  It really does.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  So, so, uh, do you have Davos FOMO right now? I, I feel like it's been a good year for Davos. You're normally our foreign correspondent and you're on the ground at all these big hoity-toity events. I go to you, but you're, it appears you're in New York.

• 1:34:09Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm in the New York studio. You know, I was in Davos in January.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Whoa, we get it, dude. We get it. We get it. We get it, Joe. You've been to Davos.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Twenty fifteen, twenty fifteen.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  They said ten years and he wouldn't lose touch. Apparently, he's completely lost touch.

• 1:34:24Joe Weisenthal?

  No, this is a real story. This is a real story, though. I got like, I got like, first of all, it's very cold there. It's not that nice. I got a flu or I got sick there. I was so miserable.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Joe Weisenthal?

  That when I got back.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Joe Weisenthal?

  I told the people inside Bloomberg, I said, never invite me to Davos again, lest I feel tempted to say yes. Because I don't, because it's like, oh, do you want to be part of our Davos team?

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:34:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Okay, maybe. So I didn't even want the temptation to say yes.

• 1:34:50Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were gonna, I thought you were gonna say you got back and you immediately switched up on your day one. You never, you never looked back.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  You forgot where you came from. No, no.

• 1:34:59Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's like, I, I do not want the temptation to go back. But I've always been the same as everyone else. Like, oh, Davos, boring, blah, blah, blah. And then finally.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  This year?

• 1:35:08Joe Weisenthal?

  There's a good Davos. Ten years or however many years it's been since I went. There's finally a good Davos where there's like a bunch of news and action.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Joe Weisenthal?

  And I guess, did I have a little fun, Mo? Maybe I did. I don't know. It seemed like a fun one this year.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been fifty-five years, something like that, going strong. What headlines have stuck out to you that have come out? We've been tracking most of the AI and tech stuff.

• 1:35:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Has anything popped up on your radar that's, that sort of updated you?

• 1:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Did anything spike your cortisol?

• 1:35:35Joe Weisenthal?

  With, without question, the Mark Carney speech, the Canadian Prime Minister, it was like, pretty out there in terms of like, the old world is dead. There's no point in nostalgia. Everybody for themselves, sovereignty, power politics is back. And this is like, you know, it's one of these things where like, you, the three of us could have had this conversation a couple of years ago. But to hear it from someone like a Mark Carney, who's like, he's such an institutional man, right? So he used to be the head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada for the matter, for that matter, like a true internationalist Davos man. I mean, I think if you thought of who is Davos man? You would think someone like Mark Carney. So to hear him basically say, say like, we shouldn't be, that world is dead.

• 1:36:19Joe Weisenthal?

  And there's no point in spending time being nostalgic for it. I would say it's sort of a, it's a mark to market moment, I would say. And so without question, I think like that was from a sort of geopolitical standpoint, the highlight of the whole event. The other one, the other speech that I thought was really remarkable or very important. With the Chinese Vice Premier, they're talking about how China doesn't want to just be the factory to the world, it also wants to buy your stuff because for all the anxiety that we have here in the US, every other country is feeling that stress as well, their manufacturing sector is getting hollowed out by Chinese competition. So it's clearly a source of, I would say, a different anxiety for China, that every country around the world looks at them and thinks, wait, are you gonna kill my domestic champions as well

• 1:37:04Joe Weisenthal?

  as you've done to, you know, European chemical automakers and so forth.

• 1:37:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great, it's great that they're saying that, but does anyone actually believe it? I mean, ask Elon, do you think, do you think, do the Chinese really want to buy Teslas?

• 1:37:19Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I mean, so I wrote about this, and my take is that, like, they have been saying this for years. This is not the first time. And they're like, oh, we're gonna lift domestic consumption, and that's gonna create imports, then that'll benefit the rest of the world and so forth. They've been saying this for years, and I think there is this view that's like, well, this is just lip service. It's just, they just say it every year, and then they say it again the next year. I think, however, in their defense, what I would say is, the structure of the sort of domestic Chinese political economy makes it very hard. And if I can just get technical for a second, they have this very decentralized approach to fiscal policy, which is, you know, all of the different provinces basically run their

• 1:38:02Joe Weisenthal?

  own economies, and the provincial leaders, they try to achieve goals that are set by Beijing. And basically, this is how you get this crazy race to the bottom, which is every, you know, every province wants to have their BYD, their, you know, battery maker, et cetera. And so, the issue isn't so much whether Chinese leaders in Beijing are serious about wanting to like boost imports. The question is whether their system will ever allow them to get out of the sort of game theory equilibrium where all of the provincial leaders feel incentivized to just export as much as possible. And it is probably a tricky thing to turn around that political system, in the same way that we have difficulties that are very

• 1:38:45Joe Weisenthal?

  difficult to turn around, even if someone in Washington DC says otherwise.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  What's the sweet spot for Chinese imports? Because it feels like they're, they are exporting a ton. Cars and phones and all sorts of stuff, rare earth elements.

• 1:38:59Jordi Hays?

  The sweet spot is luxury goods. That's the one thing, it's like you can't.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  But they want to import chips, but we've, you know, we're really putting the kibosh on that, going back and forth or whatever.

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, the companies do.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  The companies do, but, uh, you know, the, the China seems to want to be a buyer of semiconductors and silicon. But is there a sweet spot product that you think that they'd actually be well suited to scale their imports of?

• 1:39:20Joe Weisenthal?

  I think this is the, this is the real serious question. So, I mean, even on the chips thing, they want to be an importer of chips now, but they don't want to be an importer of chips in five years, right? They want to be an importer of chips only so long, only for so long as it takes for them to have domestic capacity to produce the world's most advanced chips. They certainly, I mean, they clearly do not want to like have this permanently be importing Nvidia chips or whatever. They would like Huawei to, uh, uh, supersede them. But then on the other things, you know, the intuitive answer is like, oh, you're like gonna, um, import luxury goods and fine wines and all that stuff. But even there, like, there was a great FT story in December talking about how China

• 1:40:02Joe Weisenthal?

  is becoming a booming producer of caviar and sparkling wine. These things that we don't associate with China at all, or really nice, like organic cherries and stuff like that. And so even there, there's the sort of effectiveness of their domestic productivity, their ability to sort of identify a sector and get really good at producing it really fast, which you can't knock them for it. That's progress, but it does create this very intense strains. And so you ask, okay, you want to import more from the rest of the world. Well, what do you imagine that's going to be in 2035? What is the rest of the world making that you can't make domestically? You can't really knock the country for it, right? Being good at building things is awesome and everyone would like to do it, but you can't, what is that thing?

• 1:40:47Joe Weisenthal?

  And I don't think anyone really has that sweet spot answer. I think it's really.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the luxury goods side, they're so good at making stuff. They can make you a watch that looks exactly like a Richard Mille. Like it looks at one, it looks like a one to one. The only difference in the, that, well, the kind of saving grace for our, our M is like. You can't just like snap your fingers and have, you know,

• 1:41:08Joe Weisenthal?

  You can't.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  That quality of brand and the story.

• 1:41:11Joe Weisenthal?

  But like the, but if you can, you definitely can't sort of establish the backstory and the brand, the legend, that's going to take a long time. But I think like even in, I bought a Chinese, a very cheap Chinese watch last year, but I sort of looked into the Chinese watch industry and the sort of like the watch nerds online, you know, people would talk about luxury watches on Reddit, et cetera. They're full of praise at the quality of the mechanical gearing or whatever.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  The horology.

• 1:41:39Joe Weisenthal?

  In a lot of the sort of, so they're catching up, you know, they're catching up fast to what they can do in Switzerland and elsewhere, even in that category.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with Japan? What's going on over there?

• 1:41:52Joe Weisenthal?

  So, you know, we did it. We actually, we have, we have a great episode that came out today. So we talked to the CEO of PIMCO, which, you know, owns the world's largest bond fund.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  That's on the Odd Lots Podcast, which is available in your podcast players?

• 1:42:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  You've been making it handmade for over 10 years.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Over a decade.

• 1:42:10Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. Yeah. Handmade in New York City for over a decade.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Sort of the Patek Philippe of podcasts.

• 1:42:16Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. Many people say that.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Joe Weisenthal?

  You, I haven't said that, but.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  It has a lot of history.

• 1:42:22Joe Weisenthal?

  This is what everyone always says, oh, Odd Lots, yes, that's the Patek Philippe of podcasts. That's right. But, um, there, you know what? So everyone is looking at these bond yields in Japan and they're surging and people are saying, you know, Japan has a lot of government debt. That's very true. And they're, they're saying, is this the big one, right? Is this the moment where the bill comes due and they're going to have to print a ton of yen and the yen, you know, is worth as much as confetti or whatever? His argument is like, no, that's, he just, he had just gotten back from Japan. He said, no, that's not what's going on at all. What's happening is that Japanese economic growth, et cetera, has been stagnant for 30 years about. And there is actually a reinvigorate,

• 1:43:03Joe Weisenthal?

  reinvigorated, uh, domestic investment and that has an inflationary impulse and that does push up rates, you know, just in the way that rates have come up in the U.S. since the zerp year of the 2010s. And his argument, which I find compelling, is that. If you look at the Nikkei, their main stock index, and you look at it in US dollar terms, that is surging to new all-time highs. So we're not seeing a collapse of the yen at all. And you would not expect, you know, if this country is like, oh, this is the prelude to hyperinflation, you would not expect to see such robustness in the stock market. And I find that compelling. So for now, I'm going to take it as this is a sign of a country.

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Expand that a little bit more, because hyperinflation, you can have asset prices going up even if there's not necessarily the fundamentals of the business aren't changing.

• 1:43:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes, but you would not expect to see that happening in other currency terms. So it's like, yes, if you look at the Venezuelan stock market in the 2010s, I mean, you just look at a line and it looks like it's going through the moon, because it to the moon existed. And then you're just like, on the Bloomberg, you just toggle that. And now I want to look at the same stock market in US dollar terms, not in boulevards. And then you see the stock market has basically gone to zero. And so it's like a simple test. And so, yeah, like in a period of like broad-scale devaluation of the currency, you get the phenomenon that you described where everything goes up. But when you see it going up in dollar terms, there has been some dollar weakness. But when you see it going up so much in terms of a foreign currency, then it's no longer a story about the base.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  What did you think about some of Ken Griffin's comments? I thought, I appreciated his perspective on the AI boom and job loss, specifically because this is somebody who's like, been heavily focused on automating trading, specifically for a very long time, working with some of the best.

• 1:44:58Joe Weisenthal?

  What did he say? Now I feel bad. What was the, I missed the Ken Griffin comment.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  He was just basically saying that like this sort of job loss concept is overblown in the short.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  His example was that he had a-

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  He said it was hype.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, he had a commodities trader come to him with a report that was AI-generated. And he said he was, he was, you know, amazed with the title, amazed with the intro paragraph. And then as he dug in, he basically called it slop. And it's a classic debate on, well, are we about to turn the corner? And Ken Griffin is the next person to be impressed? Because Andre Karpathy was not impressed with the code that these models were writing a year ago. Now, he's like, I'm falling behind. It's amazing. And so is Ken Griffin the next domino to fall? Or is he a canary in the coal mine for some true plateau?

• 1:45:46Joe Weisenthal?

  It would be really interesting. I would love to, if I could, the jury, if I, what I would really love is not to hear Ken Griffin's take on AI, but what I'd like to hear is a pod manager within Citadel.

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Because so many of those jobs of like running the pods or that, you know, I've talked to a bunch of them now.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:04Joe Weisenthal?

  And they're coding jobs. So there's someone gets hired as a junior analyst within a pod, right?

• 1:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Joe Weisenthal?

  And they're gonna study, you know, they're gonna track industrial stocks. So they're gonna track, they're gonna trade chemical stocks. But those jobs are like basically coding jobs are a large part and they're, they're running back tests and so forth and they're trying to see, okay, what information corresponds to useful signal, what sort of economic data and so forth. And these are all just, you know, they're computer jobs, they're engineering jobs.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And they're in many cases competing at some of these firms for some of the same talent as, in many cases, as big tech.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, that's.

• 1:46:40Joe Weisenthal?

  So I agree, like, like, I, I think it's, many people would agree with Ken Griffin that you are not gonna get some gem of insight about what stock to trade or anything like that, or any commodity from a sort of AI-generated report. I, but, you know, like, it's also, we know at every, every engineer, every software engineer we talk to talks about how much, how impressed they are right now with like Opus 4.5 and so forth. And so I, you know, I would be curious because we've talked to, we have an episode of the podcast coming out next week with the head of a major bank. They are seeing, you know, the, I'll say, the tenor of the conversation has changed from last year to this year.

• 1:47:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Last year, when you ask executives, well, what are you actually getting value out of, from AI right now? They would say, well, we have tests everywhere, right? We, all of, we're all, we're testing a bunch of stuff, we're really excited about it.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Now they come back with clear examples of this is a workflow process that was more costly or time-intensive last year than it is right now. And so I think from my perspective, clearly, just talking to people, people are finding productivity gains that are real from it.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  That's so funny because I remember more of the Ken Griffin quote, and one of the lines he said was that he specifically asked a bunch of business leaders to give examples of how AI is improving their business. And he was taken aback by the fact that none of them were citing generative AI as the core driver.

• 1:48:10Joe Weisenthal?

  That's interesting.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  But I, but I, I, I agree with you generally. Uh, there was an interesting report in the Wall Street Journal about how, uh, the C-suite is reporting much more time-saving from AI tools than workers in the non-suite, C-suite, uh, category. And it wasn't sure what to make of that, um, whether it's just like stuff fills the gaps more, there's some sort of incentive. I don't know.

