Apple's iOS 26 Review, Meta to Pay $15B for Scale AI Stake | Andrew Huberman, Scott Belsky, Sai Senthilkumar, Karri Saarinen, Roy Bahat, Alex Israel

(02:52) - WWDC Recap (15:17) - Apple's Retreat to its Core Competency (22:45) - Apple's iOS 26 Draws Mixed Reviews (52:58) - Meta to Pay Nearly $15B For Scale AI Stake (01:00:17) - Sai Senthilkumar, a Partner at Redpoint Ventures, focuses on growth-stage investments in enterprise software and AI, and leads the firm's InfraRed initiative, which introduced the first publicly traded index of cloud infrastructure businesses. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid advancements in AI, particularly in developer tools, highlighting companies like Cursor and Anthropic that are transforming software development through AI-powered coding solutions. He also addresses the evolving competitive dynamics between established infrastructure providers and emerging startups, emphasizing the significant opportunities for innovation in the AI-driven infrastructure market. (01:36:58) - CNBC's Disrupter 50 List Reactions (01:44:55) - Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, a project management software company, discusses the company's recent $82 million Series C funding round led by Accel, valuing Linear at $1.25 billion. He highlights the company's efficient growth, noting a 280% profit increase over the past year and a customer base exceeding 15,000, including prominent AI firms like OpenAI. Saarinen emphasizes Linear's focus on streamlined solutions tailored to software development workflows, contrasting with competitors' more customizable but often overwhelming platforms. (02:01:27) - Scott Belsky, an entrepreneur and author, co-founded Behance, a leading online platform for creative professionals, and served as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. In the conversation, Belsky discusses the evolving role of AI in creativity, emphasizing the importance of human elements like taste and storytelling to infuse soul into AI-generated content. He also explores the concept of collective memory within enterprises, highlighting how AI's growing contextual understanding can enhance collaboration and knowledge retention. (02:32:49) - Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, discusses the firm's recent $75 million fundraise, emphasizing their continued focus on early-stage investments in startups that are shaping the future of work. He highlights the firm's commitment to transparency, noting that their operating manual and deal documents are publicly accessible to help founders understand their processes. Bahat also touches on the firm's relationship with Bloomberg L. P., clarifying that while Bloomberg is the sole investor, Bloomberg Beta operates independently without strategic investment directives. (02:47:24) - Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis Technologies, discusses the company's innovative approach to revolutionizing the parking industry through artificial intelligence and strategic acquisitions. Facing initial resistance from property developers, Metropolis shifted its strategy to a "growth buyout" model, acquiring traditional parking operators to integrate AI-driven, seamless payment systems. This approach has positioned Metropolis as the largest parking operator in North America, with plans to expand its technology to other sectors like gas stations and retail, while also preparing for the future impact of autonomous vehicles on urban infrastructure. (02:59:24) - Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and Stanford professor known for his work on brain function, behavior, and wellness, and he hosts the Huberman Lab podcast, where he translates scientific insights into practical health advice. Huberman addresses concerns about proposed NIH funding cuts of 40%, emphasizing the critical role of both basic and applied research, and discusses strategies for rebuilding public trust in science after the COVID-19 pandemic. He advocates restructuring research funding to prioritize impactful, collaborative, and discovery-driven science, highlighting how significant breakthroughs such as GLP-1 treatments and brain-machine interfaces arise from fundamental research. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.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://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, June 10th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. It's a great day. We're doing WWDC reactions. I will run you through a little bit of the show. We want to talk about the MetaScale AI deal. Forty-nine percent for just fourteen billion dollars. It's a steal. You're getting Alex Wang. You're getting the Scale AI team. They're giving it away. We were going to talk about the Glean fundraiser, competitor OpenAI. They're cooking in enterprise AI. Some of the reaction there from what's going on in deep research and some of the advancements that OpenAI has been rolling out there. Very interesting for Glean's business. Glean still ripping. So they're up, raised a big round today.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  They also got the CNBC Disruptor List, fifty top startups. We've had a ton of them on the show. We're going to go through, do a little underrated, overrated, maybe. See who should be higher.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Spicy, John.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Personally, I love them all. I think they should all be tied for first place. But CNBC ranked them. One to fifty.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, hopefully it was purely pay to play and CNBC just kind of auctioned off the spots.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  That's the.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  That would be the most fair thing, you know.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Agree, agree.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  And then we got a bunch of great guests. We got Si from Redpoint coming on. We have Kari announcing a massive, what is it, Series C Unicorn Round at Linear? One of our sponsors.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Must be their Series C.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  We have Scott Belsky from A24 coming on. Roy Bahot from Bloomberg Beta coming on, announcing a new seventy-five million dollar fund.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  And then this guy.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Metropolis.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  And then we got Andrew. This guy Andrew Huberman.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Andrew Huberman.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  May have heard of him.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  He's got.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Fellow podcaster.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we're excited for the show today. But let's kick it off with the timelines, reaction to WWDC. Liquid glass, whatever, says Juan. The most important thing in iOS twenty-six text is finally left aligned. You know, I saw people posting about this. You said this about like the center alignment, left alignment thing. I hadn't noticed it. It looks a lot better left aligned. I don't know why. I didn't know what I was missing.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  We'll take it.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Huge improvement.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  We'll take it.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So now text in iOS notifications, left aligned. Huge news.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  All the different version numbers are now, they're doing car models. So it's iOS 26. They jumped forward a bunch. I believe we were on like 18 before. So they just skipped a bunch.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to be in the thousands.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  We're in 2025.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  In the thousands.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  And it's the iOS 26 across everything. So unification there. It's happened in Android a while ago, but now it's, it's come to iOS.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Again, a lot of people with negative reactions. We're going to take you through some of the positive reactions. Steve Jobs would have cornered you in a dark alley and beat you to with a metal pipe when he suggested something like this. That's what Kitsey says. This was yesterday's reaction. Today, some of the designers are coming out and saying, hey, let them cook. There's, there's a silver lining here.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  There's certain, there's certain examples that are really, really gnarly.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  So, so there's that one super viral one that's like really hard to see. And then people put it next to the Oppenheimer with the blast. I think that's a fake photo. I think they adjusted the brightness on that. I don't think that's a, I think, I, no, not a deep fake. I don't think there's any AI involved. I just think that, that someone went in there and was like, let me turn up the brightness for, for effect. And I think that that's fake. And I think that also, again, this is, this is a beta. This is something that they're going to be iterating on before it goes out to the masses.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  It's honestly a bit weird for a trillion dollar company to launch a beta.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  It is odd.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  They should just say, no, this is an alpha.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but, but it makes sense in terms of like, like if you are a developer and there's a, and there's a significant change to the user interface. You want to bake that into your app so that you don't look out of place on day one when everyone updates.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  So you gotta get the beta into the hands of the developers so that the Airbnb app and the public.com app and the ramp.com app save time and money. Time is money, save both easy use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  And travel, John's favorite.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  And travel, the travel is amazing.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  Favorite thing.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Speaking of which, we gotta book our hotels for tonight because we're going to San Francisco for YC demo day tomorrow. Tune in.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a massive string.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  With Ramp Travel, you can book last minute and it's still a breeze.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  It's really, really easy. But yes, if you're designing an app, you want it to feel somewhat seamless with the rest of the UI. And if there's UI changes, you gotta, you gotta test drive those beforehand. You gotta make sure that those are right. So, the big question, should we have our intern Tyler Cosgrove over there install iOS 26 beta? You know it's potentially he's on the green screen. Something happened. He's on the green screen. Should we make Tyler install? Oh, there, there we go. That's where he is really like, I'm glad that you did the false background for a minute and make it look like a green screen instead of showing the real.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we wanted him to be more approachable.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Yes, we just put a green screen behind him as a fake background.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but anyways, back to you. Is that a Mykonos? Where are you right now?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Oh, this is just my, my pool in my backyard.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, cool.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  This is where you take podcasts.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Sometimes, you know, sometimes fellow, some of my friends will, will go on podcasts. They'll just use my backyard.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's what it is.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I would love, I would love to watch you risk it all and install the update. So, why don't you?

• 5:32John Coogan?

  Are you willing to do it?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I'll do it, yeah.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Okay, do it.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna do it for the team. He's taking him on for the team.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  iOS 26 beta. It could go terribly wrong because the bugs, you know, the, the thing with the beta is that you can't go back. You can't, you can't roll back to the non-beta.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  And so, you could be living with, with, with minor grading bugs for like months until they fix it. Now, they fix it pretty quickly. I've done it like once or twice, gone on the beta because I'm, I'm so excited. I want to try the new thing.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  This is basically intern hazing.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  It is hazing. It's the, it's the WWDC version.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. All right, Tyler. Well, you are brave.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Okay, good luck with that.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  And get, why don't you get started?

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Get started and then give us, give us the review. We'll be checking in with you to see how the iOS 26 installation process goes and, and, and any, any problems you run into there.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  We also have some other

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  He's like, guys, I can't, I can't read anything on my phone anymore.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  We also have some, we also have some big show updates. Not only do you have intern cam now, we also have the breaking news camera. Let's go to it now.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy too, because I can see.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  You see this? Okay, so this is the breaking news camera. When we have breaking news, we cut to the printer, cut, and it prints out. You can read the breaking news. Okay, Jordan, you want to read that to us? Hold it up on the single.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. We have some breaking news. If we can switch cameras.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  So, breaking news, Snap to launch smaller, lighter augmented reality specs smart glasses in 2026.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  I'm excited for this.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  From CNBC. Thank you to CNBC. Snap on Tuesday announced its plans to release a sixth generation of its augmented reality glasses in 2026 as competition in the smart glasses market continues to heat up. The maker of Snapchat said that its next generation glasses will be called specs. Breaking with the company, Spectacles branding that it used for previous. Drop the akles. Drop the akles. Just do specs. It's cleaner.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Well, they dropped the T too, so it's technically drop the tackles.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Drop the specs. Drop the tackles. Just specs. Larger tech rivals like Meta, Apple, and Alphabet are investing heavily into cutting-edge head-worn devices.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  The computer will be on your face, and you're gonna like it.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  The most recent edition of Spectacles were released in September 2024 to developers only. That edition of the glasses was available under a leasing model that required users to commit to paying 99 a month for a full year if you wanted to develop for them. So that's $1,200 guaranteed. And then if you want to keep it more, it's probably continues to be $100. So it'll be interesting. It'll run Snap OS operating system, which they developed in-house. Snap said that developers will be able to incorporate Google's Gemini AI models into programs that they developed for smart glasses.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  So you could see some sort of, yeah, exactly. So you could see someone where it's like, okay, you're gonna get the glasses, you're gonna build something on top of them.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  The comms out, Google says, hey.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Oh, that's where you're going with it. Okay.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't know. I think very unlikely, but, but still, you know.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Well, Snap's market cap, exactly what Meta just paid for, 50% stake in Scale AI, 14 billion.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Anything's possible.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Spicy.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  So Snap's at 14 billion. The the stock hasn't really moved over the past five days on this news. It's clearly Snap, you know, staying in the game with the WWDC news, getting something, getting a story out there that, hey, we're still in the game, we're moving and we're doing cool stuff. And and I'm excited for this. I think we need more, more innovation here, more people testing different stuff. And it's clear that with a new format, with a new paradigm of like what the product is, there's a whole bunch of interesting directions you can go, whether there's an augmented reality display, whether it's voice only, whether it's glasses, prescription glasses, a whole bunch of different things.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Social media goats, both of them are just not, the idea of not being a part of the next platform shift is just an idea that is a world they don't want to live in, right?

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  They are, you know, both, both Zuck and Evan are going to be, you know, competing.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so fun. Could be interesting from a developer angle, obviously, you know, nowhere near the budget of Reality Labs for what Zuck is working on with Meta, but potentially some sort of innovation. I agree, I agree.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  They can be good.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  I'm optimistic. I certainly want to try it. Anyway, let's go back to Liquid Glass. Ben Thompson gave a whole, posted a massive article on Stratechery called "Apple's Retreat", "Apple Retreats", something like that. You should give it a read. You should subscribe to Stratechery, obviously. "Apple's Retreat to its core competency", "The headline feature of WWDC this year", this is from the latest Stratechery article, "was Liquid Glass, a new unified design language that stretches across its operating systems. I will reserve judgment on Liquid's glass aesthetics and usability. Gruber likes it, but I am, but I am not one to install developer betas on my devices."

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  But Tyler will.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  But Tyler will. That's why we have Tyler, because I agree with Ben Thompson. It's extremely risky, but he's willing to do it, taking one for the team over there.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the whole, the whole TBPN army, he's, he's really saying, I will, I will sacrifice myself for all, I will fall on my sword.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  It's okay. If it goes really south, we'll get, we'll get a new phone. It's always, always a possibility. But good luck. Hopefully you can make it through. Tyler, we'll be checking on you throughout the show. So first, let's read Gruber's Gruber's overview of his reaction to liquid glass. Because we saw Timeline hated it. They said Steve Jobs would hate it. Let's go to John Gruber, Derek Fireball.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it is, is it was popular to hate on it.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  And because anytime there's like-

• 11:20John Coogan?

  When someone's on a downswing, they love just piling on downwards.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  And when everyone's on an upswing, they love just piling on upwards. It's not-

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  No, and I think, I think it's also normal if a, if a widely used consumer product does any type of meaningful upgrade.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  I mean, this was-

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  The default is that typically is that it's bad.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Meta or Facebook back in the day launching the feed.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  They're like, I want to go back to just randomly looking at your profile. I don't want to see random-

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Ah!

• 11:44John Coogan?

  All, everything, every change is always met with some sort of pushback. And then years later, people wind up loving it. I feel like this is something that could grow on me. I'm, I'm reserving until we've fully been tested it on our intern. If he gives it the thumbs up, I'm going to install it. So let's go to John Gruber.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's kind of, it's, it's kind of fun.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  It's brave.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's daring and brave and bold to do something like that. And, uh, you know, just because Tyler's doing it, you know, doesn't mean you shouldn't, you know?

• 12:13John Coogan?

  This, this type of bravery that Tyler's exhibiting today, I think it might be one day like an exhibit in the computer history museum.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  The bravery he's, he's exhibiting today will be in the history books.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  They might even name the next operating system Cosgrove.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  They should. Cosgrove.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Cosgrove OS.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Mac OS 27.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Mac OS Cosgrove.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  After Tahoe.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  It's got an amazing, it's got an amazing ring.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  It has a nice ring to it.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  It's got a nice ring to it. And it just loads with this image. Like, that's the default wallpaper.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  For the daring and brave technologist who installed the beta on day two.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  You did, you know, what everybody said, you're crazy.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  It was impossible. Everyone said you're crazy.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  It's impossible.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  You're crazy.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  You should never do that. But he did it. He took the leap.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  He took the leap and did it anyway.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, first, uh, this is going back to Ben Thompson's piece. First handcrafted UI overhauls are the polar opposite of a probabilistic world of generative AI. One is about deep consideration and iteration resulting in a finished product. The other is about in the moment token prediction resulting in an output. That is ephemeral and disposable. Both are important and creative, but the downsides of that creativity, unfamiliarity and edge cases versus hallucination and false confidence are themselves diametrically opposed. Apple's historical strengths have always been rooting and designing for finality. In my first year of stratechery, I did a SWOT analysis. Let's give it up for SWOT analysis.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Love SWOT analyses.

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  Of the big tech companies and said about Apple. And I think we've talked about this a bunch on the show of like generative AI is inherently imperfect. Apple is about pixel perfection.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  So Apple's product development process is wonderful for developing finished products, but that same process doesn't work nearly as well when it comes to building cloud services. Cloud services are never done. They are best developed by starting with an MVP and then iterating based on usage. This is precisely opposite of what it takes to design a piece of hardware and it's a big reason why Apple struggles so much with cloud services and why other services companies struggle with products. The canonical example of this, of course, was when mobile me was the mobile me launch, which was delivered fully formed and which, when faced with real world usage, crashed and burned. Apple's latest offerings are better, but still suffer from too much internal development time per release. This is a hard problem to fix because it touches the core of what makes Apple, Apple.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  I think it matters. I think it matters whether or not liquid glass is good because it will be a testament about the state of Apple's strengths. The point of this article, however, is that W W C was a retreat to those strengths, which is good. This is a bull case. They're not getting over their skis and they will eventually, I mean, if they're to win, probably defer to the other companies and play to their strengths and let the other companies win in the places where they are best.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Tim just calling up Sam and saying, Sam, I'm going to need 50 billion.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Siri, it's yours? 50 billion. 50 billion, you know, if you and Masa could pull together the capital, we could make it happen.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  I mean, I keep thinking about Siri and I keep running through like, what would it have taken to, to just? To just replace Siri with a frontier level, you know, simple response model, not even the reasoning stuff, just GPT four O level, you know, you ask it a question and it reads you like a basic response and not lose the other Siri functionality. And I think that it need, they need to kind of flip the paradigm because right now Siri is only, it's basically all tool use. It's basically a router. So it takes in, you know, you ask Siri, what, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow? And it knows that you just, and all it's

• 15:49John Coogan?

  doing is picking out keywords, weather, and it goes to the weather API internally and then tomorrow and it feeds that in and then it delivers that back. Like ChatGPT kind of flips that around by having the default interaction be much more generalizable and it can return kind of any result. It can return a paragraph. It can tell you about a historical event or just talk to you. And then if it needs to use a tool like web search to get you the weather for tomorrow, then it goes and calls that. And so you need to kind of flip that around. I was wondering about like, like, why hasn't, like, what, if you, if you rolled back the clock and you were like, okay, Apple just wants to be in the game, what would it take to launch a V two of Siri? And I was like, well, okay,

• 16:33John Coogan?

  if they, if they try to partner with someone under the hood without, like, they don't even have the option of just saying, we are going to partner with Anthropic under the hood and it's going to be, and it's going to be basically white labeled, then no one will ever find out because there are just too many leakers. Like it will find out immediately. And so Mark Gurman will have the story immediately and everyone will know. So they won't be able to say like, this is magically ours, when really it's someone else's, even if they're paying them to be, and there's tons of NDAs.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Like they do with cloud services, right? I don't actually know who's under.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  I think they, I think they do a lot of that. And then I think a lot of it comes down to the privacy angle is that they want to make certain claims about privacy and ESG and net zero and stuff. And so if they were to just white label another company that didn't have the same reputation in privacy or, or environmentalism, like people would Wait, wait, wait, but like Anthropic isn't, isn't known for their privacy rules as much as possible. So maybe they're training on my Siri results now. And that's a whole, that's a whole thing and they have to, you know, build up Anthropic's brand to have the brand of Apple, which is just, I'm sure Anthropic's doing great, but they're not known like Apple is in terms of how seriously they take it. Yeah. And then in terms of, in terms of acquisition, obviously there's all the antitrust stuff.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  We'll get into this with a scale AI deal, but every major hyperscaler except for Apple now has basically done one of these like interesting aqua hires of a foundation model lab to kind of juice up their AI efforts. And, and, and it's kind of been a mixed bag. Maybe we see one from Apple. They certainly have the cash, but it would be a very, very different. It would be a departure from their current strategy. Anyway, let's go to John Gruber over at Daring Fireball with his review of Liquid Glass. He says, I've got iOS 26 installed on a spare phone already. Oh no. You didn't even use the real phone. Tyler, mistake number one, never install it on your main phone. How's it going so far?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so, so I'm, I'm going to download it. It's 19 gigabytes.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  So my phone is not, you know, I only have 64 gigabytes on my phone, so I'm gonna, I gotta do a, you know.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Delete everything?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna delete everything.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  So.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  You'll delete, just go to your photos app, select all the images, delete them all and then clear the trash and you'll make more memories. Like memory, you could always make, you're making more memories all the time.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  Clear out, clear out those images and.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, good luck.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  If you, on a more serious note, if you need, we'll cover your, your sort of Apple iCloud plan. If you need to get those images in the cloud so you can get.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  If you need, if you need backup, feel free to expense it on your ramp card.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, put it on the ramp.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  So Gruber says, I like the new UI a lot. In addition to just looking, just plain looking cool, Apple has tackled a lot of longstanding minor irritants. For example, the iOS contextual menu for text selections, the one with cut, copy, paste. For years there, for years now, there have been a lot of other useful commands in there. Including share at the very end. But to get to the extra commands, you had to tediously swipe, swipe, swipe. Now with one tap, you can expand the whole thing into a vertical menu. Elegant. And I agree, I noticed that that was getting like, it was originally, it was just like, just copy, just, just cut and paste. It was pretty easy. And then they added, if you wanted to bold or italics, you had to swipe over and then click on that and then go to text to text. And there were like seven different things eventually.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Good, good move. Minor update, but important. And this is what, this is, this is the polish that Apple's so good at. And then he says, there's some stuff in Mac OS, Mac OS 26 Tahoe. I already don't like, like putting needless icons next to almost every single menu item. But overall, my first impression of liquid glass on Mac OS is good, too. It's fun and lots of little details are nice, joyful and useful in an old school.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  If you love Mac OS Tahoe, you'll love Mac OS Cosgrove. I'll just say that.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  It's just gonna be a banger. It's gonna be the best ever. There was an interesting article in here that Ben Thompson linked to by Sebastian DeWitt about physicality, the new age of UI. He actually posted this back on June 3rd before Apple refreshed this. So there's a lot of, oh, do we have some breaking news?

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just printed this out because.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  So this was a good post from Signal. He says, watching this WWDC, thank you Signal for the, for the content. And I'm just happy to be back printing.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, I don't know how we went a few months without it. So he says, watching this WWDC felt like watching a dinosaur try to do ballet. Technically and aesthetically competent, but spiritually, spiritually lost. They talked about Apple intelligence, like they just discovered the concept throughout the presentation. There was zero ecosystem thinking and no real attempt to rethink a single interaction model. More importantly, there was zero sense of how to be relevant in a world where interfaces may disappear. Apps get abstracted and AI is the OS. Apple still thinks in icons and widgets while the world is moving towards awareness, intent and delegation. It'll be interesting to see how much of a penalty they will pay for missing this boat.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Another negative post. Now, Signal did have a couple other posts that were more positive.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think this is generally why I'm excited about Johnny and Sam's hardware project is it's an opportunity to rethink the device from the ground up with AI at the heart versus Apple, which I think going back to, you know, Ben Thompson's position is smart to play their own game right now and understand that they do have the option of auctioning the sort of Siri out to the highest bidder at some point.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Alex Heath, who we had on the show yesterday, had a good post who said, "This is so very clearly designed for an interface that sits on top of the real world, not a phone, something you would need for AR glasses." And so, this idea that it's a little awkward now when you see these images of these glasses over the background of your phone display, it can look a little too transparent, the contrast ratios are all off. But if you think about if they're really going all in on AR, VR, and they want to project these screens over the real world long-term, setting themselves up to really

• 22:56John Coogan?

  dominate there and not need to do another refresh, could be big, could be big. Anyway.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Tim had spent some time with Trump. Trump is known for playing 4D chess. Maybe Tim's playing a little 4D chess with liquid glass. He's like, "Screen is gonna be, everything's gonna be a screen. We're just gonna put UI everywhere."

• 23:16John Coogan?

  They have a patent for a glass iPhone that you can see through or something like that, or something that actually would appear more like glass or appear transparent. And a lot of the transparent, I feel like a lot of the transparent technologies, it's like the closest we're gonna get to just true holograms is if you have a variety of devices that are projecting holograms into glass sheets. And so, maybe it doesn't start with your phone immediately because the battery needs to be right there, that needs to be solid. But if you think about a display and you're projecting on that and doing kind of the same wave guides that are happening. In reflected augmented reality glasses, you could do that on a monitor or something like that. And so that could be very cool. Mark Gurman had a more positive take on WWDC. He says, excellent WWDC.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Cohesive story, deep integration and continuity across the devices. Zero false promises, impressive new UI and significant new productivity features on the Mac and iPad. But the lack of any real new AI features, despite that being my expectation, is startling. And so people were expecting, you know, maybe there will be a new Siri. Maybe they will move the ball down the field in AI and they did not. Ben Hylak, of course, taking credit for it as always. You know him from taking credit for the Jaguar rebrand now. He says, so excited to see my, my, to finally see my work from Apple ship. I was the head of design for the WWDC app notifications. There's still a work in progress. We've only had the last year to work on them. Stay tuned.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  So was this, was this, is this fake or is this real?

• 24:49John Coogan?