• 1:48:34Joe Weisenthal?

  I do, look, I, I, I still think by and large at this point, probably it's modest what people, in terms of, oh, this is like really moving the dial. Or this is a dramatic change in how productive our employees can be at any level. And I'm sort of, you know, even in the C-suite, I'm like, I, I'd be curious to know what exactly they're doing that, okay, this is saving them time. I mean, maybe in some cases, it might just be they're having an AI draft an email for them that's a lot quicker and there's probably some.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. When I think about the C-suite job, I think about a lot of deep research reports for every business, every business decision that they're making. And they're probably, they're not working less, they're just saying that, you know, well, to make this one decision, I need to, I needed to get a survey together of all the companies in this category that I could potentially do business with before I walk into this meeting with this one company that I might do business with. And yes, that would take an hour on Google and a spreadsheet to pull together. Deep Research just does it in 10 minutes in the background on your phone. And so I, I feel like there, there are real speed ups there and maybe workers just haven't been diffused in that way, or it's less relevant in like a non-knowledge work, non-executive functioning task.

• 1:49:46John Coogan?

  It's, it's just a different diffusion level. Um, anyway, I, I want to talk to you about the future of the New York Times homepage because.

• 1:49:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, great. I love this topic. I love this topic.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  We're blackpilling a little bit, saying that it's not going to be maintained in a future where, you know, the news is collected. And my point was maybe if the cost to maintain the New York Times homepage goes down, because AI tools are more available and more diffuse and cheaper, that you might actually see a continuation of the greatness that is, you know, beautiful homepages. What do you think?

• 1:50:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I think that's a great take, actually. And I guess my concern isn't like, okay, we're not going to have websites anymore, per se.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  I mean, we still have newspapers, right?

• 1:50:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, we still have newspapers, right. But it's more that, you know, if in a world in which we are communicating, you know, I buy my auto insurance through an AI agent of some sort, of some source. Like, why did that, why does that auto insurance company really need to have a web presence as we know it? Or why is the web presence optimized for human consumers? As the sort of human consumer becomes less and less a factor, less and less relevant for them. So, you know, I wasn't even, like, when I wrote that, like, I wasn't even, like, dooming or blackpilling or any of that, per se. And actually, you know, even going back to the New York Times example,

• 1:51:14Joe Weisenthal?

  you know, the post-homepage era is actually, you know, it's been there for years, right? So if you think, if you think like the digital, digital media at the New York Times, what are they probably really excited about? Well, it's probably like getting their, many of their reporters to get comfortable doing reels or going out, doing TikToks where they talk about that story. So like, in a sense, the sort of post-webpage era has been around for a long time. But it feels like with like, the sort of efficacy and the clear usefulness of agents and scraping, etc. It's just not obvious why it's going to be much of a priority. Maybe for, you know, the Times is a really nice homepage. And so to your point, it would be easy to maintain and so forth. It's probably very easy to maintain as it is, or a lot, certainly a lot easier than it used to be.

• 1:51:57Joe Weisenthal?

  It's not clear that this is going to be the sort of dominant way that we sort of trade digital information.

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they might. They have a big, obviously, games division.

• 1:52:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  We could see them continue to invest or maybe get into gaming, open a casino in Vegas.

• 1:52:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:14Jordi Hays?

  The New York Times Casino.

• 1:52:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you imagine how great that would be?

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  It was a great ring to it, honestly.

• 1:52:19Joe Weisenthal?

  I went to Vegas, hanging out by the pool at the New York Times Casino.

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  I want high stakes Wordle. I'm putting 100 Gs down on Wordle. Let's go.

• 1:52:26Joe Weisenthal?

  I would love, people would love that. They gotta do it.

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  People probably would love that.

• 1:52:31Joe Weisenthal?

  The thing about the New York Times is, you know, other than, there's a handful of others perhaps, and I would like Bloomberg is one of them.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Joe Weisenthal?

  But, you know, it is a brand. It is a lifestyle brand, right? In a way that very few news outlets of any sort have ever been able to achieve. So, you know, they go into cooking and they have cooking shows. They go into, you know, simple games on the phone. There are not many news entities of any sort that could pull that off. And I've always been, for years, a sort of, not literally, but a New York Times bull, because it's just been so obvious to me that there is this one news brand that is also this big lifestyle brand, and their core subscribers will follow them into all of these new ventures. And it's just something, you know, like, I don't want to name names,

• 1:53:22Joe Weisenthal?

  but like other like big publications, similar national general news publications do not have that same cachet where if they get into some totally new line of business, that they'll have subscribers who will pay up all of that money. So the New York Times is sort of a, sort of a special entity in that respect.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. You know, I completely agree. It's also interesting that the New York Times has managed this like, sort of influencer transition remarkably well. When I go on YouTube, I'll see the Ezra Klein Show, or Ross Duffitt, or Hard Fork. And Ezra and Ross have like their own brands, but they still like has the aesthetics of the New York Times, and they brought that into YouTube, and they do these collabs. Like, just watching how they've actually mechanically positioned as the talent is more forward, but it's still under the umbrella. Very, very smart.

• 1:54:11Joe Weisenthal?

  And every, again, every publication would love to pull that off, but it's really tough because then you get this situation which the talent says like, oh wait, why am I still here, et cetera? I think it actually speaks to just like how powerful that New York Times brand is, that someone, you know, Ross Douthat, et cetera. No, this is a very good fit, but it's tricky. Every publication is going to try to do some version, have their own, you know, equivalent of their Substack roster, right? Or have their equivalent of that. And I think very few are really going to be able to pull it off at scale.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Are you one-shotted by vibe coding?

• 1:54:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you know what? I have like full-on AI psychosis and I'll tell you, here's, here's the, here's the evidence that I realized. Complete Victoru attack. Yeah, so here's a, I, I, I'm going to admit this here, but here's, here was the moment that I knew I had full-on, um, one-shotted psychosis, which was whatever, whatever term I wanted to use. So I was like vibe coding, I was using Claude Code and I was like very impressed. And then I opened up a second Claude Code window, so, because I wanted to be able to work on a couple like aspects of the project in parallel. And then the second window, it made a suggestion for what I work on that was actually a very bad suggestion. It was the first, had I actually said yes to the suggestion, it would have really set

• 1:55:32Joe Weisenthal?

  me back quite a bit. It was, and I'm glad I paid attention, overwrote it. And my first thought in that moment was like, the original window would have never made that mistake. You know, it's like, the original window, that window really got me. This window doesn't get me at all. And I was like, I'm, I'm sticking with the window on the right side. And in that moment, when I like had that thought that, oh, this window doesn't get me the way the other window, I was like, Joe, okay, I gotta step away from the computer a little bit. That is, those are early signs. I think I'm like, you know, I'm very proud of myself. I think I avoid psychoses of all sorts. I've been on Twitter for 15 years and I haven't gone crazy. And so I was like, okay, I saw that in myself as like, step away from the computer, it's just a computer, there's no personality, there's not one screen that gets me better.

• 1:56:16Joe Weisenthal?

  But when I noticed that is like, okay, I'm, I'm more at risk perhaps than I thought.

• 1:56:22Jordi Hays?

  What have you been building?

• 1:56:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, so I'm very obsessed for years with this idea that people write and speak fundamentally differently. And when we give speeches, we use various things. We rhyme, and we speak in rhythm, and we use mnemonic aids, and we say first and you, and all these different linguistic things. And it's just been a personal interest of mine. And I sort of think that as digital media has saturated our lives over the last 15, 20 years, even our written text comes to resemble more spoken text. And so I thought, well, it would be fun if you could like build a piece of software that actually empirically tested this question. Like, does a piece of writing in a newspaper today resemble more written word than, say,

• 1:57:05Joe Weisenthal?

  that same column or whatever 20 years ago? And I'd like to be able to test this out. And there are various lexical markers that linguists and others have used to work on these things. So I thought, okay, it'd be fun to see if I could build this. And so I've actually been able to build it. People, go check it out, havelock.ai. And you just drop a piece of text in, and then it says, this sentence looks literate, this sentence looks like the spoken word, and so forth. And it's almost works. Like, I'm actually astonished. It's not perfect by any stretch. I still have a lot of work to do. But basically, I sort of was able to vibe code this sort of machine learning model, where I trained a model to detect this is rhyme, this is not, et cetera. And then it breaks out every

• 1:57:48Joe Weisenthal?

  sentence, and then sort of scores the whole piece. And it works. And I'm sort of astonished.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  And you've been testing it on Davis?

• 1:57:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, like, so I, you know, I tested on the Mark Carney speech and the Trump speech. And the difference is remarkable. It's every sentence, it sort of classifies one as this resembles the spoken word, this resembles the written word. And the difference, you know, we hear this, right? You hear the two speeches, and you're like, okay, they're speaking at a very different register. This feels very different. And it's cool that like I've been, uh, you know, with two weeks of hobby coding, been able to build this model. And I actually, I trained, uh, you know, I'd learned how to, I don't know what I learned, but I was able to build this little machine learning model that identifies each sentence and categorize in one. And I'm like, this is crazy. It actually kind of works and I don't know anything about code.

• 1:58:37Joe Weisenthal?

  And this is something that I've wanted to exist for a long time and I was able to just build it.

• 1:58:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's cool because it's something, it's something, uh, it's something that like, I'm, I'm sure you could find a way to turn it into a business, but it's actually a tool that just should exist. Like there were so many tools that didn't exist because there was no business justification to devote hundreds of hours.

• 1:58:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Uh, exactly that, right? Like, so this is an interesting thing, but who's actually going to take the many, many sort of, uh, hours that it would take to actually code this? Cause I don't think there was like some obvious path to riches here. But it was a, you know, I did like an hour or two a day for a few days at five in the morning before my kids got up. And it is a properly working piece of software that I can use. I still need to fine tune a little lot. There's still mistakes and so forth, but it actually works.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  You have to turn it, you need to turn into like a vibe coding slash mindset influencer every morning. It's like, it's 5:00 AM. I'm tired. I'm still at my, I'm up at my desk. Everyone else is sleeping.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Jaco Willink gets the photo of the watch every day.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  It's 2:00 AM on the west coast. Every, all my enemies are sleeping.

• 1:59:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm gonna.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  I just ran my most recent, I just ran my most recent, uh, essay through havelock.ai. I got a 76% orality score. I write very, very loosely, strongly or.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Part, part of that is that we do.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  I started the essay, Trump, Greenland, Elon, blah, blah, blah. Let's focus on the important thing. I feel like, cause I deliberately write exactly like I talk.

• 2:00:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. And so that's like, I'm pretty happy about that. It sounds like it scored it pretty well.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:00:17Joe Weisenthal?

  That also means that you are writing in a way that connects with the modern, um, you know, the modern audience. And so I think that's great. And you could test that and now you can know. And is this in the contemporary register? And I don't know, like high score, low score, better or worse. I just think it's cool that this thing can actually sort of figure it out.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Anything else, Jordy?

• 2:00:38Jordi Hays?

  No, super fun.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Always great.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang. Anytime. Great to hang.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you, Joe. Have fun out there.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  That is right.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  So, up next, we have an anonymous guest.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  An anonymous poster.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  We have Cold Healing, an anonymous poster joining us.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  An internet anthropologist.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  A TikTok anthropologist, Cold Healing, Midwesterner in exile, loneliness epidemic superspreader, and a dark statistician. I'm gonna tell you about CrowdStrike before we bring him in from the restream waiting room. CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, without further ado.

• 2:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Chat is saying that Microsoft is down. Microsoft is down.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  People are not getting emails, but Wyatt.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  I thought the stock was down.

• 2:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Wyatt is in the chat hanging out with us because Microsoft is down. So, a little silver lining there.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Well, without further ado, let's bring in Cold Healing into the TV panel.

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  This is his profile picture, their profile picture. How are you doing? What is your profile picture of?

• 2:02:01Speaker 10

  That is a photo of me. It's in my apartment in Peoria, Illinois, that I lived in when I was posting a lot on Twitter. I took it, I'm holding a sword in it. It's like a self-timer photo that I set up.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  For some reason, I thought it was an RPG.

• 2:02:15Speaker 10

  Yeah, people always say this. I really don't get this RPG thing. I mean, it is kind of sharp like an RPG is, but.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  I did, I initially, I now see the sword outlined.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  You thought RPG?

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  I did think RPG.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  Too many hours in COD.

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Too many hours in COD.

• 2:02:28Speaker 10

  It does have a very small hills, but yeah, thanks for having me on, guys.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining. Anyway, give us a little background on like how you see your work, what you post, how you select content, how you curate, what are you trying to achieve with everything you do?

• 2:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'll start by saying, I'll start by saying, I think that something that I like. One thing about your account that I think is really important is like algorithms like make us view the world and the internet in a specific way, right? Like even with Davos this week, I've been thinking like, wow, Davos was like all AI, all tech. And obviously it was not, right? There was like, tech was a part of it and that's just my algorithm, you know, serving me content that it knows I'm gonna be excited about. And you're taking content from all over the internet. I don't even, I'm sure you have like a bunch of different instances and accounts that have different interests. But I feel like the work that you're doing is a new science.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anthropology is the correct term.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  And it's very important.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, that's very nice to say. I mean, I think my goal is to just try to be like on the crest of what's happening on the internet. I mean, there's so much happening. I think that in a lot of ways, institutions are not fully chronicling what's happening, if that makes sense. Like a lot of the cutting edge culture on TikTok especially, I thought was not, I'm just also being unnoticed by other people on the internet, I think. I mean, I sort of accidentally came into this role, quite honestly. I mean, I've been on TikTok since 2018. I was like, you know, viscerally loved the platform, like first time I got on it, you know, the algorithm of it is just so good. And I was just, you know, instantly like, you know, just pulled in of like, wow, I can just, you know, see so many different parts of the world really quickly.

• 2:04:19Speaker 10

  And so, you know, I was doing YouTube anthropology even before that of just, you know, getting into different niche subcultures online then. But yeah, I mean, basically it's just, you know, I think this is all like worthy of studying and worthy of just further thought. And so I try to share the things that I think are, you know, worth commentary to my audience. Yeah.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  What videos are most memorable? You were Uh, you surfaced the, the product manager.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Poolside PM.

• 2:04:47Speaker 10

  Yes, yeah, yeah. Product manager, I think that's of all the ones that's like number one most memorable. That's like for sure. Cause I was like, you know, it really like blew up my account in a lot of ways. And also just, you know, the downstream impacts of, you know, it, it kind of causing the.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  You kind of destroyed product management.

• 2:05:03Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  You sent the product management field back.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  No, they were early. They were early. They understood that there would be a lot of downtime while you're waiting for the agents to respond after you fire off a big long prompt. And so best to spend it at the pool. They were just early. The future's here. It's not, not evenly distributed.

• 2:05:21Speaker 10

  Um, yeah.

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  But what was the response to the poolside PM's thing? Because when you surf and when you recontextualize some of these videos, sometimes there can be pile-ons, there can be, you know, like positive things that come out of it. Like, how were you processing that moment of like mega virality?

• 2:05:38Speaker 10

  Um, I mean, yeah, for sure. I was definitely like me reposting it changed the context of it a ton, right? It was initially posted by like, you know, a girl on TikTok excited to share, you know, her, like, you know, her somewhat comfortable life. And she's posting it in a tongue-in-cheek way too, right? She's aware this is like, you know, not her normal way of going about her day. She's posting it, you know, because it's like, oh, this is a funny afternoon that I spent. But then, you know, it gets into, you know, Twitter discourse and especially in like tech Twitter discourse, you know, becomes kind of like a, a representation of the excesses of the, um, 2010, 2020s like tech hiring boom. And, um, yeah, I don't know. I think that it, you know, that recontextualization definitely brought like a whole new audience from it.

• 2:06:19Speaker 10

  It was interesting. I mean, like she like had like multiple responses to my, my reposting of it, which was not really just me reposting it. You know, I mean, I think it was also all the other, you know, external commentary, because I didn't really say that much. I mean, for me, I reposted it because it felt like my own life, you know? That's what I was doing back then, you know, I was working a work from home job and, you know, I felt represented by the fact, you know, like I wasn't in the pool, you know, but I would go outside and sit on my patio, you know? And it's, it's really not that, that dissimilar and it's, you know, it's great. It's, it's great to sit in the sun with your laptop and, you know, you can go inside when something important happens. Um, I really don't think that that's like, you know, an end of the world way to work.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk to me about day in the life videos generally. Every time I see one surfaced, the comments are always like, there's so little work getting done. But if you personally, I've made enough videos that I can imagine if I tried to make a day in the life, there would be a lot of downtime that I would cut out because taking one phone call isn't as engaging as watching me assemble a meal from six different things. Just visually, it makes more sense to take a video of the commute, the coffee that you get, the meal that you have, then yes, there's one frame of you doing Excel for six hours, but you don't put, you don't put, that doesn't take up 45 seconds of the one minute clip.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  But have you thought about like what the, what the medium is that is the message of these videos?

• 2:07:40Speaker 10

  No, a hundred percent, you know, is like, it's initially shot, or these earlier videos, like 2022 day in the life videos that I was posting of, you know, like the product manager pool girls, those are sort of shots in this way that's aspirational, that shows all the fun parts of their life. One thing I've been talking a little bit on my account recently is how it's kind of flipped the other way recently. You actually see kind of people shooting these day in the life videos in an intentionally mundane looking way.

• 2:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, these people like day in the life of, of a middle manager at an accounting firm. And then they just show like, it just looks like, they make it look like, they're like, wake up, protein shake. Go on a, go on a one mile jog, drive to work. It's like, it, it, it's like the least aspirational.

• 2:08:23Speaker 10

  Some somber music in the background.

• 2:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and yeah, it's such an interesting, interesting view. Something about the day in the life is just so triggering to people too. Like whatever life is being lived, people just develop an opinion.

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  Because everyone has a life, everyone has a day in their life and they immediately compare it, I suppose. What, what do you think about this, if I remember correctly, the original poolside day in the life video? At the end, she sort of remarks that, you know, she's been making personal social media content because everyone might post a photo of an engagement or a wedding or a kid announcement. But then at a certain point, if your account gets big, it's, it felt like she felt pressure from her colleagues to actually make content about work and this was her expression of that. And I'm wondering if you've reflected on like what the role of the lower level employee in brand building around a corporation's work-life balance and what it's like to work

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  there that could go either way. Is that an interesting new trend? Are there pitfalls there?

• 2:09:28Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:09:29John Coogan?

  How have you reflected on that?

• 2:09:29Speaker 10

  I think that's already over, to be honest. I mean, this was, you know, three years ago that that video was posted. I think that now people would not represent that. You know what I mean? Like if you were a he, you especially would not say what company you work for. Like if you are representing, like if you're a Palantir employee, you're not going to make a day in the life of a Palantir employee with, you know, the fun little lunch that you get, you know?

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:51Speaker 10

  Like, that's not, like, it's very discouraged by HR departments, you know, it's also just socially discouraged. So I think that people have become like aware of the context of it. And yeah, I mean, in that video, she does say at the very end, she's, you know, like, hey, my friends were encouraging me to share about, you know, my life. So I didn't have, if you look at my post, it looks like I didn't have a job. And, you know, it's just like a playful post that she was making.

• 2:10:11Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how have you processed generative AI content on these platforms? It feels like, you know, from our point of view over the last few weeks, we don't, we don't use TikTok, but our point of view over the last few weeks is that it's getting really good. And there's like entirely new genre of, of creators that are just leaning in and this is the only thing that they're doing. But what's it been like on TikTok?

• 2:10:37Speaker 10

  Yeah. It's definitely there. I see it more on Instagram reels than you on TikTok personally, but there definitely is generative AI content on it yet. I still don't think it's at the level where it like viscerally wins over human-made content. Like we have, you know, all these, you know, repetitive, like viscerally, I just mean like, you know, every person sits and they watch it and they see like which one they spend more time on, which one they're compulsively drawn to. I don't think generative AI content is at the point where it's winning at scale yet, but there are some niches it's really good at. It's honestly really good for like lower budget creators. I see it like a lot from content that feels like it's from not, like not in America. Like it's someone that's maybe not in as pretty of a place, you know, they're in like a country that's not as good and they, you know, make content that ends up, you know, with generative AI that kind

• 2:11:20Speaker 10

  of can whatever, represent certain things. And yeah, I feel like that's where it's doing well.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  I have one more on the generative AI question. I've noticed that it does feel like we're at a tipping point on Instagram reels. I'll notice that oftentimes there's AI content and you and if I can clock it, I usually go to the comments and there's other people that are clocking it. And then there's usually a secondary discussion about AI being bad or just displacement, water usage, electricity, blah, blah, blah. But I recently saw a cinematic AI movie trailer all about the Beckham drama. Have you been following this at all? Are you familiar with this Beckham?

• 2:12:00Speaker 10

  What is the Beckham drama here?

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  I'm not going to explain it well, but Victoria Beckham and David Beckham are having some sort of inter familial feud of some sort where the son is posting.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  We end up in The Hollywood Reporter once and suddenly John is our new culture expert.

• 2:12:19John Coogan?

  No, but, but basically, but basically like there is, there is a, there is a traditional like big Hollywood celebrity drama story that has bubbled up and people are making front-facing videos explaining it. The Beckhams themselves are posting about it. There's PR stories about it, but some creator used generative AI to create like a dramatic like movie trailer about it. And what was interesting is that it's obviously clockable as AI, but everyone in the comments, including the, the actual, the, the, the tagline on the video, what they upload, the title of the video is like, okay, AI, this is a good use of AI. And everyone in the comments was like, I approve of this use of AI, which is very interesting

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  because truthfully, like there is no one that's getting displaced from that because if you're like, you're not going to go and do a hundred million dollar budget video shoot just to make a joke about the Beckham drama. Like maybe that will be made in, you know, a few years or something, or Netflix will do something, but you're not displacing anyone. And so it does feel like we're at this turning point, but it requires a lot of context, a lot of human element, a lot of creativity to really break through in a way that reaches like universal acclaim. I don't know if you have a comment on that.

• 2:13:31Speaker 10

  No, it's a great point. Like there's, um, yeah, trying to phrase my thoughts exactly here.

• 2:13:39Speaker 10

  Like generative AI content is widely disliked by people. I think this is the starting point. You know, there are lots of people, if you post anything that is generative AI content, you will get comments about, you know, water usage, you know, get contents about, you know, take comments about taking away jobs from artists. Um, and those, those comments do, you know, tend to go away if people like it more. If it's, you know, high quality AI content. Um, to be honest, I mean, I think a lot of the comments about, you know, arts and water usage come out of like a place of fear from people of kind of not understanding what, what the future holds. And I, I'm, I'm, it does make me optimistic, honestly, when I hear people say things like, oh, like I like this particular AI usage, even if I think that that's not the right way to think about it. I think that it's a

• 2:14:21Speaker 10

  good kind of sign of at least the culture starting to adopt these things. I do think it's, it's going to inevitably happen that people adopt it. Like, I'm not really worried about the long term, honestly. I mean, I'm not like a, a hyper AI optimist. I think that the technology does a lot of positive things. There's also going to be some negatives as a result of it, you know? But, um, I really was.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's also a new, there's a new kind of content, which is content that could be made by paid actors, but no paid actor would ever agree to, which is like an Epstein reenactment. Oh, sure, sure. You know, you've seen, you've seen some of these like, you know, memes of like them on like, yeah, Facebook videos, things like that, where if you ask an actor like, okay, you're going to play, you know, this like billionaire financier. He's based in New York and they'd be like, okay, like I'm out, right? Um, what about, what about other platforms? Uh, I feel like content has been flowing from, uh, these like IRL streamers pretty heavily into acts, you know, there seems to be this whole culture of their own kick.

• 2:15:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of those are like clips and highlights, if that makes sense. Like there are people who sit and watch IRL streamers all day, but then a lot of those are kind of second order. Like a lot of those spend, a lot of those are really kind of content farms to make clips for TikTok, which are then the primary form of consumption. Like there's this guy who I followed for years, World of T-shirts. He's kind of one of my like favorite personal internet creators. He like started as a guy who wandered around New York City and like filmed concept, but it's gradually become like a live. He does like crazy stuff in his real life, like will kind of like scream at people on the streets. And so he now has like crews of people that follow him around and livestream him. I don't know. Very interesting man. But you know, kind of the ecosystem is yes, you can watch the livestream, but most people kind of watch the highlights of the livestream, which I think is an interesting kind of

• 2:16:06Speaker 10

  concept farm angle where at the end of the day, still the sensor of it is these like short form vertical video apps that can kind of be like the end of the sea for any form of content. Like it all flows into the scroll of these platforms.

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  Feed the trough, as they say.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  Talk about, talk about publishing in GQ. I want to know both about the process. Have you, have you written for prestige publications before? Do you, do you enjoy the written form? And then I want to know the thesis of the essay as well.

• 2:16:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, so I wrote, I guess for audience, I'll write a piece about Target for GQ. I didn't go to Target for like seven years and then I went again. And so I wrote a piece about that for GQ.

• 2:16:51John Coogan?

  And why did you stop going?

• 2:16:54Speaker 10

  I stopped going just like, I didn't like the brand was essentially it, you know, like I, it's like, it's so red and over the top. I preferred, it felt like dishonest to me, basically. Like when I was, I was going inside Walmarts and Walmart felt more honest. And so, yeah, but then I kind of, you know, that, that kind of stopped being true for me. Like I was, you know, I was getting more back into brands in America and I was like, I'm ready to go back to Target. Also, it's inconvenient. I live in New York City now. I used to live in Peoria, Illinois, which is about equal distribution of Walmarts and Targets. Now in New York City, there are no Walmarts at all. And so if I wanted to go to like a large, you know, convenience store, Target was the only option. And so I was like actually making my life more inconvenient for the first year. Like I lived in New York as a result of following this rule.

• 2:17:39Speaker 10

  And so I thought it was just an interesting, I mean, the essay is about that, but also kind of about the larger concepts of like purity rules that you follow in life. You know, I think that there's so many rules like that. I mean, people love setting purity rules around their phones right now. Really common, you know, thing that people do of like, oh, I need to have X amount of non-phone time or I need to set down my.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  I can't sleep more than five, five feet from my phone. I gotta, I gotta keep it close, you know, or I can't sleep well.

• 2:18:06Jordi Hays?

  The inverse.