  I think this is brightness adjusted. I think that they, I think that whoever shared this image turned up the brightness or brought up the, brought up the lows. Basically decreased the contrast in the, in the photos app like to make it look worse than it actually would. But I mean, even, it doesn't even matter because even if this is the way it looks, this isn't the way it will look when it will ship to, to, to people. Because it's obvious and, and, and Apple doesn't make these like obvious mistakes like this, especially when it comes to design. They, they might do something that is like rough in the short term, but better in the long term. Like what I think is happening with the photos app where in the photos app, they are understanding that in the future, you won't want to scroll at all.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  You will just search and search will be so powerful because every photo and video will be tagged so thoroughly from AI. And it will understand the context so much that you will just ask it to pull up a photo and it will do it immediately. The problem is, is that right now people, A, aren't, they haven't switched that UX paradigm to actually go search first. And second, and, and second, just the tagging is not that good. Like I had a video clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger from a movie on my phone. I wanted to pull it up and so I searched like Arnold, Arnold video. And it couldn't find it because the clip that I had started with a black frame. And clearly, it's only indexing like the first frame. And so if you have like a fade in to a picture of your dog, it won't get text, something like that. I don't know if that's exactly what's happening.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  I use the text search in photos quite a bit.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  I find it like searching Coogan if there's some document.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. The text search is fantastic. And even even things like objects like I, there's a picture of a vending machine. You type in vending machine, it'll do a pretty good job. Sometimes it'll miss it though. But that these, these like generative AI things, they get to 99.9% accuracy pretty quickly. Apple's just a little bit behind on them, I think. Anyway, if you're trying to upgrade your design chops, head over to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Get on Figma now.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  We'll go to, we'll go to Willem. He gives his review of Apple's Liquid Glass. Clearly hints at a clear interface, AR glasses and unifies OS beyond devices. Like iOS seven, I would be shocked if this version of Liquid Glass ships to everyone later this year. Too many accessibility features for a company that pioneered it. Unfortunately, this means it's going to be muddy slash blurry. UI design used to be about function. This is decoration, late empire feeling. Oof. Hate the trend of floating menus that seems to be happening everywhere. It puts useless noise on the edges of the screen. Ultimately, little of this matters when you can now just talk to the computer. Everything is computer. Anyway.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  There's an interesting deep dive from this Sebastian DeWitt, talking about some of the history here. Speaking of iOS seven, he said, on June 10th, Apple showed off what, this was in the spring of 2013. June 10th, Apple showed off what would be the greatest paradigm shift in user interface design ever. iOS seven, I remember exactly where I was and how I felt. It was a shock. I love a designer who's just so in the weeds. They remember where they were when iOS seven dropped.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Had to be there.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  If there is indeed a big redesign happening this year, it'll be consequential and impactful in many ways that will dwarf the iOS over, iOS seven overhaul for a multitude of reasons. The redesign is rumored to be comprehensive, a restyling of iOS, macOS, iPadOS, TVOS, WatchOS, and VisionOS in the intervening years between iOS seven's announcement and today. iPhones have gone from simply a popular device to the single most important object in people's lives. So true. The design of iOS affected and inspired most things around, from the web, from web to graphic design, to any other computer interface. That's why I figured I'd take this moment of obscurity, this precious moment in time, where its changes are still shrouded in fog, to savor something wholesome, naivety-

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Great writer.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  ...of where things are going, so I can let my imagination run wild. What would I do if I were Apple's design team? What changes would I like to see and what do I think is likely? And then he breaks it down. The shaded age, he goes back to the skeuomorphic era. iOS started out as-

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up this?

• 29:01John Coogan?

  iOS started out as the iPhone OS, an entirely new operating system that had very similar styling to the design language of the macOS Tiger dashboard feature. Yeah, I remember this. You could just put the widgets anywhere. It was very messy, all the sticky-

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  This was so fun as a kid.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Messing around with all the different widgets.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  All the widgets, and then you would swipe-

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Discovering, discovering-

• 29:23John Coogan?

  It was great.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Widget. I couldn't, I legitimately felt like a kid in a candy store with widgets.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was a beautiful time.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  He says, "The icon layout on iPhone OS 1," it wasn't even called iOS then, it was just iPhone OS, "was a clear skeuomorph." Skeuomorphism was the buzzword at the time. You might have heard that word being thrown around. It might surprise you that it doesn't mean it had lots of visual effects like gradients, gloss, and shadows. It actually means that to make it easier for users to transition from something they were used to, in this case, phones typically being slabs with a grid of buttons on them, to what they had become. Phones were all screen, so they could show any kind of button or interface imaginable. And yes, there was a whole lot of visual effects in the user interfaces from iPhone OS 1 to iOS 6. In this age, we saw everything from detailed gradients and shadows and simple interface

• 30:15John Coogan?

  elements to realistically rendered reel-to-reel tape decks and microphones for audio apps. I remember this, the reel-to-reel tape deck in the voice recorder. Pretty remarkable. And like, when the directions would actually be like a, like a physical sign that you would see on a highway. It was-

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  So cool.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  It was such a cool design language. I mean, it feels so not Apple now that they've spent 10 or 15 years post-skeuomorphism, but it was definitely unique at the time. Having actually worked on some of the more fun manifestations of it during my time working at Apple, I can tell you from experience that the work we did in this era was heavily grounded in creating familiarity through thoughtful, extensive visual effects. We spent a lot of time in Photoshop drawing realistically shaded buttons, virtual wood, leather, and more materials. That became known as skeuomorphic design, which I find a bit of a misnomer, but the general idea stands. Of course, the metal of the microphone was not in fact metal. It didn't reflect anything like metal objects do. It never behaved

• 31:18John Coogan?

  like the object it mimicked. It was just an effect, a purely visual lacquer to help users understand that the Voice Memos app worked like a microphone. The entire interface worked like this so as to be approachable as possible. Notably, this philosophy extended to even the smallest elements of the UI. Buttons were styled to visually resemble a button by being convex and recessed or raised. Disabled items often had reduced treatments to make them look less interactive. All of this was made to work with lots of static bitmap images. The first signs of something more dramatic did begin to show on iPad. Some metal slider sheen could respond to the device's orientation. So as you deleted

• 32:01John Coogan?

  a note or email, it did not simply make it vanish off the screen, but pulled it into a recycling bin that went as far as to open its lid and close as the document got sucked in. I remember there was one that would shred things when you deleted it. They had a bunch of these fun ones.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine that Apple designers in that era being like, today I'm moving on from Apple. I was the designer that made the lid open and the thing swoosh into the can.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  It must have been so delightful to just be a designer and just focus on just that one interaction for like weeks.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that became a critique of Silicon Valley, was just like, you're working on something, like the idea that something like this doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Beautiful things matter.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  They do.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  And even a feature like this, especially in the Notes app of an iPhone, was something that was being used millions and millions of times a day and it's worthwhile to make it beautiful.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  And so there was pushback when they went to flat design. The flat age started in iOS 7, introduced an entirely new design language for iOS. Much was written on it at the time, and as with any dramatic change, the emotions in the community ran quite high. I'll leave my own opinions out of it mostly, but whichever way you feel about it, you can't deny it was a fundamental rethinking of the visual treatment of iOS. iOS 7 largely did away with the visual effects for suggesting interactivity. It went back to quite possibly the most primitive method of suggesting interactivity on a computer. Some buttons were nothing more than blue text on white background, like the inbox button. The home screen, once a clear reference to the buttons on phones of yesteryear, was now much more flat-looking, one part owing to simpler visual treatment,

• 33:46John Coogan?

  but also a distinct lack of the essence of shadows.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  It is hard to look at this after looking at the last era.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Schemorphic era was amazing.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Goaded.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  It was amazing.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  It was amazing.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  I see why they had to move on in some ways, because it was just like the previous era felt, you know, like...

• 34:05John Coogan?

  It started to feel dated.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  It felt like...

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  It feels vintage. I mean, it looks vintage today.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure the kids today will like jailbreak their iPhones back to looking...

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I saw a comparison of the original Photos app, which looked like a camera lens, and then the flat design camera app had just a camera icon that was completely flat. And now we're back to a camera lens in the new era. And so some of that skeuomorphism seems to be coming back with the glass redesign, liquid glass redesign, but not fully, you know? We're kind of splitting the difference. We're going in a different direction.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  I just looked up, do people still jailbreak iPhones?

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  And Reddit says it's still possible.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  The big thing is there's not much need for it. A lot of the things jailbreaking was for have been implemented into iOS.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, because the App Store is so robust.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  So you can get an app. There's an app for that now. There didn't used to be an app for it. There were many, many, many, many apps that were not available. And on the first iPhone, there was not even an App Store, so. But why did shadows have to go? They had, they had an important function in defining depths, depth in the interface after all. Looking at the screenshot above actually doesn't know justice. The, the new iOS seven home screen was anything but flat. The reason was that the shadows were static. iOS seven embraced the notion of a distinct visual layers and using adaptive or dynamic effects to distinguish depth and separation. Why render flat highlights and shadows that are unresponsive to the actual environment of the user when you can separate the icons by rendering them on a separate plane from the background?

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Parallax made the icons float distinctly above the wallpaper. The notification center sheet could simply be a frosted plain, pane above the content which blurred its background for context. Johnny Ive spoke proudly at the iOS seven introduction on how, quote, "The simple act of setting a different wallpaper affected the appearance of many things." This was a very new thing. And so they're not losing the depth. They still, they're, they're bringing the depth and they're actually making the depth more, more complicated with the liquid glass feature. And some people are frustrated by that. And but one thing that they're, that they're highlighting is that it's intense from a computational perspective. Everyone is saying like rendering all these new features is definitely going to hurt your battery life. Yeah. Because it's so much more, although Apple is fantastic at integration and they're

• 36:24John Coogan?

  fantastic at this type of hardware and software integration and this, these types of renderings. They will probably be very quick. Yeah. And so I wouldn't, I wouldn't expect a disaster, but I would, I would, I would expect a little bit more of a load just from the, the graphic layer, although it will be heavily optimized. Also, a new thing in the interface was that the UI Chrome was able to have the same dynamics. Things like the header and keyboard would show some of the content they obscured shining the, through as if it fashioned, as if fashioned out of frosted glass. While it was arguably an overcorrection in some places, iOS seven's radical changes were here to stay with some of its dynamic effects getting greatly reduced. Parallax is now barely noticeable.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Over time, its UI regained a lot more static effects. I, I wonder how much parallax there is? I don't really notice any right now. I mean, I guess when you swipe around, you can kind of tell they're, they're on a different plane, but I may, I might have it turned off. I don't even know. More interface elements started to blend with the content through different types of blur, like the new progressive blur and the button shapes were slowly starting to make a comeback. It's settled into a stable state, but it was also somewhat stagnant for bigger changes. There would have to be a rethink. What would come next couldn't simply be a static bit app. Again, it would have to continue the trend of increasingly adaptive interfaces. So he goes on to talk about the age of physicality and vision OS and kind of where Apple's going

• 37:49John Coogan?

  and predicts a lot of what wound up happening. So Ben Thompson, to go back to him, he talks about Apple's retreat to empowering developers and partners. This was your point about maybe Apple will be auctioning some stuff off. We'll see how their service revenue grows over the next few years. But first, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex project.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  It's like a, it's like a AI golden retriever for mitigating risk and automating compliance. It's literally a golden retriever turned into software.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  What the golden retriever does for your yard, Vanta does for your business.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, it's like having a golden retriever in the office. Like you just feel safer.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  You do, you do, and you are safer.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  And you are safer. So Ben Thompson writes about Apple's retreat to empowering developers and partners, says, "That's not to say there weren't some notable AI announcements in Apple's keynote. First, Apple announced the foundation models framework." This is a quote from the Apple team, "This year, we're doing something new and we think it's going to be pretty big. We're opening up access for any app to tap directly into the on-device large language model at the core of Apple Intelligence with a new foundation models framework." This was what I was asking Alex about, Alex Heath from The Verge, the question of, hey, there...

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Even if, even if the models aren't frontier, just the fact they're happening on device. The speed is very important for a lot of these models, being able to use a model without a connection to the internet. People are still, they're still missing internet on planes occasionally, or, or they have patchy service. Building, building an app that takes advantage of that and, and opening that up to the developer ecosystem where you can get really creative and kind of start finding those like niche cases of where AI can help for certain things, you know, we, we, we need the beer app. The iBeer app of the AI era, it's coming.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  We've been begging for it.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  This development. For example, if you're getting ready for an exam, an app like Kahoot can create a personalized quiz from your notes to make studying more engaging. And because it uses on-device models, this happens without cloud API costs. So if you're this like kid developer who doesn't, who, who maybe doesn't have an economic model yet, you can build an AI product that only uses on-device compute and you have zero, you have zero like cloud costs.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Which is amazing. I mean, of course, there's ways to charge.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  Less attention than it should have.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, everyone was expecting it and it's great, but it is very cool in terms of just, you can now vibe code an iOS app that has some sort of AI functionality. It's not going to be incredible. It's not going to be frontier, but you can get something that's served into the store that only uses Apple's APIs and creates an experience that is, that is zero ongoing cost. It's entirely hosted by app and runs on the device, which is amazing. I, I, I think that that's very, very exciting to see where people go with this. They give another example of if you're camping off-grid, poring over the hikes you downloaded to all trails, just describe what mood you're in, the mood you're in, and all trails can use the on-device models to suggest the best options. So

• 41:06John Coogan?

  doing, doing things like recommendation algorithms on device, much, much faster, much easier. We couldn't be more excited about how developers can build on Apple intelligence. And so it's important not to oversell the capabilities of Apple's on-device AI models. Of course, developers who want to create something that is competitive with the output of something like ChatGPT will need to use cloud-based AI APIs. Of course, you got to. Burn, you gotta burn up the H two hundreds to get the really good stuff.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Um, you know, it's like mid, midwit, midwit intelligence on too cheap to meter. Not quite, not quite super intelligence too cheap to meter, but like, you know, i- i- i- it's a midwit.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  We got two digit IQ.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Two digit IQ.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Too cheap to meter.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Too cheap to, it's really, it's free.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  It's bullish.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  It's on the device. Uh, the real, that reality, however, applies um to Apple as well. Part of the folly of the initial Apple intelligence approach is that Apple was promising to deliver beyond state of the art capabilities on the cheap, using its users, processors and power. What is compelling about the foundation model's framework is how it empowers small developers to experiment with on-device AI for free. This is what I was talking about. An app that wouldn't have AI at all for cost reasons now can. And if that output isn't competitive with cloud AI, then that's the developer's problem, not Apple's. At the same time, by enabling developers to experiment, Apple is the big beneficiary of those that discover how to do something that is only possible once you have an Apple device.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Second, Apple deeper, deepened its relation, uh, its reliance on OpenAI, incorporating ChatGPT's image generation capability, capabilities into Image Playground and adding ChatGPT analysis to visual intelligence. That's cool. There is still no sign of the long rumored Gemini integration, or the ability to switch out ChatGPT for the AI provider of your choice, but the general trend toward relying on partners who are actually good at building AI is a smart move. Third, Ben Thompson writes, Apple is incorporating ChatGPT much more deeply into Xcode, its integrated development environment. This is their VS Code competitor that you need to use to write Objective C apps for the, uh, for if you're building iPhone software,

• 43:10John Coogan?

  uh, for building apps for Apple platforms. Uh, developers can also plug in other models using API keys. Xcode still has a long way to go to catch up to AI, AI first IDEs like Cursor. But again, partnering with a foundation model maker seems like a much smarter strategy than Apple trying to do everything itself. These are to be sure obvious moves, but that doesn't make them any less important, both in terms of Apple's future and also with regard to the theme of this article. Apple's initial success with the Apple two was because of third-party developers and developers were critical to making the iPhone a sustainable success. Trusting developers and relying on partners may be a retreat from Apple's increasing insistence on doing everything itself, but is a much, is a, is very much a welcome one. And so, um.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  People are also, you know, he quotes Marques Brownlee here, "The Windows Vista update with Aero Glass was a huge part of my childhood, so I'm getting serious flashbacks. It does have a little bit of like the Windows Glass vibes. The biggest part of WWDC was about liquid glass, which has drawn some unflattering comparisons to past Microsoft operating systems releases. Again, I'll withhold judgment until it ships. But there is another Microsoft OS comparison I've been thinking about recently. To me, last year's series disaster was a lot like Windows 8. Windows 8 was an attempt to leverage Microsoft's large PC install base into a competitive position in touch-based devices, and it did not go well. Consumers, particularly enterprises, hated the new UI, and developers weren't interested in the

• 44:37John Coogan?

  platform without users. Microsoft was forced to retreat, and eventually it came out with Windows 10, which was much more in line with the traditional Windows releases. Apple has clearly missed the boat on cutting-edge AI, but what I'm open to is the argument that this was a ship the company was never meant to board, at least when it comes to products like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, I've long been convinced that Apple has gone too far in its attempt to control everything, even tangentially related to its devices. To that end, I understand why many people were underwhelmed by this WWDC, particularly in comparison to the AI extravaganza that was Google HiO. I think it was one of the more encouraging Apple keynotes in a long time, and that's what Mark Gurman said as well. Apple is a

• 45:20John Coogan?

  company that went too far in many areas and needed to retreat. Focusing on things only Apple can do is a good thing. Empowering developers and depending on partners is a good thing. Giving even the appearance of thoughtful thinking with regards to Apple App Store is a good thing. Of course, we want and are excited by tech companies promising the future. What is a prerequisite is delivering in the present, and it's a sign of progress that Apple retreated to nothing more than that." It's here for Ben Thompson, another great article. Nailed it. Very, very good.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  Hall of Famer.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  Future Hall of Famer.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  If you're looking for the apple of sales tax, get on Numeral, Numeral HQ, sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. It's AGI sales tax, baby.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  Get on Numeral.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  Now.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  So, Sarah Guo at Conviction, former, former guest on the show, friend of the show, said that Apple transcription is still so bad, so, so bad compared to what's available on the market. They should be embarrassed. Okay, so I agree. I am now in the pattern of if I want to send you a long text with a lot of thoughts, I will go to ChatGPT, I will click the dictation button, I will talk to it, and then I will copy and paste that into the iMessage window.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you instruct ChatGPT to synthesize it?

• 46:41John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  And organize it?

• 46:42John Coogan?

  I don't. I just use it for the transcription.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  I just use it for the transcription. I open up the ChatGPT app, I let it transcribe, I don't even send the prompt.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  John hits me with one of those, John hits me with one of those.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  There's bubbles, it's like this long. You actually don't do that, right?

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Very rarely.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  I don't really notice.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  You don't notice that I do it. But even if I'm just saying like, okay, I'm walking around, I can't really stop and tie.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Here's what we're hitting in the gym. You wake up, you wake up at 5:00 AM, first thing, transcribe the workout.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Five for five, 2:25, bench press, yeah.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  So basically, I agree it's bad. The question is, why is it bad? Because there are so many companies out there that they could work with, license by, partner with. There's a million different ways to solve this problem. Why is it bad? And I was thinking that maybe part of it is, let's say they buy a company that has amazing transcription, and it is discovered that that company trained on data that it didn't fully have access to.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  All of a sudden, instead of going after some startup with $100 million raised and 50 million in the bank, and you're going to take them for all your, for all their worth, you're going after Apple.

• 47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  And you can maybe get a billion dollar settlement.

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  And so that's like a huge liability, and it's also potentially a PR nightmare. Because a lot of Apple customers care about the AI training. Adobe's had to be very thoughtful about this in the sense that like they're like, hey, look, we will let you opt into letting letting us train our image, our models on your images. If you're on Behance or one of these other services. People don't like the idea of of training just happening on their hard work generally. And so I think that there's some PR risk, there's some legal risk, but I agree that they need to figure it out.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  Way less risk if they're just leveraging a vendor that is giving them.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Even that, even that is like, it's tough for Apple because if it's like, oh, well, they're working with this vendor and the vendor's not above board. Okay, well, now they're they're linked in the.

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they should also be able to go to somebody like Scale AI or Merckor and just say like, hey, we want to build a transcription product and we're just gonna make it ourselves.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  I mean, they face they like they face they face backlash when Foxconn has bad working conditions, right? And so if they are partnering with another company and then there's some viral news story, whether or not it's real, that that those people, I don't know.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  But everything Apple does carries risk.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Even if they have great intentions and I don't think that.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, they need to figure it out. And this is something that that just feels, it feels so easy to move the ball down the field because they already have a transcription product.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's just make it better.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  They just need to make it better.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  One of the ways in which we can make it better.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  And it's clearly not the modern transformer based architecture. Yes, they need to do a training run. Yes, they need to build some GPU data centers for it. Yes, they need new data, training data, but there has to be a way to do that in an environmentally friendly, PR compliant, like, like, do it, do it the Apple way. I'm fine with that, but like, you gotta do it because this is such a basic functionality of a phone now. And the fact that I'm going from one app to the other just to you, just in, just because the Siri button isn't, the transcription is just not good.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  And and and that would be such an easy thing to just say, hey, hey, we're we're state of the art in this because this is something that is actually improves the daily experience of the of the of the phone user for sure. And same thing with.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  That's so, so backwards to have to go in another app just to send a message, transcribe a message.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  I, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm fine with them not inventing like the newest paradigm of like deep research, like that doesn't, that product doesn't need to come from Apple.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  But we've had good dictation and transcription for years now.

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  And it's open source. And it's not even, it's not even that it's just like open source. I'm sure they can't just like then the open source model in because of the license and all. I'm sure there's restrictions on that. Like you're not just going to give whisper to like the biggest company.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  We should have somebody that's a big dictation head and have them apply to get a job. No, no, no. It's just somebody, just a fan.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Go, you know, an Apple fan goes, joins Apple purely to just, you know, beat the dictation drum internally. Cause I feel like it just needs to be a handful of people.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, that are really power users.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, I wanted to highlight this post from Pirate Wires. Uh, they did an interview on April 16th with David Hanimer Hansen. That's D H H of Rails fame. Uh, he also works at 37 Signals with a friend of the show, Jason. Screen recordings of Apple's new iOS 26 liquid glass software design appear to show a jumble difficult to read apps and incoherent home screen app animations. For a company that built its brand on seemingly impossible feats of technology, Apple now finds itself stuck in a self perpetuating cycle, falling behind in the AI race, struggling to attract talent needed to catch up and fumbling product releases. Pirate Wires writer Blake Dodge diagnosed the company's problems in a May interview with 37 Signals D H H.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Read the interview in full on the site link threaded. I recommend you go read it. I won't read it here. You have to go subscribe to Pirate Wires. Also, it has a lot of bad words.

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it does.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  He, he really let loose and I'm sure there's a lot of insight there.

• 52:05Jordi Hays?

  The regarded state of affairs at Apple.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yes. Not, not quite, uh, not quite family friendly material, but, uh, if you're an adult, head over, hit the subscribe button, check it out and read it in full. Cause there's a lot of insight there. Anyway, that is, uh, the WWE reset recap. We have, uh, seven minutes until our first guest. I thought we were going to do that in 15 minutes, wound up being a 55, 53 minute segment. Love it.

• 52:29Jordi Hays?

  Nice. Well, should we cover the scale?

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yep. So Meta is paying 15 billion, I thought it was 14, 15, something like that, for 49% stake in Scale AI that pays out investors and employees. CEO Alex Wang is leaving to join Meta and head up a superintelligence lab. Feels like those license and acquire deals at Character AI inflection in Adept to avoid regulatory scrutiny, says Tane, who's been on the show. This is from The Information. You gotta hit the size gong 15 times for Alex Wang. Let's hear it for a fantastic outcome.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  I just pulled out my audio. So I'm gonna need to let you hit the size gong.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  I will hit the gong.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Where's the gong mallet? Oh, it's over there.

• 53:12Jordi Hays?

  Where's the mallet?

• 53:12John Coogan?

  It's over there.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  Technical difficulties.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Lots of difficulties, but we got, we got it done. Congratulations to Scale AI.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  That was not 15 hits, John, but...

• 53:28John Coogan?

  That wasn't 15 hits, but it was one big one. And it's very exciting. I'm a big fan of Alex Wang. I've met him, I interviewed him on stage at an event about a year ago. And he has a ton of really deep insight into artificial intelligence. And I'm sure he's gonna be an absolute beast in the boardroom.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Hopefully he can get a board seat.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  A boardroom general.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  He's a boardroom general.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's funny when these, these kind of deals are relatively recent phenomena.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  We saw this with Character AI.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  To Google.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  To Google.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  Adept to Amazon. Inflection to Microsoft, and now Scale AI to Meta.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  And the interesting thing here, I was talking with an early Scale AI investor this morning, and they just still didn't, you know, I think the deal is still in the works. They didn't have full insight into how exactly it was structured. The question is, Meta's paying $15 billion for 49% of Scale AI, and Scale AI through that is losing... Their CEO.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  To Meta.

• 54:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  Now, Scale AI is a very big business.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  They have a ton of customers that I imagine are going to want to continue to work with Scale AI. The question becomes what happens to the actual EV of Scale AI in a scenario where half of it is owned by a hyperscaler who has very different incentive structure than a traditional acquirer. The positive here is that.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Didn't you talk to somebody at Character or Adapt or Inflection? You talked to one, somebody who was.