• 2:18:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, so I just wrote kind of about like that, that concept of like purity rules in general. Cause I thought this was like, it's such a silly one, like the idea of not going to Target is, you know, obviously there's no ethical impacts on that and very little, um, even moral impacts on that. Right. It's even aesthetically, like it's very low impact on almost all parts of life, but it's a rule that I followed for a really long time. And so I kind of wrote about that. Yeah. I mean, it kind of just came into being like one of the GQ editors. I had like a long form blog that I posted every once in a while and he just liked the long form blog and reached out to me and asked if I wanted to, um, write for GQ. Um, yeah, it was a really cool experience to do. You know, I, I do really believe in working with editors. It helps a lot to work with, you know,

• 2:18:49Speaker 10

  like high quality editors. Um, you know, I studied writing in school, but was never like to get to a professional level. I don't work as a full-time professional writer. And so it was really cool to work with like editors who could help me, you know, refine my voice. I think was, it was a good experience.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a great publication. We, uh, uh, we, we'll find like an old profile in GQ every once in a while that just breaks down something in a very interesting way. We read a whole deep dive on the, the history of Richard Mill and stuff in GQ. It's a fascinating publication that, that I think, I think has been, uh, maybe discounted because it's not putting up breaking scoops and news every day. It's not in your face, but there's a lot of really timeless stuff that goes on there. There's more to breathe, more breathing room. It's a, it's an interesting canvas to have the opportunity to, to paint on. That's exciting.

• 2:19:36Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  Sorry, Jordy. Yeah, please.

• 2:19:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't have anything.

• 2:19:40John Coogan?

  Oh, uh, uh, I wanted to, uh, ask, uh, on the question of purity rules, do you think we're still in a bull market for purity rules? I don't know that I saw a ton more activity in 2026 around New Year's resolutions, people stepping back. There was obviously the big anti-alcohol move, which I see as part of that. I don't know if you'd put that in the same category, but, uh, are we becoming more puritanical as a society? Less puritanical? Like where, where, where, where do you think culture is moving?

• 2:20:10Speaker 10

  I I I think culture moves, I mean, I don't know, I don't think there's like a hard direction. I think where where culture is setting purity rules more and more is around like phones. Like I was saying at the beginning, I I think that's kind of the big trend that I would clock for in increasing of that. I think that um I think we're clearly getting to a point at which, you know, just maximal pure enjoyment on your phone is not the most pleasant way to live your life. You know what I mean? Like just letting yourself get pulled into your phone at all times is not the most pleasant way to live. And I think that we're going to gradually like come up with a set of rules that works for everyone on what the most, you know, the the best etiquette on phone usage is. But I I don't know what that looks like, but I would expect a lot of like experimentation over the next like five years or so to try to figure that out.

• 2:20:53Speaker 10

  So, yeah, that's my purity rule like um like uh that for the next few years is is that we'll see a lot more of like phone purity rule usage.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Last question for me on uh New York City. Uh, we talked to Adam Faze about how New York is experiencing a boom in content creation. And uh his analysis was that a lot of it was around uh TikTok creators and those man on the street style videos. What do you do for a living? If you need a lot of random extras effectively, uh there's no place better to do it than specific parks in New York City. Are are you experiencing that? Is it annoying? Have you ever been asked, what do you do for a living?

• 2:21:33Speaker 10

  Um, I've had one time where someone approached me for a man on the street video. Um, I kind of just walked away from it. I didn't want to be in it. Um, it's not super common. I I do think what I I love the concept of all these kids coming to New York City because of um TikTok or whatever other reason that they're pulled there on the internet. Um, I I I kind of, I think it's really magical that, I don't know, it's it's really cool that they're all kind of pulled to one location. I think if you compare the the migration arcs of other generations, right? Like the the Gen X people who went to Portland, they're trying to like get away from something. The millennials were kind of going to these like mid-sized cities. I think it's really beautiful that, you know, yeah, like Austin and Nashville, Denver.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09Speaker 10

  Um, but I think it's really, like, it really seems like Gen Z. I mean, I am one of the Gen Z people, and I guess I'm like, I'm very old Gen Z, I'm 28. Um, but that, you know, that, I think it's really cool that Gen Z in general, it seems to me, my read on on the ground is that they're coming to New York City, like the biggest city they can. It's already established, they just like want to be around other people and participate in these systems.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Speaker 10

  Um, I think I think it's really special and cool.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I like some of that that content. It's interesting when you see a video of someone just like playing music and they're a musician and they could just play it in their apartment, but if they go out in the street, they'll get a stronger reaction. And sure, you could go to Hollywood, but there's just more random people on the street in New York. So a lot of creators have just kind of coalesced around that. Anyway, Jordy.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, thank you for coming on. As these cultural moments pop up, would love to have you back on for some hard hitting analysis in real time.

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  From the source, from the anthropologists. But it's great to hang in. Thank you for doing the work.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we appreciate everything you do.

• 2:23:10Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having me on.

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin.ai. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  We have some breaking news.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news is, without further ado, Brex has been acquired by Capital One. Hit that gong. Five billion dollars. Boom. Wrong header there, boys. But let's pull this up.

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  So yeah, Hunter in the chat was asking if we already discussed OpenAI planning to take a cut of customers' discoveries. There was some back and forth. We did discuss that a little bit, Hunter, but thanks for showing up in the chat. Always good to see you, as always.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Capital One strikes 5.15 billion deal for fintech Brex. Deal would give credit card issuer access to technology used by thousands of companies for corporate credit cards.

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Brex, of course, was valued at 12.3 billion in 2022. They hadn't raised in a while outside of, I believe, a debt facility.

• 2:24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, I think this is, this deal makes a lot of sense.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Brex is.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  When we had, when we had Pedro on, the CEO of Brex, we talked to him about how they were doing more enterprise offerings. They were starting to explore some of this powering businesses behind the scenes, right? Wasn't that?

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they had that deal with first, third, what's?

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Fifth third.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Fifth third.

• 2:24:41John Coogan?

  Fifth third. It's a real mouth.

• 2:24:43Jordi Hays?

  Third bank. It's the, they were the fifth third bank.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  So, wow. Anyway, so a little more details. 5.15 billion in cash and stock in a deal that gave the card issuer more firepower with corporate clients. Brex founded nearly a decade ago, offers corporate credit cards, expenses and rewards. It also oversees nearly 13 billion in deposits held at partner banks and money market funds. Acquisition comes at a key moment in the payment world as fintech and crypto firms threaten to siphon business away from banks. Some established players have looked to look to team up with these firms to stay competitive. Capital One with roughly 670 billion in assets, not as bad. Obviously acquired Discover last year for 35 billion.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  They also acquired Paribus.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Capital One bought Eric Gleiman and Kareem Atiyah's previous company.

• 2:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I knew that, but I didn't, I didn't put that together.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  And they spent a brief stint at Capital One. Capital One is, yeah, they want, they want Silicon Valley founders and they want the companies that they built.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is so funny because I was with, I was with Art, the chief business officer at Brex, hanging out, he was hanging out with my neighbor Ben. I saw him like less than probably a week ago, he was hanging out at the beach and I'm sure, I'm sure he was.

• 2:26:05John Coogan?

  I got something cooking.

• 2:26:07Jordi Hays?

  Excited, excited for this news to hit the timeline. How much did they actually raise?

• 2:26:13John Coogan?

  Oh, but yeah, it's a big number and it's big business. And so congrats to everyone over there. Let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We have Kathy Wood joining in just a few minutes. We can play this video about AI industry news every two weeks. We've been, we saw this on Instagram reels and I was cracking up because it feels like this comedian on Instagram.

• 2:26:49Jordi Hays?

  And just, just to close the loop, Brex has raised a total of 1.67 billion in combined equity and debt financing. So anyways, certainly going well beyond the press stack and solid outcome.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Great outcome.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  Congratulations to all of them. So Advit Mohunta says, can these AI products stop going against each other? And he plays a video called AI Industry News Every Two Weeks.

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  Let's see if we can play it. Is it available? We might need to come back to that. In the meantime, let me tell you about Applovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we have Kathy Wood in the Restream Waving Room. Let's bring her in to the TVP and UltraDollar. She is the CEO of ARK Invest. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How are you doing?

• 2:27:43Speaker 11

  Oh, thrilled. I'm so happy to meet you. I've heard so much about you. Congratulations on all your success.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. How is your 2026 going so far?

• 2:27:54Speaker 11

  Ah, it's great. It really is. I wrote a New Year's letter, and then we put out Big Ideas yesterday, and it's been a whirlwind, a whirlwind. I feel this is a very important year for us.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  And is AI the only thing that you're tracking? Is it as all encompassing in your world as it has been in ours?

• 2:28:19Speaker 11

  It is by far the biggest catalyst to innovation out there today. But we're very focused on our five major platforms, and AI is involved in every one of them. So robotics, energy storage, AI itself, blockchain technology, and multi-omic sequencing in the life science space. And so we're really focused on the convergence among those platforms. They involve 15 different technologies, and so AI is part and parcel of all the convergences taking place today.

• 2:28:57John Coogan?

  Yes. And how are you setting up the firm to actually cover those five trends? What does the team look like? Who do you like to work with? And what are the keys to success to growing a career at Arc?

• 2:29:14Speaker 11

  That's a great question. We have set ourselves up very differently from traditional asset management research. In that world, the research responsibilities are organized by sector, or industry, or sub-industry. And in fact, many firms are very proud that they have five different healthcare analysts following very narrow silos of companies, or five consumer analysts. We have set up ARC around this idea that these technologies are converging and are

• 2:29:58Speaker 11

  going to impact every sector, every industry. So our analyst research responsibilities are broken down by technologies. So the 15 different technologies involved in those five innovation platforms. And what they are looking for is, okay, how is this technology going to scale across sectors? How big is this opportunity going to be? I don't think traditional research is set up to do that. I think to really understand how big the opportunities are going to be out there, you almost have to set up research this way.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you're famous for taking very large positions, very concentrated positions in really important companies. What does it look like to get comfortable with a new management team, a new CEO? Is it just endless phone calls, meeting in person? Do you have any rules for how you grow a relationship over time with a new business leader who you think is working on a breakout technology?

• 2:31:09Speaker 11

  Well, I think very important is understanding the background of the new business leaders. You know, I've been in the business for a very long time. I actually started in college in the late 70s and while most of my career had Overnight success.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  It's a true overnight success. We love it.

• 2:31:30Speaker 11

  No, but we know, I know a lot of people out there.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:31:35Speaker 11

  And I've always loved the part of our business where I get to meet the people making making these companies happen. So I'm a devout follower of talent, where it's going, where it has come from. I usually have some frame of reference that I can use as a line of questioning, just to see, you know, is this, is this the kind of leader and the right leader for this company at this time?

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  How do you, what's your framework for understanding if a management team or a CEO is really set up for this AI transition that every company is going through? Because every company, every CEO wants to say that they're getting the most out of AI, they're getting the most efficiency, they're running the most pilots, etc. But clearly, many companies are just kind of, you know, doing the demos but not actually evolving their businesses.

• 2:32:38Speaker 11

  So now, are you speaking about more in the startup world or are you talking about enterprises?

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Both, both really. It's everything from a, from a company, you know, like an enterprise software company, maybe a system of record that is looking to evolve.

• 2:32:57Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Jordi Hays?

  All the way through like a manufacturing company who, you know, maybe has been using robotics for years. And so they're like, I don't really see why people are so

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've seen a number of founder CEOs that have been completely reinvigorated by the AI boom. They've built a great business, but you can tell that they are completely in a new gear, working harder than ever. There's also legacy players that just placed the right bets at the right time and they're just paying off and reaping the reward. And then there are some big company CEOs who it does feel like they got caught a little flat footed and have to adjust their business models.

• 2:33:35Speaker 11

  Yes, and the way we do our research, and again, a lot of people know us for our top-down research, so the big ideas that came out last night. We are as bottom-up stock research-driven or equity research-driven as any other team you'll find out there. That's where I came from. So, we took, from a top-down point of view, two years ago, in Big Ideas, we took the position that, because we were seeing it play out in the numbers, that the tech stack

• 2:34:14Speaker 11

  would change, that the, you have the infrastructure layer, which of course, very strong. You have the platform-as-a-service layer, poster child for that, Palantir, was gaining share, significant share. And then you had application layers, software-as-a-service, growing but losing share of incremental growth. We put that chart in, and we had no idea how quickly this was all going to happen. You know, software stocks, more traditional software stocks last year were terrible, and even this year, they're still suffering.

• 2:34:55Speaker 11

  So, AI is happening faster, I think, than anyone could have imagined. Anyone who thought they had time to adapt, I think, has been mistaken. And, you know, I even see it with large enterprises, when we go in there and ask them, "Okay, what's your AI strategy?" You know, they treated it in the beginning like, "Yeah, we'll let our teams experiment with all these new tools coming up, ChatGPT." No, no, no, no, no. That's not the way this is going to work.

• 2:35:33Speaker 11

  There's going to have to be complete restructuring around AI, or else you're probably gonna fail, maybe not outright, but you'll become irrelevant. So... I think even ARC, for example, we have brought in Palantir. We're only 70 people, but we've brought in Palantir. And I can see, we brought it into research first.

• 2:36:00Delian Asparouhov?

  Sure.

• 2:36:00Speaker 11

  I wanted to see, how could we transform our research process? And we're already seeing incredible results in terms of productivity gains by the research team. But I can see that in the rest of the firm, it is going to take, well, first of all, you have to have someone other than the CTO, and that's true even in our case, saying, "We're doing this. We're doing this. Our research is telling us, this is the way the world's going. We cannot be caught flat-footed."

• 2:36:37Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Speaker 11

  And so I really think you need the CEO, not the CTO, CEO, CFO, to drive this change. And I think, you know, many people think, "Oh, the results are so immediate." And they are with our writing and editing, perhaps. But when you're trying to transform an enterprise, it takes, it's hard work. You have to collect all the data, even data that you didn't know existed. So you have to figure that out. You have to clean it up. You have to integrate it. You have to map out workflows in excruciating detail. And that all takes time, and a lot of people in this world are impatient.

• 2:37:23Speaker 11

  They don't see results right away. But I think the results are going to pay off. I think the way Palantir is doing it, just put its software on top of legacy. No rip and replace. And over time, it will usurp the role of all of those, that inefficient legacy software. So I think it's going to take time in the enterprise. And I know there was the MIT study that said, "Hey, this isn't happening. This is a figment of Silicon Valley's imagination." And we disagree mightily on that.

• 2:37:58Jordi Hays?

  How?

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  How are you hoping to see the private markets evolve in the next five years or so? It's, you know, we've seen this tremendous growth of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, these sort of XAI. Leading, XAI, leading labs that are happening all in the private markets. And if people really, really work hard, they can probably figure out how to get exposure to them, but certainly it's been cut off. And I know you guys have your, the private side of the business as well, but any sort of wishes or hopes in terms of how, how the interaction between the private market and the public market can, can evolve?

• 2:38:38Speaker 11

  Well, I think the lines are going to start blurring a bit. Hopefully, because the SEC, under Paul Atkins, is going to get rid of all of the, the regulations and bureaucracy. And I do think his aim is in that direction. In terms of the, the private markets, I, I think we're starting to see venture capital firms move into crossover funds, because, well, first of all, there was a big arbitrage opportunity, you know, when the public, when innovation in the public markets was getting

• 2:39:22Speaker 11

  crucified, and believe me, we were the poster child for that. I think a lot of these funds were looking at the valuations in the private markets so much higher than in the public markets that that kind of started the conversation going. And then, of course, this administration is talking more and more about the democratization of opportunities and venture, of course, being a big one. And, you know, this idea that you have to be accredited in order to have access to companies that, you know, our, our investors, the younger investors in particular,

• 2:40:07Speaker 11

  You know, they don't have the the net worth or or even the annual income, but they know more about these technologies than many of the institutions investing in venture. So, you know, we felt it was important to open it up and and to be very complimentary to what's going on out there. We're not taking board seats, we're not leading, but we are putting out research and we are willing to bring visibility to companies in our venture fund. And we're bringing, you know, a new kind of investor who really has been yearning

• 2:40:52Speaker 11

  for this opportunity for years.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  Want to talk about Bitcoin and specifically there was news yesterday Coinbase is rolling out an advisory firm on quantum computing and blockchain. There's obviously been kind of fud people talking about the potential implications for quantum and Bitcoin and crypto broadly. How are you thinking about the asset today? I know this is certainly a topic that you've talked about many, many times on CNBC and other shows, but we'd love to hear the latest.

• 2:41:30Speaker 11

  Sure. First, I'll start with quantum. So in our Big Ideas Report, and it's in the first section called The Great Acceleration, there is a page in there, I think it's titled Some Interesting Technologies Will Not Be Disruptive for 20 to 40 Years. And Brett Winton, our chief futurist, and you know, with with that title, chief futurist, you've got to be thinking about these things and and.

• 2:42:02Speaker 11

  Coming up with analyses that either support or refute the conventional wisdom out there. So if you if you go in, you'll see a very interesting chart. Google has doubled the its number of qubits. It's taken four years for them to do that. So it's even slower than Moore's Law in the semiconductor space. And so we what Brett did was illustrate, okay, let's assume they accelerate progress here, if they can, to a Moore's Law pace.

• 2:42:37Speaker 11

  Okay, then in 2044, let's talk about about quantum computing and and the risks that that are in sort of the whole blockchain technology infrastructure, particularly Bitcoin. So we are not worried. We are seeing whales, so the original, the OGs, they are shifting Bitcoin from wallet to wallet because of quantum fears. So that's happening, but it's also created some FUD for for the markets.

• 2:43:21Speaker 11

  Are they selling because they know something we don't know? Are they selling simply because they don't want to go through the downside of another four-year cycle? Have we hit the low at down only 35% this time instead of 85%? So we're in that kind of a market, and I do think we're in a basing period, which really started 1010, on 1010, the flash crash. It was the software glitch at Binance caused a lot of auto deleveraging.

• 2:44:01Speaker 11

  It was kind of crazy to learn about that kind of deleveraging, meaning firms who thought they were hedged, if they were on two different exchanges, and Binance was one of them, they were auto deleveraged on one side of a trade, and so they were totally exposed in a way they never expected. That caused, we think, $28 billion of carnage. And we think that is washing through the system. We are very positive on Bitcoin for the three reasons I always say. You know, it's a new technology, really important.

• 2:44:40Speaker 11

  It is a new and a first rules-based, global, private, meaning no government oversight, monetary system. That's huge. That is huge. That is its calling card. Big hedge against inflation and a hedge against deflation if we end up in a banking crisis like '08, '09. And it is the first, the leader, of a new asset class. Many people are looking at gold and they're saying, "Well, wait a minute. Gold has doubled in the last year or so. Bitcoin's way behind."

• 2:45:21Speaker 11

  Well, if you if you start the clock at the end of the bear market in '22, gold is up, I think, 170%, and these are maybe dated by a couple of weeks, and Bitcoin by 360%. So we think that Bitcoin... Oh, what happened?

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  That was just a little air horn we used. You said 360%. It was a nice number.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  There's some sound effects over here. Not to be jarring.

• 2:45:53Speaker 11

  They didn't prepare me for this. Anyway, okay.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  They briefed you about our flashbang. We will save that one for another time. But yes, sorry, continue, please.

• 2:46:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, so I'll just say, it's very interesting over the full market cycle from '20 to now. Gold and Bitcoin's correlation hardly, it's almost nonexistent.

• 2:46:18Speaker 11

  Hardly anything, but we think Bitcoin is especially as intergenerational wealth transfer takes place in the next five to 10 years.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:29Speaker 11

  Yep, it is the digital gold and its supply growth is lower than golds will be.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:38Speaker 11

  And especially now that the gold price is up, miners can go out there, they're being paid to find even more. So that can't happen with Bitcoin.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:47Speaker 11

  So I think in a big ideas you'll see, we expect Bitcoin to scale to $16 trillion in market cap by 2030 and it's below two now, so.

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about the name of the fund? Where did the name come from? What does it mean?

• 2:47:05Speaker 11

  The name of the company?

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  ARC, yeah.

• 2:47:08Speaker 11

  ARC, yeah, yeah. So there are two ways to talk about this. I can talk about this from a regulatory point of view or the personal point of view. And I'm happy to share both.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Please, I would love that.

• 2:47:24Speaker 11

  Okay, so the regular, ARC was the name I chose for a personal reason, I'll get into that, but I was, or we were told by the, I think it was SEC, that we could not have all caps.

• 2:47:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:47:38Speaker 11

  We had to have lowercase r and k unless it was an acronym.

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:47:44Speaker 11

  And so as soon as we got that, that word, immediately I thought, okay, active, research, knowledge.

• 2:47:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:47:55Speaker 11

  Active means more in the public world because there's passive in the public world, doesn't mean as much in the venture world.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:02Speaker 11

  So that's why we have it in all caps. The personal reason was in 2006, I decided I needed to figure a way out of the traditional asset management world because it was going passive, it was going benchmark sensitive, which means you take The QQQ, so the NASDAQ 100.

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:28Speaker 11

  If that's your benchmark, then you pretty much invest in all of those companies and tweak a little bit here, a little bit there. That's what benchmark sensitive is. To me, that's not investing. And in fact, so, back then, you know, I would just, I was trying to figure out how to do this, because if I quit my prior position, I would have lost all of my deferred comp, which was sizable.

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:59Speaker 11

  And so, I worked, took me seven years, you know, should I say seven lean years, but whatever, seven years, and I just used to open the Bible, and this started in '06, open the Bible, "Okay, God, just tell me, this seems like an impossible situation. What do I do? Just help me, help me." And how many times did I hit Ark of the Covenant?

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:29Speaker 11

  Ark of the Covenant, which is what the Israelites took into battle before them, believing it was the presence of God, and that they would be protected, because they were going into battle. And so, it kind of was appropriate. I was going counter, counter the pendulum swing to passive and benchmark sensitive. And, you know, especially after COVID, a lot of people, you know, they just thought we were going to fail, because this was not the way to do things.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  How do you think about the relationship between religion and markets? I've always been fascinated. We've had Pat Gelsinger on the show, and he, there's been a number of times when he was either quoting scripture or Bible verses, and people were sort of reading into that, how he was processing, what's going on at Intel at the time. I would love to know more about the interaction between religion and investing, because it's so rarely discussed, but it's a fascinating topic and crossover.

• 2:50:32Speaker 11

  Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. So, you know, I can say I was moved in the way, I mean, you could, the way I think about what happened there and what I just described is many people would use the universe, they're responding to the universe, or the force, or the Holy Spirit, or that, right? So we're all moved by something. Sometimes it's unhappiness, you know, whatever.

• 2:51:05Speaker 11

  You know, I just, I use prayer as other people would use meditation, let's say. And I certainly don't go in there, you know, day to day and say, "Okay, God, what should I do? Buy or sell this stock?" No, not at all, not at all. It's, I would say it's those moments of meditation that bring mental clarity, you know, you clean the, clean the, the, the brainwaves out or whatever. And that, that's more, and it's also, you know, I would say it's a way of living, just generally.

• 2:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sorry. Not to completely change gears, but back to, back to AI productivity. I want your reaction to this Wall Street Journal report yesterday that it showed that CEOs reported that, that, you know, 20% of the C-suite executives at the Journal interviewed said that they were saving 12 hours a day, or 12 hours a week, some massive number. And then they polled workers, and workers, 40% of workers said they're saving no time with AI. And I'm wondering if what you read on that is, is it that, one thing that we were kind of kicking around as an idea was potentially that the work of the C-suite executive is more ready to be transformed by AI because,

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  like, in your role, you are a CEO, you, you do a lot of research. Every question that you're faced with over the course of a day in your life, you probably want more information, you want it neatly organized and delivered to you, and AI is uniquely good at that. Whereas many workers might not be in that level of information processing role. But how do you, do you think that this is going to be a report from the Journal that we look back on, like that MIT study where, "Ah, it was just sort of an anomaly in the data," and everything continues unabated?

• 2:53:02Speaker 11

  Well, this is a survey, of course, right? It's not quantitatively measured. And so what could be going on is, you know, the C-suite is really trying to lead, lead the charge into the AI world.

• 2:53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:19Speaker 11

  And, and we're all in the knowledge industry. It's going to change everyone's job dramatically. So those who are saying it's not saving me any time, I don't believe, or they're not harnessing any tools. What I do believe is they are saving time, and if they're saying they're not, then it might be going to a longer lunch hour, or, you know, an earlier end of the day. The history of technology is, is that it increases productivity and the number of work hours is, goes down over time during the Industrial Revolution.

• 2:54:01Speaker 11

  Big decline in number of work hours. Farmers used to have to work six and a half days a week, or whatever. And, you know, their families, the children, they got room and board, there wasn't much more. But then they went out into the working world. So the farmers and these unpaid family members, you know, their work week got shorter, and I think that's part of what's going on.

• 2:54:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. We've been tracking the optimism around AI and progress, sort of loosely along two axes. There's, there's a view that GDP will start growing as AI diffuses and we go into a new technical revolution. We're already seeing some green shoots on the GDP figures, but it's still early. We're not at 10% GDP growth, but that's what some AI leaders are predicting. But then you also have the employment question, and there's some leaders of AI labs that say the future will be high GDP growth, high unemployment, which seems like it will have, you know, significant social consequences, and we will have to grapple with that as a society and deal with those problems. But I'm wondering...

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  I'm wondering if you have a view between what we should expect in a decade from AI as it rolls out. Do you do you fall into that camp of high GDP growth, high unemployment? Or are you more, you know, the jobs will find new jobs. And so maybe we will see an economic boom, but we will also still all find ways to, you know, fill our time during the day with employment.

• 2:55:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think that one of the reasons this question is popping up more and more. Well, first of all, is our imaginations, but also because the unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds has increased much more than the overall unemployment rate. It's now up to double digits, 12%. The average duration of unemployment, the average, is about 24 weeks. And so that's kind of scary. A lot of entry level jobs are are are going unfilled.

• 2:56:12Speaker 11

  In other words, maybe the people answering that survey are are now being faced with the reality that, wait a minute, they're not going to hire someone to come in and handle this grunt work. I have to do that, too. Maybe maybe that's what's happening at the low end to give them some credibility or at the lower end there. We're in the camp, and you'll find this in Big Ideas as well. We're and we've been saying this for a while. And at first, when we said it, we probably said it three years ago for the first time. We think there's going to be a step function change here in real GDP growth, just as there is with every technology super cycle.

• 2:56:57Speaker 11

  So just to illustrate that, in the 400 years, between 1500 and 1900,

• 2:57:05Speaker 11

  Brett Winton, working with academia, found out or learned or that real GDP growth was 0.6%. Then we had railroads, internal combustion engine, telephone electricity, and it went to 3% for the next 125 years. Here we are.

• 2:57:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:24Speaker 11

  We think it's going north of 7%. And that's conservative. That's conservative. I think it's conservative, really productivity driven.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:36Speaker 11

  And, and we think that, that this is one of the greatest times to start a business. When I started Arc, there was no ChatGPT to say, okay, do a deck for my startup, because this is what I want to do.

• 2:57:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:57:55Speaker 11

  There wasn't anything like that. I had to create everything.