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I talked to, I talked to. What happened with Character is basically like the cap table was effectively wiped out and reset. And to my.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  But not wiped out.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  Not wiped.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Like cashed out to the tune of a very high valuation.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  So they're happy. Everyone's happy. That's the thing with these deals.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  I ended up in a situation where they had this massive balance sheet, no investors.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Like no preferred shareholders.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  It was effectively, is effectively, to my knowledge, community, or sorry, employee owned. And I don't think that's what's happening here, but it is seemingly clear that the founders, the team and the investors in Scale AI will be getting paid out, I would imagine, pro rata, based on that $15 billion mark. And the, and the thing that's wild here is, I mean, I.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  So it's an up round for everyone. Everyone gets, everyone gets cashed out, gets a ton of money. Alex gets to go work in like a hyperscaler on superintelligence and actually like take a run at some really serious like high technology.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The thing that was ultimately surprising here is.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  So Scale AI has more than $900 million in cash on its balance sheet at the end of last year, according to financial information shared with prospective investors. They've raised more than 1.5 billion from investors. So they only burned 405, 600 million of that. Like they kept more than half of it. The company made 870 million in revenue last year and expected more than 2 billion this year. And it lost about 150 million. So, I mean, doing, they're pretty well. I mean, there is a world where, where like Scale AI as a company, even though they're not wholly owned by Meta, they are independent and they have $900 million war chest and they can go build a great business and do a bunch of stuff there. And then the, the relationship with Meta can be a fantastic growth engine.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, the, the only reason this was surprising to me, well, I guess, one, it's.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  Scale AI was, you know, if you're trying to build a new research lab, they're probably going to need to still acquire a lot of other top talent.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine Meta going and trying to bring in, you know, people from Anthropic or OpenAI into this new organization. But it felt like Scale, I do wonder if Scale, you know, Scale's team could go back and see Circle's IPO and the success of that.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, you mentioned this.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  If they would have still done this deal because Scale AI.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Because Scale could have ripped in the public markets.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Circle IPO showed that the public markets are very receptive to pure play technology bets that have great narrative around them.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  And I could easily, seeing what Circle has traded at, I could see Scale trading well beyond, you know, this valuation they're getting from Meta.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  I agree with you. The question is, how does the liquidity picture, what does the liquidity picture look like in that scenario?

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  They wouldn't, insiders wouldn't have been able to unload 15 billion.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  14 billion.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  14 billion.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Like, does that actually play out? Because, yes, the stock could have traded up to 100 billion market cap. But can you actually, if you're an investor, can you actually get liquidity without crashing the stock? If you're putting 15 billion of downward pressure?

• 58:16Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, that's a lot.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Big question.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ultimately, huge pickup for Zuck.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  I think Alex, you know, will continue to be, you know, execute very well. And I can imagine he'll be a huge part of recruiting.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, he's done a fantastic job. He's like, been everything, he's been on everything from like, the Theo Von podcast to testifying in front of Capitol Hill and lawmakers. He's got a ton of range. He's very able to storytell and do creative deals, which increasingly are extremely valuable in the world where the AI paradigms, like the secrets are known. It's about, okay, how can you actually marshal the capital and the will to build the hyperscale data center? To actually go and get Jensen to fork over 100,000 H200s on schedule. I'm sure there's a ton of different things in the works.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting for Meta too, even if they're able to leverage the Scale team to simply get better at ads.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  They can make back the 15 billion.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  In short order.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  There's a ton of different ways this works out. And I mean, they clearly need a lot more reinforcement learning, training data for, to improve Llama 4, because they need a, they need a reasoning model. If they're going to stay in the game, that's clearly the next paradigm. And I mean, like, a big part of what we learned about from semi-analysis this week was that verifiable rewards are really important in reinforcement learning. Scale AI pioneered that humanities last exam. They've been in like the evals game defining the rewards that you would work against in the reinforcement learning paradigm. And so there's a whole bunch of ways that plugging Alex and the Scale team in makes a ton of sense. Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

• 1:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Go check it out. And we have our first, let's give it up for Adio.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Redpoint, our first guest, investors in Adio.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  No, wait, really?

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  What a coincidence, one hand watches the other. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  Great, guys, great to be on. Huge fan of what you guys have built, so this is exciting.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Would you mind kicking us off a little bit of an introduction?

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  For sure. My name is Saisam Lakumar. I'm a partner at Redpoint Ventures, we're a venture capital firm in the Bay. It's been around for over 25 years. We've invested in companies like Netflix, OpenAI, Stripe, but we're known for infrastructure, software investing. So companies like Stripe, Twilio, HashiCorp, Kribble, Chain Guard. And yeah, that's been our bread and butter.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  And walk us through what's going on today.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're in San Francisco at AWS's Builder Loft. We've partnered with Nasdaq to actually move their exchange to SF. So in about 30 minutes, we're going to ring the bell.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  About 150 people here. Yeah, it's like, it's like that Dalian tweet, like, move Silicon Valley to Miami. We just.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Move Wall Street to the bank.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Here, so we're excited. It's an exciting day for us. But yeah, this is our annual conference and we do it every year.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:01:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  Well, break down some of the.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully you guys have, we have a Gong cam here.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  You need a bell.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully you guys have a bell cam set up.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  The Gong might be better than the bell, I think.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, SF, SF is very Gong-coded.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I want to know about the top themes for the conference, the top tracks, the top discussion points. What are people debating?

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  What, take us from kind of where the discourse is and where the frontier of that discourse is going.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  For sure. You know, we created this whole initiative a few years ago to call out the importance of infrastructure software as standalone category. It's, it really is like the picks and shovels behind how software is consumed and delivered. It's this invisible piece of software that we just take for granted. When you, when you buy something on Amazon, for example, there is some application that we open, but it's powered in the back by all of these dev tools and databases. There's some global server taking in billions of bits of information and you need to secure it from all of these DDoX attacks, which happens millions of times a day and we just don't know about that. So I guess across the whole application delivery lifecycle, there are just a ton of

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  different infra tooling and it powers virtually everything we do. So, yeah, we, we take, we, we do this conference every year to just shine a light on all of the amazing innovation that's happening at the infrastructure layer. So we, we divide the world up into four different subcategories. Everything happening at the AI and model, modeling layer, all of the data infrastructure tooling that needs to be built out around that, the cybersecurity vendors that need to protect that data and all of the developer tools that actually creates the software. So we've been, we've been doing it for, this is our third year of doing it and we also highlight basically the top 100 fastest growing private infrastructure companies. We all get them in

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  a room. We have the CEO of AWS, Matt Garman, coming to chat today and the president of YC, Gary Tan. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a fun day.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  I have this, I have this thesis I want to bounce off of you and get your feedback on. It feels like DevTools infrastructure, it's less monopolistic. It's, and maybe that makes it easier for, maybe not VCs to make money, but entrepreneurs to make money. You just don't get steamrolled as much. Am I, am I off there in, in thinking that a lot of these DevTools markets are more oligopolistic by nature of the fact that hyperscalers are competitive and the different cloud platforms are competitive? Like what, what is the current dynamic? Because I feel like the narrative is always like, someone comes out with some infrastructure or DevTool. It's kind of a boring company.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  It flies under the radar for six years and then it gets, and then, oh, it's worth a couple billion dollars.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  And that's worth like 20, 30 billion dollars.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Exactly. So, so we break down like what structurally is going on there? Why is it harder to build these crazy, crazy monopolies? And, but, and then is that narrative about like base hits being easier or unicorns being easier? Is that even real?

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  I actually, no, I, I agree with that sentiment maybe a couple of years ago. But if, if you look today, I mean, look at Cursor, it had $500 million in ARR in, in less than a year. And I guess like DevTools, it's always been this like very sequen, like if you think of DevOps, it's this very sequential process, right? It's like, yeah, if you have your engineers on one side, then you have your, your SRE folks on the other. And then there are, there are tools for the developers, there are tools for the incident response engineers. And there are like these distinct stop gaps that exist across the lifecycle, right?

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  But with these code generation tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Copilot, like they all started on the left. And they started in the IDE where these developers are actually coding. But you can see the writing on the wall and where they're going. So now you're consuming and writing all of these applications in the IDEs, but they're probably going to extend right and they're going to start doing the code review stuff. And then you're going to deploy the apps. Like you can see it in lovable, for example, with just like a simple query, you can go from that query to a full blown production app that's live on a website. So like before, you needed like 10 different designers and engineers to do all of that. But now with just one tool, you can do that. So I think, I think yes, it's not been as monopolistic in the past,

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  but I think that world is changing and like the clear horses right now, in my opinion, are cursor and anthropic in the coding world. Interesting. And, and so, yeah, I mean, it's just crazy. Like two years ago, like people were saying, LLMs, all they could do is just spit out code. Like you couldn't actually write real software and impact software development. Two years later, I think there was this interesting stat, like computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors. And it's, it's just crazy.

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  That is crazy. How do you compare and contrast the adoption of AI versus traditional cloud? I know that you guys have done some, some research around, you know, cloud adoption, you know, more than a decade at this point versus even just the, the growth rate on the token side?

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's just incredible how, how much faster the consumption is on the AI side. I think a really good analogy or data point is if you look at the cost of EC2, like servers during the cloud, it got efficient like very, very quickly and it allowed people to consume cloud software all across the board. But when you look at the cost of inference, which I think is the equivalent to EC2 in cloud, but inference for AI, it's, it's literally dropping like a hundred times faster than, than the cost of EC2. But at the same time,

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Applications are being built and consumed 10x higher than it was during cloud. So it's like 1,000x more consumption at the end of the day. So it's just insane like what's happening in the age of AI. And the markets itself, like there's this massive services component that is going to be converted to product-based software revenue because you can encapsulate all of that, all of these workflows with software, like LLMs are software at the end of the day. And you're taking these huge markets and you're making them available through software.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about competitive dynamics between sort of scaled infrastructure providers like Databricks and Cloudflare and companies in that category versus some of the upstart companies that are scaling rapidly but still having to compete with these founder-led companies that are basically, they're not going to miss this sort of like platform shift.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I think the existing infrastructure vendors, they can actually embed the AI products in their suite. Like take vector databases, for example, which I think is an incredible market still, right? And there's like all of these use cases. But is there a vector database equivalent of Databricks yet? Like, no. Actually, what happened was that MongoDB extended vector search part of their, as part of their suite. So I think like, but like, that's not to say, like, for example, like, two years ago, people would not have thought an IDE like Cursor would be better than GitHub CodePilot. So I think there are pockets of the infrastructure market where sometimes the incumbents are going to win and they can just leverage their existing technology to extend their applications.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  But then there are like AI-native wedges, like the IDE, for example, where there is tremendous opportunity for a couple of 22-year-olds to come and create a $10 billion business in two years.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's stay on Cursor, WinServe, the new dev tools, like IDE coding, AI coding market. What's I'm I'm I've kind of been there's a little bit of a horse race going on. You know, you're either cursor guy or a windsurf guy or you're an investor in one. But as I talk to more and more of the founders, I just increasingly become convinced that this is such a growing market. And it remains potentially oligopolistic that they might kind of all wind up winning in some way, or at least returning investor capital and making the founders fantastically wealthy and successful. How much of that narrative do you think is real? We talked to Scott Wu over cognition. We were like, oh, like OpenAI just launched Kodak's like, are you cooked?

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  And he's like, well, we grew 40% last month. And so it seemed like very much not so. And we talked to another person who was saying that GitHub Copilot, not the trendy tool at all, at a $500 million run rate. And so that in and of itself could be a public company if it was spun out. And so it feels like when we're talking about doing something so net new, something so additive to companies workflows, there's just so much opportunity that it kind of just is like a rising tide lifts all boats. But what do you think about that narrative generally?

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the application with the strongest product market fit within the AI world, it's coding and like the market itself, there are tens of millions of developers. If you just assume moderate assumptions and what you pay them, it's like a $1.6 trillion market in spend. It's like, it's absolutely massive. It's like the mother of all markets. And I think it's really interesting. There are companies going after certain pockets. So you have the code, the code generators that living in your IDE. And that's where the developers are today, right? It's where the actual development happens. So cursor, it was just magic in a bottle. It's tap, tap, tap. And all of a sudden you have a full blown production app and you save yourself countless hours in development.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  But when you, when you can see where the world is moving, like all of these processes think about humans at the center. But it's like very, very quickly, we're thinking it's going to shift to having agents at the center. And so companies like cognition and factory, they're not going to exist in your IDE. Like you're just going to go tell it, you're going to go tell an agent to go do something and it's going to come back and have a pull request. And you're just going to approve. So I think. I think there will always be a need for software developers, but I think they're going to move increasingly from actually coding to being kind of these like orchestrators of of a product. And I think like product managers, for example, are now enabled with these tools. I think at the end of the day, like I don't, I don't think it's gonna.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Yes, there's like some developers that might lose their jobs, but you're, you're actually just making their, their jobs a lot easier. And there's just going to be a ton more software. There's gonna be more software.

• 1:12:13Jordi Hays?

  If you're not Jevon's paradox pilled now, you never will.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Reacting to the news today, the scale AI meta deal. How do you expect the data labeling market to evolve now that? Now that in, in some ways, one of the key players in that space is has other, it will naturally have other priorities if, you know, half their, their company is, is owned by Meta, who has, um, you know, their, their own goals around super intelligence.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, if, if you're in the model providers, there are like two use cases that are just so clear and, and hair on fire. The one that's like inference, it's actually running these models. Two, it's data labeling. How do you actually structure your data and clean your data and feed it into these models and such that you can actually advance? The L L Ms. And so I think it's, I think it's a brilliant acquisition. I think whatever the sticker price is like, it's, we're, we're going to look back. It's going to be like the Instagram deal. Like you need accurate classified data to feed these large language models and for a variety of use cases.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  There are so many data labeling businesses that we see like pockets in, in hiring and, and whatnot and, and coding and, and like, they're all screaming out of the gates. Like they go to like zero to 20 in like two months. And so I think, I, I think it, it just makes a ton of sense. And I, I think it's, I think it's a brilliant acquisition.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  I want to get your reaction to WWDC. Felt like Apple was kind of pulling back from some of the territory that they'd over expanded into in artificial intelligence. Obviously, it's a developer conference. Do you think that there's opportunities for startups to build new companies even around servicing the nascent AI for Apple environment? You could imagine there is like, there is no cursor for Xcode. There's probably a way to solve that problem.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, Anthropic and their deal with Xcode, they're working on it.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, but but there's probably some way to even advance that. And then also just serving up models into, you know, iOS APIs that are like more tailored. Like, there's been a couple of companies that developed backends that were specifically tuned for iOS apps in the past. Some of those wound up getting sold. So how are you thinking about opportunities coming out of WWDC or or just general reactions? Maybe you don't even follow it at all.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  You know, it's interesting when you look at, when you look at like past platform shifts, like the cloud, you first need like the workdays and ServiceNow's and Salesforce's running at massive scale, like pushing the limits of like cloud rails before you can, before you can really understand what kind of innovation needs to happen at the infrastructure layer. So, you know, our guest here with Apple and all of these apps that are built, like you need the AI native versions of these apps to start like hitting the limits of the underlying models before you can really understand. So I, for sure, it's going to happen, but I think it's going to take some time.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  What is, what's the discussion or what do you expect the discussion to be around agents? There's great narratives around agents right now. There's individual agent products that people use, whether it's coding agents or or sort of research agents. But despite, you know, Salesforce, you know, marketing, whatever their agent cloud is.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Agent Force.

• 1:15:38Jordi Hays?

  Agent Force, things like that. It doesn't feel like they maybe have broad adoption yet, but a lot of promise. So so how do you think about kind of agent adoption? Given, you know, there's people, I think, at the event from on the browser infrastructure side, AI agent DevOps, all that kind of thing.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, I mean, it's it's clear it's the next paradigm. I think we're just catching it in a point in time where they're they're stumbling agents. But like, again, there are some clear use cases where it it's it's clearly working today. Like, if you like technicians agents, for example, there are low level development tasks where like that is fully automated. And the largest of companies know that, but like, no one else really knows that yet. And it's it's it's it's mind blowing what's happening. Same thing with customer support. You have your companies like Sierra and Dakagon, and that's just a use case that makes a ton of sense for agents to operate. So I think

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  as the agent infrastructure improves, there are things like memory and context budgeting. There are a lot of these like hairy infrastructure problems that need to be solved. But ultimately, also, the agents are going to improve dramatically. Like, from a year ago, it, I, you know, agents have just gotten so much better. A year from now, they're going to be even better. So as agents improve, all of the infrastructure around it improves, like memory. Like, I think very, very soon, there will be an agent for every industry.

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it, do you think that it it ends up looking something like regular SaaS? Or from a, from a, from a user standpoint, in terms of you have sort of a dashboard? Or do you think there's potentially totally novel paradigms?

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I I think UI is is just a big problem, or or just an opportunity for these companies to kind of rethink how you surface these products and extend these products to your end consumers. If you look at agents running in the developing world, in development world, they're just running in your CLI in the background. Is that the best way to do it? I don't know. Maybe voice is the best way to interact with them in the future. So I think I think that UI is still being reimagined right now. I'm I'm guessing what we have right now will be thrown out the window. And and that these abstraction layers will be very, very different in in a few years.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, the voice thing is interesting. That was actually in that original vibe coding post from Andre Karpathy. He says he doesn't even touch the keyboard. He just uses Whisper or some sort of like super whisper app, he said, and he just talks to it and just says, yeah, just the padding, accept all. Uh, you know, oh, there's a bug, fix it. And yeah, I mean, I it would be very, it'd be super, super weird because for the longest time, the programmer was, you know, the keyboard was sacred. It was don't have, you don't even have a mouse. Everything you do is on the keyboard. Probably have an ergonomic keyboard. You're dealing with carpal tunnel because you're on the keyboard so much. And if we move to a world where the, you still have a genius programmer who can understand the architecture,

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  understand what questions to ask, what features to build, that type of stuff. But the actual interaction day to day is, is via voice. That would be a very, very big shift. It'd be very interesting. Anyway, I want to get your reaction to the news today that Glean raised $150 million Series F at a $7.2 billion valuation. Now,

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  So you say Glean?

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Glean, yes. So Glean, their, their whole goal is to enterprise search. And I'm interested in particularly, who are the beneficiaries up and down the stack? Because I imagine that they're in a position, you know, to kind of say, hey, they stuff all your data in Glean, but they probably want to be more of an integrator and sit on top of your data lake, on top of your, your snowflake, or on top of your, you know, your AWS installation, or your, and plug into your Slack. How are you thinking about having tools that really allow folks in the enterprise to interface with all of the infrastructure that you have described?

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  Totally. And you know what's interesting is the category isn't, isn't new. Like enterprise search and like, there were so many startups and there's this graveyard of companies that existed. But I think the clear why now, or at least the enabling technology was LLM. So of course, Glean is going to benefit, but like, what's powering all of this? Or OpenAI is in Anthropic's like really, really powerful models. Now, there needs to be this layer of infrastructure that exists between the model providers and Glean itself. It's like the hairy problems like memory and caching. And so those providers are going to win as well. But ultimately, the consumers also, and these companies win. It's, it's, it's amazing, even for me, like if I'm trying to search something in Google Drive, like how long it takes to get something.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  It's degraded. Somehow it's gotten worse. Like, I can't even send an email. It's just like, there's so many like cookies now that if I search for like Jordy, it'll find that in some random URL string and be giving me some like, you know, spam email I got. It's

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you know, we should expect, and I think

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll get better.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Not I think, OpenAI is going to release a product here.

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  You will have, why does there need to be an application on top of this?

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, they were teasing this a little bit with the, what was it? The new

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think there was a little bit of drama around different people not wanting other people to invest in Glean.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  That was one thing.

• 1:21:02Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  But then there was also the latest news that that Deep Research now can search across GitHub, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, SharePoint.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  That's a Glean competitor.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  That's a Glean competitor.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  That's a Glean competitor, they're just not saying it.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  And so I think for the applications that make, that there is really a strong part of Margaret Fit with the large language models, we should expect the model providers themselves to move up the stack and address parts of these apps. Because I mean, if you think about like the models themselves, like, yes, they make a ton of money, but they also burn a lot of cash because OpenAI is just trying to build that next frontier model. So they're going to go where the consumers are. Like, let me go buy Windsurf, right? And be in the IDE. Let me go release something in the enterprise search space to compete with vendors like Glean. But I mean, I think it's fascinating.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when are you ultimately, or the CEOs that you're meeting with today? When are, you know, it doesn't, I think there's areas in which people feel safe, right? If they're working on like a specific application of LLMs with a bunch of deep integrations and workflows, people generally feel safe today. But is there, are you expecting a lot of dialogue around people just trying to assess like, am I on the lab's roadmap? And really trying to figure out like, at what point they're going to get, you know, Sherlocked?

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, you either have to be, you have to be building on the right side of AI. So if you're trying to solve for deficiencies in the model today, and you're trying to build these things, like, very, very quickly in a couple of months, all of that tooling just didn't need to exist. So you just need to be building on the right side of AI. As these LLMs become more powerful, like, your application itself should become a lot more powerful. And how do you embed into workflows and also build all of the little hairy infrastructure things to empower all of that?

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting, like ironically, like wrappers aggregation aggregating demand being a front door to AI like that's where a lot of the value has accrued, or at least like it feels like the foundation model companies feel most threatened by those approaches versus the

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Threatened or just want to own them?

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  They want to own them or they want to compete with them directly as opposed to the okay, yes, you leapfrogged us on capabilities. That's much less of a threat than, oh yeah, you beat us on a benchmark. That matters a lot less than than when people think of this particular AI use case, they go to this website instead of mine. That's more threatening to the foundation model labs, in my opinion.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  Totally. You know, a good analogy is that the hyperscaler hyperscalers like GCP, AWS and Azure are the equivalent of OpenAI and Anthropic for the AI world. And if you saw what AWS did, for example, right with Elastic, they open source. Elastic was a very permissive license and they open sourced it and they started competing with Elastic itself. What Elastic ended up doing was they they went for a much more restrictive license, but you still had AWS selling Elastic's core product. And then Elastic is also existing as whatever it is, a $10 billion business today. So I think going back to your point, I mean, like it's, I don't think it's winner take all. I think the model providers are

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  going to have a large portion of revenue and and spend here, but they're also going to be a really exciting AI native companies that exist on top.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yesterday, we talked to Vlad from Inphysical, working on API keys and secret management.

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  Really cool company.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, raised a $16 million Series A from a lot Gil. I wanted to know more about different strategies and approaches to building infrastructure plays that either play directly or alongside open source strategies. And so there's an open source package out there that's gaining traction. How do you build a product or company around that? Or you have a company that's built something? Do you open source it? What are the different strategies that you're seeing? What's working? What's gone out of fashion? I just love some color on how to build either with or alongside open source in the enterprise.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think open source is a double edged sword. I mean, obviously, we've been fortunate to back companies like HashiCorp and ClickHouse.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  And we've seen the commercial success of those businesses. But ultimately, the, for these companies, the biggest competitor is actually your open source project.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  Right? Like, why do I need to go pay you millions of dollars when I can just try to do this myself and fork it? And so for the open source companies out there, I think you need to be really careful and just kind of understand where your product is going, the types of enterprise features that you could add that buyers would actually want you to pay for. Aliya Databricks, he has a good analogy here, like building a massive open source business is like hitting two home runs simultaneously. One, you need a really exciting product where there's a ton of open source traction. And two, you need to figure out monetization. In the case of Databricks, you know, they had Spark and it was great, but they had to figure out a way to make Spark really, really cheap and easy to use.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  And, but they had to hit these two massive home runs to build a big business. So for the open source founders out there, I would say like, really consider how you're going to commercialize this product.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are the, what are the case studies that people are coming back to today? I remember learning the, the history of Red Hat Linux, built on top of Linux, of course. Fantastic business, wound up a public company. Then we've also heard the story of GitLab that went through Y Combinator, became a fantastic business. Databricks has a similar story. What other stories are people latching on to these days? What are kind of like the, the, the, the, the famous examples that people keep pulling from in this open source enterprise infrastructure world?

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, MongoDB is one, right? Look at the success of that business. And what's really interesting is that they released their cloud product much later from the actual open source. It actually came right before the IPO and it's actually accelerated their revenue growth. Since it's the only company where that's the case in enterprise software.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  So how were they making money before having a cloud offering, just?

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Well, they, they had an enterprise, uh, core version of their open source, but like,

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Then they also released a cloud self-hosted version of that product.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  HashiCorp is another example, right? With Vault and all of these systems. And so they're, they're, they're obviously like companies that have been successful in doing this, but it's, you, you need to be really careful and you need to think about monetization.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just seems so dangerous because you're building on top of an open source product. You know this is going to be baked into Amazon and Google and Azure like very quickly. But at the same time, you're maybe a founder mode company. You have a lot of really aggressive people that can go and move and launch new features that can just keep you a cut above. And then, yeah, you know, the company says, yeah, I could get, you know, 80% of what I want on AWS, but I want it to be perfect. And so I'm going with you because you're the best vendor.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, is the total cost of ownership of having all of these developers internally and trying to maintain this in-house? Is it much less than the actual service that they're providing, the enterprise service? If that's the case, then great. If not, then you really have to reconsider this, the strategy.

• 1:28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, nothing's worse than having an open source installation and having to deal with like, oh, we gotta turn it off and turn it back on. It's much better to pay someone else to do that.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  And then, and then, you know, it just creates just really interesting dynamics with the open source community, right? If I'm only going to release features in the paid enterprise version and I'm going to kind of just stop releasing features to the open source version, then your community is going to get upset. And so like, it's, yeah, you just have to be careful.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for taking the time during the busy day to check in with us.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Fun ringing the bell. Come back on again soon. This is great.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Send us some photos. We'd love to see it. Enjoy the rest of your day.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  Big gong.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, see you soon.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  See ya.