• 2:57:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:57:58Speaker 11

  Now you can look at an unmet need out there and say, hey, ChatGPT, or hey, Grok, come help me build this business, right? So we think that fears of unemployment, sure, there's displacement short term, but think about what's also happening. 1.3 million baby boomers are retiring every year.

• 2:58:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:58:21Speaker 11

  Right? And we've just had, or we're in the midst of an exodus of immigrants.

• 2:58:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:58:31Speaker 11

  And, and, and, you know, little in migration. So that, I think, is helping keep the unemployment rate low. But entry-level jobs can be done by AI.

• 2:58:47Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:58:48Speaker 11

  And so that's what we're seeing at the younger level. So what I say to young people is, you all, in your mind, have thought of a, a new business that would really fulfill an unmet need, something that frustrates you. Why don't you do it?

• 2:59:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:59:06Speaker 11

  And use AI to do it, to plan it, and just get going while you also look for a job if you're unemployed. I think we're going to see the biggest entrepreneurial explosion in history.

• 2:59:21John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Thank you. We gotta hit the gong for 7% GDP growth. We have a gong around here. I love the sound of that.

• 2:59:30John Coogan?

  We have, we have real sound effects in addition to the soundboard. Thank you so much for joining. Yes, please.

• 2:59:37Speaker 11

  Can I just give you one more stat?

• 2:59:39John Coogan?

  Yes, please, please.

• 2:59:40Speaker 11

  We think, we think inflation will go negative.

• 2:59:43John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:59:46John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 2:59:47Speaker 11

  Yes, and that's technology.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  This is amazing. This is a very optimistic picture of the future and I'd love to hear it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and

• 2:59:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was great to meet you.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  Explain all of that, a very wide-ranging conversation. I love the history and the personal story and everything that you're doing. So, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day

• 3:00:06Speaker 11

  Thank you, John and Jordy.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  To come chat with a bunch of people with a funny soundboard.

• 3:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:09John Coogan?

  We will see you later. Hopefully, hopefully we made a good impression and you will be back soon.

• 3:00:13Speaker 11

  You did. Now I know why you're famous.

• 3:00:16John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:00:18Speaker 11

  Bye-bye.

• 3:00:20John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Have a great day. Jordy. Oh, that was amazing. 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. Go and check it out.

• 3:00:42Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't keep it together, the chat the whole time.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  I know. The chat was going insane.

• 3:00:47Jordi Hays?

  I literally, I was fighting for my life.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  Oh my god, the chat was going insane.

• 3:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Every time I'd look up at the screen, I was just trying to

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  I know, I know. It was just wall-to-wall flashbang. And I'm just trying to hold it together. I love, I love you guys, the chat. I love you. But also, you make the job a little difficult sometimes.

• 3:01:06Jordi Hays?

  That was the hardest battle of my life.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  That was insane. And there's nowhere to look, because I'd look at the chat, I'd look at Tyler, I'd look at my phone and I have 100 notifications. I assume it's people texting me to pull the flashbang. And also, by the way, I can't, I can't trigger the flashbang. That's Jordy-exclusive. We need a smoke to clear the air. We need, we need to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, next-level vibe coding, state-of-the-art reasoning, and deep multimodal understanding.

• 3:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, some news. So, we're gonna have Pedro from Brex is gonna join.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:01:40Jordi Hays?

  We're working on getting him on.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Delian's also gonna join separately, of course.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Jordi Hays?

  So, I don't know who's coming on first.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  Good show.

• 3:01:48Jordi Hays?

  We can, whoever's in the waiting room.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  But we have another guest jumping on right now. We have John.

• 3:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna push. We're gonna push John just because the stories.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  And he's okay. He has some time, so we'll help on with him later in the show. Fantastic. Well, before we bring in our next guest, let's tell you about public.com. I saw someone in the chat asking for public.com. Read, here it is. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service.

• 3:02:16Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I've never cried on air.

• 3:02:20John Coogan?

  This is a unique experience. The chat is, is a wild, wild, wild experience. But thank you to everyone who's been supporting. She was a great sport, had a bunch of interesting things to share. And I truly do love the optimistic view because we, so we, we had actually written a chart for high growth, high GDP growth, high employment, low employment, low GDP growth. And we were trying to track where the other AI leaders were because Dario, of course, came out and said, I think we'll have high GDP growth and I think we'll have high unemployment. I think there's going to be a lot of labor displacement. And me and Jordy and Tyler were going back and forth on where we all sit. Where does the US sit right now? Where do different leaders feel like they, the world is going if they're

• 3:03:05John Coogan?

  charted on this two axis chart? And, and I kind of jokingly put myself all the way in the most optimistic camp. I said 10% GDP growth and less than 5% unemployment. I don't know if I have my, I don't know if I have it in myself to truly believe that. I do think that there might be some gyrations in the employment market, but it was great to hear it from her and we appreciate her taking the time to come hang out with us while we throw soundboards and flashbangs around. Anyway, it sounds like we have someone in the restream waiting room.

• 3:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Who do we got?

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 3:03:37Jordi Hays?

  John, we got John. Let's bring John in.

• 3:03:38John Coogan?

  Let's bring John in to the TV. John, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 3:03:43Jordi Hays?

  Look at this setup. This is incredible.

• 3:03:45John Coogan?

  What do you have behind you?

• 3:03:47Speaker 07

  The Home Library. What else would it be?

• 3:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 3:03:49John Coogan?

  Give us some recommendations. What's the best thing on that?

• 3:03:52Speaker 07

  Um, there's incredible history of Houston rap music that I highly recommend on this book.

• 3:03:58John Coogan?

  What era? Like?

• 3:03:59Speaker 07

  This is like Screw era, like Screw into Paul Wall, Mike Jones.

• 3:04:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, that's what I learned.

• 3:04:07Speaker 07

  Leading in everything that led up to that moment.

• 3:04:08John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, very cool. Anyway, thank you so much.

• 3:04:11Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, sorry. This was, this was the last 15 minutes or so have been one of the more chaotic that we've ever had. We had Kathy Wood on talking about a variety of theses she has on, on markets. Uh, the, our chat, we have some sound effects. Our chat just kept telling us to spam the sound effects and I couldn't, couldn't keep it together, but, uh, we're super excited to have you on here.

• 3:04:33Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday was, uh, was kind of a funny experience. Somebody sent, somebody sent me the video that you posted, uh, with the rugby and there, we only made like a hundred of those. We gave them out, we gave them out to friends. We would have happily sent you one if, if we knew you were, uh, in the market, but of course.

• 3:04:49Speaker 07

  I was tapped in. I was tapped in.

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, you found it.

• 3:04:52Jordi Hays?

  You were tapped in.

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  You found it online.

• 3:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, so I'm glad, I'm, even though it was bootleg, I'm glad that it looked great.

• 3:04:59John Coogan?

  It looked great. It looked great. Yeah. There it is. There it is. Well, we have sent out a, an official TBPM. It's in the mail. It should be arriving any day.

• 3:05:08Jordi Hays?

  And what did it smell like when it arrived from Canada?

• 3:05:11Speaker 07

  Okay, so can I, can I be candid? Can I be candid with you guys?

• 3:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes, of course.

• 3:05:14Speaker 07

  I feel like we can be candid.

• 3:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:05:17Speaker 07

  When this package arrived in my package room in my building, it looked like it had been assembled by a small child. It was, it was packed into like a mailer, like a, like a regular mailer.

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:29Speaker 07

  That was tattered at the edges.

• 3:05:31Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:05:31Speaker 07

  It had a label from Canada.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:34Speaker 07

  And there was a full retinue of packing tape layers, like four or five layers on top of the mailing label. I opened the package. I had ordered one. I got two.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  You got two, okay.

• 3:05:47Speaker 07

  I got two, so there's a bonus one of you guys.

• 3:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:05:50Speaker 07

  Um, do a swap. Smelled like cigarettes. Smelled like cigarettes.

• 3:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you think a child was smoking cigarettes? Selling bootleg TBPM merch.

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  A cigarette smoking child is selling bootleg TBPM merch.

• 3:06:03Speaker 07

  Non fumar.

• 3:06:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, and but I will say, as a as a clothing connoisseur, when I saw the images that you guys had posted of your polo, I was like incredibly high quality material.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:06:14Speaker 07

  I could see it in the photos. I knew that the embroidery would be like robust to the touch. I knew. I get this.

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 3:06:24Speaker 07

  This looks like it was made from, you know, you get like a 10 pack of terry cloths.

• 3:06:28Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:06:28Speaker 07

  On basics.

• 3:06:29Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  Not good.

• 3:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, see, this was the issue. A lot of people, when I first I posted that that we had that there was bootlegged merch floating around and a lot of people are like, oh, what's the issue? Like, you guys are a podcast. It's not your core business. We don't make merch to make money, right? Uh, but the issue was like, I knew people would buy it and they'd get it and they'd be like, this is low quality.

• 3:06:48John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:06:49Jordi Hays?

  And we we care a lot about quality.

• 3:06:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:51Speaker 07

  I was like, but on the on the flip side, you guys are popping and you're getting bootlegged. So, my vote's off.

• 3:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good interview. Thank.

• 3:06:58John Coogan?

  Thank you. Anyway, sorry. Uh, for your first time on the show, please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar.

• 3:07:04Speaker 07

  Sure. Uh, my name is John Carmonica. I am a pop music critic at the New York Times. I am the co-host of PopCast, which is our pop culture talk show.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:13Speaker 07

  Check us out, youtube.com slash PopCast.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:17Speaker 07

  Get a sticker.

• 3:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then and then and then the the reel that started this whole thing on Instagram, uh, break down the thesis. And then and then, uh, just to clarify, uh, none of the footage in that is AI generated, correct?

• 3:07:32Speaker 07

  No.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Okay. But the.

• 3:07:34Speaker 07

  I just look like that.

• 3:07:35John Coogan?

  I mean, no, no, no, no. It's something about like the camera movement and your dancing was like a little bit of like, whoa, there's a lot going on. Okay.

• 3:07:43Speaker 07

  Movie magic, baby.

• 3:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Movie magic.

• 3:07:45Speaker 07

  Movie magic.

• 3:07:46John Coogan?

  But what was the thesis?

• 3:07:47Speaker 07

  Yeah. So every week we do a song of the week. It's not necessarily pure endorsement. It's usually a song that's reflective of a bigger idea in pop music. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about AI in pop, you know, recent months. We had a big episode on that before the holidays. I listened to the Bruno Mars song that just came out and I was like, if you had told me that this is just some guy trained on

• 3:08:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:07Speaker 07

  the pop charts of 1972 and made this, I would have totally believed it.

• 3:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:12Speaker 07

  So. Typically, we film in my car. My car unfortunately is in the shop, so we went up to the South Bronx and filmed a dance video uh in my mechanic's garage. That's awesome.

• 3:08:23John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a beautiful set. I don't know what you shot that on, but it is is like it's a beautiful like piece of media.

• 3:08:29Jordi Hays?

  Did you go?

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 3:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Go to the Bruno Mars concert in the steal a brain rot game in Roblox?

• 3:08:36John Coogan?

  What?

• 3:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Did you not hear about this?

• 3:08:38John Coogan?

  No, what are you talking about?

• 3:08:39Speaker 07

  I know about this, but I don't.

• 3:08:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a Bruno Mars played a concert in the game steal a brain rot in Roblox, which by itself, just reading that sentence, it kind of feels like it would give you brain rot. So I guess it is.

• 3:08:50Speaker 07

  None of those words are in the Bible.

• 3:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  Okay, well, let's zoom out and talk about AI music. Um, we were talking about it earlier and and I've always been on this this train where the AI tools are incredible, the it's, you know, it's hard to tell the difference, but they're always, whenever I see a viral piece of AI media like Harry Potter Balenciaga, I return to the fact that AI didn't come up with the concept. AI was used to instantiate the idea that was created from a human. And in fact, after Harry Potter Balenciaga, I went to, I think, ChatGPT and I said, here's the here's this thing that's going viral. They're mashing up a kid's classic with an iconic fashion brand. It's this high low. Create a new viral video concept that will absolutely take over the internet.

• 3:09:38John Coogan?

  And it just was like, like, you know, like Star Wars Louis Vuitton. And it was like, that's not actually going to break through in the way that Harry Potter Balenciaga did because it's not innovative. It's not the first time it's had something happen. And and I'm wondering, like, how much do you think we're, you know, you're seeing music that's like purely just the AI did it, or it's more of a tool? Like, how are you processing the AI music boom right now?

• 3:10:03Speaker 07

  Sure. One note on the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing. You know that there is an actual Balenciaga Fortnite collaboration.

• 3:10:10John Coogan?

  Really?

• 3:10:10Speaker 07

  Do you wear that?

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  No, I'm not. Wow.

• 3:10:12Speaker 07

  So when Demna, who until recently was the creative director of Balenciaga, had a really, I would say, a robust sense of humor and irony about the types of. Of clothing that he made.

• 3:10:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:10:25Speaker 07

  And a lot of times he did some unlikely garment collaborations and he, there's a sanctioned Balenciaga Fortnite. Hoodie, maybe a shirt, two or three pieces. So they were the troll outtrolled the AI.

• 3:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah.

• 3:10:42Speaker 07

  Um, as, as far as AI is a music tool, you know, one of the things I think is causing a lot of people anxiety right now. Is you look at some of these artists who are cut from whole cloth, right? Solomon Ray purports to be a soul musician, but really it's just a guy running a bunch of Anthony Hamilton songs through a program. And coming out with a new one, probably allegedly.

• 3:11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:05Speaker 07

  Now, that doesn't scare me because eventually Spotify, Apple are gonna say, there's gonna be some banner, some badge. It's like, this is not a real person, to the extent that that matters. Here's what I think is interesting.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  Or, or it's not fair use and we need to shuffle the revenue over there. And so you're effectively just.

• 3:11:22Speaker 07

  In the same way that sampling.

• 3:11:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:11:24Speaker 07

  Had many years.

• 3:11:27Speaker 07

  And then everything kind of came into formality. That's gonna happen with AI and frankly, it's gonna happen much faster.

• 3:11:33John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:11:33Speaker 07

  What I think is interesting is if you go into any songwriter producer studio in Los Angeles right now, which is where all the sort of hits are written typically. The, the hierarchy of that room is typically famous person, famous person's guy, you know, like songwriter helper. Melody person, a name producer who you probably maybe would have heard of, one or two songwriters. And then one or two kind of studio hands who are sort of like moving the knobs. I would bet anything that in every single one of those sessions, one of those low level folks is already deploying AI. In unexpected ways. There's an interview with Teddy Swims, who's like a moderately successful pop star a couple of months ago.

• 3:12:16Speaker 07

  And he said, oh yeah, AI, yeah, I use that to multitrack my vocals. I use that to try out, what if I change the key? What's it gonna sound like?

• 3:12:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12:25Speaker 07

  I would bet anything that in the same way that autotune was quite quietly used for a long time and then became completely accepted. These AI tools are gonna get used and deployed in these not totally discernible to the earways. But in terms of workflow and process, I bet they're already there in everything we're listening to on, especially on pop radio.

• 3:12:45John Coogan?

  I heard an interesting story.

• 3:12:48Jordi Hays?

  From a friend, from a friend about a friend of theirs who was a like a backup like studio singer whose work went to basically zero because

• 3:12:58Speaker 07

  Right.

• 3:12:59Jordi Hays?

  They were working on tracks that were just meant to be demos so that a songwriter could share it with different labels or artists or whatever. And then suddenly it's like, you don't need somebody to go into the studio to like sing your song. You just like prompt it and, and so yeah, I think.

• 3:13:12John Coogan?

  What, you're obviously a student of history. We talked about the book, the books behind you. What

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  What anecdotes can you share about previous technologies rolling out in music backlash to electronic drum machines backlash to electronic music? Give me some more, like, what are you drawing on for its core?

• 3:13:33Speaker 07

  Okay, so I mean, the, the, the story that I think becomes really, it looms large in a lot of people's mind, Dylan going electric, right?

• 3:13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:42Speaker 07

  This is an era of folk music where everybody's like, you know what's authentic is me. I don't smell great. I'm strumming on an acoustic guitar. I perform at four cafes a night in the village. We all hang out and write together and have sex with each other and that's, that's the scene. And then Dylan sees what's happening with technology and sees what's happening, especially with the guitar. And the electric guitar has become a creative tool for an entire legion of rock musicians. And Dylan brings it to the Newport Folk Fest, to the Newport Folk Festival and says, I'm, I'm plugging in. I don't care what you guys think. And of course people call him Judas and, and say that he's doing heresy and the fact is he's just following, he was a follower at that point.

• 3:14:26Speaker 07

  I also mentioned autotune earlier. You may remember Jay-Z put out a song called DOA, Death of Autotune. This is at the peak of T-Pain.

• 3:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:35Speaker 07

  T-Pain is dominating radio with essentially computer music that sounds a lot like Zap and Roger from the late seventies into the early eighties. That kind of like synthetic funk music that was really popular after like the earth, wind and fires of the world. T-Pain comes along, formalizes it, becomes a go-to songwriter, producer and collaborator. And all of a sudden, everything on the radio sounds like Computer Jay-Z comes along with death of autotune and says actually stop all that and that people are like that's nice old man like let's keep it pushing and autotune is now widely accepted in every genre you hear it in country music you're in pop you're in reggaeton you hear it in hip hop Those these questions that were sort of like anxious critical anxious critical discourses when they emerged

• 3:15:20Speaker 07

  Nobody really gives two thoughts to anymore I think that's probably what's gonna happen

• 3:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah

• 3:15:26Speaker 07

  12 to 24 months from now with AI

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I want to go so much deeper and have you back to spend way more time with all this I'm interested in your thoughts on On the the downstream implications of AI music because I I could imagine that if you're a particular artist that can Create one of those like shelling points where there's a specific tour that everyone's talking about you gotta go see the era's tour This particular tour at the sphere was something that so many people took Instagram reels of and posted that Everyone just knows it's really creates this proof of authenticity I'm wondering what other downstream effects

• 3:16:05John Coogan?

  Might are you thinking about as artists react to competition from some anonymous person with AI that can create music that's maybe at Indistinguishable so they gotta specialize

• 3:16:18Speaker 07

  Here's the thing here's the anxiety that it brings up for me and I think it's an anxiety that I've long felt Before AI posed itself as a problem I'm a very intense listener it's my job but also just even before it was my job I was always an intense listener you guys may or may not be intense I don't know

• 3:16:37John Coogan?

  Sure

• 3:16:38Speaker 07

  What I can tell you is that for every person like me there's 50 people who are casual listeners

• 3:16:44John Coogan?

  Sure

• 3:16:44Speaker 07

  Which is to say they press play on a Spotify playlist and walk away and don't think too hard about what the second song is or the fifth song is

• 3:16:51John Coogan?

  They're not studying they're listening

• 3:16:53Speaker 07

  They're not studying and they're not preoccupied they're not every song that comes on they don't do a gut check with themselves and say Do I like this am I curious about this is this an artist I respect they just kind of let it go in the background everything is dentist office music it's moving in that direction There are plenty of real life artists who are making music like that And those are the people who have been shutting out some of the bigger and more creative people.

• 3:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:19Speaker 07

  AI accelerates that process, but AI didn't start that process.

• 3:17:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:17:23Speaker 07

  And I think what is also going to accelerate is more and more people as consumers are going to get trained to try to not pay too close attention to the specifics of what they're listening to.

• 3:17:33John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Okay. I have fifty more questions, but we do have to move on. But thank you so much for hopping on and shorting us.

• 3:17:40Speaker 07

  Do you want me to burn this?

• 3:17:43John Coogan?

  No, no, keep it. It has lore now. We've discussed it on the show. It lives on forever in the Instagram reel. It's great. I love it.

• 3:17:51Speaker 07

  One thing I'll say before I go is that many of my favorite rap shirts from the nineties are all bootlegs.

• 3:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:56Speaker 07

  This may be, this may turn out to be the thousand dollar shirt twenty years.

• 3:17:59John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. It has lore now. It's been discussed on the show. Well, thank you so much.

• 3:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's like actually schedule your next appearance today. We'd love to have you back on.

• 3:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so much more to talk about.

• 3:18:11Speaker 07

  You guys are killing it. Congratulations.

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. You too. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 3:18:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And, uh,

• 3:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Pedro is in the waiting room.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  We have Pedro.

• 3:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Bring him on in.

• 3:18:28John Coogan?

  From Brex.

• 3:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Five billion dollar man.

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  The gong ready. Wow. What a day. Pedro, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Congratulations.

• 3:18:36Speaker 13

  How are you guys? Thank you so much. We're super fun. Good to see you as well.

• 3:18:40John Coogan?

  Give us the news. How'd this come together? What happened? I want to ring the gong.

• 3:18:43Speaker 13

  Yeah. So, so today we're announcing the largest bank fintech merger in history. Uh, between Brex and Capital One. Uh, I'll let you go for it. Go for it. Five point one five.

• 3:18:59John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:19:02Speaker 13

  Thank you. We're really excited about this.

• 3:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:04Speaker 13

  And, and as we, as we thought about this, right, Capital One is the first fintech ever. They invented this concept of bringing technology into the industry.

• 3:19:13John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right.

• 3:19:14Speaker 13

  And as we got to know them, what we realized was there was a really obvious one plus one equals five scenario here. And, and, and really, when we did think of the world that they operated, it was completely different than anywhere else compared to Brex. They had the, you know, hundreds of millions of consumers, millions of businesses, you know, a hundred fifty billion dollars in market cap, nine hundred billion dollars in car GMB. And really, the way that we we thought about this is when we combine the product that we do with the Brex, we created this new category of company that brings financial services and software under one platform to help customers make better financial decisions, right?

• 3:19:54Speaker 13

  And we combine this with, you know, the the product and the platform with Capital One's unprecedented scale, brand, distribution, and balance sheet. We have this unique opportunity to accelerate our order of market and product with a level of investment that we would never be able to match as a standalone company. So it's really about how do we build the most important financial platform for businesses in the U.S. and this is such a unique combination of being two founder-like companies that fundamentally believe in growth and be here to win.

• 3:20:25Jordi Hays?

  They always say, what's the phrase, like you meet your acquirer, you know? Years before any deal happens. Yeah. How did you guys, like first, how did the conversations first start?

• 3:20:36Speaker 13

  So, so I've I've heard of Rich and the Capital One team for many, many years. Actually, even when I was back in Brazil, they were already an inspiration. These guys have been building FitTech for a long time. They invented this idea of bringing data into underwriting, which of course is one of the big things that we pioneered back in 2017, as you know. So, so a lot of this has been, you know, deep admiration and respect. And then as we started to spend time with them, I think the biggest thing to me was the deep respect they had for technology. And the fact that when you think of a bank, M and A, people really think about, okay, we're going to go and integrate all these teams and spend all this time and make it super slow. And really, the the main idea is keeping Brex independently and just accelerate, like

• 3:21:21Speaker 13

  accelerate the growth. And we're going to integrate a few parts of the business, but the majority of it will run independently. And, and you know, when you put in behind the $6 billion R and D budget of Capital One, the $6 billion marketing budget, that gets a very special, a very special combination. And, and I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that this was the easiest and fastest path for Brex to be the number one player in our space, operating with this, you know, unprecedented scale and ambition with them.

• 3:21:51John Coogan?

  What I want to talk about other exciting areas of plugging, bringing like a Silicon Valley ethos to a larger company. How much of what you see over the next few years is like deploying AI transformation and bringing like that that high-energy, early adoption of AI throughout the organization? Or any other areas like even just marketing, there's so many different areas that you have a unique view from the founder seat.

• 3:22:21Speaker 13

  Oh, 100%, 100%. And, and, and look, I think, I think the thing that about well, capital on the special is being a founder like company is just this ability to make, you know, quote unquote, bold decisions much more aggressively than others, right? And, and when you look into, for example, the engine that they've built on the go-to-market side for a small business. I think, I think it's nowhere in the world matched in to the scale in which they operate. When you look into the technology and data and what they do on the credit side and underwriting. It, it's really sort of an N of one thing. So I think there's a lot for us to learn from them. And, and I think the, the things that we're really excited to bring to the table is especially when you think about this space, right, and bringing financial services and software into one.

• 3:23:06Speaker 13

  It is really just AI and the direction of the roadmap that we're building as a standalone company. And, and now that we can, you know, double, triple our level of investment over the next few years together. It's going to be a really unique thing to do and just bring this capability to the millions of businesses that are already on their platform. Will also be huge, right? So, you know, super, super, and, and maybe the biggest thing to say is, you know, uh, we're not going anywhere. I'm saying that I think this is going to be the most exciting years of my career. Yes, we're making history here. Super grateful.

• 3:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, are you coming for Rich's job? Are you going for the top spot? Some people want to sell, you know, they want to, you know, just rest.

• 3:23:48John Coogan?

  There's no resting.

• 3:23:49Jordi Hays?

  But I know you're ambitious, so I can see you going, going straight, going straight for the top.

• 3:23:54John Coogan?

  We advocate for this for every acquisition. We want the founders to get inside, take over.

• 3:23:59Speaker 13

  I, I have immense respect for Rich. He is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation. And and he's incredibly private and doesn't talk a lot about the, he says that the, you know, the story of Capital One is the book that will never be written.

• 3:24:12John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:24:12Speaker 13

  And and and there are some, there are some amazing stories there.

• 3:24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:16Speaker 13

  But which is the way in which he runs the company is founder mode to to the extreme.

• 3:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:21Speaker 13

  And and and there's a lot there that that that inspires us. But look, the reality is, for now, there's so much to build in the space that we're in, right? We're still Brex's one percent of the market.

• 3:24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:32Speaker 13

  Uh, when we bring it together, the existing, you know, commercial card, there's a lot more room to go. We're going to be the third largest corporate card issuer in the U.S. Uh, and there's a very clear path to build the most important financial platform for businesses in the country. So.

• 3:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:45Speaker 13

  Uh, really excited.

• 3:24:46John Coogan?

  What about location? Uh, I think of you as a San Francisco company. I'm sure you've uh, expanded. I think of them as a New York company. Do I have that right? Or they're gonna be like.

• 3:24:56Speaker 13

  Yeah, they're mostly based.

• 3:24:57John Coogan?

  Just lots of flights or, yeah?

• 3:24:59Speaker 13

  Yeah, they're mostly based in Virginia.

• 3:25:01John Coogan?

  Oh, Virginia.

• 3:25:01Speaker 13

  Uh, so, yeah, so, uh, in DC. So, so the biggest thing for us is we're actually keeping Brex mostly standalone.

• 3:25:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:25:09Speaker 13

  Uh, and and large, you know, operating largely independent. So the idea is, I remain in San Francisco, our leadership team remains in San Francisco and, you know, spread over the U.S.