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  Bye. Whether you're looking to get exposure to MongoDB or Red Hat Linux, go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Oh, Jordy.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  And they got a new campaign today.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  How did you sleep last night? Because I went on a whirlwind tour. I fell asleep in my son's bed. So I got two hours of sleep.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't pick up.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  I need an eight sleep in his bed and then I can have Tyler vibe code up something that merges the two data sets together because I think I got like nine hours yesterday. I'm feeling fantastic, but I only logged seven hours on my actual eight sleep. So I got an 86. How'd you do?

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  I got an 83. That's two nights.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Oh, two nights in a row. Let's hear it for John Coogan, the sleep master. No one outsleeps me. No one outsleeps me. Don't even try. Oh, we got some breaking news for the printer.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  I am definitely ill.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  We got some, I'm going to be a hand model now. This is, uh, this can be bad. Okay, we got some breaking news. Anduril has been placed number one on the CNBC Disrupter list. Congratulations to Anduril and Trey Stevens is jumping in on the timeline, taking a shot at Sam Altman, saying, ha, take that, Sam Altman.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Gotcha.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  You suck. Crying emoji. Of course, they're buddies and founders, funds and investor in OpenAI. So they're having some fun. Uh, it was crazy that Anduril got number one because OpenAI has what 10 times the market cap at this point, but both fantastic companies. You love to see them at the top of the list, number one and number two.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely dogs.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  We should go, we, we should go through the, uh, the Disrupter list because we have a little bit of time before our next guest. Uh, Karri from Linear is joining at 12:45. We have 15 minutes. Let's go through some timeline reaction. Let's go through some CNBC, uh, Disrupter list. I want to see who's going on. So anyway, uh, to recap the glean news, they raised a hundred and 50 million dollars, adding billions to their valuation. They're 70, 7.2 billion dollar valuation now.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  7.2.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  7.2 and it was a who's who on the cap table. The, uh, the CEO, Arvind Jain, really using the long post feature on X. He gives shout outs to Wellington, Cosla, Bicycle VC, Geo Desert Capital, Archer Man Cap, Alt Cap, uh, Capital One Ventures, City Ventures, Co2, General Catalyst, DST, Iconic, uh, Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed, Sapphire, Sequoia. Everybody's in.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  So this tells me that OpenAI didn't really get their way and not wanting to people to invest in glean.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Yes, so what you are referring to is, uh, the fact that, uh, back in October of 2024 last year. There's an article in Reuters that says OpenAI asks investors to avoid five AI startups, including Ilya Sutskever's SSI, sources say. So as global investors such as Thrive Capital and Tiger Global invest 6.6 billion in OpenAI, the chat GPT maker sought a commitment beyond just capital. They wanted investors to refrain from funding five companies they perceive as close competitors. The list includes Anthropic, XAI, Ilya Sutskever's new company Safe Superintelligence,

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  and then where was the other one? Two application firms, Perplexity and Glean. And so this was kind of a funny moment because Anthropic seems like their direct competitor. Glean was kind of just thrown in there.

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but in many ways.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  But it makes sense.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. In many ways Anthropic is not trying to compete in the core.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:32:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, they're so AGI-pilled, they're not trying to compete.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  They don't have a voice model. They don't have an image model. They're just focused on that. So but at the same time, they are competitive. And if you can keep your investors on your side of the table, there used to be like an unwritten rule in Silicon Valley that you only back one company.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI has just gotten so big, they're effectively, you know, public company scale.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  We are the market.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  So to, it's a hard ask to say.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Just don't invest in SaaS, enterprise, other labs. Just don't invest.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Just don't invest.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Take a year off.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  Take a year off.

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Take a long summer break.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Get some Anderal shares.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Take a six-month spring/summer break.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Just put your whole team on getting into the massively oversubscribed round over there. Focus on that.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Work on yourself.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  Work on yourself. Focus on yourself.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Hit the slopes.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  No more investing. Focus on yourself.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. But this news happened last week. OpenAI said, "We're rolling out ChatGPT Record Mode to Teams users on macOS. Capture any meeting, brainstorm, or voice note. ChatGPT will transcribe it, pull out the key points, and turn it into follow-up plans or even code." This was taken as a granola attack, but it also plays into the Glean story. So Signal said granola is more of a social company than a B2B company. It punctured a norm. No big player would have taken the risk of recording without permission, but with granola, beautifully reframed it as productivity, intimacy even. Once the social acceptability shifted, it was inevitable that infor players like OpenAI and Notion would mimic the mechanic under the same pretense. This is the difference between product innovation and cultural mutation.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Tech can't move where the culture hasn't first been softened. And so.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  So interesting because Otter, do you, do you remember Otter AI? Have you used them?

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  I've, I've used Fireflies.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  So Otter was started in 2016.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Jordi Hays?

  They, they crossed a hundred million ARR.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  This year.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  And in many ways, it's very similar to granola.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  I believe I inspired some of these because I don't want to take too much credit because I didn't build anything. But uh, in, in 2014, I had, I had a workflow where I would record, uh, I would record meetings, audio. I would record the audio of, of Zoom meetings or, or Google Hangout meetings. And then I would send those to a, a transcription service that was not using AI at the time. And I would use Zapier to automatically do this or Zapier. And the guy and the team at Zapier, uh, reached out and they wrote a blog post about my workflow as being like a cool example of how to use Zapier in an interesting way. And a couple of founders reached out to me and said, hey, we want to build this as a product. And one of them was Fireflies and it's like a banger company now too.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  Um, and obviously it's massively, massively enabled by AI, uh, and, and only gets better and better. Um, but yes, uh, Kevin Wheel over at, uh, OpenAI, the Chief Product Officer, uh, said deep research can now search across GitHub, Google Docs, Dropbox, HubSpot, Outlook, Box, and even more. You can connect any chat to Google Docs, SharePoint, Dropbox and Box. There's even an initial version of MCP support for HubSpot.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  This is big.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  There's record mode and chat GPT, single sign-on for chat GPT teams. So they are firmly going into the enterprise. Uh, and this was, this was a point that people were making was that chat GPT for teams didn't feel like an enterprise product. It, it just allowed you to provision a normal chat GPT instance to an employee and say, hey, we're, we're covering the cost, basically. It wasn't truly integrated. Imagine how cool it'll be if we add someone to the, to the TBN team and they, and they immediately get access in their chat GPT to all of our internal documents. Everything that we have about, uh, uh, uh, all of our transcripts, all of our, all of our.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Almost like an enterprise search product.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat like Glean.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Somewhat like Glean, and so it was clearly on the roadmap and they, and they worked towards it. Anyway, they're doing great. OpenAI is number two on the CNBC Disrupter 50. Then you got Databricks, Anthropic at four, Canva at five, Ramp at six. Let's hear it for Ramp.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Take a second.

• 1:36:37John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it. No surprises there.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  At seven, we gotta get the founder on the show. Very interesting company.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Crime fighters.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Crime fighters. They solve a ton of crime in America, more important than ever. AlphaSense.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of like product titles, Gary Tan.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  Yes. Gary Tan is a service. AlphaSense is at number eight. They of course acquired Tegus and are a market research team, market research firm.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Juggernaut.

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Intelligence, juggernaut, big advertiser on Invest Like the Best. We love to see it.

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  How, okay, I was about to say, I was about to say, if there's a single company in the top 20.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  I'm cooked, yes.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm cooked.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Yes, but number nine, Octopus Energy, look it up. Give us a breakdown.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  Haven't heard of them. Smarter, greener, fairer energy for every Texas home. Is this a base power competitor?

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Interesting. Is it, do they make batteries or do they make solar panels? Break it down for me. I'll keep reading while you do some research.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  So I'm on the website and I still don't know how it works.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, all you need to know is that they're number nine. Let's have the founder on the show. Have him explain it to us. We don't need landing pages, Jordy. We get it straight from the source on this show.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of graphics of octopus. I don't know.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  Wait, really? Is it, is it energy generation, energy storage? You do some research. I'm going to read through some of the more list. They got Stripe at 10, Revolut at 11, Thrive Market at 12, Metropolis at 13. We have the founder of Metropolis coming on the show in just a few minutes.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  Trans, uh, Transcarant? I haven't heard of this. They care. They're at number 14. We gotta look up them. Lead Bank, fintechs fixer at 15. Haven't heard of them. Carbon Robotics, Weed Tech, we talked to the founder of Carbon Robotics.

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Transparent one place for health and care.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Verta, Verta Health, what comes after GLP-1s? That's an interesting company, we'll have to dig into them. Frutist, the berry unicorn? We gotta look into Frutist, that sounds awesome. Sironic at 19, we know them.

• 1:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Frutist is...

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Moonpay is still up there.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  So what is the criteria for getting on this list?

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  Uh, we will, we will dig into that.

• 1:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Because it's definitely not revenue.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Uh, there's a whole bunch of great companies on there. You got Figma, Zipline, Sierra, Runway, Nivon.

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  So Frutist is inspiring, inspiring, enjoyable and nutritious snacking.

• 1:38:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  Frutist grows the world's most delicious berries, bursting with flavor, crunchy goodness and freshness in every bite.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Okay, here's how they chose the list. So they're all private.

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Have any of these?

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  I love, I, I'll go out and say, I, I'm a huge fan of fruit. I think it's one of, one of...

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  God's greatest inventions and gifts. Uh, but have any of these fruit brands broken out?

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Frutist seems like they've broken out. They're on the list.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful website, beautiful website.

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  Uh, do you want to hear about how they chose the 2025 disruptor 50?

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  I do, I gotta know, John.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  So, uh, they're all private, independently owned startups founded after January 1st, 2010. They were eligible to be nominated. Companies nominated were required to submit detailed analysis, including key quantitative and qualitative information. Quantitative metrics include company submitted data on their sales, number of users, employee growth or lack thereof, and more. Some of this information has been kept off the record as it was used for scoring purposes only. CNBC also brought in data from PitchBook and IBIS World, um, and compared those based on the, on the industries that they are attempting to disrupt.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  There's a board of leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship from around the world, along with newer advisory board that ranked quantitative criteria by importance and ability to disrupt established industries and public companies. This year, the two advisory boards found that scalability and user growth were the most important criteria, followed by sales growth and access to capital and community. It's very funny that Anduril's number one, because like, what other user growth metrics? Like, that's not the metric for them at all. Users aren't a relevant metric. They're not looking at like MOWs and DOWs. They're looking at like, how many things did we build?

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Fruity's coming in. I'm still fixated on Fruity's.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  You're obsessed with Fruity's.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Because I guess going off of users, you know, they're selling consumable good and Whole Foods, but a tough, tough go for, you know, companies like Scale AI, which are down at 2028.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  So Fruity's is better than Scale AI on this list.

• 1:41:12Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, if you're going off of this.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  You'd go short Scale AI, long Fruity's.

• 1:41:16Jordi Hays?

  It's possible this is, should be Meta's next target.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  They should try to move up the list.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Yes, get them all. They already have a deal with Anduril.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  They have an amazing distribution engine. Every other ad could just be an ad for berries or fruit. And I eat these things all the time. And it'd just be a good way to really, they could potentially turn Fruity's from the berry unicorn into a, you know, a decka unicorn.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  A decka corn.

• 1:41:41John Coogan?

  We need, we need more food. We need better food. This is a common, common theme. This makes a ton of sense. So new for 2025, we can compare the way the two different advisory boards considered the importance of the list criteria. While the two boards mostly agreed, the VC group thought that the size of the industry being disrupted was more important than the academics did, with the latter ranking access to capital and community as more important criterion than the group that provides said access. The ranking model is complex enough to be sensitive to these differences of opinion. And perhaps more than ever, it makes good on the concept that companies must score highly on a wide range of criteria to make the final list. Nominated companies were also asked to submit important qualitative

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  information about themselves, including descriptions of their core business model, ideal customers, and recent company milestones. A team of CNBC editorial staff, including TV anchors, reporters, and producers, and CNBC.com reporters and editors, along with many members of the advisory board, read the submissions. And provided holistic qualitative assessments of each company. In addition, the VC advisory board assessed a small group of finalists as an additional component of the qualitative review. Specifically, we asked VC, the VC group, to assess some of the companies that would, if selected, be making the list for the first time, as well as to help in the consideration of high-scoring, early-stage firms, a group with lower valuations but promising business firms.

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Part of the criteria, they didn't want the top 25 to all be enterprise SaaS companies because that doesn't, it's not good for ratings.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  It's not good for ratings.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Not good for ratings.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  So, only 11 of the 2025 honorees are pre-ChatGPT CNBC Disrupter, but most of that group, Anduril, Databricks, and Canva, chief among them, the embrace of the new era is what has kept them here. And so, there were 19 first timers in either 2023 or 2024. Companies are moving up, they're moving down, but it's an exciting list. Who else sticks out on this list? We got to get some of these folks on. A better ride to school from Zoom, Wabi, how self-driving trucks see and learn, that seems interesting. Aptronic, five feet, eight inches, 160 pounds, all robot, haven't seen them.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Harvey's on the list, lawyering up AI. They got good pithy phrases.

• 1:44:02Jordi Hays?

  Good lines, Notion, project, project management.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  We got project management for your projects.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  That's kind of an odd one.

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not the strongest.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  A bridge, getting a doctor's note.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Isusu, isusu, treating renters like owners.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Shield AI, we have the CEO on.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, very fun list. We love a good list. We were, now that Conrad's out, the Midas list has fallen from grace and we need new lists, but congrats to Anduril, congrats to OpenAI, and congrats to everyone that made the list of the CNBC Disrupter 50.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  One thing's clear, you got to be an absolute dog to get on this list.

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  Yes, you do. Well, we have Karri from Linear coming in the studio.

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  Get the gong ready, John. Why don't you hit it?

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  I will hit it for him.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  We're going to hit it a few times. Karri, before you dive in, yeah, give us the numbers first.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  How much did you raise? How much did you raise?

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  Eighty-two million.

• 1:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Low dilution round, at a billion. Congratulations. We love to see it. A lot of people would have said, you know, this was maybe an unlikely round. You guys have been very, very efficient, but it's a testament to. Proven the haters wrong. They said it couldn't be done. Well, they said it could be done. They said Karri would never, wouldn't do it. It's great to have you on. Massive milestone for you and the team. How are you feeling?

• 1:45:28Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, feeling great. And yeah, I think it's definitely like, um, one of this, like, I think like all of our rounds has been kind of like interesting because since I think the seed round, we haven't really needed the money. So each round is kind of like we're doing something different or we're signaling something to the market. So it's a little bit always like strange to do these rounds because like, I think like often like you celebrate it as a way to be able to do something more. And I think like in the end, we will do something more, but also that like not a lot of changes, like we, we still keep billing for the customers and the things we're doing.

• 1:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Talk about maybe some of the last rounds, how they were unique and what makes this round unique.

• 1:46:13Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah. I think we also like done this like interesting thing where we have kind of doubled down on each of the investors. So Sick Oil led our seed round, um, back in 2020. And then we did a serious A with them, I think 21. And then we did a serious B with XL in 22. And then now two years later, or like about three years later, we, we did a serious C with them. So I think there's also like, um, I remember when I was talking to back in the day, like around the seed round to a lot of seed round investors. And I think like they, they had this like, they create this fear that this platform funds can be

• 1:46:55Karri Saarinen?

  challenging and like there can be this signaling risk and all kinds of things. And I don't know if that's really true or I haven't, I don't even know like when that has happened. But I do know that it's kind of like interesting when you are working with this platform funds. They can like double, like kind of like lead two rounds in, in, in like kind of sequence. And I think the benefit there is that you can kind of push down the dilution because there is, um, they already have some kind of ownership and they like, I think like a lot of times the. With this game of like fundraising, like the the actual absolute numbers don't matter like how much you raise or what the valuation is, it's more like everyone else is fighting for their percentages.

• 1:47:36Karri Saarinen?

  And so if you if you kind of like work with the same investors, you have more like, I don't know, leverage or or there's a little more like flexibility on those percentages.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It also makes board construction easier because you're not adding twenty five different board members from every fund. Uh, on the platform fund thing, I mean, it's clear that like that narrative came out of like kind of the clubhouse era where the company got marked up multiple times for by the same insider. And and the metrics didn't really meet that. Um, was this more of a vibe round or an excel round? How are the metrics tracking? What what are people?

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  Definitely an excel round.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  What are people watching? Are they looking like is Mao Dow the key KPI? You don't have to give us the actual number, but like, what is most important? Is it revenue, profit, EBITDA, EBIT? Like what what metrics are are are most important for a round like this to get done in this era?

• 1:48:28Karri Saarinen?

  Um, I mean, like, I think like all the later stage funds, like or later stage rounds, it is about the growth and and the revenue. Um, I mean, obviously, different companies are different. So like there might be like other other things, but but for us, since we we sell the companies, it it generally like turns into revenue. Like, we don't have a lot of like free users or free free customers. So, um, e- everyone is like a bait customer. I think it's like comes down to, one is like kind of like the growth and the the kind of position we have in the market. We been able to capture quite a lot of the growth market these days, like the early stage startup, but but also like the late stage growth market, like companies like Ramp or Mercury or

• 1:49:10Karri Saarinen?

  Brex or or, um, and even OpenAI, which is like, I don't know, like if you categorize it as a growth company or like enterprise or what is that? I don't know.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  It's a massive company. Behemoth, yeah.

• 1:49:21Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  We need a new word, centacorn, something like that.

• 1:49:25Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think like we I I think like it comes down to like we we work with the best companies out there.

• 1:49:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:31Karri Saarinen?

  And I think like we also have like a lot of, um, people really love the product and like they really want to use it. So I think like we have had a lot of opportunities that we could have additional investors join the board or like lead these rounds. But for me at this point, I think it's it's probably like in the next next, like the next time around, there's probably reasons to find someone new and like find someone. With like some kind of specific or different skill set. But right now, I didn't feel like that's necessary. Right now, I think like the biggest thing what we're aiming for is that. Like, we have this core business and and product going with a lot of like fifteen thousand customers, like companies. Um, I I think that.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:50:15Karri Saarinen?

  Uh, the next thing is that that they're kind of like the AI and how how, but you probably heard it this like a million times on this on the show, but. I think again, uh, the AI is like shifting the the market and and like how things work. And like how software is built. And I think we often I like to do these rounds when we don't need to do it.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Karri Saarinen?

  And we also like when we are about to hit something big, and I think we we're about to hit something big with this like.

• 1:50:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about some of the discussions around. Yeah, talk about some of the the discussions, uh, you know, with Excel and and some of the other partners and internally with the team around this sort of inflection point. With agents, because for the first, you know, you guys have had a bunch of integrations for a long time. But this is sort of a novel type of integration. I know you guys are working with, um, you know, Devon and cognition and and other players. And, um, you know, that that feels to me like a a lot of the. Uh, linear is positioned as a platform that can help manage agents feels like, you know, a major catalyst.

• 1:51:18Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, um, yeah, so some some of those companies we've been working now, but and there's a lot more coming, I don't I don't have the exact dates yet, but I think we're also working with the bigger companies out there that are are building some of the like the like the model companies. Um, so hopefully those are coming soon. So, yeah, I think like the with the agents, the idea is that we have this, we have built this like end to end workflow for. Like discovering and planning and building products, and it's like kind of familiar to these organizations and these product teams. And I think like right now, like we we started seeing this traction from our customer base and also talking to CTOs. Almost every CTO out there is thinking about.

• 1:52:00Karri Saarinen?

  AI, like, how do we, how we we, I think, like, the CTOs and the CEOs are writing these memos and, like, they know that they I can help their organizations. But the the problem now is like, there's a lot of friction, like the the solutions are not that. Like designed yet, like it it's a little bit hard to use some of these tools and or use this technology. So the idea here is that like we have this familiar system that people already do use to to do their work. And so we can easily introduce these agents and some of the other AI capabilities into it. So they don't have to like go somewhere else to do it, but they can kind of like. Continue what they're doing, but now instead of assigning task or or like.

• 1:52:43Karri Saarinen?

  Kind of like code bugs or something to humans or the teammate teammates. You can assign them to agents and then work with them to solve them. So I think like the the the kind of like the idea there is that. We want to make it as easy as possible for organizations to. Kind of adopt the AI or add up these agents or add up like the new technology. Um, because like a lot of the other companies are kind of like more building the. Underlying technology, but then sometimes it's it seems like it's hard to for enterprises to adopt.

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, orchestrate them.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  I want to let you get back to building, but I have I want to get W W C.

• 1:53:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get your take on W W C.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Linear is a fantastic design driven firm. I'm sure that there is a lot of internal chatter in the Slack or in the in the in the. I in the group chats about W W C. How's the reaction been?

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Liquid glass.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  Liquid glass. What's the take? Give break it down for us.

• 1:53:38Karri Saarinen?

  Um, yeah, I don't want to go too harshly until I I think I think until it's like in production. I do think like there's some discussion. I think that. The borders are too rounded and I think like some of the borders are off like you they're not following the right like. When you have like two rounded rectangles, you just kind of like follow the same curve with those curve. Um, with those round like the border radius. Um, so it looks like an kind of like an even like that there's even spacing alongside all of the all of the kind of path. Um, but I don't know if that was a mistake someone did for the keynote or they just. Di- didn't want to like, I don't know. They didn't do it correctly. Um, I hope it was a mistake. Um, I think it's it seems like really.

• 1:54:22Karri Saarinen?

  I I think obviously visually interesting, but I I'm still like skeptical until like I see it like how well it actually works in practice. Like at linear, actually, we did have some of this. We had this like transl- translucent UI at some point. And then I decided to remove it because I I thought it was like too distracting and it's actually was kind of slowing the application down. So I I decided to remove it and and so I'm hoping that Apple can make it performant and also like not not distracted.

• 1:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you think? Do you think there's always going to be readability challenges with it? Or is it something, you know, you that that they can solve?

• 1:55:03Karri Saarinen?

  I mean, I think the starting point, it it it is hard to like solve that because like I think it's that was my experience with like having like transparent UI as well as that. It it can work well if you have a nice, like, I don't know, solid colored background on your computer or or something. But then like if you have like a photo, like on the on the phone, you have a photo of your family or something. It it can be kind of pride and like there can be a lot of different things going in the background. So I do think it it will be hard to like make it kind of easy, like the contrast to be enough to to read it. But I don't know if they're gonna do some kind of magic there that they could

• 1:55:43Karri Saarinen?

  figure out like what's on the background and then adjust it somehow. Um, so I'm hoping that they can figure it out, but um, I'm I'm I'm remains a little bit skeptical until like actually.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  Our batteries, our batteries are gonna be cooked.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  I'm rooting for them. I think they'll, I think they'll figure it out.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations uh to to you and the whole team. And uh, yeah, excited to uh see what you guys continue to cook up.

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:56:11Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one, Karri.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Let's check in with Tyler. Apparently he has iOS twenty six installed. Give us the update, Tyler. How's it going?

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  See it. Yeah, so I got it fully installed. I mean, we might have to put those uh those posts in the true zone. It looks pretty good on iPhone.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  It looks good.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  It's like pretty readable.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Give us the review.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  I think it's I I I like it.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  I mean, it's it's a bit slow on my phone. That might be because.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Which one do you have?

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  I have an eleven, so it's like.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Wait, I'm on like sixteen.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  He's got a vintage iPhone.

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  It's either that or I think also usually in the beta versions, it's it's a bit like slower.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  I have a sixteen Pro. I'm I'm.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm I'm gonna have to.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Light years ahead of you. Oh, my God.

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  But um.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks pretty good. I'll I'll bring it up there.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring it up. Let's see it. We're putting on the printer cam. We'll see it. And yeah, here we go. Okay, cool. Can we see?

• 1:57:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't see much.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  It actually looks pretty similar.

• 1:57:09Jordi Hays?

  How is it? I expect, okay, there's the, there's the, there's translucent.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, this doesn't look as.

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  It's mostly just the home screen. Like, if you go, I went to a bunch of the, like,

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Here, open, open hinge.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  The calculator looks so.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:57:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you can see the glass effect, like, right here, up at the top.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's nice.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  And look, so look at the search bar as, as I scroll the apps here, you can see, you know, that, that glass effect, it's not too bad. You bring down the, the settings.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm bullish. This is groundbreaking.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  I think this is, I think this works. This is, this is pretty readable. Anyway, thank you for volunteering. You'll have to, we'll have to check in with you over the next couple of days.

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  We're sorry if it destroys your productivity, but you're cracked, so.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  You're cracked.

• 1:58:03Jordi Hays?

  You'll figure it out.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Tyler.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  You know, Apple's gonna be pushing this pretty hard. They gotta do some out of home advertising. They gotta get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Drop the Genmoji ads. Market buy every single.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:22Jordi Hays?

  Billboard in San Francisco for iOS Tahoe.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Tim, say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick, combined technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  We have our next guest, Scott Belsky, coming into the studio in just a minute. In the meantime, we will react to some posts on the timeline. Kendall says, trying to quickly change the subject on the Zoom call when everyone else is cracking jokes about the Waymos and I can feel my, I can feel myself choking up lots of sympathy for the Waymos. Lots of coverage in the Wall Street Journal today about the, about the burning Waymos, talking about how this played directly into the hands of.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  Of the of the Trump administration by making the tech company clearly align with, you know, against the burning of Waymos. Very sad to see. Hopefully, things resolve. It does feel like the report from LA. I've been driving around today. It feels like things have calmed down a lot. In general, I was able to drive all the way across LA without any. I was in downtown, didn't really notice anything. And so it does seem like things are are calming down, thankfully. Anyway, I like this post from Tyler. I'm gonna mispronounce this name. Well, I'll just say Tyler. He says, unlike the rest of you cowards, I think the Y Combinator valuations are too low. We will find out

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  what the valuations are coming in at tomorrow when we're at YC Demo Day live in San Francisco. We're bringing a huge swath of the crew. We're going up right after the show wraps. The team is stoked. We'll be giving out hats. We have a whole bunch of different hats, some TVPN hats, some Ramp hats, and the Ramp hats have TVPN on them. So they're all limited editions. I think people will really like them. So if you're a founder at YC Demo Day, or you're an investor at YC Demo Day, stop by our table, come chat with us for a couple minutes, and we will get your take and hear your pitch and hopefully turn your Demo Day into a massive party round, because we will be live from the Palace

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  of Party Rounds. Mike Solana reposted the video of the Waymos leaving Los Angeles. Apparently, Waymo is moving their cars out of LA. I don't know how real this is, but it was a video of several Waymos driving through LA, kind of all together. Maybe they're leaving.

• 2:00:48Jordi Hays?

  We're getting out of here.

• 2:00:49John Coogan?

  That doesn't quite make sense, because you think you could just put them wherever they store them and charge them and clean them, but who knows?

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't necessarily believe that this was a response.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  This seems like fake news, but Solana has a great post. As always, the elves are leaving Middle Earth. Very funny. Anyway, Ramp has a post in 2012. In 2024, Ramp placed 32 on CNBC's Disrupter 50. This year, number six. They're grateful to their customers for betting on a better way and allowing us to fix the parts of finance people hate, so they can do more of what they love. And shout out to our friends at Anduril for making number one. What a fantastic lineup over there. What else is in the news? Oh, Warner Brothers. Oh, wait, we have Scott Belsky in the studio. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Scott?

• 2:01:38Jordi Hays?

  Here he is. Finally.

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  Long overdue. I'm sorry it took me so long to invite you on. I'm so glad we could make this happen. It's fantastic to finally meet.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  We were sending invites constantly, mentally.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  We were like, this is a dream guest. So thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Would you mind kind of setting the stage for us? Cause you've done a lot in your career. What are you focused on right now? What's interesting to you? And then we can kind of dig into all the hot topics of the day.

• 2:02:04Speaker 05

  First of all, it's been fun to watch you guys at work and congrats. I'm just, you know, creating conversation, which I think is appreciated by all of us. What am I up to these days? I mean, my obsession has always been the intersection of creativity and technology. Behance is probably what 58 million, 60 million creatives online right now focusing their work. That brought me into Adobe, had a long stint at Adobe, leading emerging products and design and various other new things there. And, you know, now I'm excited to kind of explore the world of storytelling and the role that technology plays there. Obsessed with the implications of new technology, you know, that emerge.

• 2:02:45Speaker 05

  And I love engaging in conversation about, you know, you guys were talking about the implications, kind of writing I do. And, and riffing off of, I don't know, like what's gonna happen because of what's gonna happen is the question.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a big question.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  It's a big question.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Maybe we should start with some of the news that's coming out of like this idea of collective memory. What's going on in the enterprise? We were talking about Glean, OpenAI, Deep Research. There's so many new products. We're using stuff, we're wiring up stuff. We have an intern in the corner vibe coding different stuff for us. We're essentially a podcast or a live show, a media company, and we're, we're writing software. Everything about how we are building this media business is different than I think people would have done even just a few years ago. But walk me through.

• 2:03:34Jordi Hays?

  It's actually crazy. The, if, if somebody told me three years ago, we have a show, a podcast, and we're building a bunch of internal software.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  I would be like, that's a huge mistake.

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  I would just be so bearish, and yet we get so much value out of our internal software we call Newsmax. But anyways, back, back to you.

• 2:03:53Speaker 05

  No, I mean, I think the, well, first of all, it's, it's when you're building a new team from scratch these days. It's almost like you're, you're able to build with another new generation of tools as opposed to. Retrofit something built with old tools.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:04:08Speaker 05

  So I do think there's this advantage that a lot of new companies are realizing now, or new teams within companies. You know, but you asked about this, this concept of collective memory, which I've been obsessed with. You know, this, this notion that the context window of these AI tools that we're using, of course, those context windows are growing, which means that their memory of us and their understanding of us is growing and persisting across all the inquiries we have. And, uh, you know, and this is becoming almost like, you know, uh, an extension of our knowledge and opinions and identity and everything else. And, and it's great when these L M's get to know us and give us better and better answers to our questions. What happens when in the enterprise, we access each other's memory? Right?

• 2:04:52Speaker 05

  So if, if the, if the context window of me working, you know, as one of your interns for years, you know, is suddenly accessible to you even when I leave. You know, are you able to keep saying, hey, what does Scott think? Or, you know, or what, what, what did Scott do? And we had this situation and is that a, is that, does that belong to the enterprise?

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:05:10Speaker 05

  And you do see, by the way, like every company right now, trying to build this memory for each of its products users. And in some cases, a lot of companies are building connectors to get the data from other products that that customer uses to enrich that memory and understanding of their customer. And it'll be interesting when that kind of memory that's for each of us becomes a collective memory. And then what happens in the, in the social, like in the consumer world? Like, you know, does your girlfriend say like, I want access to your context window, your memory, you know? And is that kind of weird? I, I think there's all kinds of weird questions and implications that arise from that.

• 2:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Do you think memory can be the lock-in that I think certain companies would like it to be? It doesn't feel like it is yet, but I think there's still an idea that it could be.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Sometimes it actually goes the opposite way. Like I, I'll ask chat G P T to tell me a joke and it'll be like hyper-specific about something I talked about a year ago. I'm like, that actually makes the joke worse, chat G P T. Like I'd prefer if you ignored my, all my questions about trains or something.

• 2:06:10Speaker 05

  Well, that can be in the prompt, right?

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:06:13Speaker 05

  I feel like, uh, You know, you see OpenAI launch the ability to log into tools with OpenAI.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:20Speaker 05

  And you know, when I saw that, I was like instantly thinking, gosh, that's a way to enrich the personalization. I do think personalization effects are the new network effects. You know, we used to talk about in terms of the the moat that companies would have with a network effect today. I do think they will have with personalization and that is a direct, you know, a direct outcome of the memory and extended context window and all of the data, you know, that they can get to give us a personalized experience that no one else could ever give us. But you're right, like there are other ramifications of that, you know, if you if you're too well known. I asked OpenAI the other day, you know, what I didn't know about myself and it told me that you're a real hypochondriac. And I was like, well, I didn't know that about myself.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  That's funny. I want to know more about these, like this idea of collective memory in the enterprise.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt, but it's an interesting thing where like the model is effectively trying to do pattern recognition. And it just identifies something that is.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  You ask a lot of questions. It's like, yeah, because you're a question answering machine.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  Like, that's not me, that's you. But but on the concept of like creating a collective memory in the enterprise, I've noticed that even though we are this new company that's starting from scratch, total greenfield, we have still not been able to go all in on one walled garden. We have Gmail, we we send a lot of iMessage groups. We also have a Slack that, you know, we are interfacing with different people on. That's a Salesforce product. And so I'm wondering if, you know, there's been, Eric Mikovsky was trying to build Beeper, this product to let you create one unified messaging interface. That was a real struggle because every major company was like, we will not let you break our walled garden.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  We're not really there yet and it seems like most of the companies are playing ball with MCP servers and the like. But what do you think the big dynamics of the big tech companies will be like once they realize that, hey, maybe if I don't want to let the fox in the hen house?

• 2:08:24Speaker 05

  Well, I think you're forecasting a bit of a, call it a data war, you know, in the years ahead, where everyone's going to leverage each other's APIs and start to pull all the data, you know, in and there are going to probably be some backroom, board-level bilateral negotiations, where it's like, well, let's not cut off Slack because we don't want them to cut off us. So we're going to let them and may the, you know, may the best, may the best model win, right, with the data provided to it. So, but that means that if the data becomes sort of readily available across the board from all of the connectors that are made for all of the products we use. And to your point, if you've built the network, your company with

• 2:09:09Speaker 05

  all these different products, that's fine, because the data is all stored probably in one of three or four clouds and you can just instantly access all of that data, use AI to see it as structured data and then be able to have AI apps built on top of it. And you don't even need to care what actual products create the data, as long as you have access to all the data. But then the question is, what are the modes, right? I think one of them is the personalization layer that we talked about just now and that context window becoming ever more important in the product. You know, I think another one is permissioning, like in the enterprise especially. Permissioning is fricking hard, right? To know exactly who's allowed to ask what question and get what answer or what

• 2:09:51Speaker 05

  column of information that might relay itself to that answer. That is a very, very hard thing to crack. And I do believe that the enterprise products that have really incredible permissioning layers and products that allow people to control and access permissioning, you know, will also have an advantage. So, I mean, and then in the operating systems, we talk about operating systems in the consumer world. You know, your iOS or Android person or whatever, and that's the operating system. Those those operating systems, like if they can't figure it out, well, shame on them. Like, they literally own the the the top layer of everything underneath, and they should be able to, you know, manage our attention and our needs with AI at that level. But what are the operating systems of work?

• 2:10:33Speaker 05

  You know, I think there's going to be another war played around those operating systems. One might be the browser. I think one might be the way that projects are managed. You know, different functions of the enterprise might have different operating systems, and people are going to be fighting to own the top layer of those.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder if that's like a almost a bull case for data lakes becoming more of a mid-market or early-stage product, because like I I I I take your point about like the the the deals between the large tech companies, just kind of happening behind the scenes. But at the same time, I'm just like, there's gonna be friction. And I just know these companies like, yes, I can export all my data from Facebook if I click 12 buttons and do it every single day. Like, the API is not bully there for a lot of these products. And so I wonder if more and more people are going to be saying like, even for my personal life, I want to be able to funnel everything into a data lake

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  that then I can drop my own AI on, and I don't necessarily want lock into one AI tool right now. I'm wondering how that how that will evolve. I don't know.

• 2:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, we're going to see this in consumer, too. It'd be really nice right now if you could describe in ChatGPT, hey, go find this image and then make it a Studio Ghibli, right? Or or make it like an impressionist's painting, right? And and obviously, there there's that kind of barrier.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just feels like the the big tech companies want that they're they're fine having lock-in. And like, you see this with WWDC, like, the the Siri button cannot be remapped still. And it's like, that would have been an easy thing to do. That would have been something that a lot of consumers demanded. What was your reaction to WWDC and kind of like how how the the AI Apple does like, uh, decisions are playing are playing out?

• 2:12:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, it's a really.

• 2:12:24Speaker 05

  Fascinating time, you know, that company's history. I think from the outside, we're questioning like, where's the vision? You know, where are we all going? And I think inside it's probably some sense of let's wait until we're really ready. We've had a few false starts. We can't get it wrong again. And so we're probably going to get something that's more fully baked, which is hopefully great. For Apple, you know, I never, I never discount Apple because of its DNA and its rigor and the quality of talent that's there. You know, on the other hand, like they're late to the game at this point, like super late. And I also wonder the things we discussed just a minute ago around personalization and some of the moats that are, they're gonna play. Also, by the way, remember this is a new era

• 2:13:08Speaker 05

  of experiences that is all about data and Apple's always been all about privacy. So Apple in some ways as a policy has done everything to make it impossible for others to get others data.

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:13:20Speaker 05

  And here we are in a world where, you know, that's what's going to enrich the experience we have from AI tools. So I think it's a, it's a different era.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that Apple, do you think that Apple will end up looking really smart on privacy? Like we're in a very chaotic time where people will let a new software, you know, company just have full access to

• 2:13:39Speaker 05

  Screen recordings.

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Visual screen recording.

• 2:13:41Speaker 05

  Record my screen. That's like an okay thing now to ask for.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  And I'm even surprised at this point that we haven't, I, I can't remember a major incident of a model producing private data in response to sort of like a, a general query.

• 2:13:55Speaker 05

  I've heard about like little anecdotes here and there, but nothing really concrete.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  You could imagine a world some days where, you know, people get their kind of

• 2:14:02Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Lines crossed and you ask for, you ask about some, some, you know, acquisition, for example, and somebody at some point dumped in.

• 2:14:10Speaker 05

  You even tried to get chat GPT to guess a picture that was from your own house. And it was, and it was smart enough to say, hey, you're maybe trying to spy on someone. So I'm not going to do that, even though it knew.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  I could, it would, it would basically gave me like the exact description of it without giving me effectively the street.

• 2:14:28Speaker 05

  So it knew, it knew not to step up the line. I don't know. Anyway, on, on privacy. It's a great question, you know, I always go back to first principles on this one. And I say to myself, You know, first of all, what do we know about the next generation? They seem to care less about privacy than the generation before them.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:45Speaker 05

  You know, number two is we're we're willing to trade a lot for less friction in our lives. And it seems like people are willing to always click accept or yes, or yes, or yes. You know, again, just to be able to have a frictionless experience in a product. Now, I think you're surfacing the point that very, you know, we we don't oftentimes realize like how much we're giving over in those instances. And I think the world of AI will make that very apparent to us because we'll start getting these personalized experiences. We're like, how the hell do they know that about me? Right? Um, but I don't know, like, there's also a part of me that says that the best technology takes us back to the way things once were, but with more scale and efficiency. Well, the way things once were hundreds of years ago is we were known.

• 2:15:29Speaker 05

  Like everywhere we went in our small towns, we were remembered. They called us by name. They knew our kids' names. They knew our favorite cut at The Butcher. Like you, you were kind of known. And in some weird way, yeah, we're being brought back to a world where we're going to be known again. The question is, we want to know how we're known. And and also, we don't want to be known by people that we don't trust.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there, there is kind of this interesting economic uh dynamic where there's almost like a de facto bug bounty for privacy in the fact that if a company like Apple has a privacy fiasco, that could wipe off hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. And so they have this massive incentive to invest to not have these privacy fiascos, the data to leak. And so you have kind of this massive economic capital cannon towards let's secure the public clouds. And so uh uh that uh my, one of my former colleagues was making the point that um in terms of open source AI versus closed source AI, oftentimes it's actually better to trust a hyperscaler with your data.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  That because it's harder to break into an AWS data center than it is to the on-prem server that, yes, you're running it, but you're the only security guard. And what happens if someone breaks in and just takes the rack?

• 2:16:41Speaker 05

  I'll tell you what, though, like, here's a bullish case for Apple. It would be that models are all going to be local, you know, in. X number of years, the most powerful, if you look at the performance of

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16:52Speaker 05

  Of L M's, right? There are these small L M's and there's these ones that run locally on on devices. And the the the the def the delta between those and top L M's is of course decreasing. Um, and so as chips get better and L M's run locally, you can imagine that all of your data can actually be stored locally in a super encrypted way. All these local models can operate to answer all of the questions you have, can search the internet when it when is necessary. And maybe we all opt to this like super private A I world, maybe for all we know, Apple's optimizing for that flag that they know the puck is going to, you know, and they're gonna launch, who knows how many years from now, like a hundred percent local A I experience that is world class with zero privacy considerations. Uh, or or risk rather.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes no sense.

• 2:17:39Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 2:17:40John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about knowledge arbitrage, like these models? We've gone from, uh, you know, massive databases of facts. And so there wasn't as much incentive to just be a the the the the person that memorizes all the facts because you can just Google it on your phone. Now we're in this age of even more significant knowledge retrieval, intelligence potentially to cheap to meter, if we can call it intelligence. Um, what is knowledge arbitrage? Like what?

• 2:18:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny, like, when I think about the term knowledge arbitrage, like, I'm actually brought back to, um, and I think this is very relevant for like people who are listening to us or kind of earlier in their careers right now and figuring out like how to plot their path forward. And you go back to the early two thousands and the people who stood Twitter and social media and things like that were getting hired by like C M O's of Fortune five hundred companies to school them on what the heck this thing was. And like how to have their brand participate. And it was really looked upon as like this complex, crazy thing that every leader in in in in corporate America felt they needed to understand.

• 2:18:44Speaker 05

  And so there was this moment of knowledge arbitrage for people who were like, you know, in their late teens, early twenties, who are deeply natively familiar with this stuff called social media could just like school the people who had no clue. Here we are again, you know, you have the leaders of all these Fortune five hundred companies saying, oh, my gosh, like we have to refactor how we work. And every function's gonna operate differently with A I. But we don't even know like when to use chat G P T. We don't even know what a prompt is and like, how does this stuff even work? And so, once again, these like very young people who got through college using ChatGPT and talked to ChatGPT about their boyfriend or girlfriend issues or whatever else, like it's native to them. And so I do think this knowledge arbitrage moment, you know, is here and the window is open right now.

• 2:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny that there's this massive fear from, from young people around how the job market is evolving, our jobs getting killed, whatever. And at the same time, yeah, it feels like social media didn't reinvent every part of a company. Like it's sort of massively changed marketing and how you should focus marketing dollars and how you should think about building brands and all these things. But it wasn't something that, that changed internal comms, like you're talking about with like collective memory. It wasn't something that changed a certain aspect of the business, like compliance. It didn't change, you know, it wasn't this sort of like full stack transformation. And for that reason, it creates more opportunity than the social media wave to just get good

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  at using LLMs and, and agents and whatever, whatever other tools you have and then use that. I mean, we, the, the, the last person that we hired was somebody who, who vibe coded, like a guest directory for us and they did it last.

• 2:20:26Speaker 05

  Like Friday.

• 2:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Last Thursday.

• 2:20:28Speaker 05

  We hired them on Monday.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  And then we saw it like Friday, where they started on Monday.

• 2:20:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, they came on Thursday, they came on Friday and we had them start on Monday.

• 2:20:37Jordi Hays?

  And just by demonstrating the ability to leverage these tools and create a product that was a V1, but it was a solid V1. And it was just a super easy decision to be like, yeah, you should join the team. So shout out, shout out to Adam.

• 2:20:48Speaker 05

  That was like 48 hours work though. That's like incredible. So in, by the way, that's changing the way product is even done. Like I'm so used to a world where you concept, you do like a sort of, you know, product scoping session, then you have the designers work in a product like Figma and make prototypes. And then engineers don't even see it until the prototypes are locked. And then it's like redlined and engineers start to like, you know, now it's a different world, right?

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  It's like, we need, we need, we need this to be done. You kind of vibe code it out. In parallel, a designer says, okay, let's how to finesse it. Here's how we can maybe change that, make that more accessible to more people. And then you just deploy and test and iterate. It's a different, it's a whole different product stack to some degree. And that's why I always say the best talent these days is like a collapsed stack talent strategy where you hire people that have exposure to different parts of the stack, whether it's engineering and design, or design and copy, or product and design. Because you're just trying to collapse the stack with the types of people you have so you can leverage these tools, you know, efficiently.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about agency? It's, it's an interesting concept because we don't have like a eval for it in terms of the L L Ms. We're, we're, we're, you know, destroying all the benchmarks in math and IQ. But the models don't seem to have volition and yet the trend is around agentic applications. We're trying to give them agency. It still seems like some, there's some sort of combination of uniquely human traits that seems to be increasingly valuable. How are you defining it right now?

• 2:22:24Speaker 05

  Well, I think that when he talked, when you talk about sort of agentic workflows and the, the role, you know, the role of agents in the future, you know, and I think about it, every company, you know, I'm calling companies these days in my mind cognicoes, like cognition driven businesses where it's ultimately inference in the center, right? And there are these, the functions of a company, which were once accounting and legal and design and like all these different functions are going to be AI tools that are running, you know, AI agents, basically they're running that function or a collection of agents doing different aspects of the function, which then begs the question of what's the role of the humans? I think we are the orchestration designers and orchestration engineers. We're like orchestrating how these agents work and how they work together.

• 2:23:07Speaker 05

  And we're also developing and enforcing the rules by which they work. Cause remember these agents are told what to do and they're rewarded based on doing it. They have to be working within a subset of rules that, that need to be administered and enforced to some degree by humans. So I, you know, so I, I start there and then I start to think, okay, so what are the functions of every organization going to look like? You know what? And then that dictates like what kinds of tools or agents are empowered to, you know, quote unquote, take agency in those functions. But I also want to say that when you say agency at first, I think of like the human, you know, the human getting agency.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  You still got it. You still got it.

• 2:23:45Speaker 05

  We gotta, dude, we gotta, we gotta exercise our agency and our taste more than ever before these days. And the years, the days of us getting a prescribed job function and sticking to it, that is like the death bell of a career these days.

• 2:24:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. As soon as it can be defined, it can be reinforcement learned against.

• 2:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Were you surprised at all about this, the, the concept of taste coming into the, the,

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  Discourse.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Silicon Valley discourse? It feels like one of those things, it actually reminded me of when venture capitalists discovered the creator economy in 2020 and 2019. But it was a trend that had been happening for like a decade at that point, where people were creating content online and turning it into a business. And then all of a sudden, people, I think, saw a statistic that was like, you know, look at this, you know, look how fast this category is growing. We should invest a bunch of dollars there. But in many ways, I feel like taste has always been a key part of our industry. And if you look at a lot of the best companies, they don't all look the same, but they have people that run them that have taste that that sort of gets applied in many different ways, whether it's hiring

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  all the way through, obviously, the visual side.

• 2:25:00Speaker 05

  You know, I am brought back to a, just earlier in my career, you know, it was all about what skills you had, right? And the resume would always, were you good at PHP or JavaScript? Or could you do code in Python? Or whatever the case might be. We come from a world where skills, like we're the hardest things to achieve and the most differentiating things for humans, right, in a project. Now, as a lot of the skills have been offloaded to compute, you know, now it's like, well, what's left? Like, taste is actually one of those things that is definitely left, right? And so I think that.

• 2:25:40Speaker 05

  The fact that everyone's sort of focused on on taste these days is more of a commentary on how less focused they are on skill.

• 2:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:47Speaker 05

  And how much confidence they have in all these models and coding tools and everything else.

• 2:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Can taste be taught, though? That's the question. Skills can be taught.

• 2:25:55Speaker 05

  Taste be taught. Like, let's, you know, can taste be taught is like a thing I think about in debate all the time with with friends. You know, what is taste? Gosh, it's like the human experience. It's childhood traumas. It's mistake of the eyes. It's judgment. It's knowing how many things to see before you make a decision. You know, but it's also knowing how to choose something that isn't so on the nose, but like leave something for the imagination. You know, it's knowing where people are going as opposed to where people are. Like, I think it's all of these factors that are so critical, whether you're making a product or making a marketing campaign or a film or whatever the case might be. And I just, you know, I I I think that hopefully we'll just overindex on human experience in order to achieve taste.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's. Yeah, it almost feels like just independent thinking. Confidence, like you can maybe develop.

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's independent, independent thinking that elicits a collective response that you want in some ways, right? I mean, I I think of this in the context of how companies get attention. There's a lot of different ways to get attention. Some, some, some ways are tasteful. You know, some ways are tasteful and elicit.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  I know what you're thinking of.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, positive response. Other, others get, you know, a lot of attention, but but a sort of visceral, negative reaction. And and taste in the context of social media, algorithms and timelines is like such an important question because it's really easy right now to do.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  To instantiate something, but not to. Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, taste, taste too, in the context of AI slop, right? There's tasteful. There's tasteful.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  I always keep coming back to the Harry Potter Balenciaga video. I feel like that was, you know, it it had the aesthetics of AI slop because it was AI generated.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Issues with it and.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  And yes, but it it had the, it had the touch of a human to think of combining those two.

• 2:27:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  Kind of completely unrelated disparate ideas. And when you put them together, it was something that you had to watch.

• 2:27:56Speaker 05

  And by the way, that's perfect evidence, the fact that you're still citing that.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:00Speaker 05

  Despite how many months, if not years of content generation has happened since.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04Speaker 05

  It shows you like the taste still stands out. And that's why, you know, people are like, oh my gosh, content is commoditized. Like everyone can do everything now. Oh my gosh, this is horrible for Hollywood. My view is the opposite. Like in the, and historically, when anything becomes commoditized, whether it's shoes, clothes, handbags, liquor, whatever. Like that's LVMH, like LVMH is in all those businesses, but they're doing the higher end, meaning infused, more scarce version of that thing that's available to anyone.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:35Speaker 05

  You're now content is commoditized, given all these new tools. And I think as consumers of content, we are going to seek more scarce, meaning infused, human, you know, brand signaled versions of content to fill our attention in time. And so I think that's a great example, you know, it doesn't matter how it was made. It matters, you know, whether there's meaning in it.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  I even knew how the tools, I, I, I knew the tools that were used to make the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing, but I couldn't come up with a unique idea that would go viral. And so I went to chat GPT and I said, here's why this worked. It worked because it was inspired and it combined two things that were so disparate. Think of another thing that could be iconic like that and it couldn't do it at all.

• 2:29:15Speaker 05

  Make me famous.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. It wasn't there, you know, that, that inspiration still needs to strike.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Did you, uh, speaking of Hollywood, did you see Mountain Head? The new Jesse Armstrong film, have you seen it yet?

• 2:29:29Speaker 05

  I haven't seen Mountain Head yet, no.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you should, you, I mean, you, if, if you don't enjoy it, uh, they're, they're really cooked. But, um, it's Jesse Armstrong from Succession.

• 2:29:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  You're making this film, the high level concept is, you know, some.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  It's the all in podcast.

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you could, you could say that, but, uh, the thing that, the thing that I wanted to get to is the, basically the overarching, part of the overarching narrative is that deep fakes have gotten so good that they're causing global chaos because people don't know what's real. And then they're seeing video and, and sort of acting on that video. I wanted to ask you in that context, or just generally about the progression of video models and how you're thinking about, you know, if VO3, you know, what do you expect from things like VO4 and, you know, new runway models and, you know, I'm assuming you're looking at everything internally.

• 2:30:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, just well, two comments, like one on video models and then deep fakes real quickly. On video models, I mean, this is like a consistent slap a hand game, right? Where, oh my God, this is the best model. And then VO2 comes out, and then Sora, and then runway, and then VO3. And it's just, it just keeps piling up. This is great for anyone who makes stories, because these models are becoming better and increasingly commoditized. However, you know, it's, would I want to be the model, you know, that's competing in that increasingly commoditized and not as great, you know, quality sort of vector? Probably not. So that's comment number one. On the deep, on the deep fake situation, it was interesting, like these new, these new websites that are coming out where, where you have these, like, anyone can make a deep fake with Trump saying whatever, you know, I actually

• 2:31:01Speaker 05

  think they're playing a secret value to society by inoculating all of us.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:31:06Speaker 05

  We all get a fake Trump said something crazy video tomorrow, and we're inoculated from the fact that we should no longer trust what we see, that we should, instead of going from a world where we would trust but verify, go from a world, you know, to a world where we verify then trust. Like, that would be good for humanity. So I'm like, I'm actually, you know, for that inoculation, because I think, I think that, I think that we need it, and we're gonna want to know where, where stuff came from.

• 2:31:31John Coogan?

  If you didn't see it live on TVPN, it didn't happen.

• 2:31:33Jordi Hays?

  No, in a weird, in a weird way, it, it, it might save legacy media, because if legacy media orients around, it orients around, like if CNN were to say, we are, you know, there's a bunch of the, you know, you have usernames like Autism Capital that are sort of de facto news on X, right? These are accounts that get billions of impressions, and they act as, as, you know, news content. But if CNBC, you know, CNBC and CNN and other services can really orient around, we did the, you know, we were late to the punch on this, but we did the work to verify that it was real, it actually might save.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:32:13Speaker 06

  And there's credentials now, there's metadata through things like content credentials that go into assets that are made on certain cameras and edited in certain software and, you know, and whether it's TPBN or CNN or anyone else can surface that information in the reporting and say, we verified this is, you know, done by the so and so and was edited by so and so. And I think that adds to a layer of what people are going to need and want in the future. So.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much. Yeah.

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  I wish we had a, I wish we had 90 minutes. This was super fun.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  Well, you have to come back on soon. Yeah, to be continued. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon, Scott. Bye.

• 2:32:44Speaker 06

  Cheers.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And we have our next guest already in the studio, Roy from Bloomberg Beta, coming in to talk about his latest fundraise. How are you doing, Roy? Great to meet you.

• 2:33:01Speaker 06

  Fresh capital in the bank or committed or something like that?

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  How much? How much capital did you raise?

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Talk to us.

• 2:33:08Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  How much?

• 2:33:11Speaker 06

  You did it 75 times for 75.

• 2:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:33:14Speaker 06

  You know, I'll take one customer sale over fresh capital in the bank, you know.

• 2:33:20Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Capital formation is the highest calling of man.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:33:26Speaker 06

  Say two guys who do not intend to form their own capital.

• 2:33:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. But we, we're in the business of covering capital formation and celebrating it.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  But congratulations. What are you most excited about? Where are you planning to deploy this? What is, how is the money burning a hole in your pocket?

• 2:33:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we, 12 years ago, started this firm to say, we're going to do day zero investing in startups. And I'll just give the context because the answer is going to be the same thing. Startups that future are future work oriented. Our bet at the time was our personal lives have changed a lot. Our work lives have not. Maybe that'll change. Like people are still using Lotus Notes for email. And, and now on our fifth fund, we are doing basically exactly the same thing. The craft of day zero, work closely with the founder. And what's burning a hole in my pocket is continuing to do that, you know? And I'm looking at our Fund One companies and feeling like they're still midway through the journey. Replit, Flexport, Campus, you know?

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  We love these companies. Most of them have been on the show. Fantastic companies.

• 2:34:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I've loved watching them. That's part of what I love about the show.

• 2:34:37Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of funds, venture funds make it to Fund Five?

• 2:34:41Speaker 06

  That's an excellent question.

• 2:34:43Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be like 5%.

• 2:34:45Speaker 06

  But I always feel like that's sort of like those stats about what percentage of startups like raise their Series B. It's like if the starting denominator has a lot of meh in it. Like, I think to me, the more interesting question is, who gets, there you go, who gets to a, there you go, hot off the press?

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  I printed, so I printed your, your post because it appears that you printed your post. I don't know if you can see this, but you printed a LinkedIn, I think a LinkedIn post and you marked it up. You said, today we're announcing our next fund, our fourth, and you just crossed it out and put fifth. And I, and, and we respect printing out posts here, so I just wanted to.

• 2:35:22Speaker 06

  The idea was inspired by this thing I stole from Congress. When the Republicans blocked a Democrat Supreme Court nominee. And then it went around the other way and they literally just crossed out the names, put in like Schumer to McConnell. It is the same. So I think the more interesting question is, who gets to a Fund Five? Or whatever fund size, without trying to gradually expand AUM. Like, it seems like so many of the VC firms out there, and we love working with them, are just in the AUM expansion business.

• 2:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep, the big AUM scare me personally. Uh, I, I looked it up here. According to ChatGPT, there's probably a 50% chance it's hallucinating. But it's estimating it less than 5% based on PitchBook and Cambridge Associates data.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  I mean, here, here you say you're, you aspire to be the most transparent investors. What does transparency mean in the context of a venture fund?

• 2:36:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you tell the founder, look, we clocked you at about a 15% chance of success. It's a bet we're willing to take.

• 2:36:17Speaker 06

  We do try to tell them how exactly we're thinking about it. But here, look up, go to our website right now, those two laptops you got in front of you, and then you'll tell me what. But which is to say, when I was a founder, so before this, I started a company in games.

• 2:36:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:30Speaker 06

  You know, you drive down to the 280, end up in an office on Sand Hill Road. And in the first three minutes of the meeting, the person be like, oh, but you're not a fit for us. We don't do this. And it's like, well, why on earth do we just do that? And we're an attacker. We're coming into an established industry. We just asked, are there things the industry does that we can flip the bit and do the other way? And so the industry seemed very opaque at the time. It's a lot less true now. And we're just like, can we be as transparent as possible? Can we put in valuation? Can we put in diligence questions? You can actually get our long form, actual deal documents from our website. And the point of it is not transparency for transparency sake, although that's a very Bloomberg idea about transparency. It's just founders are our customers. We want them to not waste time guessing what we do.

• 2:37:13Speaker 06

  And so if they can disqualify out by seeing, we don't do that thing, great, better for everybody.

• 2:37:19John Coogan?

  We're big fans of Bloomberg. We read a lot of Bloomberg pieces on the show. What is the actual relationship between the fund?

• 2:37:24Speaker 06

  Do you have your terminal subscription yet?

• 2:37:26John Coogan?

  No, we gotta get one. This is my go to terminal every day is a Wall Street Journal, but we, we, we do have Bloomberg subscription. You gotta get a terminal. And we've had a bunch of Bloomberg folks on the show. You're like the fifth Bloomberg affiliated person. We got Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway. We got Sharon Gaffare coming on the show on Thursday.

• 2:37:43Speaker 06

  Bigger brands than me, one and all.

• 2:37:45John Coogan?

  But what is the relationship between the fund and Bloomberg as a whole? Obviously Bloomberg does a ton of different stuff. What does that look like and how is it evolved?

• 2:37:54Speaker 06

  The company is the LP in our fund, period and end of story, full stop. We are not a strategic investor. So unlike a bunch of other corporate backed funds, we're not trying to find some startup that's going to be a Bloomberg partner.

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:04Speaker 06

  Bloomberg wanted to understand what was happening in the world of startups. The argument was best way to do that is give startups what they need, which is just money.

• 2:38:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Cool.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  Talk to me about deployment of the fund is, is 75 million. That's a lot of smaller checks. Are you holding back some for Pro Rata and Scale Up like?

• 2:38:24Speaker 06

  You know, the line about like, tell me the fund size, I'll tell you the strategy.

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:27Speaker 06

  Part of the reason why we've kept our fund size where it is, is we want to be as early as possible. And so I can't remember the exact number, but it's something like most funds. Their first check ends up being something like 75 basis points of fund size on average. And we end up a little bit around there, slightly bigger. We do, you know, we reserve for follow ons, but then we also have an opportunity fund. Cause what we realized is we wrote some big checks in from our core fund into some of our winners. We wrote a big check into Replit at one point, whatever, the, you know, company, Newfront. And it's like, well, if we're going to do that, we might as well have the capital to do that reliably. So we've got an opportunity fund.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the early stage, are you, are you trying to pick a winner and then not invest in competitive companies? Like, how do you think about that?

• 2:39:11Speaker 06

  So very old school on all this stuff. My view on competition is competition is in the eye of the founder. Like, I have an attitude on this, which is, if I back you, I want you knowing I have your back. Not that I'm thinking about which of your competitors to introduce to somebody. And so any founder we invest in, if they tell us that a company is competitive, we won't invest in that company. Shit still happens, like, you know, companies pivot into being competitive and we're going to work it out. But that's the principle.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, but yeah, but that's on you. Driving the news cycle this week, you got WWDC, Apple kind of pulling back from.

• 2:39:42Speaker 06

  It drove the news cycle, it drove the news cycle kind of by necessity. But I kind of feel like if you had said, but nothing happened, would we have all just nodded along politely?

• 2:39:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, our, our intern Tyler spent hours today setting up.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  Installing it. Yeah. Well, yeah, he assembled the first American made iPhone yesterday. Today, he installed arguably a harder challenge, installing a beta, iOS 26. But I mean, there is, there is a bit of a narrative for startups there in the sense that if Apple is truly pulling back and not going to steamroll the startup developer community in terms of AI based apps, that could be a potential boom for, you know, we could see another rise of a mobile -esque era where AI companies are building on iOS in a little bit more friendly territory than it's been in the past. Obviously, there's the Fortnite decision and discussion around the App Store. What are you seeing that's interesting? Or just what else is driving the news cycle for you?

• 2:40:40Speaker 06

  Well, no. So I do think, look, Apple has to be an attacker on AI. You've pointed out the way that the privacy first philosophy makes it a lot harder for them to do AI and AI developers who go there talk about running into that internally. You know, all the big tech companies want to be the platform on which everybody else share crops.

• 2:40:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:57Speaker 06

  And at the moment, that's OpenAI and Anthropic. It's like you have all these fast revenue growth.

• 2:41:01Jordi Hays?

  Share crops is such a savage but real way to describe so much.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  Thirty percent cut. It's just thirty percent. Just give me thirty.

• 2:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Just thirty, thirty, thirty.

• 2:41:11Speaker 06

  Of course, naturally, but the market didn't exist but for them.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:41:15Speaker 06

  And, and I think they're gonna try to figure out, can they disrupt some other part of the ecosystem? I feel the same way about the Scale AI acquisition, which is Meta has to attack. They need a layer that they can control that everybody else depends on, and this looks like their play at it. The other thing I think is interesting about that, that I've been thinking about is how many of these big AI companies have effectively been acquired in ways that the government doesn't get to approve? It's, you know, the big talent acquisitions. When I saw this, I was like, that looks like an acquisition the FTC doesn't get to approve.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:47Speaker 06

  And so I don't know if that's the motivation. I have not spoken in any of the parties. We're not in Scale AI. But my sense is you're basically seeing the Game of Thrones play out, but the government is one of the houses.

• 2:41:57John Coogan?

  What's very interesting about that is that we are, yeah, Lena Khan's gone and we're in a different regime, but it's the same thing.

• 2:42:02Jordi Hays?

  Let us, let us do deals.

• 2:42:04John Coogan?

  Let us do.

• 2:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Let us do some, some M and A.

• 2:42:07John Coogan?

  Just, just one twenty-eight billion dollar acquisition. Just let us sneak it, sneak it in. It's fine.

• 2:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's get it by. Just one. Let's open, let's get the M and A window open.

• 2:42:15Speaker 06

  I mean, the other thing to say is, when was the last time you heard a big tech company buy a company for eighty million dollars? It felt like that used to happen all the time.

• 2:42:22John Coogan?

  All the time. Yep.

• 2:42:23Speaker 06

  And now it's a lot less common for a variety of reasons.

• 2:42:25Jordi Hays?

  They took that from us.

• 2:42:26John Coogan?

  They took that from us.

• 2:42:28Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 2:42:28Speaker 06

  I feel aggrieved.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there used to be, there used to be a, a, a really great outcome for a lot of folks where, you know, if you're a founder and you start and you still own twenty, thirty percent of a company and you sell it for eighty million, like that's, that's a house in Balowalto and the kids and generational wealth in some ways. Um, and yeah, that, that has gone by the wayside. I don't exactly know why, because those seem to be easier to get across the finish line from an FTC perspective, but I guess folks just start thinking.

• 2:42:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at, at what point does the FTC just say like, look, we know, we can see what you're doing.

• 2:42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, also.

• 2:43:00Jordi Hays?

  Fifteen billion on this company for, and, and the CEO no longer works there.

• 2:43:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the flip side, yeah, I mean, the flip side is like, when was the last time a company was valued at eighty million? Every company seems to go straight from straight from five million to 500 million in two days. And so I don't know where you're getting 80 million. That's just hard to hard to find. I do. I do have a question for you. I don't even know if you can speak to this, but there's a lot of companies that are thinking about plugging into the terminal. We see what perplexity is doing. We see a bunch of AI agents for financial

• 2:43:36Jordi Hays?

  perplexity is trying to disrupt

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  trying to disrupt the terminal. Are you looking at that space?

• 2:43:41Jordi Hays?

  That's outside of noise.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  Is there anything interesting there that you've seen or heard rumblings on the other side of the

• 2:43:47Speaker 06

  I can't speak to what's competitive.

• 2:43:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:50Speaker 06

  I, you know, they're my LP.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:43:52Speaker 06

  For their business strategy. What I will say is when you, when you run a firm that's got a name of another company on it, my guess is the Google Ventures GV guys have this too.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:01Speaker 06

  Pitch that's like, we are going to be the Bloomberg for X lands on my desk.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:05Speaker 06

  And maybe not everyone, but many of them do because they're like, and how amazing would it be to also have Bloomberg as an investor?

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:10Speaker 06

  Almost all of them seem to misunderstand to me what the value of the Bloomberg terminal is.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:16Speaker 06

  Because it packages data.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:19Speaker 06

  Community with a messaging system outside in perspective news, et cetera. I mean, that's just some of it.

• 2:44:24John Coogan?

  So much stuff.

• 2:44:25Speaker 06

  And it's more than just let's display some data. So everybody who's trying to disrupt, I think is in for a surprise when they realize what an ecosystem it is.

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:33Jordi Hays?

  I think this happens constantly, especially in media. People see a media product. They like it. They don't understand why it's successful. They try to reverse engineer it, but if you don't understand the why, you're never going to be.

• 2:44:46Speaker 06

  But can I ask you guys though, for you, you tried before, what's your hypothesis on your why of why this has been so successful for you?

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  The main one is that most people in tech media have done it part time historically, and we decided to just kind of burn all of the ships and make this the full time thing. We got some great advice from David Senra, the host of the founders podcast, another full time media creator. And he basically just said, you guys have something that's, that's working. You should go 10 times harder at this and

• 2:45:21Jordi Hays?

  And we also enjoyed it a lot.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  We loved it.

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  Talking about business.

• 2:45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we loved it.

• 2:45:25Jordi Hays?

  Which was kind of the foundation, but yeah, the idea that there's a lot of. There's a lot of technology podcasts, there's a lot of business podcasts. If you actually drill down and you look at how many people are actually full time. Just making media, it's very, very small.

• 2:45:41John Coogan?

  It's pretty small.

• 2:45:42Jordi Hays?

  And the nature, the other thing is the nature of by taking something way more serious than anyone else. It can sort of morph and evolve in the way that the show has from us two and a printer.

• 2:45:53Speaker 06

  My, my, my viewers, uh, uh, look on this is it's, it felt, I'm obsessed with Hamilton. For a variety of reasons. One of the reasons I'm obsessed with it is nobody would have said, one of the great media properties of the last 10 or 20 years would be a musical. And so it defined the genre through intensity and seriousness and you feel immersed in a world and like before the show, they used to go out on the street. And do some little ditty or something like that. Whoops, my camera just froze. Okay, there we go. And, uh, and you guys have that same kind of immersion. I teach this class at Berkeley on the structure of the media industry. I will be inviting you as guest speakers.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Amazing. We'd love that.

• 2:46:27Speaker 06

  Not when you're live.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  I grew up, I grew up in Berkeley.

• 2:46:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, you did.

• 2:46:30Speaker 06

  Fucking the other thing that you've realized is it's cheap to start a media company. So as long as you don't get too big for your britches and figure like a venture back company. Your financial aspiration, maybe this is yours, is to create one of the most financially successful businesses in the history of capitalism, which is in VC. As much as an $80 million exit along the way can be magical for everybody involved. That's the hope. Is that you can produce something wildly valuable and make some money.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 2:46:55Jordi Hays?

  This is super fun.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  This is great. We'll have to have you back.

• 2:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the new fun.

• 2:47:00Speaker 06

  Appreciate what you're doing. Keep us all immersed in it.

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  We will, we will come back.

• 2:47:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll hit it. We'll, we'll wait till after the show.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  73 more to go.

• 2:47:10Jordi Hays?

  73 hits.

• 2:47:12Speaker 06

  I'll come in and bang on that.

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:47:14Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:47:15Speaker 06

  We'll talk to you later.

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Roy.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have the founder of Metropolis, Alex Israel. He's in the studio, but really quickly, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Welcome to the stream, Alex. How are you doing today?

• 2:47:34Speaker 07

  Good. How are you guys doing?

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  We're doing great. We've been having an awesome show.

• 2:47:38Jordi Hays?

  What's it like to land on the CNBC list?

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:42Jordi Hays?

  You guys are on there, right?

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  You guys are on there. Congrats.

• 2:47:43Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's got to be your guys' biggest accomplishment ever. There's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing that tops that.

• 2:47:49John Coogan?

  So rude.

• 2:47:50Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm kidding. It's, I mean, anytime, you know, I know the CEOs that land on these lists are like, you know, they'll post about it, they'll post about it, but it's like you get back to work.

• 2:47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:47:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's, uh, look, it's flattering. I just like being in the company of, you know, OpenAI.

• 2:48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 2:48:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, you just gotta get back to work.

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, the first, the first CEO to be like, you know, normally CEOs say, job's not finished. In this case, job's finished.

• 2:48:11Jordi Hays?

  No, we're done.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  We're done.

• 2:48:12Speaker 07

  We're out, we're just done.

• 2:48:14John Coogan?

  We're done. This was the whole goal the whole time.

• 2:48:17Jordi Hays?

  The whole goal.

• 2:48:17John Coogan?

  And now we can retire.

• 2:48:18Speaker 07

  It's kind of like an exit, but better.

• 2:48:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's definitely better. It's definitely, yeah, I can pay my college tuition.

• 2:48:23Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't pay the bills, but, you know, you could send it to a family member and maybe they'll be impressed, you know?

• 2:48:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you'll get some text messages. Uh, anyway, uh, can you kick us off with an introduction on, on, on the structure of the company and what you guys are building? Because it's super interesting and I, I know we can go a bunch of different directions, but I'd love to get your kind of, uh, ground setting first.

• 2:48:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, of course. Um, so, you know, traditional in a lot of ways startup story. Founded the company in 2017 and now are one of the fastest growing payments companies in the United States. We talk about ourselves externally as an AI company for the real world, but it's all about how you leverage computer vision and artificial intelligence to create next generation payments and commerce everywhere you go. Whether it's a retail environment, a car wash, or a gas station, how do you just walk in or walk out, or in this case, drive in and drive out?

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  That is fascinating. Um, talk to me about the strategy of actual, uh, building the business and, uh, acquiring assets and, and, and actually getting, like, the go-to-market motion is different here, right?

• 2:49:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was very different. I mean, look, we started very, you know, I don't know, stereotypical. We raised the, you know, I guess large, but $20 million seed financing, $40 million Series A. We hit the market.

• 2:49:40Jordi Hays?

  Wait, $20 million seed in 2017? That, that, that, that's more than, bigger than a mango seed, which, which started to become popular a bit later. Uh, I don't know, was that a water, watermelon seed round? Um, what, what, what, what was the catalyst there? You just, you had a bunch of experience in the space and, and so people had a lot of confidence in you? Or why, why did you need 20 million at the time?

• 2:50:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know, I guess serial tech entrepreneur. Uh, I don't know. My last series A, my last company was three point five million and I, you know, I thought I was rich. You know, and then, uh, you know, twenty million dollar seed financing. But look, we knew we were tackling. You know, the first vertical that we entered was mobility and we wanted to go after the parking industry. And we wanted to deploy technology in the parking industry. And we knew that there were a number of companies, whether it was standard cognition or Amazon Go, that were leveraging computer vision to create these next generation experiences. And we knew it would take a lot of capital and we knew it would take a while, a while to penetrate the market. So we wanted to make sure that we had the capital in place to, to really go after the market.

• 2:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Talk about your position in, in parking, uh, today. It sounds like you're, you're thinking about other categories already. At what point did you decide that you could be thinking about other, other applications of the, the tech and infrastructure?

• 2:50:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I'd say, so after our series A, I'd say we hit product market fit and unit economic fit really quickly. I'd say the problem was we hit a wall with our go to market. And that was, you know, at the time, we were scaling our technology to a number of large asset owners across the United States. And we'd effectively knock on their door, ask to take the keys for the parking experience to their two hundred million dollar development. And they're like, cute startup, come back in fifty years. So we realized we needed a, a different go to market motion. So we shifted strategies and we invented what we qualified internally as a GBL, which was this idea of a growth buyout. Could we raise venture capital dollars and could we acquire old world businesses?

• 2:51:36Speaker 07

  So we started rolling up old world parking operators that are, you know, the cost plus staffing agencies that were even a positive that run parking across the United States. And we kept rolling them up to a point where now we're the large parking operator in the United States.

• 2:51:49John Coogan?

  It's amazing. What, uh, yeah, yeah. But what is the structure of the, of the parking market generally? I feel like, uh, I, I live in Pasadena. When I drive around, some of them are city owned, some of them valid and some of them don't. It feels very fragmented. It, I, I couldn't name one unified brand. But what, i- i- is the, is the structure of the parking owner market as fragmented as I perceive it to be?

• 2:52:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, completely. I mean, it's as fragmented as the real estate owner market, right? People that own real estate own parking. And there are, you know, hundreds of thousands of real estate owners from a Class A perspective all the way through an airport across the United States. And we deploy our technology to facilitate that type of seamless experience where a consumer can just drive in, get a text message when they arrive, and get charged when they leave.

• 2:52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, is that historically just because there's no economy of scale like there is in in real estate? Or is that just because the asset class is so big that you can't possibly own it all?

• 2:52:46Speaker 07

  It's just so sexy, you know? Everyone drives like Herbert and they're like parking.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:52:51Speaker 07

  You know, it's like, no, it's like the last bastion of non-institutionalized real estate in the United States.

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 2:52:57Speaker 07

  And it's everywhere. It's 15% of the surface area of our cities. And for us, it was the first touch point. And to your comment earlier, we realized that if we can roll out parking and we can deploy a seamless payment product across parking, then we can move into gas stations and car wash and quick serve retail. And then we can move past the car and into the store.

• 2:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you talk about the, uh, the kind of longer term vision for city parking? I feel like there's, with autonomous cars, people are excited about maybe reclaiming some green space. Whenever I see a big city and there's just like one flat parking lot, I'm like, that would be way more efficient if it was like three stories of underground parking and then a massive building on top with some mixed retail and some.

• 2:53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and on the autonomous cars, people like to say, oh, when we have autonomous cars, we'll need less parking in cities. And, and, and I can see that in some way, but, but at the same time, I'm not excited to spend every day in Waymos, effectively taxis. I am excited to have my own autonomous car. And the idea that I would drive into the city and then my car would just be driving around all day, like it's got to go somewhere while I'm, while I'm podcasting, right? Like it's can't, you know, so, so it's going to be parked somewhere. And so I think the sense that autonomous driving is going to eliminate the need for, for parking is, is, um, or, or certain, you know, some, some of the parking in, in cities is maybe off base.

• 2:54:24Speaker 07

  No, look, I think it's an interesting question. I mean, when we founded the company, we spent a lot of time thinking about the future of autonomous vehicles. And to your point, like cars are not going to circle the block endlessly looking for their next job. They're going to get off the road and back onto the road as quickly as possible. And that's the conversion of parking from parking lot to mobility hub. You know, where you can facilitate the cleaning, servicing, charging and deploying of vehicles. I mean, at this point, our underlying technology enables kind of seamless. I would say integration or connectivity between an autonomous vehicle and old world infrastructure. I mean, at this point, we're interacting with millions of Americans every single day that are on our platform or interacting with our locations.

• 2:55:07Speaker 07

  And I think at this point, we're onboarding fifty thousand Americans every single day that are signing up for the first time with Metropolis.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, the idea, you know, uh, you're not gonna, a Waymo is not gonna have like a, a humanoid robot in it that presses the parking ticket. You know, button when it's coming in and, and then is like feeding the ticket back in it obviously would just happen. You know, if Metropolis can be that hub for, for autonomous vehicles, that it makes, makes a ton of sense.

• 2:55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, talk to me about, uh, the, like, the evolution of financing. You're obviously using a lot of venture capital, but I imagine that it's a certain point. Um, you need to interface with private equity firms or banks or debt providers. How, how can you get creative with the, uh, with the different structuring financially on some of these larger deals? And can you give me kind of like a one oh, one oh one on what it, what it takes to get a billion dollar deal done these days?

• 2:56:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, we did, you know, the last deal was a one point eight billion dollar Series C.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  Huge, huge.

• 2:56:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, listen, we took an old world, you know, hundred year old company that was publicly traded private.

• 2:56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:16Speaker 07

  And, yeah, look, it's, if you look at our cap table, it's exactly that. It's venture and private equity in the same rounds. So last round was Eldridge, Vista, Three L, Tomasek, Vista, BDT MSD. Um, and like you normally don't find all of those players in one.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Party round.

• 2:56:38Speaker 07

  But yeah, look, I think that you guys talk about this more than I do, but the capital markets operate very clearly in these very set boxes. It's credit, it's private equity, it's growth, and we kind of broke through that with an entirely different strategy, which is, how do you take next generation technology and artificial intelligence and start acquiring old world businesses to scale into the market even faster? But in the context to your question, in the context of our business, it's structured to a great extent like any series C venture company would be structured.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Talk to me about what the communications challenge of taking over a 100-year-old company. It feels like you're fortunate that you don't have the stench of maybe like, oh, we're gonna buy and lay everyone off. But it is change management, it is a new structure in the organization. I'm sure there's some communication that you have to do when you buy a company. What has that been like and what are kind of the best practices?

• 2:57:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, look, I think that we went from a 200-person company organically to a 2,000-person company with our first inorganic acquisition, and then to a 23,000-person company with employees in 400 cities. So yeah, there's massive change management, there's massive internal communication protocols. But I'd say first and foremost, it's like, how do we put our employees and our team first? And you're right, we were lucky because this was not a turnaround. This was not a structure where we're looking for cost synergy. Metropolis and this strategy of taking these old world companies private was all about revenue synergy.

• 2:58:15Speaker 07

  It was how can we drive more revenue and more value, not only to real estate owners, but to our employees and our team members? So it's been exciting. And what we found is, it's really interesting, you see cultural friction on both sides. You see cultural friction in the engineer that's worked at Amazon for 10 years that now works for Metropolis, and then you see friction on the parking attendant. But you find people that are really excited about building a hyperscaler and really excited about how they can leverage and build on the existing infrastructure of this 100-year-old company.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:58:51Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 2:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Come back on when you're, when you have a good reason for us to hit the size gong.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to.

• 2:58:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you'll have, I'm sure you'll have many more in the near future. This is great.

• 2:59:01John Coogan?

  Looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time, guys.

• 2:59:03Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you soon. Cheers.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  Bye. Next up, we have Andrew Huberman joining the stream. We'll bring him in in just a second. We have some breaking news, too. Scott Wu has posted about the new model from OpenAI, 03 Price Drop makes it 15 times cheaper than GPT-4 32K, the state of the art model from two years ago. Meanwhile, the number of use cases is probably up 1 million X. Kudos to the OpenAI team for dropping the price. So congratulations to everyone over there. And welcome to the stream, Andrew. How are you doing?

• 2:59:34Speaker 08

  Great. Great to see you.

• 2:59:36Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's new in your world?

• 2:59:39Speaker 08

  What's new? Goodness, this week we have a big episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast out with the current NIH Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's a MD and a PhD. He has a unique background because he has a background in medicine, obviously, the MD, but he also has a background in economics.

• 2:59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:57Speaker 08

  Incidentally, did his undergraduate, master's, PhD, and medical school training, and then was a professor of medicine at Stanford. So, you know, he's at, he's Stanford the whole way. And as NIH Director, right, he, he holds a ton of power over what happens for the future of basic and clinical research. And he looks at all of that through the lens of an economist, but mostly through the lens of a, you know, public health official. So it's a very unique perspective. And folks on X will recognize it.

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:29Speaker 08

  Vocal. I don't want to speak for him and label, we have to be careful with labels, but

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:00:35Speaker 08

  Anti-lockdown, I don't know.

• 3:00:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:38Speaker 08

  You know, not, not a huge fan of the lockdowns for most people, right? He, he does say that there are certain populations that he felt should have been Kept indoors, but other folks probably in his view should have had more options.

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's a long episode. I wanted to basically get a preview of it. You guys focus on a couple of things. One, how to fix the issues with science and two, the importance of funding research. Both, sorry, basic research and then applied research. So why don't we kind of cover?

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  My, yeah, my big question was like, the narrative right now is that research funding is being cut like immensely. And I was wondering if you, if you got a feel for how severe the cuts are, is the narrative overblown? What is the balance of cuts between applied and basic research? And then we can kind of go into some of the implications of that.

• 3:01:33Speaker 08

  Sure. Okay, so there is an upcoming vote in Congress in September, I believe. And it's on the table to cut the overall budget for research for NIH by 40%, 4-0.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  That's huge.

• 3:01:48Speaker 08

  Which is huge.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  That's huge.

• 3:01:50Speaker 08

  The budget for research at NIH, there are multiple dimensions to NIH and I don't want to get lost in the weeds of it. It's a, you know, it's just something I'm very familiar with. I was on grants panels for, you know, over a decade. My lab was funded by NIH. We could go really deep into the weeds, but let's just keep it pretty simple. NIH funds basic research, which is research that it's not specifically geared toward understanding the, or trying to solve a particular cure or treatment for a disease. So think all, everything we understand about cell biology, not everything, but much of what we understand about cell biology.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:21Speaker 08

  It was because of NIH funded research into the functioning of the cell over the course of, you know, 50 or more years. And that led to important implications for treatments and cures for cancer. We don't have a quote unquote cure for all cancers, but many cancers now can be cured.

• 3:02:38Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, these are non-commercial. This is like non-commercial research, so things that we cover a lot of.

• 3:02:45Speaker 08

  Can't even be patented, right?

• 3:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we cover a lot of.

• 3:02:48Speaker 08

  Cannot be patented. So, basic research is, you know, a laboratory wants to understand how cells work, how neurons work, how the immune system functions, gut-brain axis,

• 3:02:59Speaker 08

  studies on, you know, how stress impacts health, sleep, etc. Then the applied work is also funded by NIH. So, clinical trials are funded by NIH. This is an enormous portion of the overall budget. The exact division between basic and clinical trial funding is hard to demarcate. But let's just, for sake of this conversation, just agree, because it's true that most of the basic research and clinical trials that are run in the United States are funded by the NIH. The NSF is a separate entity, right? But NIH's, its specific goal is to improve the health and longevity of American citizens, and by extension, the rest of the world, right? Because it is fair to say that while there are excellent, you know,

• 3:03:44Speaker 08

  research funding bodies in the UK, and Germany, and Switzerland, and all over Asia and around the world, that the NIH, when people say it's the crown jewel, it's the one that's devoted the most billions of dollars to basic and applied research. And it's no coincidence that the majority of Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine, and chemistry and related fields have come from work that was either initially seeded by or certainly supported by the NIH. So, you can't overstate the importance of NIH funding basic and applied research. That overall budget is facing a 40% cut in September. Now, you know, I'm hearing two things out there, right? I wear many hats. One is, my lab ran on NIH money. It no longer depends on NIH money.

• 3:04:29Speaker 08

  There, I'm a podcaster, so I have the ear of folks who are like, this is really scary, right? It gets very political, because the current administration seems to be taking a more. Like they're going to revise the way that NIH is structured potentially twenty plus institutes down to eight. So all of it looks like downsizing. There are a lot of people who are terrified about this. Okay, there's another camp that I hear from a lot, and I can't even say particularly on X. And I want to be very clear, this camp doesn't always lean right. It's it's pretty even across the board, that are saying, wait a second, why are we giving so much money to these universities to do research from our tax dollars? And I know this will upset people who are science minded,

• 3:05:14Speaker 08

  as I am, who care about science, but they're saying, why are we doing this? Right? Some of these universities, not all, but some of them, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UT, Austin, etc. The private universities often, although some public ones do, have very large endowments. And they're thinking, why are we funding so much of this work? Maybe these tax dollars should go elsewhere. There's another key issue, and this came up during the discussion with Dr. Bhattacharya, which is, there are many, many people, okay, I'm just, who voiced to me that they don't want to give their tax dollars to basic or applied research at all. Okay, this is a large and growing crowd, because they feel that there needs to be, for lack of a better way to put it, some

• 3:05:55Speaker 08

  truth and reconciliation. Right? They want two things acknowledged. And I've, and I've actually heard this from many of the, let's just say, the highly recognizable names in the, in the world of Silicon Valley, um, super tech, or, or founders and funders and, and investors, etc. And those two things are the following. One, they want the NIH to acknowledge, or CDC and/or others in government, to acknowledge that there were, in their mind, failures during the pandemic, in particular lockdowns that impacted the non-laptop class. Okay, we're talking about janitors, um, staff, teachers, kids, etc., that basically had to halt their work and their income.

• 3:06:38Speaker 08

  They're, they're pissed off about this, right? That no one's kind of acknowledged this. The other thing that they're very angry about Is the lack of acknowledgement from the scientific community that the science community makes errors. Sometimes errors that, for instance, in the field of Alzheimer's research, I want to point out, not all the work in the field of Alzheimer's is bad. Much of it is very solid or excellent. But they are frustrated by some recent kind of unveiling of the fact that there were findings that later were found to be fraudulent, basically, and that it was never checked up on. And then that opens up a whole discussion, which I also discussed with Dr. Bhattacharya, about what's being done to solve the so-called replication crisis.

• 3:07:20Speaker 08

  So they're upset about the about the public messaging around health and science, right? They would have preferred, it sounds like, that people in government say, hey, listen, you know, we have a virus that we don't understand, and we have ideas about what might control it, but we don't fully understand this. So it was very iterative, and a lot of people are pissed off, kind of like when you're, you know, fifteen or sixteen, and you're being told you can't stay out late, and then your parents are staying up late, or, you know, or like, we had governors who were saying you had to wear a mask, but then were taped in fancy restaurants on the northern coast, and, you know, restaurants, and like, much in the way that a teenager goes, wait a second, like, you smoked pot in college, and you're telling me not to smoke pot. Like, there's a logical flaw here, and we at least need to talk about it.

• 3:08:05Speaker 08

  So there's this kind of notion that, that this isn't my stance necessarily, I'd be happy to share my stance, but that the scientific community has kind of cloaked its errors. And so there are a lot of people in the general public, they're like, don't give these universities a dime, let them dip into their endowments. And the last thing I want to say about that is, not every university has large endowments. Most public universities do not have large endowments. It's also true that universities don't like to spend their endowments, and the typical way that they hide behind their endowments or endowment spending is to say, that money is earmarked for other things, right? So it's, which is not to say that it isn't, but, and then the last thing, and I know I'm going kind of fire hose here, but I want to make sure this comes out, is that the

• 3:08:47Speaker 08

  big issue that is really on the table as well is this notion of indirect costs. You guys are finance guys. So basically, a laboratory might get a grant of a million dollars across four years, so two fifty a year for four years. And the university then gets what are called indirect costs. They get, let's say, 500K typically. It's anywhere from 300K on the million to up to 750K on the million. There are a few cases of even more than that. The so-called indirect funds that take care of administrative costs and the basic costs of doing research. And earlier this year, the Trump administration said, we're cutting that to 15% across the board for all universities.

• 3:09:27Speaker 08

  And that was very prominent on X, because Elon retweeted it and a number of other people retweet it. And I would say, while the indirects have been very controversial, I just personally, it's my view. This is my personal view, is that a severe cut to the indirects, while on the face of it might sound good, that's going to disproportionately hurt the public schools without large endowments. Okay, because they don't have money to dip into. And, you know, something more in the range of 30% seemed reasonable to me, based on my understanding of what those funds are used for. But historically, there have been some challenges with indirects. You know, there were universities, I won't mention which, caught for spending some indirects on things that were unrelated to the science. You know, perhaps keeping the lights on in the English department. That's typically not the case now.

• 3:10:12Speaker 08

  It's for disposal of radioactive waste. It's for, yes, janitors, it's for painting the walls of the building. But it's not for making, you know, a lavish lifestyle for the administrators, right? If administrators have a lavish lifestyle, it's presumably through some other mechanism, not IDC.

• 3:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was some example, I don't know if it was UCSF or some school, where they had like a multi-hundred-million-dollar administrative budget. And I think people really wanted to push on that. And, but I think your concern is like, obviously, there's like this massive trust issue between the public and new parts of the administration and science. And how do we rebuild that trust without destroying the entire system, right? Is that, is that kind of?

• 3:10:54Speaker 08

  You nailed it. And I would like to just highlight in the backdrop of all of this, there is one very major emotional issue that I'm going to catch a lot of heat for this, but I don't really care anymore. And we're on X. So, you know, a lot of, I put out a post recently that said, hey, listen, I'm very concerned about this 40% overall cut as the most severe damage to science. We're not talking about allocation. We're not talking about indirects. We're not talking about what's going to happen with that with that body of money. We're just accept this 40% cut. And I'm very concerned about this. But I don't want to talk about, for instance, the fact that federal funding to Harvard or to Columbia has been frozen. And a lot of people said, well, why not? I have a lot of friends at Harvard

• 3:11:39Speaker 08

  Med and at Columbia and elsewhere. And they're like, wait, this is, why won't you talk about that? Well, that's actually a different issue, right? The reason that money has been frozen is that in the eyes of the administration, they are Harvard and Columbia are violating civil rights laws. Until that's resolved, there's no discussion about NIH to be had. It's not an NIH issue. It funnels through NIH money.

• 3:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are tying the issue even though just because it has some of the same buzzwords. That's interesting. I have a question about the 40%. I mean, there is a world where, like, where what becomes important is the ranking of what gets cut. And so my question is like, within the, within the basic research that you're seeing, what should we be fighting for hardest to keep? What basic science or applied science research are you most optimistic about going forward? Because we saw this with GLP-1s. I mean, I'm sure CRISPR, these stuff, this stuff was NIH funded at one point. There was a ton of research. And then we get this big boom, like, but it's 10 years later. What's on the frontier? What are you most excited about?

• 3:12:45John Coogan?

  And what should we be fighting for? Let's keep the funding there no matter what.

• 3:12:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, great, great question. In fact, the most important question. So regardless of whether or not this 40% cut happens, if it's less, if it's kept the same, a couple of things. First of all, despite the fact that NIH funds basic research and that many laboratories, including my own, for many years focused on basic research, like how does the visual system work, we always had an eye, every laboratory has an eye toward, you know, what the translational implications could be. Okay, so we were actively involved in trying to solve, you know, blindness due to glaucoma, even though we were focusing on some basic questions. So I think it's a statistical issue. If you step back and you say, okay, in the field of, let's just say, vision, my former field, what is the leading cause of blindness? Cataract. But you know what? You can fix cataract. You can slide out the

• 3:13:35Speaker 08

  lens and you put in a new lens. That's being done now. Great. What's the second leading cause of blindness? More than 70 million people worldwide, glaucoma. You can test for eye pressures, but once the cells in the eyes start deteriorating, people go blind, there's no recovering those cells. You could say, wow. So, okay, so let's take the top, let's take the statistically, the top causes of blindness, and let's, let's fund those. Okay. Retinitis pigmentosa, etc. You could do this for pretty much any field. So in the field of, of brain health, you'd say, okay, dementia, you'd say, major depression, you'd say a stroke, you'd say, you know, I'm gonna piss off some people because I'm not gonna mention their, their particular suffering, you know, here. But it's not hard

• 3:14:17Speaker 08

  to find Parkinson's, right? MS. I mean, it's not hard to know what the problems are to tackle. The problem is deciding what the targets are. And as you mentioned, like with CRISPR, I mean, in many ways, it was a fortuitous thing, right? Down in a lab was worrying on bacteria. I mean, it's, you know, it's very hard to predict what basic research is gonna lead into these different areas. But we, we know what the critical areas are. So I'm not trying to dodge your question. I do want to say that the emphasis from Maha on chronic disease and chronic health issues, I think has concerned some of the people in the scientific community because, listen, I as a podcaster that covers science and health will be the first to say that if you're not sleeping well, your mental health and physical health is

• 3:15:00Speaker 08

  not going to be good. You can miss a few nights sleep, but if you're chronically sleep deprived, you're sicker than you normally would be. If your gut health isn't proper, if you're not getting exercise, if you're not getting sunlight, if you're not doing these things, of course, right? But I think that people who are in the kind of hardcore mechanistic science community are like, great, we're all going to strive to do those things and we should, but not at the exclusion of figuring out signaling pathways that are vital for, like, the GLP-1s are a beautiful example, right? This peptide acts at the level of the brain and the gut to make people feel more full. It also, by the way, shut down the debate as to why people are fat. It's because they eat too much, right? They eat more than they burn. Remember, people used to argue about it? Yeah, yeah, totally. No, no, GLP-1 silenced that. Yeah.

• 3:15:45Speaker 08

  Now, are they eating too much because of a hormone issue related to having too much fat? Maybe there's some depression? Sure. Like, I fully acknowledge, like, I'm not trying to be completely insensitive, but like, but we isolated the problem by understanding that this peptide, discovered in, the discovery of this is worth spending two sentences on, please. A Gila monster, a reptile that doesn't need to eat very often, makes a lot of this peptide that it turns out is manufactured by humans too, and if you increase it thousands of old in humans, you know, you're not hungry anymore. And so I think that, you know, the guy studying Gila monster, I doubt was thinking about curing obesity, but there you go. Now, and of course, there's a debate to every one of these things. No medication should ever replace lifestyle factors, right?

• 3:16:30Speaker 08

  Yeah. There are many, I think we sometimes fail as healthy, fit people. We fail to understand that lifestyle factors are very hard for people to implement. Even if they have copious amounts of disposable income and some free time, it's just tough. It's just tough. It's hard to do. And so I think that the emphasis on nutrition and exercise is wonderful. I think, I don't think anyone on either side of the political debate would argue that Maha in principle, Make America Healthy Again, isn't a great thing. I think what they probably would appreciate hearing, now I'm speaking for kind of the more science mechanistic biology minded folks. They'd probably like to hear a little bit more about, hey, you know, they're probably signaling pathways in the brain

• 3:17:13Speaker 08

  that are relevant to, you know, to depression, that maybe a next class of antidepressant drugs are probably good. I don't think anyone would say there's no need to develop antidepressant drugs. We probably take too many of the ones that don't work and have too many side effects, but as a country. But so when you say, what are the most important things? What we really need is a, is a very rationally grounded planning committee. A sit back and say, you know what, we're going to put X number of dollars towards this, X number of dollars towards that, X number of dollars towards this. And this is where I think Dr. Bhattacharya really shined on the podcast. He said, and I would totally agree, and I got, I have already, my phone's been blowing up with some anger from colleagues about this.

• 3:17:54Speaker 08

  Much of the work that's funded by NIH, here's the dirty secret, is already completed. Because they tend to fund things that are very certain to be completed. And so people put forward grants based on work and preliminary data showing, I can do this, and it's already kind of worked out, then they use the money for the next iteration. This is the dirty secret of every NIH funded lab. And it tends to favor a kind of pedestrian, more pedestrian science. Then they use foundation money and they use other sources to kind of do the high risk stuff. But if you were to look at like one of the more impressive funding bodies in science, like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, right, gives the equivalent, HHMI folks, as they're called,

• 3:18:37Speaker 08

  never, they always say, it's not that much money, but let me, many, we can do the test, we can take away their money and we can see how well they do or don't do. They don't like doing that. It's like being on academic steroids, right? The equivalent of three grants per year, basically, NIH grants per year. And more money translates to, when it's excess money. I know that word excess money scares investors, especially if they're taxpayers. But if that money is being used to fund really, like really bold hypotheses, like, it's my opinion that every single peptide, not just GLP-1. Every single peptide shouldn't be getting tested in the gray market of gyms and biohacking. That's frankly, it's bullshit.

• 3:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and isn't the reason that we don't have good studies on a lot of peptides is it's not profitable to study them? Because they're effectively naturally occurring and you can't patent us like, am I correct there?

• 3:19:30Speaker 08

  Like BPC 157, right? You hear about that all the time is will it accelerate healing? You know, the animal studies are solid. There's no human studies. My good friend Peter Attia is like, I'm not going to touch that stuff. There's no clinical data in humans. And the rest of us are like, well, I take it and it works and there's no reason for a drug company to take it. I'll take it transiently for like a joint.

• 3:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the core issue and I've, yeah, yeah, I've taken it too. I've benefited from it. I recommended it to John a couple of weeks ago. He had, he had an injury. I just said, hey, I'm not going to like, this is not something I'm going to take, you know, weekly for my entire life, but in certain instances. But, but break down that specifically that you're saying because it's, because it's effectively science. There's not, there's no real ability. Would, would a drug company have to create some variation of it in order to patent it? Is that, is that?

• 3:20:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, in fact, here, I'm going to catch heat from everybody, but you know, the pharma companies that make GLP-1s. I mean, most people have realized that GLP-1s are very expensive and the dosages that they're typically prescribed, people get some discomfort. And so the new thing is people get it compounded at a compounding pharmacy and they're microdosing GLP-1s. The number of women that I know who are microdosing GLP-1 in service to the spring and summer, outrageous, right?

• 3:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, outrageous.

• 3:20:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's outrageous. And, and the idea is that it's, GLP-1 is a good example. I mean, again, insulin's a peptide, you know, but, but there are many peptides. Like for instance, I'm very excited about this peptide pinealine for, for sleep, right? And it's for some other properties too. But there's no reason why a drug company would go patent pinealine. They're busy patenting drugs like the recent class of drugs, the Doras. This is an interesting story. Work on, on a peptide called hypocretin.

• 3:21:25Speaker 08

  Uh, this peptide is involved in generating wakefulness. It's also in the feeding pathway. And there's a new class of sleep drugs that suppresses the wakefulness pathway as opposed to making you more sleepy. So lower abuse potential. The Doras have been released, right? They maintain the, the architecture of sleep pretty well compared to other sleep drugs like Ambien, et cetera. Here's the issue. They're about $325 a month. So for a lot of people, that's prohibitively expensive and they're patented.

• 3:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to put it in context, that's, that's a luxury gym membership.

• 3:21:54Speaker 08

  Right. Pinealine probably costs you, and I'm not suggesting people take pinealine. I'm not a physician, so talk to your physician and then ignore him or her. If you choose, don't, don't do, uh, what, don't do that on my, uh, on my suggestion. But you know, it costs you about $15 a month, right? And, and you know, it's, it's for me, for me personally has allowed me to, I get two and a half hours of REM sleep a night in a six hour sleep bout. So I've shortened my sleep bout to about six hours a night with a lot of deep sleep. And, and pinealine, is it completely safe? Reasonably, but we don't know. We don't have clinical trials. Now I'm willing to run that experiment on me.

• 3:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:29Speaker 08

  But are you willing to run that experiment on you is the question? And that's where it gets down to personal freedoms and, and that's a, you know, I don't want to cover too many things here. But the, I will say that Robert Kennedy has been pretty vocal about, at least before the election, about wanting things like peptides and stem cells and supplements to be more widely available. The truth is they're pretty widely available now. And I will put an asterisk on stem cells. I know a very prominent public facing physician who was almost paralyzed permanently from a stem cell injection into the disc of his back. I talked to a neurosurgeon friend who ultimately saved his life, by the way. Uh, I, this is a well-known story within the, the wellness community. And he said, yeah, you know, the discs can't accept stem cell injections.

• 3:23:13Speaker 08

  But if you go down to Mexico or you go out of country and you say, you know, my back is hurting, they'll inject stem cells into the disc of your back. So is this to say that stem cells are bad? No, they're not ready for clinical use yet. And the United States has been very careful about things like this because before they were careful. There was a clinic in, uh, down in Florida that injected some stem cells into the eyes of people with macular degeneration who were worried about going blind. And guess what? They all went blind right away, permanently. So I do want any discussion about peptides and these kind of things. When you get into the realm of stem cells, it starts getting to be a serious matter. So I don't want to give the, uh, the impression, I'm like, oh yeah, try this, do that, you know, shoulder hurt, put some stem cells in. When you're

• 3:23:55Speaker 08

  talking about stem cells, you're talking about cells that can become essentially anything, including tumors.

• 3:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, I'm curious, I mean, you, you and, and, uh, Rob, I feel like do such a good job of, of threading the sort of needle around having conversations without giving endorsements for specific things that are untested and, and really focused on, um, on understanding, uh, helping people understand the world, the science themselves, and then take the actions, um, that they themselves, as well as, um, you know, their, their doctors, uh, believe they should take. Do you think that, uh, podcasters generally in health, uh, don't really understand broadly the responsibility they have? I, I remember when

• 3:24:43Jordi Hays?

  I was in college, there was a popular tech podcaster at the time that would pretty much widely endorse microdosing, right? And I, I looked up, I looked up to this guy, right?

• 3:24:54John Coogan?

  Psychedelics, right?

• 3:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, psychedelics, right? And, and in hindsight, I look back on that and I'm like, that is so wild, wildly irresponsible to, to basically recommend, you know, that, that there's microdosing, some people report tremendous benefits, but to sort of broadly endorse something in hindsight feels insane. And I don't think people fully grasp the responsibility that they have and just how much impact they can have on an individual or, or how a community thinks about something.

• 3:25:23Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, Rob and I, we take it super seriously. I mean, I've probably taken, I've taken heat for a bunch of things in the larger science community, but probably one of the things I've taken the most heat for is, um, my belief that certain supplements can be helpful. Um, not as a replacement for, for, um, you know, good behaviors and for prescription drugs. I'm a fan of certain prescription drugs. Listen, I read an episode on ADHD and talked about the prescription drugs and took a ton of heat from the kind of natural, uh, folks. And then I did one on behavioral tools for ADHD and took a lot of heat from the folks who said, "Hey, listen, my kid got a lot of benefit from taking stimulants for ADHD." So we, we do weave back and forth and on that kind of knife edge, um, and it can be tricky. In terms of microdosing, because I saw it come up in the comments before today's discussion,

• 3:26:08Speaker 08

  and so it's just kind of flagged in my mind, there, the data on microdosing psilocybin are basically clear that it, it's not known to have any major effect on major depression, or some of the other things that psilocybin is being tested for clinically, um, including major depression, PTSD, et cetera. The data from clinical trials out of Robin Cardard Harris's lab at UCSF and elsewhere on high dose psilocybin, so macro dose, right, for, you know, two, two and a half grams, uh, four grams is the quote unquote heroic dose, if you're speaking Northern California language, um, you know, uh, uh, you know, those dosages done in, in pretty, uh, maybe, you know, two, two weeks apart or so, with the support of a clinical staff going into

• 3:26:52Speaker 08

  it, through it, out of it, et cetera, have been very successful in those trials for the treatment of, of depression. Microdosing has shown very little effect.

• 3:27:00Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:27:01Speaker 08

  Um, MDMA was, was put up to the FDA last year as a potential, um, treatment for PTSD. It has not been approved. It did not pass approval, uh, unfortunately, as a component of those trials, um, uh, there were some sexual improprieties in one of the clinical conditions that, you know, all it takes is, is, you know, one bad incident, right? And then it was very, but it cued people to this larger theme. How are you going to protect patients who are really incapac, they're not incapacitated, but they're not in a position to really advocate for themselves, that you need probably multiple clinicians in the room and checks and balances. So I think ultimately it will be approved. Um, the remission rates on PTSD, by the way, from, uh, Properly dosed and spaced MDMA is remarkable, up to somewhere between sixty and seventy percent

• 3:27:45Speaker 08

  remission rates on PTSD. And the new thing that people are very excited about is ibogaine or iboga. Twenty-two hour psychedelic journey. This has been tested largely from Nolan Williams' lab at Stanford. For the, it seems to, in one or two sessions, it has led to a significant number of veterans essentially ceasing their alcohol use disorder, what is typically called alcoholism and opioid use disorder. But you need to be heart rate monitored while you do this. The point here is that any discussion that we have on the podcast is, as you can tell, like, I'm not known for being very succinct, and it's for a reason, right? You have to flesh out the conversation around these things. You can't just say psilocybin is good, MDMA, yeah, like, works, great, mission, you know? People can really get hurt.

• 3:28:30Speaker 08

  And I think discussions around whether or not you take magnesium threonate or bisglycinate before sleep, like, okay, you can probably speed through those a little more quickly. But when you get down to things about psychoactive drugs, in particular, Schedule One, illegal psychoactive drugs, when you get down to things about hormone therapies, you know, you're just trying to get into the, into the realm of where people can really screw themselves up. That said, there's, you know, there are a number of things that I hope that the NIH and the, and the public health messaging going forward will be more expansive about, which are drugs that are currently prescribed at, at enormous rates in the United States and elsewhere, for which there are very severe side effects, like, like, there's this whole

• 3:29:12Speaker 08

  thing about people taking finasteride and dutasteride, men, to, to keep their hair, and getting permanent sexual dysfunction, right? Permanent sexual dysfunction, some of them killing themselves as a consequence of this. I mean, these are young guys, it's clear those drugs have very different effects in young people versus old, some people can use them safely, some people can't. These are FDA-approved drugs, as well as, you know, I think we're finally coming around to the idea that the SSRIs can be very useful for things like OCD, in certain cases for depression, but it's, it's a double-edged blade, a lot of people suffered it as a consequence. So, I, I hope that, I, I hope really strongly for three things. One, as a scientist who essentially has my podcasting job because of the way the NIH supported me coming up through graduate school, postdoc, my lab, I think a forty percent cut

• 3:29:58Speaker 08

  Would be too severe. Regardless of the IDC issue, I, I think it's just too severe. It's going to kneecap science throughout the world and health. The growth of new discoveries throughout the world. I'd like to keep that funding level. I really would. What happens to IDC? What happens to Harvard and Columbia? Separate matter within there. But then I would very much like a, a very thoughtful committee to go in and look at every single grant. Every single grant by area.

• 3:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to have a scalpel, not a, not a.

• 3:30:30Speaker 08

  Scalpel. And you could say, I mean, listen, in the field of neuroscience, am I the most qualified to decide what grants should be funded or not funded? No, but I can tell you that I sat on study section for a long time and I can tell you there were clusters of grants. That didn't solve what we call, what good labs call the deletion test. If this laboratory didn't exist, would it change the direction of science? You have to pass the deletion test. It's not solved. You have to pass the deletion test. If you didn't exist, would it matter? That's a harsh test. Nobody wants to be subject to that test. But anyone that's getting millions and millions of taxpayer dollars, and by the way, millions of taxpayer dollars often to work on and kill. And we could argue about the, I think most people are specious. They'd rather see a mouse or a rat life or a non-human primate life. You know, we're, we're killing animals.

• 3:31:14Speaker 08

  We're, um, we're occupying the lives of graduate students and post-docs with taxpayer dollars. The, the work needs to be justified by passing the deletion test. And the idea that AI could, you know, do that, maybe. But the idea that a jury of close peers are going to decide the deletion test. And if you pass, that's flawed in my opinion. Because the in culture, we don't have time for this, but the in culture of sciences, you know, people aren't like helping each other out just to help each other out. But when you're very close to something, it's very hard to make a really clear decision about it. And when you're too far from it, you're not, you're not qualified to. So we need people that are in the middle. Who can really go in and say, okay, in the field of, of let's say, visual repair and neuroscience, give me a scalpel. I hate to do it, but also, you know, some are gonna pass.

• 3:31:59Speaker 08

  And then I do think that instead of cutting people's funding entirely, there should be initiative saying, hey, listen, if you wanna run a laboratory, would you be interested in working on these important projects that maybe the Americans paying for this research ought to be able to to vote, upvote? Why not? I mean, it's 2025 and the NIH has done beautiful work over the last, funded beautiful work over the last hundred years. But I think an update in the way these things are handled is great. As I say that, every single one of my colleagues is probably quaking that they're not gonna pass the deletion test, except the ones that know they would absolutely pass the deletion test. And then the question is, who's making the decision? And I'm not saying I should be making that decision, although I have some strong opinions about what's great, what's meh, and and what's like lousy.

• 3:32:43Speaker 08

  But I do think we need, we need to be more discerning, the same way that a bunch of VCs would sit around and say, like, hey, what are we getting for this investment?

• 3:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think the question they ask is if we don't make this investment, is the is the world gonna be, you know, worse off? Like, does this company, you know, I think it's not the quite the same test, but I think it's important for investors to run that that process and understand, are we really funding the future that we want? Or is this kind of a rounding error and the dollars would be better elsewhere?

• 3:33:13John Coogan?

  Can you give us a white pill? Like, are there any other organizations that can come in and help? I I always think of what happened in computer science and artificial intelligence. Google created the transformer architecture, not patentable. It created large language models and we got chat GPT and we got all this great stuff. It would be amazing if we could find a way that the big pharma companies that are big and profitable wind up stepping in and funding some of the gap. Maybe there's nonprofits, maybe we just, you know, the the sheer will of the American people, we wind up voting for more funding. But how do we really make science amazing and ensure really strong progression over the next few decades?

• 3:33:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, it's that's the the key question, right? So I mean, listen, I grew I was born at Stanford Hospital. Yeah, did my training, much of it at Stanford. I'm gonna say I'll probably die at Stanford. I'm in the hospital. I'd like to die, get in the morning sunlight or something, but. My dad's my dad's a physicist turned computer scientist, right? Worked at Xerox PARC, which was an incubator for ideas, right? So I grew up in that landscape. And, you know, he always said, you know, eventually degrees in computer science will be important for starting companies, right? But when I was young, that wasn't the case, right? People dorked around on computers and made video games. And and then we saw cell biology migrate into the world of biotech and for the treatment of certain diseases. It has been, I mean, we can't forget that there are certain basic discoveries, going back to our earlier discussion, that have led to

• 3:34:40Speaker 08

  tremendous treatments like the drops to lower eye pressure and glaucoma. If you catch your eye pressure elevation early and you take those drops, you will keep your vision. Wow. Right? You'll keep your vision. So it's not like we can't cure glaucoma, but you have to, that's based on basic work. So the real key here is to ask, you know, so where has it been done successfully before? It's been done successfully in in the world of computer science and AI. Right? Growing up, I heard about AI. It was kind of like, like, no one, no one took AI seriously growing up or brain machine interface was like. It's just sci fi. That was so. Seriously. Now, my good friend from from childhood, Eddie Cheng, is the Chair of Neurosurgery at UCSF.

• 3:35:17Speaker 08

  I mean, he's using BMI, brain machine interface and AI to get people with locked in syndrome to to speak and to and Elon's gonna get them to move. I fully believe that Neuralink is gonna solve paralysis. Really do. I'm not saying that because we're on X. It's I know, I know the head neurosurgeon there. They're well on their way, right? Yeah. So the question is, what, when should it move into biotech? And, you know, Peter Thiel had the breakthrough labs idea. He was paying people to not go pursue graduate degrees in labs to get the PI like me, papers and advance their careers and then maybe go get their own lab, but to take great ideas and go to through breakthrough labs. I don't know what happened to breakthrough labs, but I do think that incubators like that, where you have enough money to test,

• 3:36:00Speaker 08

  you know, to move fast, right? You know, move fast, break things model, figure out whether or not something is promising and then advance, advance that. And here's the key. As soon as something looks promising, you want to be able to pour. Human power onto that. And the problem in academia is every graduate student in postdoc needs a first author paper in order to have the potential to get a job. And so one thing that I'm, I've, you know, been in Jay Bhattacharya's ear about is, you know, I think, I think the, the independent investigator model of science in this country, where it's the Huberman Lab, or it's the whatever lab named after the P I. I think that's a flawed model. This is going to really upset some people. There should be labs named after a particular mission, like curing blindness laboratory, or solving Alzheimer's laboratory.

• 3:36:45Speaker 08

  And then people can collaborate within that lab without the idea that they're necessarily going to go start their own lab. In, in Europe, typically there's a lab head and it's, it's very hierarchical, but people who get PhDs often stay in those labs as permanent careers. They get paid better and better. The NIH has not had a mode to keep paying people as staff scientists. And most people don't want to go off and run their own labs. So I think the ability to iterate more quickly, much like a, a tech company funded by NIH would be enormously beneficial. And I, I could be wrong, but I think it's going to be music to most people who would like to go to graduate school. Because what it means is that you can be on the bench next to someone and they get the thing that's really interesting. And rather than feel like, shit, I got nothing. You can now start working together to accelerate the progress of that work.

• 3:37:29Speaker 08

  And so you, now, who can go off and run a lab becomes a separate issue, but it's really becomes discovery based science. And, and we can't forget that the taxpayers are funding this, right? So this is like, as much as we'd all like it, the next generation of scientists to all have their own labs. I think what we really want is for the next generation of scientists to have the opportunity to make fundamental discoveries that seed health and cures and treatments for disease, right?

• 3:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:56Speaker 08

  I mean, really, do we really care about the careers of scientists? No. That we care about treatments for cure, treatments and cures for disease. The careerist model-

• 3:38:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, I do think, I do think it matters that, that young people aspire to be scientists.

• 3:38:10Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 3:38:10Jordi Hays?

  And that is a concern that I have about the destruction of, of trust between the public and the science community via COVID. The concern is that you'll have a, a, you know, a 10 year period, a decade, you know, a decade. Where young, young people say, well, I'm not going to go into science because they have some, and I, and I think that that's the work that, that you do with Huberman Lab has potential to heal that divide between the public and the science community and, and one of the reasons why I think it's so important.

• 3:38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I listen, one of the most, the three most gratifying things I can hear as feedback for the podcast are, I can't believe this is free, you know, that, that feels good, that people are sleeping better, like, oh goodness, I made a few morning sunlight and dim the lights and a few things in the evening and like I'm sleeping better because I know that catalyzes many, many other positive changes. And then the third one, and the one that's most heartening to me as a scientist, less as a, you know, a health podcaster, is when people say like, you really turned me on to like neuroscience, or, you know, or I'm going into the field of psychology, I want to be a therapist, but I'm really starting to incorporate some physiological tools with my patients. That to me is, those are the three most gratifying things, you know, I, as you can probably tell,

• 3:39:23Speaker 08

  I'm very impassioned by this, right? Folks close to me know this is how I talk all the time. No, I haven't had any caffeine in the last, you know, four or five hours, just kind of.

• 3:39:31Jordi Hays?

  We, we have, we have.

• 3:39:33Speaker 08

  I do, I do. I'm glad you love this stuff.

• 3:39:37John Coogan?

  We love it. We drink it every day.

• 3:39:39Jordi Hays?

  We debated, I, I, we didn't have time, but I debated having you join the call and it was just stacks of cans, so you couldn't even see us.

• 3:39:45Speaker 08

  I do four of these a morning, minimum. But I have a very high caffeine tolerance and, you know, in.

• 3:39:52John Coogan?

  Fast metabolizer.

• 3:39:53Speaker 08

  Fast metabolizer and, and you know, there are many issues I care deeply about, but what you just put your finger on is so key. If this 40%, I know people are like, don't give them this money, they fucked up during the pandemic, excuse my language, or they lied. Listen, these kids that would potentially become scientists, we can harness their energy, they didn't lie, they didn't do anything wrong. And if you, if we train them properly and we put them into an environment where, where the spirit of that environment is just discovery based, maybe a little less careerist, a little more discovery based, you know, and we really fund the most important work.

• 3:40:29Speaker 08

  We can really transform the treatment and cures for all these diseases that everyone is so concerned about. I I know that because it's proved to be the case every single time. If you look at AIDS, there are two things that led to the treatments and, you know, AIDS isn't fully cured, but it's a very different landscape now than in the eighties. Two things, right? Money and emotion. And it came emotion first and money, and then a bunch of scientists in labs and a bunch of funding. Okay, so where the reason we don't have a cure for schizophrenia, even though it's 1% of the world's population, is sadly, it tends to run in families. There's not a strong lobby for for research on schizophrenia. The director of NIMH told me that, former director, Bob Desamme. The reason there's so much interest in autism is that any human being with half a heart looks at a kid,

• 3:41:14Speaker 08

  and I'm not talking about kids that are on the spectrum or a little neurodivergent who, you know, I I work with those people, like, we're not talking about that. I'm talking about kids that have, like, stereotype motion, can't be in an open environment, will forever need support. I'm not I'm not trying to, like, split the spectrum, but there are there are kids on the spectrum that really struggle, right? And so the reason there's so much interest in in finding treatments for things like that or for major depression is because many, many people suffer, right? And what's required is money and scientists working on the right problems and ditching the things that aren't promising. The faster you can iterate, the better. And so I do think the Silicon Valley model has something to offer. And I don't know what the latest update is on breakthrough labs and if Peters moved on from that.

• 3:41:58Speaker 08

  I haven't heard much about it, but that doesn't mean that they don't have something interesting. But, look, I

• 3:42:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the key is like if if you have one, you know, one car that that comes out, it's not so great, you don't destroy the car industry. You know, you don't like basically dismantle the entire system. This car, you know, hurt people, so we should just eliminate all cars, you know?

• 3:42:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, look, I think in in engineering, we're on X after all, like, in engineering, more of an engineering stance on on basic research is helpful. It's also true that, you know, I can name off countless discoveries in biology where, you know, in an accident of leaving something, you know, on the shelf too long or something led to an interesting discovery. I mean, there is some fortuitous aspect to it, but Now with AI, you can also run lots of hypotheses in Silico. More in vitro, then move to in vivo models. I mean, there is a way to make the money go further. But ultimately, there's no replacement for great ideas. And there's no replacement for the for human energy. And the best source of human energy that I know is youth.

• 3:43:06Speaker 08

  And so you you need to catch people when they're coming out of college. Not send them to work in a lab for three years before they might go to graduate school, then realize that they can't make a good living compared to their friends in finance like. You're not going to get rich doing science, although some scientists do get rich, right? I mean, Genentech was started by scientists. I mean, there are companies, you know. But ultimately, you want to harness that that energy of youth and the spirit of discovery and give people the resources. Now, I had wonderful mentors and and one of the most important things they taught me was you get money, you give it to young people and you get the fuck out of their way and let them try. And and then when they don't work, you you guide them and you say, listen, like, you're wasting your time, move on.

• 3:43:48Speaker 08

  Like, no, no, no, no. And they get down to it. No, move on. It's like a bad relationship. Cut and run. And then you just start the next thing. And so and eventually you get hits. And then if you compile human power onto those hits, right? I'm just describing what everyone knows to be true, but this is not the way that the system has been designed. It is. It is old and clunky. And it doesn't need to be scraped or, you know, hacked in half almost at a forty percent cut, but it does need to be revised. It really does.

• 3:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:19John Coogan?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 3:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is fantastic.

• 3:44:22John Coogan?

  I want to hit the gong for you. Can you give us a stat? How big is the Huberman Huberman Lab podcast now? Can you give us an idea of the scale of the impact you've had? We like to hit the gong when we hear big numbers.

• 3:44:34Jordi Hays?

  He's looking over at Rob.

• 3:44:35John Coogan?

  He's like, no, no, don't leak any of it.

• 3:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Even some rough numbers.

• 3:44:37John Coogan?

  Just any number, maybe just one episode hit a million downloads. Give us some number, something.

• 3:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Those are rookie numbers.

• 3:44:43John Coogan?

  Those are rookie numbers.

• 3:44:45Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:44:47Speaker 08

  So, well, can I say one thing first?

• 3:44:49John Coogan?

  Please, anything.

• 3:44:49Speaker 08

  That, you know, rankings reflect acceleration, not absolute reach.

• 3:44:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:54Speaker 08

  Like Rogan, like when people go like Rogan's not in, Rogan's reach is like beyond. I, I know the numbers, I, I'm not going to talk about his numbers, but it's, it's like, it's in order of magnitude greater than all the other major news hubs combined.

• 3:45:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:08Speaker 08

  Unbelievable. Uh, but no, we, we are very blessed to reach, um, you know, 20 million people.

• 3:45:15John Coogan?

  20 million people. Let's go. Let's hit the gong.

• 3:45:20John Coogan?

  So much for coming on.

• 3:45:23Jordi Hays?

  This was, uh, an important conversation.

• 3:45:26John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 3:45:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited for people to get the, uh, get into the entire episode.

• 3:45:30John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. It's fantastic. It's over four hours long.

• 3:45:32Speaker 08

  No, and thank you. So if nothing else, you know, with the Huberman Lab Podcast, I, I always say, if nothing else, I'll cure insomnia. But no, the, um,

• 3:45:40Speaker 08

  you know, it's timestamped so you can break it down. If you want to get right to the vaccine stuff, skip to that.

• 3:45:44John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. I listened to it last night.

• 3:45:46Speaker 08

  Podcast can be digested however you want.

• 3:45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:49Speaker 08

  I want to say thanks to you guys. I started watching your show since you had Rob on.

• 3:45:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:45:53Speaker 08

  What you guys do is great. I also think that you're transforming the way that media is, is, you know, dispersed each week and, you know, and, and it's awesome.

• 3:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:01Speaker 08

  You guys on X doing what you do and elsewhere. So that, thanks so much.

• 3:46:04John Coogan?

  We appreciate it. Yeah.

• 3:46:05Jordi Hays?

  You guys are both welcome anytime.

• 3:46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, anytime.

• 3:46:07Jordi Hays?

  This is really fun.

• 3:46:08Speaker 08

  If you ever need more Matina, let us know.

• 3:46:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:46:10Jordi Hays?

  We got a fridge coming. We got a fridge. We're going to park a fridge right here.

• 3:46:14John Coogan?

  We're going to do it. The guys, the whole, the whole crew back there is, is cheering.

• 3:46:17Speaker 08

  Where are you guys based?

• 3:46:18John Coogan?

  We're in Los Angeles in Hollywood.

• 3:46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:20John Coogan?

  All right. We'll come right over.

• 3:46:22Speaker 08

  It's a nice day.

• 3:46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you soon. Thanks so much for having us.

• 3:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. You're the man. Cheers.

• 3:46:26Speaker 08

  All right.

• 3:46:27John Coogan?

  Uh, fantastic episode. Very fun.

• 3:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks, we had 30 minutes scheduled with Andrew and we just.

• 3:46:34John Coogan?

  We went longer, but we have some breaking news. We can go to the breaking news camera.

• 3:46:38Jordi Hays?

  The breaking news printer.

• 3:46:40John Coogan?

  The breaking news printer.

• 3:46:41Jordi Hays?

  If you want breaking news.

• 3:46:42John Coogan?

  Watch it live as it comes out. I got a note that it's slightly out.

• 3:46:47Jordi Hays?

  I see the laser working.

• 3:46:48John Coogan?

  There we go. What is this? What is this?

• 3:46:50Jordi Hays?

  What we got? Whoa.

• 3:46:51John Coogan?

  Shane Copeland at Polymarket says X and XAI are live on Polymarket. When I check Polymarket to get a gist of what's going on in the world, I always wish there was more context. Now there is the first of many XAI partners with Polymarket to blend market predictions with X data and Grok's analysis. Hardcore Truth Engine. See what shapes the world.

• 3:47:11Jordi Hays?

  The Truth Engine. Let's give it up for Truth Engines.

• 3:47:14John Coogan?

  We love Truth Engines. This has been a fantastic show. We will be at YC Demo Day tomorrow. We have a flight to catch. We covered most of the news. You've heard it. We talked about it yesterday. OpenAI hit 10 billion in ARR, almost 2X since the end of 2024. Yeah, it's just casual 10 billion ARR. You know, it happens.

• 3:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Happens all the time.

• 3:47:37John Coogan?

  Yep. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it for the timeline. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover, but I mean, maybe we can close it out with this fantastic post from Mert, who's been on the show from Helios. He says, "Having $300 million liquid is truly an interesting limbo. Golden handcuffs in a way. You have almost infinite money for daily expenses like groceries, Amazon binges, and chill little vacations, but you can't really splurge on anything sick. You have just enough money to think about making a real boy amount, but a razor-thin margin for error if you screw it up. You're also at the exact amount where it becomes cozy and hard to motivate yourself to go that much harder." Tough spot, TBH.

• 3:48:18Jordi Hays?

  Tough spot.

• 3:48:20John Coogan?

  Oh, we love Mert. He's an all-time poster. I love him. We got to get him back on the show. He's so fun.

• 3:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 3:48:26John Coogan?

  This is great. Yeah, we'll always close out with a banger. Anyway, thanks for watching.

• 3:48:30Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to tomorrow.

• 3:48:30John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify if you're in SF and you're at Demo Day, come by and say hi. We'd love to talk to you.

• 3:48:36Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to it.

• 3:48:37John Coogan?

  Have a great one, folks. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.