• 3:25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:18Speaker 13

  Uh, we continue to hire in Brazil, we continue to hire in Seattle, we continue to hire in New York. And really, it's like, how do we add fuel to the fire? That's, that's really the mindset.

• 3:25:27John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:25:28Speaker 13

  Uh, and we're going to integrate a few parts of the business that are important, like some risk management functions over time, of finance reporting and all that. But fundamentally, the cool thing of this is, you know, how do you play this game at a completely different level of scale? And just, uh, get ahead like five, seven, 10 years of what we would as a standalone company. Uh, and we're really excited about it.

• 3:25:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, lessons for entrepreneurs, you know, looking back at the, uh, since 2017, I mean, crazy ride.

• 3:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:56Jordi Hays?

  One of the fastest growing companies of its era. Then through COVID and Zerp, like, it's been an insane roller coaster and and, you know, the last few years, uh, you know, focusing on, um, on, you know, you're just navigating through that whole process is, uh, and getting to this outcome is, uh, uh, super inspiring, but, uh, any, any lessons that you're taking from it?

• 3:26:18John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Learnings?

• 3:26:19Speaker 13

  I mean, so many, right? I, I, I think, you know, it's, it's, I started this company when I was 21. I didn't know a lot about, about, about things in the world and, and I think a lot of the journey of the company is, is, you know, also a reflection of the founder journey. And, and over the years, you know, we've made a lot of mistakes, we've learned a lot. And, and I think the last few years, honestly, were the most challenging, but also the most rewarding years of my career. Because I ran this company, you know, as sole CEO. I have an amazing leadership team and I have a fantastic team across all of Brex. But it was a, it was a very different game to play.

• 3:27:00Speaker 13

  And then when you see what we did on growth, what we did on the enterprise side and the level of deals that we're winning across every single player. The majority of AI companies are operating on Brex. When you look at the momentum and the revenue growth as well as, you know, profitability, right? It's, it's really remarkable what the team did here over the past few years. And I think the biggest lesson is, you know, continue to believe in the, in the things that made you start and things that keep you going because there are roadblocks, right? Brex wasn't in a great place in 2023. But I just had this belief that we were not living to our fullest potential. And we can be much more as a company.

• 3:27:45Speaker 13

  And, and I think what we got today is, first, a really exciting milestone that this was all worth it. But the most important part is what the company gets to become. And just cementing Brex as a, a part of the US financial system forever. And the fact that a company would be around, this product that we created, that we have so much conviction and belief, will be around for 10, 20, 30 years at a massive scale. So really sort of unique and emotional moment for me. I, I really have so much gratitude for the team we built at Brex. Some of the most talented, hardworking, smart and kind people that I know. And that without them, like, none of this would be possible. So just, just immensely grateful for, for everyone that contributed to the journey

• 3:28:30Speaker 13

  and, and getting us here today. And again, we're just getting started in this new, in this new phase.

• 3:28:35Jordi Hays?

  What a moment. We were, we were joking earlier. It, it is interesting that you now have more common ground with, with Kareem and Eric over at Ramp and that you've both sold the company to Capital One, so.

• 3:28:49Jordi Hays?

  But great stuff, super, super inspiring and congratulations to the, to the whole team and the whole cap table on the milestone and it's great, great to catch up.

• 3:29:00John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:29:01John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. See you guys. See ya.

• 3:29:05John Coogan?

  Up next, who we got?

• 3:29:08John Coogan?

  Do we have anyone in the re-stream waiting room?

• 3:29:10Jordi Hays?

  We've got Delian.

• 3:29:11John Coogan?

  I think we got Delian.

• 3:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Coming through.

• 3:29:14John Coogan?

  Coming in from Founder's Fund. Is he available in the re-stream waiting room? Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Welcome to the show, Delian. How are you doing?

• 3:29:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, just great day, great day.

• 3:29:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:29:30John Coogan?

  No, not the flashbang. Did this hit you like a flashbang or were you expecting this?

• 3:29:37Delian Asparouhov?

  No, I mean, how was I supposed to know this happened to you? They did a good job of, you know, sort of keeping it, keeping it down low. And I want to start where it ended. Common ground with Eric and Kareem, right? There is some common ground. They both have now sold a company to Capital One.

• 3:29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:49Delian Asparouhov?

  There's a lot of distance between the two of them. Kareem and Eric realized it is impossible to have a significant influence on the world by being within the structure of Capital One. The only way to save customers' time and money was to go out and build an independent generational company. Pedro somehow believes the exact opposite. He believes the only way for him to accomplish anything is to go into an old Saucy Bank, convince them to overpay for his company by 50% and probably accomplish nothing with the rest of his life.

• 3:30:13Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, we're not, we're not, yeah, we're not, we're not doing, we're not doing, we're not going to do any grave, grave dancing here as much as.

• 3:30:21John Coogan?

  But who, who knows? I mean, you know, what if he, what if he does his earn out? He leaves, he starts a new company, you know? Are you gonna, are you gonna sign up? You say, hey, you know, I've backed people that have sold to Capital One before. I've seen this story before. His next company might be backed by you.

• 3:30:37Jordi Hays?

  What if you end up inspiring him to go do the earn out, come back, start a, start a ramp competitor?

• 3:30:42John Coogan?

  What if he starts a moon base with a mass driver?

• 3:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't possibly.

• 3:30:45John Coogan?

  And you're just like, wow, he actually cracked it, you know? This could happen. I don't know.

• 3:30:48Delian Asparouhov?

  Look, as George Hope likes to say, chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. So I'm just trying to put a chip on his pocket.

• 3:30:53John Coogan?

  You are.

• 3:30:53Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly, exactly. The thing that I'll also, you know, sort of point out, and this is more of like a, you know, sort of, you know, general company building, you know, sort of macro point, but it's an analogy that I, you know, learned from Keith back in the day, which is, building companies is a lot like laying cement. In the early days, you have the ability to like, you know, manipulate it, shape it, et cetera, right? It is, you know, sort of soft and malleable. The moment that it starts to harden though. Trying to change company culture requires like a jackhammer. It's loud, it's painful, disruptive, it breaks your structural integrity. And so I think the thing, I was kind of listening into Pedro's interview and it's a little bit of a joke or a quip, but it's still funny to me that throughout the entire interview, there was never a time where he really deeply was focused on how this is impacting his customers. In particular, is it going to save them time and money? Right?

• 3:31:36Delian Asparouhov?

  And I think that just comes down to what the early days of the two companies were like in terms of focus areas. The early days of Brex were focused on celebrating go to market, celebrating basically like signing up logos, celebrating wins. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying that is what the culture was. They celebrated the champagne campaign, they set up the South Park Cafe. And those types of micro decisions feed into what employees want to work on because they see what the founder celebrates versus, you guys know, what Ramp celebrates from the get go has always been saving customers time and money through better product, better automation, better savings. And that's what ultimately the individual employee on the line celebrates and thinks about every single day because they see that that's what the founder is celebrating. And so I think as you see this, the two sides of the story basically play out, I actually

• 3:32:18Delian Asparouhov?

  think it comes down to those early, early cultural micro decisions. And I think companies and founders should be thinking about that a lot, even in completely unrelated categories of like, what is going to be that penultimate winning culture? When I think about the space industry, are you Relativity Space and you're celebrating renders and capital raising? Or are you SpaceX and you're celebrating like technical accomplishments and actually like landing rockets? And ultimately that's going to be what plays out. Relativity goes and raises $3.5 billion, never launches a rocket. SpaceX obviously launches their first rocket on like, I think $60 million total raise.

• 3:32:50John Coogan?

  On the question of Ramp strategy, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the actual structure. If you think about Brex and Capital One, they now have like, that combined entity has a consumer business. I've pushed, "Glyman, get me a personal Ramp card that I can pull out for my personal finances." I actually talked to some people who set up like whole LLCs just to run their personal finances through Ramp. It's like very cumbersome because Ramp does not have a consumer business. Is that in the cards? Do you think that there's a world where Ramp grows into a bank? Or is focus like the actual correct strategy for now, forever? How do you see it progressing?

• 3:33:30Delian Asparouhov?

  I think focus really matters, right? Like, we have a, like, you know, sort of core ICP, which is just like, you know, you know, the all basically enterprises of America. And I think like, there's so much more that we can do to serve our customers even better. You know, sort of seeing us, you know, basically spin up, you know, sort of Ramp Labs. And, you know, today, we just, you know, they launched, you know, a new version of, you know, sort of Ramp Budget. And I think any additional energy spent on just continuing to develop next generation products, especially ones that obviously utilize AI that is focused on the core ICP for Ramp, is a far better utilization of our time. And, you know, to take it back to like the Peter Thiel philosophy, we believe in building monopoly, right? And ultimately, anything that isn't serving that core ICP is a distraction from the potential to build a monopoly. I think what I find particularly exciting about today and about the news about Brex

• 3:34:15Delian Asparouhov?

  is that it is probably the strongest monopoly thesis for Ramp that has existed since the company's basically start. If you remember when we funded it, you know, and it like, you know, came out and launched in 2019 and 20, Amex still had like a really big, you know, sort of enterprise business. Brex was a multi-billion dollar company. Divvy was still super, you know, sort of fast growing. Bill.com was still super, you know, sort of fast growing. Expensify was fast growing. Like, there were so many players in the market. You fast forward today, Divvy basically got acquired, is barely around anymore. Brex, obviously, you know, sort of got acquired. Amex has almost entirely shifted their focus to their consumer business, right? If you look at how much of their gross profit basically comes from consumer business and how rapidly that's growing relative to enterprise, it's all the CEOs basically talking about on quarterly earnings calls. Their entire, basically like, you know, you know, FMV basically growth over the past three years is entirely based on the consumer business.

• 3:35:00Delian Asparouhov?

  And so enterprise corporate spend, cards, spend management, budgeting, just the like smart CFO suite that smart CFOs use. Dude, the like field is somehow more open today than it was five years ago. There's less funding going into it, less like super competent teams that are, you know, sort of focused on it. And so why would you ever like give up focus on just continue to maximize that? When like, you know, we're still only 1% of the way there. There's so much more basically to do. And so, yeah, would I, as a consumer, like, love to have that level of power, like, in my hands? Sure. But like, as a Ramp shareholder, why would we not give up the fact that we literally have the best monopoly opportunity since the company got started that we need to continue to go capitalize on?

• 3:35:40John Coogan?

  Jordy, anything else?

• 3:35:42Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm happy for the Brex team and I think it's a great outcome and I can also see why you are excited about this moment, simply because a lot of people probably mocked you for investing in a corporate card company when you initially led the round into Ramp. Even with the quality of the team, it seemed, like you were saying, it seemed like the cards had already been fully dealt and there wasn't some type of greenfield opportunity. So I guess congratulations to you too.

• 3:36:18John Coogan?

  Congratulations to everyone.

• 3:36:20Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, congratulations to everyone. Honestly, I hope the industry can just move past this rivalry. It's like we're all serving, we're all building tools to grow the economy and that's something I can...

• 3:36:39John Coogan?

  Delian's gotta say something nice. Aren't you a YC founder, Delian?

• 3:36:42Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, since I'm a 2014, but you know...

• 3:36:45John Coogan?

  So you're a YC founder. This is a good outcome for the YC community. Let's give it up for the YC community. Delivering returns.

• 3:36:52Delian Asparouhov?

  Jordi and Coogan, you guys are much better people than I am. I think that's why you have much better hair than I do. I unfortunately am incapable of not being anything but a vengeful paranoid comedian. So that's all I've got in me. And I'll say, the Ramp story, as you guys may know, started on Fortnite. Krim and I playing together, seeing his brilliance. I'm happy to end the Brex story and the rivalry on my favorite, basically saying in gaming, which is GGWP, easy, no re, which stands for good game, well played, easy game, no rematch.

• 3:37:28John Coogan?

  No rematch.

• 3:37:29Jordi Hays?

  Savage.

• 3:37:30John Coogan?

  Who knows? There might be a rematch. We'll see what the next company is. Anyway, have a good rest of your day. We'll see you later, Delian.

• 3:37:38Delian Asparouhov?

  Cheers. See you later, boys.

• 3:37:40John Coogan?

  And that concludes probably the most chaotic stream of our show.

• 3:37:45Jordi Hays?

  Definitely the most chaotic. We had technical difficulties. We had flashbangs. We had

• 3:37:50John Coogan?

  Surprise guests.

• 3:37:51Jordi Hays?

  A $5 billion deal get announced live. We had bootleg merch.

• 3:37:55John Coogan?

  Bootleg merch. We had a good time.

• 3:37:57Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but no, this is a fantastic moment for Capital One and Brex and we are, we're excited for them.

• 3:38:05John Coogan?

  I'm excited.

• 3:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, I think that's it.

• 3:38:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 3:38:08Jordi Hays?

  I think that's it.

• 3:38:09John Coogan?

  That's planted.

• 3:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, chat, the, the, the concerning thing is the chat knows that now they can just say, start spamming flashbang into the chat.

• 3:38:19John Coogan?

  It's so awkward for us.

• 3:38:20Jordi Hays?

  And I'm not going to be able to keep it together.

• 3:38:21John Coogan?

  Nope. It's gonna have to happen every once in a while. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to the TVPN newsletter at tvpn.com. Uh, we have a great show for you tomorrow. I think we're a little bit lighter on the guests as we've been doing on our Friday shows. We'll be hanging out, bringing you the news.

• 3:38:41Jordi Hays?

  The mansion section.

• 3:38:41John Coogan?

  Doing the mansion section.

• 3:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 3:38:43John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific, sharp.

• 3:38:48Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:38:48John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye.