David Sacked by NYT, Sir Dylan Patel Joins, Kushner & Sama are Thriving | Ro Khanna, Jonathan Swerdlin, Cristóbal Valenzuela, Vincent Weisser, Ben Hylak, Alby Churven

(00:16) - Alby Churven is a teenage entrepreneur from Sydney who, by age 14, has already founded Finkle, a gamified learning platform aimed at teaching teens coding, entrepreneurship, AI, and real-world skills. He began coding when he was six years old, and previously built Roblox games and a youth-oriented soccer brand before pitching Finkle to Y Combinator (Winter 2026). Alby’s vision blends youthful creativity with a mission to rethink education — and his journey has drawn global attention for ambition and boldness. (07:22) - Three Years Since the Launch of ChatGPT (13:06) - Gemini Surges (20:17) - David Sacked by NYT (39:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:19) - Dylan Patel, Founder and Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, discusses Google's strategy to sell Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) externally, highlighting the challenges posed by their non-standard design and the need for broader software support. He emphasizes the importance of open-source software in expanding TPU adoption and notes that while Google's internal software stack is robust, making it accessible to external customers is crucial. Patel also touches on the competitive dynamics between Google and Nvidia, particularly regarding hardware performance, software ecosystems, and market positioning. (01:33:48) - Ro Khanna, a Democratic U. S. Representative from California's 17th congressional district, is known for his advocacy on technology, economic equity, and transparency. In the conversation, he discusses his legislative efforts, including the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandates the release of all Justice Department files related to Jeffrey Epstein, aiming to hold powerful individuals accountable and restore public trust. Khanna also addresses the impact of artificial intelligence on employment, emphasizing the need for policies that enhance human capabilities rather than replace workers, and highlights the importance of balancing technological advancement with job preservation to maintain social cohesion. (02:11:19) - Jonathan Swerdlin, co-founder and CEO of Function Health, is dedicated to empowering individuals to proactively manage their health through comprehensive lab testing and advanced imaging services. In the conversation, he discusses Function's mission to provide affordable access to over 160 lab tests and full-body MRI scans, enabling early detection of potential health issues. Swerdlin emphasizes the importance of utilizing technology to make personalized health data accessible, aiming to help people live longer, healthier lives. (02:27:59) - Thrive Announces Partnership with OpenAI (02:29:55) - Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO and co-founder of Runway, discusses the release of Gen-4.5, the company's latest AI video generation model. Gen-4.5 achieves unprecedented visual fidelity and creative control, producing cinematic and highly realistic outputs while providing precise control over every aspect of generation. Valenzuela highlights that Gen-4.5 has surpassed competitors like Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora 2 Pro, securing the top position on the Artificial Analysis Text to Video benchmark. (02:46:41) - Vincent Weisser, CEO of Prime Intellect, discusses the recent release of Intellect 3, a 100-billion parameter model developed through scaled reinforcement learning and post-training, achieving state-of-the-art performance at a smaller scale. He highlights the creation of an open environment where contributors worldwide can develop reinforcement learning environments, enhancing the model's capabilities across various tasks. Weisser emphasizes the trend of open-source models matching closed models' performance and the potential for businesses to fine-tune models for specific applications, leading to better performance and cost efficiency. (03:01:01) - Ben Hylak, co-founder and CTO of Raindrop—a company providing monitoring solutions for AI agents—discusses the challenges of silent failures in AI systems and the importance of real-time monitoring to detect and address these issues. He highlights how Raindrop's platform processes millions of events daily, enabling engineering teams to identify complex problems like tool call failures and user frustration. Additionally, Hylak shares that Raindrop recently secured $15 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to further develop their monitoring infrastructure. (03:17:02) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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 Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Monday, December 1st, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We have a special guest.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Special guest today, opening the show with us, Alby from the Land Down Under.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Please.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Probably saw him go viral recently, but why don't you introduce yourself?

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I just, I actually arrived in LA on Saturday.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm from Sydney, or Wollongong, so about an hour and a half from Sydney. And yeah, I've been building something called Finkel, which is basically Duolingo for life skills. And I just applied to YC as well with that post on X.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  How many views did you get on the application video?

• 0:51Speaker 02

  I think it got like 7.8 million, so yeah.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit the gong for Alby.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  Well done, well done.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  So, give me an example of a life skill that you can learn with your app?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess like entrepreneurship especially, startups and stuff, because like in Australia, I don't know about in the US, but school is very entry level, it's not hands-on. I feel like it's very, just not preparing us for life. Like you do need it if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or something, but some kids don't want to do that. And like, yes, you do have commerce and computer science and stuff, which I am doing as electives, but they're not hands-on and they're very like outdated and like textbook-heavy. So I feel like actually learning life skills that can, that you can apply now, especially like with AI and everything.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Like if you don't know how to use AI now, you're sort of going to be left behind, so.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  Very exciting. What are you, what are you hoping to get out of your trip? You're on summer holiday right now?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Well, like my exams just finished before I came, so there's still like two weeks left of school.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  How do you think you did?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  I think I got, I got like a B in science and like

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  A B in math.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Focus on, focus on the game. Focus on the game.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get out of it is just to like meet as many people as possible. Make as many connections as possible because this trip probably won't, a trip like this probably won't happen again for a while. So yeah, that's sort of my goal.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  What's the status of the Y C application? You've submitted it?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Have you heard back yet?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  No, it hasn't been, but still like.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  I'll need to.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we think, we got, we got a lot.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  If you're Y C L I'm watching this, please go leave a recommendation.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  But congratulations. Thanks so much for coming by. What, what is the stage of development of the actual application, the, the product itself? Are you live?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  So it's in demo right now. We're getting like beta testers. But the beta should, um, should be launching soon, probably by like the end of this year.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Do you have a waitlist? Are you doing E L capture yet?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, like waitlist beta testers. We've got like a couple hundred, but yeah.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Well, congratulations on all the attention. I'm sure you'll convert it into a lot of opportunity and have a great trip.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Thanks so much.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  And good luck with the Y C application.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Thanks so much.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  And looking, looking sharp in the suit.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Looking sharp in the suit.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Have a good rest.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Thanks for stopping by. Uh, before we move on to the rest of the show, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, thirty plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream dot com. And it's been three years since Chat G P T launched. I wanted to reflect a little bit. Everything changed or maybe nothing changed or maybe some amount of change in between everything and nothing. You're more on the nothing changed camp. I sort of agree with you. I was sort of, I was sort of reflecting on like, okay, Thanksgiving's happened. It was Thanksgiving over the weekend, you know, how different is my world? Like, there's not a humanoid robot that's cooking for me. And also, I, even if we had a humanoid robot, I think that would, I think Thanksgiving would be the day we let the robot sit in the closet because

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  Let him cook.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  We enjoy, no, no, let us cook. We enjoy cooking. Cooking is a fun family experience. And so of all the things.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  Let us.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Thanksgiving is like the track day of cooking. Like even if you have the robot that does it, you still want to do it on Thanksgiving. You don't want to cook on a random Tuesday. When you're busy, you got lunch, you know, all this other stuff. Uh, Thanksgiving is the, is the Nuremberg ring.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  And I was doing some dishes after Thanksgiving and I felt like it was a good way to kind of like, it felt like walking off the pot.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't walking, wasn't walking very far.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Kind of back and forth.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, so that, that, that hasn't really changed that much for me. Um, I was thinking, I was reflecting more on the agentic commerce thing. It feels like chat GPT and OpenAI, they really are pushing to make revenue from agentic commerce, like both in this holiday season. Uh, and incredible speed of execution, like clearly it's a big opportunity. If you can figure out how to, you know, run ads, commerce, convert, take a cut of that, that's big. Um, my experience actually demoing it, it was kind of interesting. Like the actual product in chat GPT is pretty good, but you can see that the walled gardens are already going up. So, uh, one place that I like to go to for reviews of products specifically around the holidays is the wire cutter. Now, the wire cutter, their whole twist was they wouldn't rate each product.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  What they would do is they would pick a category and then they would just tell you what their best product was in that category. Sort of like a cluster max of, of vacuums. So they would give you the platinum tier, uh, vacuum and then a budget pick. And so I've always liked the wire cutter. I think they do a very rigorous job. Uh, they were acquired by the New York Times. The New York Times is currently in a lawsuit with OpenAI. And so if you go to chat GPT and say, hey.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  And I think they're about to be in a lawsuit with David Sacks.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, which we will talk about on the show in a little bit. But if, but, but, but if you go, so I went to chat GPT and I was like, hey, okay, pull a deep research report. Just pull everything from the wire cutter and, uh, and tell me every category and every product that's top ranked. Because then I can just scan it really quickly and be like, oh yeah, I didn't even remember that that category existed. That would be a great gift. I'll get it and I'll go through the, I'll go through the wire cutter link. I'm fine with that. I'm paying chat GPT. I'm happy to go and use their affiliate link on the wire cutter. That's how the wire cutter monetizes. Uh, but it couldn't do it. It couldn't do it. It said, hey, we don't, we can't touch the wire cutter. Like it's off limits. You gotta head over there yourself. Get, uh, pop open a Chrome tab, brother. If you want to get over there, like that's on you.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Or or maybe an Atlas tab. I don't know. But uh so so so that that had not really changed that much for me. But the one thing that did really change on Thanksgiving was the discourse. Like the AI narrative has fully arrived to just family and friends.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  You mean fam in the in the home?

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, in people that don't work in technology that don't their job is not.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Showing off their favorite trough.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, not that more talking about is it a bubble? Where do you think all this stuff goes? Um, the stuff that, you know, we've been talking about for months.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  You're not living in a bubble? You think the average family in America is talking about the AI bubble?

• 7:15John Coogan?

  I saw multiple newsletters where the whole conceit of the newsletter going into holidays was how to talk to your family about the AI bubble? And how to how to talk to your family about AI generally? And I think it's real because if you've been watching your 401k over the last year, you've seen a massive spike and then a recent sell off. And if you've turned on any news or opened up any newspaper, you've been hearing about one trillion dollars. And you're like, what a trillion dollars? That chat GPT app, they need a trillion dollars to make that thing work?

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  Chat?

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Right, chat. Uh, and so and so it is, it is a really big narrative. And so I wanted to reflect on like, what has actually changed over the last three years? And specifically in the Mag Seven. The Mag Seven has been on absolute tear. Just over the last three years, the value as a whole has basically tripled. It was a little under eight trillion dollars. Now it's over 21 trillion dollars. It's a lot of value created in the last three years. Nvidia was second to last in the Max in the Mag Seven when ChatGPT launched. It was worth just 420 billion dollars, something around there. Today, the stock is up over 10x. Basically, it's for 4.36 trillion dollars.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  And up today.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  And up today.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Despite all the chaos.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel was trying so hard to bring that stock down, but he couldn't do it. He's coming on the show at noon. We're going to confront him about his bear posting and whether or not the market is overreacting.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Broadcom is down today.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Supplier, the maker of the TPU.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, a lot of these things, it's like, it's already been priced in. I mean, even when you read that semi analysis uh uh piece, you know, a lot of it's like, we've been writing about this for months. People have already put this trade on, et cetera, et cetera.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  But I do think that the Nvidia, the 10x that's happened, has really created some crazy zealots and just an entire industrial complex. Because there are so many people who heard AI, they tried the chat GPT thing, and they were like, this is big, how do I get it on this? I can't buy OpenAI. OpenAI is running away with it. Oh, they need Nvidia chips. That's the logical next step. They went in Nvidia and they got a 10x and they could have gotten a 10x on like a million dollars, 10 million dollars. There's no amount of money because it was already a 420 billion dollar company. So you could be, you could put your entire retirement savings in it. No problem, complete liquidity, right? It's not, oh, you've got to get some SPV. It was really easy.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Seiki Chen from Runway was saying that back, I think it was 2020, 2021. He said he put an uncomfortable amount of his net worth into Nvidia. And obviously.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  And near Cyan, same story, right?

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Still underappreciated, the Nvidia 10-year fund. All it does is buy Nvidia, just by investing in it, you can't possibly sell.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  God's chosen company. That's what the, I think, title of the fund was.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Oh, really? That's hilarious. And so, I mean, yeah, there's been a ton of zealots. We're going to talk to Dylan Patel at noon about some of the zealots that have been attacking him. Previously, the world's largest company in November of 2022 was Apple. And at the time, they had a sizable lead over Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Now that gap has closed a bit as the hyperscalers have grown more over the last three years on the back of the AI boom. And it's interesting, I mean, you can sort the MAG7 by market cap. And today, you get the following ranking. Tesla, then Meta, then Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, and then Nvidia at the top. And the big question, I think, that's on everyone's mind and kind of underpins

• 10:54John Coogan?

  the horse race that we cover every day on the show is, what will that ranking look like in the next three years? Is Nvidia really a monopoly? Is it impervious to attacks from the, from, you know, different suppliers?

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  What does Broadcom have to do to get into the MAG7?

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Tesla's sitting at 10 on the market cap.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Companiesmarketcap.com, which we are not affiliated with.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Which is just a fantastic website.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Broadcom is sitting at number six above Meta currently.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, I think, uh, I think, you know, several years in the one trillion dollar club, like just being, you know, undeniable at that, uh, at that scale. There's also just like a bit of branding, like, um, some of the companies that made it into the Mag7 were, I feel like the Mag7 leaned understandable, like not that deep in the supply chain. Even Nvidia was the deepest. Nvidia had the least of like a consumer brand, but still a lot of people used the gaming's graphic, gaming graphics cards. Broadcom is really tricky because there's no consumer angle whatsoever. Consumers can buy Tesla, they can use Meta products, they can buy on Amazon, have a Microsoft, you

• 12:09John Coogan?

  know, operating system, they can use Google, they can have an iPhone, and they can have an Nvidia gaming graphics card.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  The top 10 right now, Tesla's sitting at 10, TSMC at 9, 8 is Saudi Aramco, 7 Meta, and then 6 is Broadcom.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  I also think you have to be an American company to be in this like Mag7 or whatever the hot ranking is, like Fang. Fang did not include, um, never included oil companies, never included international companies. Cause if you go there, then you could be like, oh, well, let's include like the Chinese tobacco company that's worth a trillion dollars or something like that. Like, there are some crazy, there's some crazy like foreign owned companies that are, if they were independent, might be worth a trillion dollars because they just have so much of.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  True monopoly.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Assets. Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't really count because it's just sitting there out in the, out in the ether. Uh, well, um, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And speaking of that, Buco Capital bloke has a post here. Gemini app downloads are catching up to ChatGPT and Gemini users now spend more time in the app. Than ChatGPT users. People are going back and forth on can Gemini catch up? You know, the model clearly very good. The big bombshell in the semi-analysis piece over the weekend was the this idea, which I think has been bandied about before, this idea that OpenAI has not done a proper

• 13:35John Coogan?

  pre-train since 4.0 and the 4.5 pre-train kind of got mothballed and so but there was this question about like, is pre-training dead? Seems like the Google folks said, no, it's not. And then they went and did a pre-train and Gemini 3 outperformed. Anthropic also pre-trained.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Pre-trained pelt.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  I mean, we asked Chulto about this and he said, oh, yeah, we're still bullish on scaling.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  And I think actually like Chulto kind of like in the subtext said like the the reason Opus 4.5 was good is not because it was a new pre-chain, it's because it was RL.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting. That was your reading?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  I I feel like there's still there's still juice in the lemon of pre-training, but it's not scale. Like, we only have one internet. Ilya was correct about that. It's not scaling the size of the pre-training, which is what happened with 4.5 from from GPT 4.5. That was just bigger, I guess. But but it does seem like there's little optimizations that you can do on the on the pre-training. But I don't know. We'll have to dig into it. But but I I think the thing that no one is debating is the fact that the Gemini 3 as a model with Nano Banana Pro, with VO3 is just like the actual foundational intelligence is plenty good to be dominant in the consumer AI category.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  The question is, can you actually get people to install the app, use it? Can they enjoy it? Do they not churn and go back to ChatGPT? I've been fighting back and forth, left and right, going into one app and the other. I was getting a ton of disconnects, errors with the Gemini app, even though the model's great and there's some really cool features.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, they need to catch up on the product side.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, the yeah, the product side. And so a lot of people are saying like, oh, Gemini team should just the app team should just go and, you know, copy ChatGPT's homework and and, you know, copy all these little features. I put out a post that the folks over at the Gemini team actually, you know, did turn into bug reports and I think are working on. But it really does seem like it's a it's a really, it's a sprint to actually create an app that is as sticky as ChatGPT because ChatGPT, the app, is fantastic and and very, very, very well designed. And so.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's some reporting from SimilarWeb is what the FT is using to track average user minutes.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  I always find those hard to, I mean, it must be like Nielsen ratings where they're like polling people or something because you can't get a pixel in OpenAI. Like you can't get a pixel into the Gemini app.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  And are they counting user minutes if a tab is open, but I'm not actually in?

• 16:08John Coogan?

  And is this just desktop? Because that's like completely separate from mobile use.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Desktop and mobile web, which again, I don't know a lot of people that are using mobile web.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  I don't know. I wouldn't read too many, too much into this data specifically. I would, I would much more look at like, what are the structural advantages that we know exist? And I mean, with Gemini, one of them is to that point about the wire cutter. You know, you know where the wire cutter shows up? Google search results. You know what, you know what company has one bot for scraping everything? Google. So the Google bot is, identifies as one entity. So you can either say, I'm allowing Google or not. And it's a big, it's a tall order to be like, yeah, I don't want to be in Google results. And so you, a lot of companies are saying, yeah, I'm good with Google showing up in Google results, but that also shows up in AI search results.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  And they can, and there are things that companies can do to say, hey, don't put me in the Gemini, you know, like training data set necessarily. But in terms of just actually showing up, you've seen it in the Google, in the Gemini app. It says, using Google search. And so if I go to Gemini and I say, hey, head over to the wire cutter, find me the best vacuum cleaner, Google probably can do that.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm testing it right now.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Gemini can probably do that. Yeah, test it. Whereas, whereas OpenAI is, is in a fight with the New York Times. Whereas Google and the New York Times, like they might not love each other, but they definitely have like a, like an uncomfortable truce, right?

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  A funny, a funny Gemini integration that I, that I've used is that you land in a, in a hangout and you just say, who is this person?

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Is this real? You can actually do that?

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  It is. It pulls up a sidebar. You can just ask like, who, who am I meeting with right now? And it'll give you like a.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  It's clearly, who am I meeting with? What should I say to them?

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  What should I ask them?

• 17:53John Coogan?

  What is my name? What are, what do they want to know about me? What, what, what should I tell them about me?

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Gemini was able to pull Wirecutter recommendations?

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  I, I don't know, this is interesting. I feel like, I feel like, um,

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I wonder, yeah, I wonder if, if, if Wirecutter is actually benefiting from this in any way yet?

• 18:18John Coogan?

  I mean, for sure, because Google hasn't, Gemini hasn't rolled out the agent to commerce stuff that would actually like scrape out the referral, uh, the referral token. And so if I'm, if I'm in Gemini and I'm saying, I'm gonna do some agentic shopping or whatever, and I say, pull me the best vacuum cleaner from the Wirecutter, it goes over and does that. And then I land on the Wirecutter and then I click that link, that should give the Wirecutter the credit. Now, if I, as a follow-up prompt, go in Gemini and say, okay, great. The Wirecutter told me the best vacuum cleaner is from James Dyson, of course, is the Dyson.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Uh, find me the Amazon link. Well, Gemini is probably not giving the Wirecutter the attribution at that point. It might even be taking its own attribution. I don't know exactly how it's, how it's functioning right now, but I would imagine that that link does not get re-instantiated as the, as the Wirecutter affiliate link. And so, um, we could see, I mean, th- these are all like going to be pretty existential questions for the SEO crowd, anyone who's monetizing off of SEO. We saw some, uh, some screenshot that apparently site traffic to Vox properties is down 50%. Um, and I don't know if, how, how much, how much of that is just the shift to social media versus the shift to AI?

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how much is it their business strategy, just being like, hey, we want to do more video?

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  And that'll be distributed off our site for the most part?

• 19:41John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people generally do not, they, they consume more and more content on social media platforms. They go from YouTube to their RSS player, to audiobooks, to Twitter, to Instagram, and they kind of bounce around from one and the other. And then every once in a while, they will go in and, and actually land on a particular site. Uh, like you can, if you go to tbpn.com, you can get our newsletter in your inbox every morning. Uh, and we can, you can also sign up for cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Well, speaking of the New York Times, David Sacks is going to war with the New York Times. He says, inside the NYT's hoax factory, calls it hoax factory, because the New York Times

• 20:25John Coogan?

  posted a piece about David Sacks, saying that the headline was Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends. And Ryan Mac was going back and forth with Sean McGuire, or yeah, Sean McGuire. Ryan Mac says, "Today's been a good example of what X has become. Complaints from a subset of wealthy tech folks about a story that circulates more widely than the actual story itself. Musk bought the platform to control the message, and he and his friends are getting just that." And Sean McGuire says, "You don't get to run this headline, then write an article that doesn't validate the claim, and then get away with playing the victim. We see through the ruse."

• 21:09John Coogan?

  And so David Sacks has responded in full to the NYT's hoax factory. He says, "Five months ago, the five New York Times reporters were dispatched to create a story about my supposed conflicts of interest, working as the White House AI and crypto czar. Through a series of fact checks, they revealed their accusations, which we debunked in detail. Not surprisingly, the published article included only bits and pieces of our responses. Their accusations ranged from a fabricated dinner with a leading tech CEO to nonexistent promises of access to the president, to baseless claims of influencing defense contracts. Every time we would prove an accusation false, NYT pivoted to the next allegation. This is why the story has dragged on for five months.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Today, they evidently just threw up their hands and published this nothing burger. Anyone who reads the story carefully can see that they strung together a bunch of anecdotes that don't support the headline." And of course, that was the whole point. "At no point in their constant goalpost shifting was NYT willing to update the premise of their story to accept that I have no conflicts of interest to uncover. No conflicts of interest."

• 22:16John Coogan?

  As it became clear that NYT wasn't interested in writing a fair story, I hired the law firm Claire Locke, which specializes in defamation law. I'm attaching Claire Locke's letter to the NYT so readers have full context on our interactions with NYT reporters over the past several months. Once you read the letter, it becomes very clear how NYT willfully mischaracterized or ignored the facts to support their bogus narrative. So-

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Will says hiring Claire Locke for this is sick. Cruise missile to blow up a straw hut.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  He's a big fan of litigation. He loves litigation. Well, people have been supportive of this broadly in tech. Let's go through some of the reaction. Sam Altman says David Sacks really understands AI and cares about the US leading in innovation. I'm grateful we have him. Brian Armstrong-

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, here's my takeaway.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  If you believe that AI and crypto are industries that we should support in the United States, then you want to have a czar focused on those things that generally feels positively about those things and wants to create the best possible environment for those industries to thrive in the US. I think that there's actually a debate on both fronts, right? Like, there's people on the left that think AI and crypto are just default bad. They want less of them. And there's people on the right that believe that too. But I think that ultimately, there's arguments for why the US should lead in stable coins,

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  which is part of why the Genius Act is important. And a lot of, you know, the AI Action Plan, there's going to be debates on individual points in that. But in general, I think, you know, creating an environment in the US where we can continue to lead in AI is important. So I think there wasn't, I didn't see any sort of like smoking gun in any of this stuff. There were some allegations around the all-

• 24:28John Coogan?

  I don't think they smoke very much at all. I think it's mostly tequila drinking.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  That they do.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  All in tequila.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Although J Cal does tote a gun regularly.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  So maybe that's the smoking gun.

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  He's a Texan.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I didn't see anything very specific. I mean, it's, it's, it's all in. Like they're, they are super connected. If you partner with them in some ways, like you would expect to get more of a read on where they're spending time in DC, what they're seeing. That seems like there are clear lines on what you can share, like what, what turns you into a lobbying firm and what doesn't. I think they've stayed out of becoming a lobbying firm and so they have clear, clear rules on that. Yeah, I think Boz distilled it pretty well. Before we read his post, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Boz said, I don't know David Sacks, but I want more expertise in government.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Experts tend to have made money in their area of expertise, have friends in their area of expertise. If people can't have history or friends in a field before leading it, then our leaders won't know anything. And I thought this was a good distillation of like the core debate about like, should you have someone who has never participated in, in, in an industry overseeing it? Or should you, like someone who's purely academic, purely outside of it?

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  And I believe there's some readers.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  And probably people at the New York Times that would like somebody that hasn't participated in either industry to, to be running in a role like that.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  And just blanket against both industries.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  And just sort of like hold them back.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  So, so, so the, so the reaction is interesting in the comments. I mean, first top comment is somebody like beefing with Boz over how he ran the Quest store. It's like clearly a VR aficionado who like has a axe to grind over niche VR policies. But the second post is what I want to get to because it actually addresses the core claim here. And Alex says, the construct you're thinking of is called a council. It's been used for a long time to allow the elected with limited knowledge on a domain to get a consensus of options from a range of experts. This minimizes conflicts and prevents kleptocracy. But like, isn't that what a czar is? I thought, I thought, I thought, I thought Sacks was a council. Like he's not, he's not an elected official.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Like, the elected official is Donald Trump, the president, and like, there's a variety of folks there, and then, and then, uh, Sacks is like appointed to this czar role that is just to give his, like, his, like, he doesn't have the right, he doesn't have the ability to just like create legislation out of thin air, right?

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  He is, he is very much accountable.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to look up the history of czars, right?

• 27:12John Coogan?

  It is weird, is it, like, have we always had czars? I know there was a whole thing about the borders czar.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  The first major czar was Bernard Barak, appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to head the War Industries Board in 1918. The press dubbed him the Industry Czar because he had sweeping powers to coordinate wartime production. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed several czars to manage the massive wartime economy, including a shipping czar and a synthetic rubber czar. These roles were essential.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Synthetic rubber czar?

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  One of the most iconic.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Stoked for that.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  People don't talk about the need for, our ongoing need for synthetic rubber czar.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  These roles were essential because existing government bureaucracies were too slow to handle the urgent demands of total war. During the Nixon era, the modern concept of the czar, a policy specialist with a specific portfolio, solidified under, uh, under Nixon. During the 1973 oil crisis, Nixon appointed William Simon as the energy czar to manage fuel shortages. He also had a drugs czar during the, sort of like, beginnings of the war on drugs. So, anyways, again, I think, unless you're just blanket against these industries, it's

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  hard to argue that you want somebody that doesn't have any expertise in said industries.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, some of these, some of these claims, here, here's one, it's sort of hard to, to track. Like, so he says, free, free from those, this is from the New York Times, from the actual article for the screenshot. Free of those restrictions, Mr. Sacks flew to the Middle East in May and struck a deal to send 500,000 American AI chips, mostly from Nvidia, to the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. The large number alarmed some White House officials who feared that China, an ally of the Emirates, would gain access to the technology, these people said. But the deal was a win for Nvidia. Analysts estimated that it could make as much as 200 billion from the chip sales.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  And so, like, I, I under, like, we, we've covered the debate around export controls and should Nvidia, where should Nvidia be able to sell things, but it's never been an open and shut case in my mind. It's never been like, oh, it's so obvious that the UAE is completely off the table.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it was also just like painting, painting the friendship between Sacks and Jensen

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  as like something that, that felt wrong was, was a little bit rough, considering it's the most valuable company in the world.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  One of the most important AI companies, potentially the most important AI company if you just go by weight in the, in various indexes.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's like, it's clear that he doesn't have Nvidia bags directly, like, that's completely debunked. So, so you have to do these like 25 different steps to get to some sort of conflict. It's a lot of like, you know.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  I read this and I think like this is, if you're, if you're the average New York Times subscriber,

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  this is probably, that you were, they were probably like very excited by this story, right?

• 30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of, I, I think a lot of people are definitely like, yeah, just riled up by the All In podcast.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Charlie in the chat says, All In Pod about to be an all-timer after this article. Do you think it's possible that David and Jason coordinated to get this hit piece done to grow All In even further? They said, we're at such an insane scale.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that, that was a crazy thing. Yeah, Jason, Jason said a bunch of, I mean, Jason made a lot of good arguments about this, but one thing was he was like, we would be smaller if we. What was it? He was like, he was like, we would be bigger if we didn't talk about politics. And that seems crazy to me. I feel like politics is like the ultimate TAM expander in the history of podcasting and media broadly.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the audience for political content is like 10 times larger.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  I would, I would think so. I, I, I do believe that, that Jason loves talking about tech and like, I think he's, I think he's.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  He's an OG.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  He's, he's an OG. He's, he's said that multiple times. Um, but, but I would be shocked if, if, if, uh, if politics was not a, was not a TAM expander for, uh, for podcasts broadly. And then the other thing is that he said that they lost money on the all-in events. I don't know how that's possible. Like those events, obviously they're like big budgets, but you know, I would, I would imagine that, that like the sponsors can, and the ticket sales, they're not cheap tickets, right? Um, I would, I would imagine that they'd be making money off that. I certainly hope so. I mean, they've been running this thing for five years. They, it's incredibly valuable in the ecosystem. They should be able to capture some value there.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they set up their own data center to sort of manage.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  There's just, I know, yeah, we, we decided to bring.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna make it back.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Podcast production on-prem and we, we ordered, we ordered 100,000 Blackwells.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  A lot of Capex.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Blue Al, Blue Al really has us by the balls. It's rough. Uh, Martin Scrawley here says, "The Sacks piece illustrates the exact problem with the New York Times. Voters specifically want this type of person, not a bureaucrat who has never worked a real job. Lena Kahn, K Street."

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, so the, the issue and the reason I think this article was written is that New York Times, uh, subscribers specifically want this type of article.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, Whiskey Titans going back and forth here. Did you miss the entire part of the article? This isn't a, quote, "We can't have businessmen in government." This is a, "We can't have the government officials who host government summits and sell access to the president for $1 million via their podcast business." Um, and Martin Scrawley says, "I doubt it was Sacks who wanted to sell $1 million passes." And Whiskey Titans says, "I agree with you. Uh, I'm sure it wasn't, but letting Jason run rampant until Susie Wiles steps in isn't a great look. I happen to think Sacks is doing fine in this particular role, but I also understand the general public feelings. Like there's a lot of graft. The New York Times isn't the right conduit for that argument though." And they're going back and forth. "The timeline truly isn't turmoil over this." Uh, Dan Primack had a

• 33:19John Coogan?

  good take. He had a whole, uh, breakdown of this, which I think was interesting. Um, he said, let's, let's kick this off, but first let me tell you about fall. Build and deploy AI and AI video and image models. They're trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. So Dan Primack said, lots of people are sending me the New York Times story on David Sacks. Outside of the all in sponsorship proposal, which feels oblivious at best, corrupt at worst. I'm not seeing much in there that's new, at least to those who've been following. Dan Primack says, as an aside, it's true that Sacks slash Kraft still have a ton of AI investments.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Thing is, all tech investments at this point are AI investments. It's kind of like internet investments at this point. If you invest in tech startups, you de facto invest in AI startups. And Jason says, we lost money on the event. The N Y T knew this and deliberately published false information. And, and Dan Primack says, they included statement that you lost money on it. What did they print that was false? They were somehow make that, that we're somehow making money in this or some gain. And Dan Primack says, just re-read, just re-read. Doesn't claim that all in made money. Said you tried to generate revenue via $1 million sponsorships, including for VIP reception.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  That didn't end up happening, but ads that you don't know what, but as that you don't know what sponsors ultimately paid, or that it doesn't know what sponsors ultimately paid, included the statement that you lost money. Am I missing something? And Jason says, Mr. Sacks has raised the profile of his weekly podcast, All In, through his government role and expanded its business. Confused, I thought you were talking specifically about the White House AI summit pieces, Dan Primack. Talking in general, don't know how you would, would not quantify. Sacks role in White House def-raised All In profile, at least among normies. As for role in biz expansion, guess you could stake your claim there. I completely disagree with this.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like the All In podcast put the White House on the map. I feel like a lot of people were like, they found out about the White House and about the US government.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Which house?

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Because of the All In podcast, they were listening to All In podcast and they were like, wait, wait, you're telling me?

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  There's people in Washington DC.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  And they run this whole country.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  They create laws.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  They're in charge of the rules.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they create sort of laws and frameworks for how our country should operate, which, which industries we want to, you know, support. And grow.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  You're telling me, you're telling me that there's a group of people and one of my besties is up there running it. This is amazing. I gotta learn more about this. I gotta figure out what a bill is. I gotta figure out how a bill turns into a law.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  Chat, what is a bill?

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Jason says, if anything, going deep into politics has been a net negative for all in, at least in my opinion, we would be, we would be growing faster and wouldn't have lost some percentage of our left-leaning audience if we'd stuck to tech, markets, science, VC, etc. That's an interesting take. I, I, I still think that all, politics has made all in so important. It made it so big.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and it made, it made the content polarizing.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  Which, but I think that polarizing in media is good.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  You actually get more attention, not necessarily good from all points of view.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  But good from a pure, just like, reach.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, I was looking at the, I, I think the, I think the, uh, the, the, the ratings are like the, the amount of viewers for, uh, for like, CNBC is bigger than Bloomberg by like a pretty significant margin because Bloomberg's like extra wonky and CNBC is a little bit, I mean, it's like literally called consumer business news, like that's what the C stands for, I believe. Um, and then, and then you have Fox, which is even more, it, it, like Fox News is political and it's much bigger ratings.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Than CNBC or Bloomberg. And then ESPN is like by far the biggest.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Because it's like sports. Everyone loves sports.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  And so, uh, like maybe that's the final, that's the final form. They should go full poker and then full sports. It should just become SportsCenter competitor.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  I could see it.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  It might be the way.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, AB says, I only learned about the Trump, uh, about Trump because Chamath endorsed him.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. I had never heard of this guy.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Who? The vodka and social media entrepreneur? He's running for president?

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Okay, so Dan Primack is weighing in again concluding it. He says, "The New York Times story was mostly a nothing burger, at least for those familiar with the situation. As for hoax, the story itself as published isn't being disputed. Obviously, the New York Times had info questions that Saks lawyers answered and disproven info wasn't included. That's how journalism works. The real complaint seems to be about the headline, quote, 'Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends.'" I get the complaint, but that's not, but it's really a matter of interpretation, not true, false slash hoax. Imagine if you had a friend and they went to the White House and they didn't try and benefit you. You'd feel, you'd feel like-

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  You might not be friends with them.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  You might not be friends with anyone. Saks and Trump and the Trump White House are pursuing let them cook AI policy. I like that. That they believe will help us win the AI race and that the rewards outweigh the risks. Others disagree. Yeah, this is so true. It's like, there is no like, oh, like, we now know the correct way to win the AI war. Like, we know that there's a correct way. It's very obvious. It's like, no, everyone's debating this constantly, even inside of tech. And Saks has one view that I think has actually played out pretty well, considering that he's been anti-Doomer, anti-fast takeoff, more industrial capacity, more, you know, opportunity to grow GDP,

• 39:15John Coogan?

  you know. There are some elements of his takes that are a little bit more like TBDs, like what actually happens to jobs over the long term? How does it manifest in GDP growth over the long term? But so far, I think he's been correct. And I think that's what Dan Primack's saying here. He says, "Only time will tell if Saks is correct. What we know for sure, though, is that his deregulatory policies should help VC funds, his, those runs by his friends, those run by strangers, etc. Thus, the headline is defensible, albeit pushing an agenda." And that's, and that's the timeline in turmoil, folks. Let me tell you about graphite dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I can't read this. AI Ambilicus, this name.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  This Ilya interview will be compulsory viewing for any future student trying to understand what misallocation of capital looks like in real life. See, I completely disagree with this take. People were going back and forth on this. We talked about this a little bit over the, uh, the, over the holidays, but, uh, fleeting in bits is can you say more? Just that he doesn't have any business direction or something else. And, uh, and the original poster says, these are my intuitions, but for what it's worth, on the micro level, he just seems adrift in a sea of possibility and not.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  I see, see, I originally read this as, uh, as, as the misallocation of capital that I've seen is like the, the 10th, 11th, 12th foundation model lab that has like a hundred to a billion dollars that is just like kind of iterating on what Ilya already worked on, already developed, right? And doesn't necessarily like if they just do, if they just create a, a model that's like not state of the art. Like, I don't know that there's going to be incredible value in that. Meanwhile, I'm like, okay, you take the guy that, that, that whose work led to chat GPT

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  and you give him a few billion dollars and let him, you know, continue to iterate and, and, uh, he's not just like, you know, firing a single can, you know, multi-billion dollar cannon and hoping he hits a target. It's like this incremental research that, uh, I think is still one of the best shots at like developing the next paradigm, whatever comes after LLM. So, um, I, I read this. I, I, I think that your, your reading of this was right, but I initially read it the other way and I was like, yeah, I do think this is. You know, somewhat, somewhat bearish on the, on the incremental large language model lab.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I can, I can kind of steel man both like, uh, we're gonna have, uh, Julian, uh, on the show in, when is he coming on at, uh, or, or we're having Vincent from Prime Intellect come on the show and, uh, I was talking to him, we'll, we'll get more information from him. He's going to be on at, uh, 140, but, uh, Vincent was explaining that, that more and more, uh, more and more companies and different business processes, they do need specific training runs. They do need the, the skill sets of a foundation model lab, but they're not, but there's a lot of, uh, business to be done. That's not purely AGI seeking, not purely paradigm shifting. Uh, so I do think that there's, there's some value there if the business can be run well,

• 42:26John Coogan?

  which is a big if, but there is a, there is a path where a thinking machines or, or one of these companies is going to go and do specific reinforcement learning, specific model development for, uh, a specific company and task that can work out. It's a very different business than searching for the next paradigm, doing science. And maybe you shouldn't even call it a lab because you're not really even trying to do foundational science necessarily. You're more productizing.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  Company.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a business, which is great. We love that. Uh, what's, what's interesting about Ilya is that, um, when we talked about this, like it is a venture style bet, like let the scientist go experiment, maybe it will work out. It's extremely high risk, probably a zero, but if it works, it's huge, right? So the expected value is still high. What's crazy is that we're doing a venture style bet at growth scale and it's just massive amount of capital, uh, for something that I think, I think the consensus here is that it's, it's either he solves it and it's incredibly valuable and leapfrogs everything and is just amazing, or it's just, you, you do get lost and you get a sea, you get lost in the sea of research and ideas and you never

• 43:32John Coogan?

  really produce anything. So, uh, I love, I love the high risk, uh, bets. I, I just understand why people are saying like, well, at that scale, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Uh, but that, but that has been happening internally at Google for a long time. They probably burned a lot of money on, you know, research projects. Hasn't been that big of a deal because they had the engine for it. And if the, if the investors are, uh, significantly just diversified, they should be fine.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, what else is in the timeline today? Finn.ai, the AI that handles your customer support, the number one AI agent for customer service. We did get a good meme. We got a couple of good memes.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  Cody says, "When my wife asks what we should eat for dinner, but says no to my first two suggestions."

• 44:17John Coogan?

  We are back to the age of research. I like it. And then when she asks, "What I want for dinner?" from Beazelord, "The answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers." Very true. It's a great, great new meme template. I like it. "When my husband asks how many Amazon packages are still on the way, the answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers." But I think that's actually true. Like, if he creates, if he creates some new AI, like, there's a bunch of different ways to monetize it. We know this is a, we know this is a fact. But of course, Ilya is, is now joining the ranks of Yan LeCun and Rich Sutton and Andre Karpathy

• 44:59John Coogan?

  of sort of industry legends that are more or less saying that scaling is over and LLMs are dead. You know, on the other side, Sholto is saying scaling, maybe not over. So, we'll see.

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  This is, uh, this post is, yeah, this post is great. "Scaling is over and LLMs are a dead end." Aw, you're sweet. Scaling is over and LLMs are a dead end. Hello, human resources.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  I love this meme template because it's like, yeah, Yan LeCun has been saying the same thing.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  He says, Yan says, "For the record, my current BMI is 24."

• 45:36John Coogan?

  This guy rocks. He's very funny.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  I thought he would have dropped the meta tag on X by now, but I guess he's still.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Oh, he's still wrapping them. Didn't he leave?

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Reporting to leave.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Okay, he's like on, on his way out, more or less. Another one billion to SSI. There's a bunch of this in the SSI bucket.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Of course, we are having Dylan Patel on the show in 12 minutes. And we should do a little bit of a run through of the drama on the timeline. The timeline was in turmoil. Lots of people very, you know, upset with semi-analysis latest post.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  How dare you?

• 46:27John Coogan?

  How dare you take us, they take, they took a swing at the king, which was the name of their article. They said, TPU V7, Google takes a swing at the king. King is of course Nvidia. And they are asking, is this potentially the end of the coup de moat? Anthropics, they're talking about Anthropics, one gigawatt TPU purchase. The more TPU, Meta, SSI, XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic buy, the more GPU capex you save. Next generation TPU V8. And they're going into what the, what the battle between TPU and the next generation GPU out of Nvidia will look like.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  And this, this upset some people. There's a lot of folks who are long Nvidia. Either they have invested in Nvidia, they made a lot of money in Nvidia, or their, their whole business is tied to Nvidia or AMD even. And so.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Or they bought the local top a month.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  Potentially. There's a whole bunch of reasons. You could also just disagree with this and you could just think that, you know, that semi-analysis, their takeaways are wrong, but I think it's a thought provoking article. I think there's a lot of.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  So thorough.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  They're extremely thorough. And I think that they do leave you with a lot of new information that you can, you know, do with what you want. And I think in general, the response to this article was very positive, but there were some folks who were very upset by it and went, and went all over the place.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  And on accounts that, that put a noun and then capital as their name.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  And suddenly they're an expert on everything.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. It was, it was a little odd seeing the credentialism come out from the anons. Cause like, I don't think we should get in the two can play that game camp. It's a little bit rough.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  But there's a little bit of interesting stuff in here. I want to read through some of this. Let's kick it off with the with the opening of the semi analysis article. The two best models in the world, Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Opus and Google's Gemini 3, have the majority of their training and inference infrastructure on Google TPUs and Amazon's Tranium. Now, Google is selling TPUs physically to multiple firms. Is this the end of Nvidia dominance? The dawn of the AI era is here and it's crucial to understand that cost structure of AI-driven software deviates considerably from traditional software. Chip, microarchitecture and system architecture play a vital role in the development and scalability of these innovative new forms of software. The hardware infrastructure on which AI software runs

• 49:06John Coogan?

  has a notably larger impact on CapEx and OpEx and subsequently the gross margins in contrast to earlier generations of software, where developer costs were relatively larger. Consequently, it is even more crucial to devote considerable attention to optimizing your AI infrastructure to be able to deploy software. Firms that have an advantage in infrastructure will also have an advantage in the ability to deploy and scale applications with AI. And as I say, we've long believed that the TPU is among the world's best systems for AI training and inference, neck and neck with king of the jungle Nvidia. 2.5 years ago, we wrote about TPU supremacy and this thesis has proven to be very correct. TPUs results speak for themselves.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Gemini 3 is one of the best models in the world. And there's a very funny bit in here. I need to find it. Saving. Oh, yeah, here. So this is this is a very spicy line in here. He says, "OpenAI hasn't even deployed TPUs yet and they've already saved 30% on their entire lab-wide Nvidia fleet." This demonstrates how the per-per TCO advantage of TPUs is so strong that you already get the gains from adopting TPUs even before turning one on. And so basically what he's what he's explaining is that Because of the competitive dynamic between Nvidia and Google with the CPU now, you can use TPU as a stalking horse.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  And say, hey, if you don't cut your prices Nvidia, we know that you have really high margins.

• 50:39Jordi Hays?

  Or not even cut prices, but encourage an investment.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so that's what they're explaining here.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia would rather invest back into your business instead of cutting prices.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Yes. And so, says, we think the more realistic explanation is that Nvidia aims to protect its dominant positions at the foundation labs by offering equity investment rather than cutting prices, which would lower gross margins and cause widespread investor panic. Below, we outline the OpenAI and Anthropic arrangements to show how Frontier Labs can lower GPU total cost of ownership by buying or threatening to buy TPUs. And so, OpenAI, Nvidia, the, you know, it was $22 billion per gigawatt, the rest of the system. So it's a $34 billion, billion dollar per gigawatt expense to Nvidia.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  But Nvidia is doing effectively an equity rebate of $10 billion per gigawatt in investment. And so, how that works out is a 29% partner discount. And Anthropic has similar math, but a little bit higher at 44% partner discount, because Microsoft is paying for a piece of it. And so, it's interesting, it's an interesting thesis and it's unclear exactly like, well, you know, if the claim that the investors will panic if it was actually just lower gross margins, well, if you say the quiet part out loud like this and you have, you know, you do the math to show that there is basically a discount, that margins might be coming down

• 52:13John Coogan?

  because of competitive dynamics, does that wind up resulting in investor panic? I mean, certainly it didn't today. Isn't Nvidia up today, right?

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  Nvidia is up 1%, adding a casual, you know, what, 10 trillion or 100 billion or something?

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Hundred quadrillion.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  10 billion, quadrillion. Yeah, gigajillion dollars.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I mean, I, and again, we said this earlier on the show, but Broadcom is down almost 4% today, which I would have expected it to be the other direction, given that to actually buy TPUs physically, you need to go through Broadcom.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, so a lot of people are going back and forth on, you know, can semi-analysis be trusted because they're writing about about, you know, Nvidia and Dylan. I think some people didn't understand that he was joking. Zephyr here has a post. Dylan is being tongue in cheek, but he's not wrong. Nvidia was extremely dominant for the last three years, as we saw in the stock. It's up 10x over the last three years. New competitors will cause a reduction in market share and margin compression, but TAM is big, so revenue profits won't go down. 75% of GM is just unsustainable. Hyperscalers will also use the cheap TPUs threat to extract better deals from Jensen, priority access for Ruben

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Feynman, or discounts on GPUs. Jensen called Altman and initiated the $10 billion deal after he saw the information about the information article about OpenAI testing TPUs. And so this is in reaction to that that that point about OpenAI hasn't even deployed TPUs yet, and they've already saved 30%.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  There's a decent post here from JustAnotherPodGuy. They say Dylan speedrunning through all the learnings of sell-side research, industry capture, pissing off IR execs, gatekeeping info based on client tier, difficulty scaling beyond single-star analysts, distorted MSN representation of your notes, eventually spending too much time marketing versus researching. Amazing biz content, though. Obviously Dylan would would push back on

• 54:24John Coogan?

  He did.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  on a lot of this stuff. If you actually read through the entire article, there's nothing in the article should actually in this article should be that surprising because so much of the article is just referencing old semi-analysis research, some of which they did a, you know, sort of before the paywall, some of which they did under the paywall.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  But it felt felt like a kind of a culmination of everything that they've been saying for a really long time. And I think that part of part of I think the surprise here is just how much how much faster this conversation has really come to a head than people may have expected. I think I think the at least at least like surface level on the timeline, I think people felt like the TPU threat was maybe like a 2026, 2027 conversation versus being like, it's a part of these buying discussions right now and negotiations.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The other buried lead in the article was, of course, about pre-training. So there's a snippet in here. OpenAI's leading researchers have not completed a successful, full-scale, pre-training run that was broadly for a new frontier model since GPT-4O in May of 2024. And, you know, this, this is, it's so interesting that this, like, if this was wrong, you would imagine that there would be a whole bunch of reaction from OpenAI people or like proxies or surrogates, right? People quote reading and be like, that's just not true. Wow, something else is cooked. But the fact that I haven't seen anyone respond to this and say like, oh, this is, this is wrong, like, we actually did.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Not that, not that, like, that's the North Star for what the business is. Like, the business's job is to create profits, right? It's not to, you know, complete successful, full-scale, pre-training runs. That's not the goal. That's just something that they might do in service of making a better model, making a better product. But ultimately, it's whatever the customers want. Yeah. And if the customers are happy with 4O-level-based pre-train and a bunch of reasoning on top, that's fine. So what, what else is in the back and forth? People are, also, I mean, really, it does make me happy that we didn't go deeper into ranking people. Because the, it does feel like when you create a list of tiers and rank a bunch of people,

• 56:47John Coogan?

  you're just creating a big bucket of enemies down at the bottom of like people who want you dead because you ranked them low. But I'm sure we'll get into the discussion of, of ClusterMax and, and what, which, what, how people are interpreting ClusterMax, because there is a whole bunch of ways to read it. Like, one way to read it is like, which, which stock should you buy, right? But like, that's not necessarily the read. The other, the other, the other read is like, which product is the best to work with as a customer? Yeah. But it's like, what customer are you? Yeah. There are some that are in the lower tiers that are fantastic for very specific use cases. Like, this is the nature of every business. Like, one of the, one of the, one of the NeoClouds that was particularly upset with,

• 57:31John Coogan?

  with Dylan, is, is in a very niche market. But if you, if you're in that niche market, it's probably a great product. It's probably great for you if you're, if you satisfy like this specific list of criteria and you don't need these features, you're probably fine then. But. It's a lot of fun. People are going back and forth. They're also debating whether or not Dylan is independent, given that he lives with Sholto from Anthropic and

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask him why he has roommates. I'm not even concerned about a conflict.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  It's roommate gate.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's roommate gate.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  What about this other, is this a tinfoil hat post from Jucon? My theory is that Meta deliberately leaked the story to the information about Google's, about acquiring Google's TPUs. For Meta, it's a classic risk-free power play. The moment Jensen Wong catches wind of Meta using Google's silicon, Nvidia is likely to rush in with an investment. They might even be negotiating as we speak. This allows Meta to secure capital and shift from burning their own cash to potentially getting discounts or effectively buying Nvidia chips with Nvidia's own money. Plus, if they actually do secure Google TPUs, they solve their compute shortage. It covers all bases. I wonder when other hyperscalers will catch on to this magic wand. All you have to do is hint at using TPUs.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but the issue is how many red flags would be waving if Jensen was like, "Yeah, we're investing $20 billion in Meta. We're very excited about Meta and owning a piece of..."

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that seems very, very odd.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  So he's in a position where I don't know what kind of leverage Jensen has around in those conversations with Meta because he doesn't want a discount. And it's not like OpenAI where he can just announce an investment or an Anthropic, etc. So how does any type of rebate actually happen is the question.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full-text search, built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 59:44John Coogan?

  Let's, uh, let's read through some more, uh, some more TPU stuff to set the table. So Clive Chan says, I keep seeing stuff about TPU. Has anything materially new happened? There's no evidence Google has ever trained Gemini on non-TPU hardware, going back to pre-GPT models like BERT. TPUs predate Nvidia's own tensor cores. Anthropic and Character and SSI and Mid Journey have long used TPUs. I'd be surprised if Meta weren't looking at them. Nvidia's moat has never been deep for the big labs. See OpenAI deciding it could do better than CUDA and investing in Triton instead. Regularly edging out C U D N N on benchmarks. Uh, there's nothing magical or structural about any of this, just good engineers doing good work.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  TPUs are not that much more efficient than GPUs and small performance per watt difference are dwarfed by whether Meta has the right kernels and systems engineering to pull talent to pull it off. Both Nvidia's and Google's moats are small and we are still at the point where individual good engineers can flip the entire balance. Why, why was this not priced in? Uh, this is all super old public info. I, I have a feeling that, uh, that this, uh, Clive Chan, who I guess is over at, uh, was at Tesla and then OpenAI is, uh, is, is a little bit of like first time in the public markets, first time realizing that, uh, the people who trade this stuff are not necessarily like on the super inside of the labs actually, uh, actually understanding.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  The, the decisions that are being made inside the labs. Like it's a completely, uh, separate ecosystem. Uh, and that's why, uh, organizations like semi-analysis exist. And I believe we have Dylan Patel from semi-analysis in the research waiting room. Let's bring him in. Dylan, how are you doing?

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:01:25Dylan Patel?

  Fantastic. How about yourself? You know, I saw, I saw the meme image that you guys, uh, put out there for me. So I had to wear a tank top to show you.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Dude, we need a bigger, bigger, uh, screen for that bicep. We'll, we'll work on it. Uh, where in the world are you?

• 1:01:44Dylan Patel?

  I'm in Florida, uh, spending Thanksgiving with my family here. Uh, I'm trying to chill out a little bit. It's nice to have the family pamper me a little bit because I broke my foot a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  I'm sorry to hear that. How'd you break your foot?

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Tripped over a TPU.

• 1:01:59Dylan Patel?

  Family reunion, playing football in Texas. We're American as we can get.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  There you go. Well, we were just running through a little bit of the TPU article. Can you, can you actually set the table for me on like, what do you think is new about it? Versus what has semi-analysis already been saying? And this is more just like tying everything in a bow.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, half of the article is just referencing.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  We've been saying this for two years. We've been saying this for one year.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  And even referencing Google's own content about the TPU dating back even even further. So.

• 1:02:37Dylan Patel?

  Yeah, I would say, I would say the majority of this piece was if you're, if you're a client, it's already been pretty much all published, but it hasn't been tied together. It hasn't had a narrative around it, right? Because when we think about like what we put out as on the paid side versus what we put out on the newsletter. Right. Our clients sort of get, you know, what changed? What happened? Here's the numbers. That's about it, right? We don't explain the technology that much because our clients are sophisticated, right? They're either in the industry or, or they're finance bros who don't give a shit about the technical stuff. And so it's either of those two, right? And so we're just explaining, here's what's happening. Here's the change. Here's the numbers, right? So for months, we've been saying Google's selling TPUs for months. We've been saying, hey, here's TPV seven versus Blackwell.

• 1:03:22Dylan Patel?

  We've even put out updates on here's what we think TPV eight is versus what we think Ruben is. And so generally it was making it into a narrative and explaining the technology in the corporate, I would say, politics or dynamicism around it, right? So that's, you know, I think, I think there has been bits and pieces put out by other, other folks, right? I think the information has done great reporting on some of the stuff after we did. But in the public space, I think, you know, for as an example, right? Like, so, so other people have put out bits and pieces surrounding this, but they haven't put out the full picture. So, so as far as like what's new, it depends on where you sit in the stack. Uh, but, but you know, Anthropic and, and Meta and folks like that have been talking to Google about buying TPU's for many months, right?

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Dylan Patel?

  Um, whereas, whereas people externally are, you know, the last week when Gemini 3 was launched, or two weeks ago, people were just learning that TPU's are trained, training Google's models, right? So it's, it's where are you in the information spectrum, right?

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. So, uh, on that information spectrum, uh, the finance bros, they can probably just like, if they, if they read into this, oh, bullish, Google or bearish Nvidia or whatever, like they can kind of trade in and out, uh, as they please, but what, on the, on the more technical side, like, are people using semi-analysis research to understand, like, okay, I'm a NeoCloud, what do I want to rack for next year? Maybe I need to be putting in a TPU order? Is that, is that how people interpret your research? Like, what happens on the technical side of the house?

• 1:04:50Dylan Patel?

  Yeah. So, so as far as like some of the paid stuff we do, we have one model called the TCO model, right? Which is, uh, calculating the TCO of all these, uh, different hardware's performance, um, building up the entire cluster cost, you know, breaking it down into like a dozen plus different things, whether it's storage or networking and breaking down the cost of everything. So there we put out research on TPU's because as soon as NeoCloud started getting offered, hey, you want to buy TPU's?

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Dylan Patel?

  We're like, okay, we need our own ground up model. So when you're negotiating a big contract, what you do is called a should cost, right? You, you go and calculate what it costs for the company versus what it costs for me to deploy. Um, and then you like, think about like, oh, what's the margins they have? What is ridiculous to offer them? What is not, right? Cause everyone always wants to know like, hey, what margin are they making off of me? Can I push that down a little bit? Um, what is, what is ridiculous to demand in a negotiation versus what's not? So we've already been working, you know, through this TCO model, we've put out four different updates on the TCO of, uh, TPU's, V7 and V8, because there are NeoClouds out there, um, as well as labs who are purchasing TPU's that are using that to understand what's the cost.

• 1:05:54Dylan Patel?

  Now, you know, Anthropic, I will say just already knew and figured it out because they've hired, hired so many Google people, but other labs are also looking at it, right?

• 1:06:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Dylan Patel?

  Um, and so, so, you know, when you, when you say, hey, on, on the cost side of things, on the technical side of things, right? There's a lot of network engineers now out there who have never deployed Google hardware that are now like, okay, I need to figure out how to do this. Tex, right? Like, you know, so there's, there's people who have DM'd me that are like, oh, we've been, you know, as you know, we've been thinking about deploying NeoClouds, but your material on this. Is technically better and teaches me more than Google's own material. Right? So it's like this is this is helpful to people on multiple factors.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the software side? Google's built their own internal stack to compete with CUDA. How much of that are they going to actually give to their customers who are buying TPU? Because that feels like you it feels like potentially you could over rotate on, oh, well Gemini three is really good, but why is it good? Is it just because of the hardware? Or is it also Google's incredible prowess, multi data center training? All this fancy stuff that they have that they won't be giving you when they sell you the TPU?

• 1:06:58Dylan Patel?

  Yeah. So that's the interesting thing is some of the stuff software will remain closed source, but you can still use it.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:03Dylan Patel?

  Right? And then some of the software they are trying to open source aggressively. And then some of the software there's never going to get out there anywhere. Right? So it sits in three kind of buckets, right? The interesting, I guess, newer thing that we did in the piece was we looked across all these different open source AI software, right? Whether it's PyTorch, whether it's VLM, whether, you know, all these different open source libraries. And we calculated and counted up how many Google commits there were, right? And you can see there's a chart in the article where the number of commits that Google's doing on TPUs has exploded over the last handful of months. Right? As they've decided to shift their strategy, sell TPUs externally, they also recognize software has to be open for this, right? You know, only the giga brains that like Anthropic can figure out how to do everything themselves.

• 1:07:47Dylan Patel?

  Right? It's it's those people outside of Anthropic, you know, types that that need a bunch of open source software that builds on top of it, right? And what's interesting is when you look at like, hey, Nvidia, you know, the biggest argument that Nvidia doesn't really make for GPUs, but they should, is that, you know, about 40% of the software that's open sourced is actually just from China. Right? On CUDA, and that's the CUDA mode, right? It's like 40% of the software is just like open source stuff, whether it's people committing to VLM or PyTorch or or all these other libraries, right? ByteDance open sourcing stuff, DeepSeek open sourcing stuff. And and and Google, you know, they don't have people open, you know, Anthropic's not going to open source software. So Google needs to catch up, not just by, hey, here's all the software we have internally. Let's open source it. They also need the ecosystem to build a ton of software on top of TPUs.

• 1:08:32Dylan Patel?

  And so that's the that's the real big challenge there. And and there's an element of software there that Nvidia is happy to open source and customers of Nvidia are happy to open source that Google will never open source because it's it's, you know, Google Cloud is selling the TPU. Gemini is the one actually using it and developing a lot of the software. And these two groups are not always going to be aligned.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, isn't that like, I mean, what are the other kind of just problems with Google becoming an actual like seller of TPU? It feels like there's obviously an opportunity because Nvidia has high margins. There's demand, it's a great chip, but culturally, structurally, like Google tries a lot of different things. They have a lot of advantages, but occasionally like they fall flat on their face with just like they can't even get an RSS reader out or something like that. So like, are there other risks to the TPU not really finding its footing for reasons that aren't just the laws of physics?

• 1:09:30Dylan Patel?

  Yeah, so the biggest challenge I see with them is it's everything is non-standard, right? Google for years, they developed liquid cooling first, right?

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:37Dylan Patel?

  For AI computing. They deployed rack scale architectures, right? Everyone's talking about GB 200 rack scale architecture. Google did it first with TPU's, right? But when they did all of this stuff, they didn't give a crap about, hey, you know, this has to go in 50, 100,000 different people's data centers, right? This has to go in my data centers that I designed myself. So everything is super vertical. The entire liquid cooling supply chain is super vertical, entire, the racks aren't even the standard width, right? So when I look at like a data center, it's like the door, the loading bays, because they're so much wider, the Google racks are like three times as wide. It's like, maybe it might not even fit into the data center, like physically, like they're the doors.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:14Dylan Patel?

  So there's like all sorts of random, like, I wouldn't say random, it's Google from first principles design stuff.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're NeoCloud and you're like, the hot thing's going to be TPU next year or the year after, and I want to be able to sell into that market, it's not just flip a switch, drop in, replace with TPU. You have to maybe build a whole new building. Like, it might be that significant.

• 1:10:36Dylan Patel?

  Right, or do, or like knock down some walls and then like, you know, I need to, I need to go get liquid cooling, not from Dell and Super Micro and HPE who I've, who serviced me already, I need to go get it from some random supplier who's only ever sold to Google. And usually they're sitting across the table from like some GigaBrain engineer who has a team of 20 people working on liquid cooling instead of like, you know, my one guy who does liquid cooling, procurement and negotiations and like also does procurement of like network stuff.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  There was, there was a, there was a tinfoil hat theory floating around that Meta leaked their TPU Meta leaked their TPU interest to try to gain some sort of leverage over maybe some negotiations with Nvidia. I don't know if you see any possibility in that, but how do you think those conversations are going? Jensen doesn't want to discount and compress his margins, but at the same time, he can't do this kind of like equity rebate thing. If he, if he took a big position in, in Meta.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  It'd be very suspicious. I totally get the OpenAI investment. That seems like it makes much, much more sense than saying, hey, we're going long Meta. You know, as a $4 trillion company.

• 1:11:47Dylan Patel?

  Yeah. At the end of the day, right? Like TPUs have like a set of maybe 10 customers, right? Cause you have to be super sophisticated.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Dylan Patel?

  Um, and so what really is challenging here is, is, you know, Meta, Meta looks at the numbers, you know, it's like, okay, OpenAI, I'm getting 30% off because they're paying, they're investing in me as a result. Obviously they get equity, but they're investing in me and I get 30% off on these GPUs. As a result, right? Meta, you can't do that. So, so Meta, there, I don't think that they're just negotiating, right? Like, you know, is, is, are they just negotiating with Nvidia when they buy AMD? No, they're engineers, right? They're developing all the software. They're actually deploying, uh, Llama 405B was exclusively on AMD for a number of months, right? Uh, for inference, right? Um, so, so when you look across, hey, is Meta just like playing around, trying to negotiate? It's like, no, no, no. Like they're, they're looking out for what is best, right?

• 1:12:36Dylan Patel?

  And Meta is power constrained and TPUs are currently way more power efficient. Meta is compute constrained. Um, and TPUs are potentially higher performance per watt and higher performance per dollar, right? At least that's what we believe for TPV7, it is. So they'd be dumb not to look at it, right? And they have the time, they have the people, they have the team. Now Nvidia at the same time has to play the game of chicken, right? Yeah, sure. They could discount the pricing somewhat. Um. And because what's funny is Nvidia is more vertically integrated than Google is when selling hardware, right? Google has to pay Broadcom who pays TSMC, whereas Nvidia gets to pay TSMC directly, right? There's this vertical integration challenge where Nvidia could drop the price a little bit and they'll be fine, but they don't want to, right? You know, the whole point is you charge the highest price possible.

• 1:13:18Dylan Patel?

  And then the last thing is they've got this like, um, you know, they've got this view about antitrust, right? You, you don't want to cut deals for specific customers because that looks bad, right? Instead, you want, you know, right now Dell pays the same price for a GPU as gigabyte as Meta. Now, the networking hardware, there's different pricing because there's a lot more competition and Nvidia can cut a lot more there. But on the GPUs themselves, Nvidia's pricing is very fair, right? And fair in the sense that they're making a shitload of money off of everyone, you know?

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, how, talk about kind of Jensen's leverage, uh, that he has around Ruben allocations as some of these customers start to, uh, at least consider TPUs.

• 1:14:05Dylan Patel?

  Yeah. So as far as like next year's TPU deployments, it's pretty set in stone for the vast majority of the volume, right? Anthropic's got a bunch and then there's some sprinkled elsewhere. Uh, but as we go into 2028 where Google can actually ramp, um, you know, the, the flip side is Ruben is also ramping. And at least based on our research, looking throughout the supply chain, um, you know, over a year ago, when OpenAI started their chip team, they poached like 15 Google people overnight, right? In one week, like someone I knew I heard up was like, oh yeah, I'm joining OpenAI. And I text like another three people I know and they're like, oh yeah, I'm also joining OpenAI. I'm like, what the fuck? Um, so, so Google's, a lot of their best TPU engineers have left, right? They also have a ton left. And so that what that's done is, you know, chip timelines are so long, that didn't affect TPV seven, that's affecting TPV eight.

• 1:14:48Dylan Patel?

  At the same time, Google's trying to diversify their supply chain, get from not just Broadcom, but also MediaTek. And so Google's got a real challenge on TPV eight in that. Uh, it's good. It's an improvement, but then when you go look at what Nvidia is doing with Ruben, Ruben is so much better because Nvidia is just pedal to the floor, paranoid as fuck. Uh, we, we have to be the best and we have to be way, way, way better than everything because how much better I am than everyone else is my margin, right? And so Nvidia, Nvidia has the sort of like, at least currently, we think Nvidia is going to be so much better that they'll be fine and they'll be able to maintain margins, right? Now, things can happen. Ruben can delay or TPUs can delay and the position looks better or worse, right? Um, there's a lot of unknowns to go through. But as far as like, what is Jensen's leverage is, look, I'm going to make the best hardware

• 1:15:33Dylan Patel?

  and plus my software advantages and I'll be able to continue to be dominant and dominate the market, right? Um, there's, there's curveballs I could go, which is like, oh, Google software, they could open source enough software that actually their software ecosystem is not far behind Nvidia. Maybe they don't want to, right? Or, hey, they could, um, you know, they could execute everything and Nvidia has a three, six month delay. Now all of a sudden they're a lot more competitive, right? Um, and, and so all these things are still open questions, but it's, it's Nvidia can play the allocation game as well, of course, right? Um, hey, I'm going to give all of the GPUs initially to companies that probably could buy uh, TPUs, but that ends up being all the AI labs and hyperscalers, right? Um, at least, you know, like Meta, right? And ByteDance, people that would actually be willing to buy TPUs.

• 1:16:16Dylan Patel?

  Um, and then you end up with this like weird situation where, okay, well, that's like 75% of the GPU market anyways. When I look at the AI labs through the Neo clouds, right? Um, when there's, you know, Nebius and Iris Energy and all these other, you know, CoreWeave and all these folks are deploying for OpenAI anyways, right? Um, you know, this, this sort of ends up being like, well, sure, I could stiff like some people in the allocation, but at the end of the day, everyone who is a potential customer for TPUs uh, is sophisticated enough to be where they were going to be on the beginning of the allocation anyways, right?

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  What, what, uh, how are you framing ClusterMax these days? Is it, is it for customers who want to buy services from NeoClouds? Is that the primary goal of ClusterMax? Because I feel like some people look at it and they're like, this is a buy rating. This is a sell rating on the stock.

• 1:17:09Dylan Patel?

  So the funniest thing is like ClusterMax V1, the title of it was ClusterMax: How to Rent a GPU. Right? Because we discussed all of that. And then, and then in ClusterMax V1, I believe we put Iris Energy and underperform. Right? At the same time, the research side of the business, uh, we explicitly were like, dude, they've got these data centers. It doesn't matter if they suck at running GPUs.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:29Dylan Patel?

  They've got these data centers. They've got this power. If you just value them on a watts per, you know, how much money they could make, it's a long.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Dylan Patel?

  At the same time as like, um, Jordan, right? Jordan, he's running ClusterMax is like Iris kinda sucks. Uh, and it was other people in the technical team before him. You know, it's like, it's like Jeremy who's running the data center side. And I think he's been on TBPN is like, dude, Iris Energy is a stock. Right? So it's like, it's, it's kind of like, you know, it's like, what, what, what, what the technical side of the house does versus what the, you know, research side of the house does. Yes, they talk to each other, right? Jeremy did ask the team like, hey, what do you think of Iris Energy? I think it's a log. And the team working on ClusterMax is like, I don't know. Like, you know, it's, it's a bad cloud. And it's like, that doesn't matter. So ClusterMax has nothing to do with the stock. Right? Um, now obviously there's going to be some correlation with how good is a stock versus, you know, who's going to want to rent from them?

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Dylan Patel?

  Um, but at the end of the day, right? Like ClusterMax is the, the goal purpose, sole purpose, and we'll be explicitly say in there is it's for people renting anywhere from like, you know, hundreds of GPUs to, you know, right below the AI lab scale, right? The AI lab scale, there's different considerations. Um, but in that range, tens of thousands of GPUs, all the way down to hundreds of GPUs, that's who we're targeting. Plus we're saying, we're giving a bunch of feedback for people to make the cloud ecosystem better.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Dylan Patel?

  The unsung hero between ClusterMax V1 and V2 is that we moved the bar up. Right? You know, what it required to be in gold, like was, was much more. What it required to be in silver was much more because everyone improved so much. Right? And as, as we continue to like, increase the requirements, make it harder and harder.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  You gotta move, keep moving the goalposts.

• 1:19:05Dylan Patel?

  Right, people keep improving the ecosystem and actually, you know, this is the funny thing. It's like ClusterMax is evil. It's like when I, when we look at the quotes and we've got hundreds of quotes on ClusterMax.ai, all these companies are like, dude, I love this, this one specific bug that this NeoCloud had, they fixed it as soon as you wrote about it, right? Or like, hey, it helped me understand the reliability, help me understand this or that. People are like, love ClusterMax, um, and, and, you know, altruistically, like, I think we're generating billions of dollars in value just from, hey, like, all these clouds are more efficient and there's less failures, and it's easier to get your workload running on any random GPU cloud and the market is more efficient. Um, now, I'm not making any money off of that. How am I making money off of ClusterMax? I'll be very clear, is people who hire us to do diligence, right?

• 1:19:47Dylan Patel?

  So people who want to acquire a NeoCloud, people who want to sign a massive, massive deal, that's not just like thousands of GPUs, but tens of thousands of GPUs. And then lastly, it's people who want to, um, you know, invest in NeoCloud. Those are the three areas where we're making money off of quote-unquote ClusterMax, but not really. We're not selling ratings, we're not, you know, you know, we're, we're in fact, like, a customer will do a consulting project, project with us, or want to, want to buy some research from us, and I'll explicitly put in our Slack shares, Slack, or I'll send an email to the CEO, like, dude, just so you know, the people working on this are not the people who are doing ClusterMax rating, right? Um, you know, the, the people who are buying, you know, the research on like, these data centers are there, and this is the power ramp, or here's the accelerators, or here's the TCO. That's not the people doing ClusterMax, right?

• 1:20:30Dylan Patel?

  And I don't care about, you know, whether you buy it or not, I, you know, at the end of the day, Google and Amazon and Microsoft are way bigger customers than, and, you know, FlucDak and like, you know, those kind of companies, right? And yet, one, some of those are ranked in silver, and some of those are ranked in platinum and gold. And that's because technically, what's, what matters not, hey, you know, obviously, when we talk about who buys our research, the biggest companies in the world are going to pay me more than the mid-sized companies in the world.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Okay, question from the chat.

• 1:20:57Dylan Patel?

  And the price is discriminated based on that.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Uh, would you change the rating of a NeoCloud if Sholto promised to do the dishes for two weeks straight?

• 1:21:07Dylan Patel?

  You know, there was an argument that I saw someone is like, who does the chores? And it's like, brother, we live together by choice, you know, we pay someone to come once a week. If you cook something, you do your own dishes, but like, you know, frankly, we're working so much. And I think like, you know, I think, I think Dorkesh has ordered pizza from the same spot three nights in a row before, right? Like, it's, it's, it's.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so, so, question is, is, is being an adult man with roommates underrated?

• 1:21:34Dylan Patel?

  Um, so I haven't lived with people in years. And then when I moved to SF.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  So you came back?

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 1:21:42Dylan Patel?

  I moved with, I moved to SF this year, you know, I'm like, oh, you know, I should live with friends, just so it's more fun. Um, and the first house kind of fell apart, so I moved into this house with these guys. And we've been talking about it for months. Um, I love it, right? It's like, look, we, we, we, we have, you know, if you think about, oh, what if we all rented our own places that were good? And then we pooled that budget together, we have a nice place.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Dylan Patel?

  Right? And then in that place, we have plenty of space for ourselves. We, we pay for someone to come and clean once a week, right? So at the end of the day, what is, what is the negative here is like, well, we're living with our friends.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  It's just guys being dude.

• 1:22:14Dylan Patel?

  But we have enough space to where like.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  And, and the beauty is, if you, if you do bunk beds, you have more room for activities.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Anyway, no, no, sorry, sorry. Actual question from the chat. Uh, when is TPU going on inference max? We gotta know.

• 1:22:29Dylan Patel?

  So we're working on it, right? We, we're, we're working with Google, um, technical folks. Um, you know, funnily enough, actually, um, we triggered a security warning for this Google engineer. Uh, Kimbo went to a, a JAX conference, right? JAX is, is the opposite, is like PyTorch for, but for TPUs. It's the most simple, it's, it's Google's own internal thing, right? Um, that people do use externally. Um, he went to this PyTorch, or this JAX conference, a Google engineer presented something. He's like, can I get the slides? They send it to him and then Google's security alert like locks him out of his computer because he sent us like a, some technical like information and like, for three days, the guy can't work and he's freaking the fuck out.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:23:06Dylan Patel?

  I emailed Jeff Dean, I'm like, bro, this is like, do not fire this guy. He sent me stuff that you presented at a public conference. He's like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, I'll get that fixed. But anyways, like, um, we're working with, we're, we're trying to. Implement it. We have access to some TPUs. The software stack is different, right?

• 1:23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Dylan Patel?

  You know, just

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  So you basically have to rewrite or re-implement Inference Max? Like, like the code that actually runs?

• 1:23:27Dylan Patel?

  I won't say it's that much work.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:29Dylan Patel?

  Like, as much as like completely redoing Inference Max, but there's a ton of work, right?

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:32Dylan Patel?

  So we're moving as fast as we can.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Dylan Patel?

  Internal target is this year.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:35Dylan Patel?

  Um, you know, I don't hold us to it.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Then the obvious question is, is like, I, I feel like Inference Max is my North Star for TCO relative in AMD versus Nvidia land. Uh, there was a bar chart of TCO for GPU versus Nvidia. It looked like, it looked like TPU was doing really well on that chart. The bars were very low. Where did those numbers come from? Do you have confidence in those numbers? Or do you think the numbers will change once you actually get TPU on Inference Max?

• 1:24:06Dylan Patel?

  Yeah, so Inference Max shows performance TCO, right?

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:09Dylan Patel?

  You know, it's great, great, like, you know, like, guess what? Like, um, you know, TCO of like a Raspberry Pi is incredible. It's like five bucks, right?

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:16Dylan Patel?

  Um, you know, versus, versus a GPU is $50,000. Performance divided by TCO is what matters. So that bar chart is saying, look, TPUs are cheaper and at least on quoted specs. You know, now, now let's make some assumptions around utilization. And in the, in the article, we explicitly said, look, we don't know what the utilization is. It's going to change customer to customer. Um, here's a range. Worst case, it's like a little bit worse than GPUs. Best case, it's way better than GPUs, right? Um, and, and so Inference Max will tell us what the actual performance is in inference. Um, because we don't know yet, right? Um, currently, the open source software for TPUs is not good enough, good enough for us to just take the open source software and say that's the performance. Right? Because that's obviously like not real, right? Anyone who like is actually buying TPUs is going to spend engineering hours to work on it.

• 1:25:00Dylan Patel?

  And so we're trying to work with Google to get a real performance number that is achievable by people. Um, you know, and, and will be upstreamed into the open source software because this is an in-progress thing. Right? No one cares what TPV7 can do today. It's about what it does in six months. Um, and so, you know, obviously, we don't want to be, you know, today, TPU's, if you're using VLLM, are worse performance TCO than GPUs, without a doubt. But the target is moving very fast. And, you know, there's a ton of like low hanging fruit for us to implement before we actually put a number out there. Right? Um, and so where does Google sit there? We'll see. Um, I, I personally believe the TCO side of things, the total cost of ownership is based on what we know on supply chain. Right? How much do, uh, how much do the chips cost? How much do the racks cost? How much does the liquid cooling cost? How much does the memory cost? How much do the cables cost?

• 1:25:45Dylan Patel?

  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? That's based on our estimates up and down. So I think the TCO side of things, we're pretty confident. Um, it's the, it's the performance side of things where we don't know. Right? Um, there is a wide range and that's what we sort of tried to state in the article. Right? Performance is a wide range.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, can you, can you, uh, explain more about Google and Broadcom's relationship? Max Hylak from, from Neuralink and Science was, was asking on the timeline last week. Why, why have Broadcom as a middleman? Couldn't, couldn't, uh, Google do the design and, and place the orders from TSMC themselves? But, but what's your read on, on that relationship and how, how durable it is?

• 1:26:24Dylan Patel?

  Yeah. So when you think about chip design, there's a few different stages, right? There's defining the architecture. And then there's actually like implementing that architecture onto a process technology. There's laying out that architecture into gates on the, on the chip. And then there's like the, the whole supply chain side of things, right? Negotiating contracts, getting allocations, et cetera.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  That takes like 18 months, right? Isn't that like an 18 month process, basically?

• 1:26:47Dylan Patel?

  Yeah, 18 months or more, right? Um, I would say, I would say actually like Nvidia is, is faster side and Google's on the slower side just because, you know, Nvidia's been doing it for longer. They have a bigger team, right? Um, and they, they, you know, but at the same time, Intel has the biggest chip design team and they move even slower than that. Right? They take like four years. At least that's what they did a year or two ago. We'll see what the new CEO can get into the, you know, uh, you know, reorg it, right? Um, but as far as like Google, you know, when they first started the TPU, it was a very few people and they relied heavily, heavily, heavily on Broadcom to do everything. Right? They just defined the top level architecture and Broadcom did everything I said below, right? Negotiating with supply chain, figuring out process, uh, figuring out how to lay out the gates, everything, right? As time has moved forward, Google has taken on more and more of this, right?

• 1:27:32Dylan Patel?

  Now they use, you know, they've talked a lot about AlphaChip where they use AI to help floor plan the chip, right? Once you have the architecture, how do I physically lay it out? Onto the chip, right? They've done more and more and more there. They haven't taken over everything yet, but that's that's sort of the point. But Google Broadcom has this like super big advantage, right? Nvidia, they they acquired Mellanox, you know, call it five, six, seven years ago. Huge acquisition. Who's the biggest networking company in the world? Broadcom, right? Broadcom is the biggest networking company in the world. And, you know, when you talk about AI, it's it's AI, it's the architecture of the actual processing elements. It's memory, uh, which you're buying from, you know, you know, the memory companies, right? Hynix and Samsung and Micron. And then it's networking, right? When you try and boil it down to the most simple things in software, right?

• 1:28:16Dylan Patel?

  The networking side of things is so important. And the, let's say, technical competence of everyone around the world besides Broadcom and Nvidia in networking is so low, or rather, it's just not as good as them. They're actually good, but it's like Broadcom and Nvidia are just so good. And Broadcom is better than Nvidia in many ways at networking that, you know, when you think about what is Google doing? Yes, they're defining how the network topology is. But when you're talking about the physical network certainties, you know, how how packets get transferred, all these different things, um, Broadcom has heavy, heavy influence there. So to this day, right, Broadcom is still charging margins like they did three, four years ago, even though Google has taken up more and more of the work. Um, but at the same time, Google can't leave until they figure out how to do

• 1:28:59Dylan Patel?

  the networking and supply chain themselves or with a partner. And so what are they doing on TPV eight? That is potentially a distraction that's slowing down their execution is they're working with MediaTek, right? MediaTek at times has helped Cisco with their network chips. MediaTek has a lot of work on some of this networking stuff. They're nowhere close to Broadcom, right, on revenue, right? For, and that's, that's, that's one metric on technical competence. You know, that's another metric. I think MediaTek is good, right? But like, they're just nowhere close to Broadcom. So now Google is having to work with, you know, I don't want to say subpar vendors, but uh, inferior vendors to Broadcom.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  And that's just to increase their margin on TPV eight?

• 1:29:35Dylan Patel?

  I would even say their angle when they started this project was never we're gonna sell TPUs externally. It was dude, we're paying, you know, a 3X markup to Broadcom. And half the cost of this chip is memory. Like, what the fuck are we doing? Right? Um, you know, at the same time, it's like, well, sure. Physically, the cost for the networking is not that much. But what value does the networking bring is, you know, sort of Broadcom? And then Broadcom is also doing the like game theory, not science of like, well, you can't really leave us. So we're gonna charge you what we think is fair. Or what we think we can charge. And Google's like, oh, no, we're stuck to you, right? So MediaTek is taking way, way, way less margin. They're not passing the memory through them. Right? And so, you know, this, this ends up being like, hey, that's a huge advantage for them.

• 1:30:16Dylan Patel?

  Flip side is like, well, they've, they've, they've got to engineer all this work that Broadcom was doing. Instead of working on a way better architecture, they've got to work with a worse vendor. Right? Objectively worse, although MediaTek, like I said, is very good. Uh, to try and implement TPUs, uh, more directly with TSMC with less Broadcom sort of in the middle.

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  Very helpful.

• 1:30:37Dylan Patel?

  And, and, and Google, you know, because it's risky, is going down both paths. Right? They're continuing to work with Broadcom on TPVA. And then separate TPVA project, they're working with MediaTek, right? Cause they can't risk, you know, fine, whatever 30 points of margin, 40 points of margin, 50 points of margin. I can't risk the TPU being late because ads runs on that, Gemini runs on that.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Uh, can you, can you give any takes on the Nvidia's $2 billion investment in Synopsys? That got announced this morning? I don't know if you, you saw it, I'm assuming you did.

• 1:31:06Dylan Patel?

  Yeah, so in a time where, you know, let's say the two biggest chipmakers Broadcom and Nvidia are making more money than ever. And everyone else in the supply chain and all the hyperscaler are trying to design more and more chips. Everyone's, everyone's sort of working on that. You've got, you've got the, the EDA vendors are at the lowest possible valuations or lowest valuations that they've had. They're still very expensive, but lowest valuations they've had on a earnings multiple basis for a long time. There, and, and, and this is on the eve of, hey, like objectively, are there gonna be more chip designs or less chip designs in five years? A lot, lot more, right? Now, the flip side is AI chip design is coming, coming. There's 20 plus companies doing AI chip design. It's a, we've got a really long article coming on that soon. Uh, that'll sort of explain the landscape, but AI chip design is gonna shake up everything.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this is AI, this is AI, AI chip design, correct?

• 1:31:55Dylan Patel?

  AI helping chip design, whether it's for AI chips or for like power chips.

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:32:02Dylan Patel?

  And so, so the question is like, you know, Nvidia, Nvidia has a lot of tools internally, right? The, the dirty, the, the thing about EDA is that there's three companies that own 95% of the revenue, but at the same time, Google and Nvidia and Broadcom and all these guys also design a lot of their tooling internally, although they are massive customers of all three vendors, right? So it's kind of like an oligopoly where the customers also contribute a lot. And so Nvidia's whole goal here is like, how do I get every EDA flow working on GPUs? Because today, a lot of it is running on, on FPGA, is a lot of it's running on CPUs. And AI, AI chip design is going to get a lot more AI influenced. How do I get everything working on GPUs in terms of like the operation of it, even if it's helping people design not GPUs, right? And, and I don't have enough engineers to work on all

• 1:32:47Dylan Patel?

  the software. They've open sourced a lot of software, right? Like Coolitho, it's, it's software for lithography, right? And they've got all this software up and down the chain all the way from lithography to laying out chips and all those other things. They just want to make it all run on GPUs. And, and so that's, that's what their goal here is, right? And now they've given Synopsys a huge, huge, they're buying Synopsys at the lowest valuations that Synopsys has ever had, with all this cash that they were going to give away in dividends or buybacks anyways. And, and they're getting Synopsys to now make GPUs first class, right? And so I think this is a win-win for Synopsys and Nvidia.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Well, we could go way longer, but I know what's on your calendar. You got to hit the gym. Thank you so much for coming by and chatting with us. This is really helpful. Have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the holidays with your family. Great catching up. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:33:40Dylan Patel?

  Goodbye. See you guys.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  See you. Uh, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Uh, we have Ro Khanna in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and UltraDunk. Rob, good to meet you. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  I'm doing well. You guys have become quite the celebrities in my district. Everyone is tuning into your podcast.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it and we're happy to have you on the show. Thank you so much for your time. What was that?

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

  Are the all in guys, are the all in guys jealous or do they, do they respect you?

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  I think that they have left, they have, they're in the stratosphere. They have left the, you know, the, the low.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  The scrap.

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're picking up the scraps compared to them.

• 1:34:24Speaker 05

  I think, I, I think like any great Silicon Valley startup, you're nipping at their, at their heels.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  Well, it's funny, we, we, we had, we had a New York Times piece about us. It was a very nice, uh, you know, just like, here's what TVP is doing. Just kind of an explainer piece. Uh, David Sacks, of course, uh, got a little bit more of the investigative journalism treatment, got five reporters. We only got one. And so I think that tells you about the relative importance of the shows. Um, but anyway, I'm sure we'll get into that. I would love for you just to kind of set.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  Normally, normally when our guest joins, join and they're wearing a suit, we, we say thank you.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  Thank you for dressing up.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  This is, I'm assuming it's one of your daily drivers. So.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I, I'm, I'm not back in my district. They, it'd be the only way I'd lose my seat is if I started to show up with a suit to like, uh,

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  the place was there, but in DC.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Suit guy.

• 1:35:13Speaker 05

  The uniform. Yeah. The uniform in DC.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  But I was hoping you could, you could sort of, uh, take us through a little bit of the prehistory since it's the first time on the show. Just explain, uh, how you wound up in this position, a little bit of your backstory and then, um, obviously there's so many hot topics that I want to talk about in, uh, artificial intelligence and tech broadly. And I want, I want your opinion on, on everything that's going on, but I'd love to kick it off with a little bit of like, how you wound up in Congress?

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  Sure. Well, I, uh, am the son of immigrants. My parents came, uh, from India in the late 1960s. Uh, my grandfather spent, uh, four years in jail alongside Gandhi as part of the Indian independence movement. And that really inspired my love of public service. Uh, when I came out to Silicon Valley, I, I had a professor, Larry Lessig, he said, if you care about policy, go, go out to, to Silicon Valley. That's where the interesting things are happening. That's where the big things are happening. So I went out. And I ran when I was 27 against the Iraq war. And I got killed. I got crushed, 71 to 19. But came to the attention of folks as someone willing to stand up for, against the war.

• 1:36:25Speaker 05

  And then I worked as a tech lawyer. I supported President Obama. I got to go work for President Obama. And then I wrote a book about what we needed to do to build new manufacturing across this country in 2012. What we needed to do to really have the modern economy in different parts of the country.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  You're one of the first American, beginning of the American dynamism movement, would you say?

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was gonna say to President Trump, he stole all my ideas in terms of manufacturing, but you know.

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's good. That's good though. That's good though, then, right?

• 1:36:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, look, I support the American dynamism movement. I'm a fan of sort of what Mark Andreessen wrote in a Wall Street op-ed about like, how do we not make masks in America? How do we not make basic things in America? When my parents came to this country in the 60s, we were the place to be. We were humming. We were brimming with confidence. Kennedy said to go to the moon. And in my first book was about why manufacturing still matters. I think it was a colossal mistake to let China eat our lunch on so many key industries, especially now with rare earth metals and magnets. I mean, we should have a Manhattan project to do that in the United States or New Zealand, Australia, Chile. But, you know, so after my time in the Obama administration, after I wrote this book,

• 1:37:42Speaker 05

  I said, "Technology is gonna shape so much of the future of this country. I have a vision of how we can make sure that it helps everyone in my district and around the country. And maybe I have something to offer to Congress." So I ran against an incumbent again, lost again. California is a machine-dominated state, very hard to break in. And I persisted and won on my third try. There you go. Third time's a charm.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  And so for this year in 2025, how would you frame, you know, your top priorities? There's this weird, there's this weird disconnect between that we've been tracking on like, how relevant is AI? It's, it's so dominant in tech and yet if you talk to somebody at Apple, they'll be like, we didn't want to focus on AI this year at all. We wanted to focus on battery life because that's what helped us sell phones and AI was actually not a driver of iPhone sales, for example. It's, it's a, it's a deeply pervasive discussion point and yet it's not necessarily, and yet it's, it's widely used, but also widely hated. It's such a unique technology, but just in terms of political priorities, what's been

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  on the top of the stack for you this year?

• 1:38:55Speaker 05

  I want to answer your question on AI, but obviously in the last few months, what's been a highest priority is getting these Epstein files released. And when Thomas Massey and I passed the Epstein Transparency Act, it was my bill, passed 427 to 1, 100 to 0 in the Senate and Donald Trump signed it. Most urgently, it's about justice for these underage girls or a thousand victims who were raped at Epstein's Island. But it's also about this kind of idea of elite impunity, that these rich and powerful people, I call them the Epstein class, don't play by the rules, which you and I have to play by and people are tired of it. And it also is a story of how, how in the world do you get some things done in Washington? How, how did a Bay Area progressive congressperson

• 1:39:37Speaker 05

  end up getting Donald Trump to sign his bill and getting 427 people in the House to vote for it and 100 senators? So that has been the immediate priority. But what I say to folks-

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  So are you, are you optimistic that the American people will ever get a, like a truly cohesive narrative on the Epstein story? Or will it be our generation's JFK assassination?

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  I'm confident we're gonna get far more than we've had so far. The release is now mandated by law December 19th or December 20th. And then more names are gonna fall. You've already had some high-profile names fall because of their affiliation with Epstein covering up for him. Sure. Or being inappropriate. There are gonna be other names that come out. Now, do I think that it's gonna satisfy everyone? No. There's always gonna be some sense that we didn't get a full justice, but it's gonna be much better than these women who were denied justice for decades, which was not partisan. I mean, they were shafted by a justice system that didn't work.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  And there are a lot of rich and powerful people who got away with it. But look, what I tell people is that AI is gonna matter even more than anything. And to your point about Apple, it's not AI literally as just AI, as Grok or ChatGPT, or a technology that detects patterns and can predict the future based on patterns. It's more that AI has become a symbol for a technology revolution that people know is changing everything about their way of life and the economy, and where they feel like they don't have control, that they don't have a full say in what that's gonna mean. They don't have a full say in what that's gonna mean for their kids in terms of having good-paying jobs,

• 1:41:24Speaker 05

  and they're unsure if their kids are gonna have as good a life as their parents had. They don't know what that's gonna mean culturally for them as citizens. Are they gonna have the same sense, or are they just gonna be manipulated by algorithms? And they don't know what that means culturally, is their kids are on phones in school and becoming sort of creatures with machines. And so this whole concept of how technology is going to be something that empowers people and that people feel comfortable about as opposed to fearful of, is the challenge in my view of our time. And you know, I've gotten attacked from some people in Silicon Valley saying, oh, it's

• 1:42:06Speaker 05

  kind of a Luddite. And I was like, no, not a Luddite. Of course, I believe AI can do a lot of great things in medicine, in coming up with new disease and lowering costs. But I don't think we can be oblivious to people's concerns about keeping jobs and keeping social cohesion and making sure their kids are going to have a good economic future. And so I've tried to be thoughtful about how we adopt AI, how we adopt technology in a way that keeps the American dream alive and benefits folks.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  And I mean, that's such a wide remit, how we adopt AI technology, because you can see it implemented from a chatbot that, you know, some random person uses, or, you know, kids are using AI, all the way down to, you know, deeper in some the bowels of some enterprise software product that, you know, no human was ever interacting with to begin with. And then it's just streamlined a little bit with some AI dropped in the middle of some big system. How are you thinking about creating some sort of taxonomy around AI? Do you do you like a divide between generative AI and more traditional machine learning

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  workloads? Do you see a divide between consumer and B2B applications, self-driving versus what happens in a chatbot? Like, how are you thinking about actually breaking apart that problem? Because there's so much there when we say AI.

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Speaker 05

  I would say that the key distinction is, is AI going to enhance human capability or eliminate human beings? That is the distinction. And that we need to figure out as a society how we get more AI that is enhancing human beings as opposed to just eliminating them. Let me Share two thoughts on this, uh, both of people who influenced me. Steve Jobs described a computer as a bicycle for the mind.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 05

  He didn't say computers would eliminate the mind. He's just said it would make the mind go really faster and better.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:17Speaker 05

  Right. And my view is how does AI do that?

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Speaker 05

  And then Darren A. Smoglu, who won the Nobel Prize at, at MIT, uh, has this idea of total factor productivity.

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:44:29Speaker 05

  Let me try to explain it simply. If you just had AI replacing human beings and those human beings then becoming, uh, not productive.

• 1:44:37Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:37Speaker 05

  Not only would you have frustration in our society.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, who wants to just get a check without contributing? People have pride, but you also wouldn't actually maximize total production because you have all these people who could be doing things.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Speaker 05

  Who are not productive and are not being able to earn a living and spend money. And so what he says is that there is some savings of that for consumers and for shareholders. If a technology just eliminates, uh, labor. But the best technologies like electricity, like automobiles, don't just, uh, eliminate people. What they actually do is they increase people, workers' ability to produce. That there are technologies that increase human capability. And so you have the benefit of the synthesis of, uh, the technology and the worker. And that that is actually what transforms lives and he calls it total factor productivity. And so my, uh, ideas around this has been, how do we do that?

• 1:45:34Speaker 05

  How do we make sure we just don't eliminate four million commercial drivers? How do we make sure that the adoption of things is actually, uh, making us more productive? And that it's being done in, with respect to, to, to, to workers and, and, and capability.

• 1:45:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but so, so let's, let's make it more, uh, specific. Cause I, I agree at a high level with a lot of that. Uh, but let's talk about like a specific role, uh, or job like truck driving. Uh, you've generally come out against, uh, uh, uh, or, or have concerns around AI-based job displacement with, uh, and with long haul trucking and truck drivers. On the other side of that, if I'm a, if I'm running a trucking company and I want to deliver the best possible service for my customers, it's possible that AI would be able to support that.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  How, what kind of like policy do you think is right in order to create, you want some guardrails around, around the industry, how AI should be used in, in trucking? I'd love to kind of understand more.

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would say have a human in the loop. And so what does that mean? When I, on a plane, you know, a lot of it is automated, but we still have a pilot there and I'm glad we have a pilot. I wouldn't want to just fly in an automated plane. And so does this mean that a truck driver's job may become more appealing? Because right now, as you know, we have a shortage actually of truck drivers, more demand. But if they have a assist from a technology that maybe allows them to rest more, that's less taxing, they're there for the edge cases if something is possibly going wrong, they're there to deal with maintenance, they're there to make sure that you have loading and unloading happening.

• 1:47:30Speaker 05

  We can reimagine what the role of a truck driver is going to be. And we can certainly have a temporary view for the next five years that you should have the driver there. Now, that doesn't mean that at some point there may not be jobs or certain parts of things that don't require a driver, but it doesn't seem unreasonable for five years to say, we want a driver in the loop and let's rethink the, the types of, of jobs that, that that will be. And if we need the government to be helping invest in, in, in these, in the developing of this technology, fine, but do it in a way that's going to be complementary with drivers.

• 1:48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is kind of happening already with Waymo where there is a human in the loop and it's but you know, the ratio of tele operators to cars on the road is potentially higher than one to one right now, you know, according to some reports. But over time, I think the Waymo team expects there to be fewer and fewer humans in the loop over time. The question is, how fast does that happen? And you're sort of proposing maybe try and make that as gradual as a process as possible because, I mean, you go back to like, the elevator operator used to be a human. Now we use buttons and no one's really missing those jobs. They phased out over time. I think the main thing is everyone

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  is concerned about rapid job displacement, not necessarily the if I told you your grandson can't can't be a truck driver, you'd say, oh, you know, he'll find a different job. But if it's like every truck driver out of the job next year, that's obviously much more dis dis like disengaging to the US economy. Is that how you think about it in terms of just timelines more than strict rules forever?

• 1:49:22Speaker 05

  I think that's thoughtful. There's a famous economist who once said in a gendered time, jobs for the father, not for the son. And by that, he meant, look, we've got to make sure that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s have have jobs. That doesn't mean that that's exactly what their kids are going to do or their grandkids are going to do. For a lot of these human in the loop legislation, we're talking about five years. We're not talking about 15 years. And we're talking about roles evolving, right? I mean, maybe that there are these evolve and then there's less of a need to hire folks down the line. And you have a natural transition of folks, but you're taking people who are workers

• 1:50:05Speaker 05

  and making sure that they're productive and they have a good life. Let me explain why I think this matters. Phone operators, which people often give an example, and Alex, Alexis, who's at Chicago, had a great point about this. That was 2% of the workforce. Commercial drivers are 10% of the workforce. You already have an anger in the country of so many people displaced by globalization, displaced by the concentration of wealth in some areas. And you really want to throw into this mix of rapid mass job loss displacement of, and then what? Just compensate them and have people stay at home and just get a check? Like, is that the society that we think is going to be productive? Or do we rather figure out how

• 1:50:48Speaker 05

  they have some role and some say, and the transition be managed in a way that is, that considers their interests as well? And that's, you know, and I get that this, it's a good nature debate, and people will say, okay, kind of you're adding some cost to the issue. And if all you cared about was shareholder profits and minimizing consumer costs is your only holy grail, and you didn't care about jobs, and you didn't care about communities, then people have a legitimate critique of me. But I would argue that that was the mentality during globalization, and it's what's led to so much of the polarization, not just for

• 1:51:31Speaker 05

  politics in the United States, but in the Western world, led to things like Brexit, led to anti-immigrant sentiment. And maybe we should consider jobs and communities not as dispositive, but as a factor, just like we consider consumer costs and shareholder profits.

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's your, what's your look back on how the Uber story played out? Because that was a weird moment where there was a big pushback from the taxi cab drivers. Those jobs still exist, but they're just way less profitable because the medallion system has kind of been undone. But if you want to make, if you want to make money driving someone, you can, but it's, you're making less money. Like, do you think that we should have handled that differently if we could run back the time? Or do you think it happened slowly enough that it was actually okay and delivered enough value to the consumer? Because Uber is one of those weird examples where the amount of

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  You know, taxi cab like activity, ride sharing activity, it 10x'd and and more people take these these rides than ever before in the taxi era. And yet it did have remarkable impact on the market structure of that industry.

• 1:52:47Speaker 05

  I'd be hypocritical for saying I'm against Uber. I take Ubers all the time.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, right. I'm the same way.

• 1:52:55Speaker 05

  Expose and the next time I do an Uber. But but I I'll say this, we we should have done more for the medallion owners, right? I I cried actually in New York. I this is became before Ziran Maldani became Ziran Maldani. When he was an assembly member, he was really focused on a lot of these taxi drivers who had lost their medallion value.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 05

  And were underwater. And what could we do to to compensate them? And I'd actually reached out to Jamie Doman, who tried to do something to his credit through through through JP Morgan. And it ended up not working out. But, you know, we should have as a government done more to help those folks who who had medallions who lost all their value. And that's an example of something where we could have been more proactive. And then there's a huge debate about Uber drivers and whether they're getting enough value and have enough say over their their lives. I would argue that that we need that. And I'd argue we need national health insurance. This is the biggest biggest area where if you're not

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  going to be employed as a traditional employee, it would really help if people didn't have to buy healthcare on an exchange that has soaring premiums. So there are better things we need to be doing to help that Uber driver. But do I do I'm I glad that there is a technology like Uber? Yes, I am. It has created jobs and it has made life easier for many people.

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  You brought up Mom Donnie. He made a post, I think it was yesterday or the day before, that a bunch of Silicon Valley types were agreeing with, which was, you haven't seen that very often. It was around, basically around SMB deregulation, making it easier to get a small business off the ground. Is that, should that be a more important conversation in every state and region? I feel like, growing up in California, I've seen so many businesses like try to get off the ground and you end up seeing like a finished, like a finished restaurant that's just has its door closed because they're waiting on some, some permit

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  or something like that. And it's obviously hard enough to start a restaurant. And it seems like oftentimes, local governments can get in the way. Do you think that needs to be just a bigger part of the conversation as, you know, given that, starting a business is a great way to insulate yourself from at least some job displacement risk with, with AI?

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  Yes, it does. And look, Zoran became famous in part with his halal video where he was basically saying it takes too much regulation to have a halal stall and we need to streamline that. And so I believe, yes, we need to make it easier for people to, to start a small business, to be their own business owner. That's not just making the permitting easier. It's also making sure people have access to capital. A lot of times that's a barrier. But I'll tell you one thing that I think is often a blind spot for folks in my district. I love small businesses. I love entrepreneurs. I think that there's a lot of people who want to build a

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Completely agree. Completely agree. We love small businesses here, too.

• 1:56:10Speaker 05

  But, here's the but. Most Americans, most Americans are not going to go just start a small business. Like this, this idea that every person in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, or Western Pennsylvania, should start a startup or build a business. Like my dad never did that. He had a middle class life. He worked for the same company for 30 years. And there are a lot of people who just wanted decent Job and they just want a job that can support a family. And there's nothing wrong with that if they want to be in manufacturing or they want to be a nurse or they want to be a childcare provider. And so sometimes our rhetoric becomes like, why can't everyone become an entrepreneur? It's like, why can't everybody become a politician? Now maybe an offer is a better life, but like, a lot of people just don't want to do that.

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

  And they still want to have the American dream. And so all I'm saying is, let's think about how to help small business owners. But let's also think about the four million people who are drivers. And like, what is their life going to look like? Uh, and uh, and it's important to have that balance.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Give me some lessons from the recent trip to China. I'm fascinated by how they're dealing with AI. Are they doing anything right? So are they moving even faster? Do they have a solution to the job displacement uh, problems? Is there anything good or maybe risky that you found going out there? What were your takeaways?

• 1:57:32Speaker 05

  Three takeaways. One, one third of the AI talent is in China. What does that mean? Uh, that means it would be totally counterproductive to ban Chinese students from coming to the United States or Chinese entrepreneurs for coming to the United States. We want to have uh, that talent come to the United States because we still have a better uh, ecosystem for capital and for investment. Second, uh, we need to make sure that we're developing the talent in uh, in AI here in the United States and investing in STEM and making sure that we're uh, encouraging the uh, the local development of that. A third, and this is the most important, important, guess how much uh, youth unemployment is in China?

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  It's nearly twenty percent. It's really high, right?

• 1:58:20Speaker 05

  You guys are too smart on this.

• 1:58:23Speaker 05

  Twenty percent?

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  But that's crazy. How is that possible? I feel like, can't they just go build more bridges and create more jobs? I thought, I thought it was a command and control economy. I don't know. It's always been crazy.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  They have enough empty sky rises, I think.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know. Yeah, what was your takeaway from it?

• 1:58:39Speaker 05

  As I describe it to people, you can't build dating apps in China, right? Like, so you, you know, the people who have these.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Is it banned?

• 1:58:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they they they're it's such a directed economy. They want everyone to like make stuff, manufacture stuff, not do will not do things that they would consider frivolous. Sure, sure. No sports app, a music app, all the cultural stuff that we do that improves consumer life or things about consumer needs. And, you know, so you're someone who gets this fancy education in college and then they're like, okay, go work at a factory. And just like we've undervalued people who want to work at factories in America, we should be having more trade schools and more respect for factory workers. They've undervalued people who don't want to work at a factory. And the reality is, like, you should have both choices.

• 1:59:29Speaker 05

  So these people, they they they're there and they don't want to go necessarily to build a bridge or necessarily to build a next factory of robotics. And the I I was hilarious because I would talk to the premier, Li Chang or others, and they'd say, well, it's a voluntary unemployment problem. These are just folks they they should be getting doing these jobs. But what if in America we said, okay, you know, as as one of the newsroom when when they're they were being laid off, said to someone, go become an electrician. Well, that's as offensive as telling a steelworker to become a coder. Like, you know, people do things and they want to do what they aspire to do. And China is a command-directed economy that has overvalued manufacturing, doesn't have that diversity.

• 2:00:14Speaker 05

  We do. Our problem has been the opposite, that we undervalued making things. We undervalued the trades. And so what we need is sort of a balance for America to have manufacturing, but also this incredible ecosystem of the service economy, which can employ people where China can't. And that's ultimately why I bet on America. I'm also, one point, you're sick of this argument that let's just go be like China, they're they're going to eat our lunch. Really? You know, the Chinese model is a a a crony communism, like, okay, Xi Jinping gets rich and a bunch of people who are running these companies get rich and the rest and they have 20% unemployment. And you have a consumer welfare declining and and and look at how most people live.

• 2:00:57Speaker 05

  They don't live in nice houses with, you know, two cars. So like, I don't want China as a model. And I'm not going to compromise every American having economic security just because we're chasing China. China is not the model. America needs to be more like America of how we built America in the 1940s, 50s.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  I completely agree. Quick couple, want your takes on a couple of things. Housing affordability, I think a lot of people agree right now that housing affordability is sort of like upstream of a lot of the problems that we're facing as a country. What's your current stance on how we can improve affordability at kind of the local level and at the federal level?

• 2:01:42Speaker 05

  I'm a Yimby, I'm an abundance guy on housing. We've got to build far more housing in California. You know, I don't endorse people who are sort of zero housing people in my district. We've got to realize that aesthetics matter, but economic equality of opportunity matters more. And you can't have $5 trillion companies in my district and expect to live like where the valley of the heart's delight. Like, if you've got that many companies, you've got to have housing near transit and dense housing to make sure that people can live there. And that it's not just a place where wealthy people can live and that the working and middle class is getting shafted. We also need to stop private equity from buying up single-family homes. People say, oh, this is a red herring.

• 2:02:27Speaker 05

  No, it's not a red herring. In some places, they have bought up too much single-family homes. So, pro-building, pro-streamlining, making it easier to build and having zoning reform and stop private equity from buying up these single-family homes.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  What about international? Will we make progress, at least in California, on those issues in the next 10 years?

• 2:02:53Speaker 05

  Yes, because I think people realize we didn't make enough progress over the last 10 years, that this is a failure of California policy. And whoever is elected the next governor, I can't imagine it won't be on an abundance agenda when it comes to housing. And it's not going to be, okay, let me do it at the last year, try to do something of an eight-year term. It's going to be day one, how do we start to do things that it's going to build more housing? So, I think it's been a wake-up call for California.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Any quick comments on the current state versus federal AI regulation? We didn't get to touch on that earlier. And you had some comments recently on SB 1047, the bill in California. But what's your updated view on where regulation should be happening?

• 2:03:47Speaker 05

  Well, look, ultimately, we need a federal regulatory framework. But the way you get good federal legislation is having legislation in the states. That's federalism. And I don't understand how you would have a moratorium on having state legislation when federal legislation right now looks bleak. The prospects of it are bleak. It is such an unpopular position even among Republicans. So my view is build a consensus that you can have thoughtful regulations at the federal level and work on that. Don't stop states from regulating. And this idea that, okay, you're going to stop all the growth. I mean, my district is $18 trillion of value.

• 2:04:31Speaker 05

  We've got five companies over $1 trillion. East of the Mississippi, there's not a single trillion dollar company, you know?

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  California's undefeated. It's so good.

• 2:04:44Speaker 05

  You talk to folks in like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and they're like, come on, come on, they're producing more wealth than ever before. Like, what we want to know is how is, how are our kids going to fit into this? And I just think that that, I wish more tech leaders, you know, who sometimes gets it is a, Jensen Huang is talking about this. Like, yeah, I mean, how do we create economic development opportunities in places that have been left out? How do we make sure that everyone comes along on the AI revolution? I just think it's in tech companies' interest to embrace this in a similar way as the economic royalists embrace the New Deal eventually.

• 2:05:24Speaker 05

  I mean, you can't have just a capitalism that is only working for some with large chunks of the country suspicious and left out.

• 2:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just worry that we don't know the shape of what we're regulating yet. Like, the unintended consequences of social media took five, 10 years to develop. I mean, two years ago, we were reflecting on this. People were worried about AI. Killing everyone and creating the Terminator. And then what wound up happening? Well, it wasn't really political misinformation. It was much more people chatting with it for a really long time, going crazy, you know, maybe overbuilding, maybe risking the debt markets. Like, the risks were very hard to predict. There were risks, but it wasn't exactly what we thought. And so I'm always, I'm a little bit hesitant about like, you know, maybe there should be regulations,

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  but how, when will we be confident that we know how to regulate it? Is it right, is now the right time? Do we have clarity? Because a lot of the stuff, it stands on, you know, we already have fair use. We already have copyright protections. And so a lot of it can be enforced through the courts, I would imagine. But of course, if new problems come up, they need to be resolved. And that's the way we resolve them in a democratic society.

• 2:06:41Speaker 05

  I think that's fair. The places I focus on are jobs.

• 2:06:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:45Speaker 05

  And American citizenship.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  And I agree with you on the jobs part, but it just feels like the jobs, we haven't seen a collapse. And even people building the AI technology are like, this is going to put everyone out of jobs, and that's good. And then the people that hate the technology are saying it's going to put everyone out of a job, and that's bad. And it's kind of crazy because they all agree that the jobs are going away. And yet, what do you get when you actually look at the jobs figures? It seems like we still have jobs. Like, it seems like we actually can't delegate to the AI. And I can't just say, hey, you know, trucker, like, I want the AI to handle this one. It's just, the technology's not there yet. And will it be a year? Will it be five years, 10 years, 100 years? There's a whole bunch of incentives to say it's coming right now. And it's hard to get a read on. And predicting, predicting when things will happen is, you know,

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  fortunes are won and lost on that, on that alone.

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  Totally agree with you. John Maynard Keynes said we'd all be working 15-hour work weeks. And he was on, he knew more about economics than any of us. So, you know, it's hard to predict. But I think what we can do is when you look at Darren A. Smoglu who says, well, why don't we have a neutral tax code? So we're not incentivizing depreciation of investment in technology and automation over hiring people. I mean, there are things we can do that make it that we prioritize having people in the loop. And then there are things we can do in our social media environment that protect us as citizens and kids. Two things are like, let's eliminate bots, right? Elon Musk talked about doing this on X and there's still a ton of bots. But a lot of the bots that use AI are, in my view, hurting our democracy.

• 2:08:22Speaker 05

  And then let's protect kids from some of the harms on social medias.

• 2:08:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:26Speaker 05

  You know, so I guess I, you know, I'd love, I love sparring with folks and I appreciate sort of the criticism I've gotten from the tech folks for the tweets on AI and drivers. But I guess what I would hope for tech people listening to this is don't resist every form of regulation and sort of dismiss people's anxieties. Instead, be part of how we get smart regulations and how we answer people's concerns. Because if 70% of the American people believe the American dream is dead and have a concern about AI, like the answer to that for anyone who's been like in a relationship is not to dismiss it and say they're dumb. It's to say, okay, how do I address that anxiety so that we can move forward?

• 2:09:11Speaker 05

  And I guess, I guess my hope would be that there'll be more tech leaders like that. Victor Peng is one who was a former leader at AMD. I mean, there's some people who are thinking in that way and I, I think it's in Silicon Valley's interest to have that kind of view.

• 2:09:26John Coogan?

  No, that makes sense.

• 2:09:27Jordi Hays?

  I think you really, you really freaked people out with there should be a tax on mass job displacement.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  Well, there is a tax on the profits, right? Like we tax profits. So, I mean, there's a question of like, maybe we adjust that, but it's all, these are all dials that already exist. We're just discussing how we turn them, I would imagine.

• 2:09:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:09:47Speaker 05

  Well, thank you. A lot of times, you know, this is one thing different for me than other politicians is I toss ideas out there. If I think there's good pushback, then I adjust my. And I I'm like a politician like this. I just talk like I talked to someone someone over a drink over at a bar. You know, I and everyone else is like so scripted. Oh, you can't put out an idea because you know, maybe it'll come back ten, two years later on Face the Nation. I just don't think that's what our politics are. I it's like, put your ideas out there like, what human being doesn't have some ideas that are dumb? Like, maybe, maybe Einstein didn't or something. Most of us, yeah, we put up good ideas, we put bad ideas, we think.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  I love that. I love that approach and it and it certainly sparks a conversation.

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  And it certainly fits with what we've done here today. This was really fun. We really appreciate you coming on the show and just like going all over the place and just talking through all this stuff. It's fascinating. I'm learning a ton and we really appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:10:41Speaker 05

  Well, you guys are doing great. Seriously, you're elevating the conversation and Silicon Valley and it's an honor to be on and I I look forward to being back.

• 2:10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to have you back on the show and and go way deeper on all of these. And I'm sure by the time the next time you're on, all of the data points will be different and we'll be looking and we'll be staring at new problems and they will require new solutions and new discussions. And so thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us.

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate your approach.

• 2:11:06Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance compliance handled so you can focus on growth. Our next guest is.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Jonathan.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  Jonathan Swerdlin. Hey, sorry for keeping you waiting. We were in, you know, a political quagmire. We were in the swamp.

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  We're in the swamp.

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  We went to the swamp. We don't normally go to the swamp. Normally, we talk about series Bs. We talk about large series Bs. He did get us going, though. He was telling us how much value has been created in in his district. It's in the trillions. It's in the tens of trillions. And we were just, you know, foaming at the mouth about the market caps. And then we said a bunch of other stuff. But thank you so much for coming on the show. For those who aren't familiar, introduce yourself. Introduce the business. Tell us what's going on.

• 2:11:59Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Great to be here. Now you're climbing out of the swamp. We're going to talk about something a little less swampy.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:12:05Speaker 06

  Talk about health. It's great to see you guys.

• 2:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, health is, health is like honestly more political than politics.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but, uh, this conversation won't be.

• 2:12:17Speaker 06

  It's funny. We say, we actually say that biology is bipartisan though. And I, and I like this idea of everybody can agree that nobody likes to suffer.

• 2:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:28Speaker 06

  You know, and, and everybody can agree that preventable death shouldn't happen.

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34Speaker 06

  So it, it, it comes out, but of course the nuance of how you get there can become political because who's going to pay for it, right?

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, but also just.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, that or, or the, uh, well, this diet.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  This diet is right wing. That diet, oh, working out. That's a right wing thing or like, no, this is left wing. And like, you know, different ingredients became politically charged over the last few years.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  My powder is better than your powder.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  For sure. And sometimes there's political influences on the right and the left who actually have the same supplier. And then they put different branding on top of it and they sell that. That's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. But anyway, we're not here to sell supplements. Uh, let's talk about the business. Uh, what?

• 2:13:13Speaker 06

  You know, it's funny. It's like, I'm not left wing. I'm not right wing. I'm the whole bird. Otherwise you fly around in circles is kind of the idea.

• 2:13:19John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  The whole bird. That's great.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  The whole bird, the whole turkey.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  So yeah, uh, take us through the shape of the business these days. What, uh, what, what's the value prop to consumers? Uh, what's the progress been? How big is the company? Kind of set the table for us.

• 2:13:33Speaker 06

  Okay. So simple value prop is get on top of your health. It's time you have your health. So what does that start with? It starts with a new platform. It's $1 per day to join. And the platform includes twice a year, comprehensive lab testing at over 2,200 locations, any quest diagnostics around the country. You go and you test everything. Heart, hormones, liver, kidney, thyroid, cancer signals, you name it. Up and down. All of that data goes into a platform, into an app that explains to you what's actually happening inside your body. And these are the things that you would not get in a physical. This is like a true, true deep look. What Function has created is this entirely new standard for your health that every year for the rest of your life, you know that you're well on top of whatever's happening inside your body. You're seeing how it's changing

• 2:14:17Speaker 06

  over time. You're making sure that you're getting well ahead of disease and you're doing everything you can to feel your best. So that's, that's the, the value proposition and that's what Function delivers right now. We started with lab testing.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:29Speaker 06

  Cause that's, that's like, that's the most impactful data. Seventy percent of medical decisions are based on lab testing. And recently we acquired a company, you might have heard about this.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:39Speaker 06

  Called Ezra. And Ezra is an imaging business. And so Ezra does, and what has been amazing for us, we've gotten FDA cleared AIs that have reduced the time that it takes for somebody to get an MRI. Okay. So why does that matter? One, nobody wants to be side in an MRI machine typically.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:03Speaker 06

  Two, it also massively reduces the cost and it picks up the efficiency.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Speaker 06

  And so you, what we've actually done is we've introduced lab testing, came one of the largest, most powerful lab tests in the country. And then we went to imaging, on the imaging side, bringing down the cost. And what you're seeing actually emerges is this new standard for health. We took the most impactful parts of the health system for capturing your data and we, we packaged it up into something that's really simple to understand and really affordable for, for many, many people.

• 2:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how, talk about how MRIs were used historically or these things that, that get done when like you're act, you have like acute pain or you have an issue and then you're doing it and this feels like.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Tear your ACL.

• 2:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or this, this feels like kind of flipping it and saying, using it as like preventative, preventative cares. Is that the right read?

• 2:15:55Speaker 06

  That's what I read, and not just preventive, I would just, I would just say responsible, because this idea of preventive is great, but it's also what might be happening right now that you don't even know about.

• 2:16:07Speaker 06

  Right? And so the word preventive and the word early are a little tricky for me, because the word early, it's like, why is it early detection? Can't we just call it detection? Can't we just get rid of the word early? What MRI does is traditionally it allows somebody to look inside the body. But to do that, it's been really, really expensive. To get an MRI, you know, tear your ACL, something like that, like you basically, you have to send thousands of dollars to look inside your body. And that's the way insurance is set up, and that's the way MRI is set up. But what MRI can do is it can look at every single organ and look for tumors that are 0.2 centimeters, 2 millimeters. It can look for stroke risk, aneurysm risk, endometriosis, hernias, tears, everything.

• 2:16:53Speaker 06

  So if you actually want to understand what's happening inside the body, an MRI is an incredible way to do it. But it's been so arcane and so difficult. It's never actually been architected and set up to look at the body and get well ahead of things. And it's usually been, oh, you go in a hospital, you broke something, you have an issue, you go look at this one particular area. In Function's case, you can actually look at most of the body through an MRI, and you can detect cancers early, you can detect the aneurysm stroke risk, et cetera. And you can do it for $499, and you can do it across almost 200 locations by the end of this year. There's never been anything like this. This is the first time in history this has been possible. It is the first time in history it's been possible geographically, from a cost perspective,

• 2:17:38Speaker 06

  technologically, and culturally, it's changing. People are realizing this. What I was alluding to before, to a really important point, is a new standard of health is emerging. And that standard includes twice a year, comprehensive lab testing. It takes a 10, 15 minutes each time. You go in, you get your whole body tested and you find out what's actually happening inside. And the second thing is now a quick MRI every year. If you do it, what you're doing is you're actually creating a baseline for your whole health. And you're seeing how things are changing over time. You're catching velocity, you're seeing bad trend lines, and you're also just flagging critical issues as well as finding out what you can optimize and what can be better in your life. And what's crazy to me is the current standard, like the status quo, we've all done this. We've all gone into the doctor's office.

• 2:18:23Speaker 06

  They test you for like 20 things, get a phone call in three weeks, you're good to go. John, Jordy, see you in six months, a year, two years, whatever. And you move on with your day. And that's just this episodic, once in a while, very narrow perspective on your health. That's gone, but they miss, they're not looking at cancer and they're really not even looking at heart disease, the two leading causes of death, let alone metabolic dysfunction, hormonal issues, thyroid issues, and functional looks at all that. I'll give you a crazy stat. A new study just came out. Forty-five percent of people that were hospitalized for their first heart attack did not have what is considered high-risk cholesterol. That should be terrifying. Why? Because if you go to a doctor's office today, a regular old physician's office for a checkup,

• 2:19:08Speaker 06

  you get your LDL checked, right? You guys have done this?

• 2:19:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:11Speaker 06

  Okay. That marker was born in the 1950s. It's older than my father.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Vintage.

• 2:19:19Speaker 06

  It's a vintage marker.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Some people would say Lindy. Some people would say that's Lindy. Okay, let's just steal that for a minute. They might say it's Lindy.

• 2:19:30Speaker 06

  So, so look, there is no world where any top cardiologist say, I'm just going to rely on LDL cholesterol based. When every top cardiologist tell you, let's look at APOB, let's look at LB little a, let's look at lipid particle size. For most people, they don't, those words are foreign to them. But they should be. I mean, it's this avant-garde stuff, right? But. So there are way better ways to look at the heart, but we're relying on something that's back to the 1950s, a status quo. And what Function's done is for hundreds of thousands of people now, we've actually delivered a new standard of health that includes twice year testing of everything that looks at your heart, it's looking at your kidneys, your thyroid,

• 2:20:13Speaker 06

  your hormones, everything. Women don't have to go to their doctor and ask for a hormone panel and get chased around. Instead, they can actually get a look at what's going on with their hormones. And then on the cancer side, real quick, cancer side, 400, you're four times more likely to survive cancer if you catch it early. But right now, status quo is you have to wait till you have symptoms to catch cancer.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:20:37Speaker 06

  There's no way that's okay. I don't want that for my family. So and now there's technology where we can actually, with an MRI, as well as with a Grail test, that we test for many, many, many thousands of people, we can actually get way out of these things.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm sold on the product. I think it's hard, I think it's hard, hard not to be. It's, it's the best kind of like value offering, I think, in health, like period. And I was sold, obviously, when you were raising pre-seed back in the day, however it been, two, two and a half years ago, or something like that, feels, feels like forever ago. Can you give us like, I'd love to get your view on an update of like, the, the market structure, a lot of companies have seen, you guys weren't, Function wasn't the first, first lab, you know, testing and, and health platform like this to exist, but your guys'

• 2:21:32Jordi Hays?

  execution and the growth, I think you're one of the, at least, growing faster than, than a lot of the, the fastest growing AI companies that we're seeing out of last year. Give us an update on like, the shape of the market, how you see the market evolving, because like I was saying, a lot of people are trying to like, ride, ride your, your coattails. But I'm curious for, for an update there.

• 2:21:59Speaker 06

  You know, we, the, the market is realizing that the word consumer health has been this like dirty word for 20 years or something. And it's not, it's, what it is, is its premise on the most primary thing that we experience as human beings is our biology. It's our, it's our life experience. And what's the LTV of your health? Right? You'd be willing to pay anything for health. It's the most valuable thing in the world for you. And so we're finally in a place where we can actually see technology and products broadly applied to health. And so it's, it's, you're looking at a TAM that conservatively is $7 trillion. And some

• 2:22:43Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for $7 trillion TAMs. John, hit the, hit the, hit the size gong for a $7 trillion TAM.

• 2:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Had to, had to. Anyways, continue, continue.

• 2:22:56Speaker 06

  I love it. I love it. No, so, so, so, look, this is, this is, people have been spending absurd amounts of money on their health through these massive service platforms like insurance companies, big health systems. And finally, people are saying, you know what, health happens outside of the doctor's office and I'm taking it into my own hands. And what we're doing is bringing scientific and medical rigor directly into a, a platform that people, they themselves can sign up for, they themselves can manage. And so they can make decisions for themselves. And that gets them way ahead of diseases, you know, as I've been saying before, like, this is, this is not a, it's not a trivial space. I think it's, it is the best, is the most anticipated

• 2:23:39Speaker 06

  service for AI. It is the best application of AI in the world is to our health, because that is the major experience. And so of, we're, we're, we're surprised that, that the, the category and all the, all the competitors aren't It's not that it's not bigger, that more people are jumping into this. Like, we, we know that people are gonna try to ride these coattails, but, but, um, we just, we are, our head is down. And our focus is on how can we deliver as much value per dollar for each one of our members? We have hundreds of thousands of members, soon millions of members. We have been growing really fast because we're at, we're actually delivering something to somebody that has real, real, real substantial value. And at a time, a lot of technology can do a lot.

• 2:24:23Speaker 06

  It's like, what are we really paying for? And it's like,

• 2:24:25John Coogan?

  Where can, where can people get started? You mentioned it's a dollar a day.

• 2:24:30Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 2:24:31John Coogan?

  Does it, take me through like the customer flow? Is it just a website? And then I go to the lab, explain how people can get, can get going.

• 2:24:39Speaker 06

  Okay, so it used to be $999 when we started. It was manual, it was,

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  Per day, $1,000.

• 2:24:46Speaker 06

  No, $1,000 per year.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Sign me up.

• 2:24:48Speaker 06

  $1,000.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  He said per year, don't, don't worry. John's just messing with you.

• 2:24:54Speaker 06

  So it started at a thousand bucks per year. Then we worked really hard to, to bring up the efficiencies in tech, got it down to $4.99. And, and a couple of weeks ago, we announced it's now $3.65. It's like, when it's actually, $3.65 dollar per day. Cause what the health, it helps an everyday thing and it's an understandable price. And when it's healthcare actually been deflationary.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  And then, so, so, uh, go to a quest labs, probably twice a year.

• 2:25:17Speaker 06

  You go to functionhealth.com.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:19Speaker 06

  Functionhealth.com.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Functionhealth.com.

• 2:25:21Speaker 06

  You just sign right up.

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:23Speaker 06

  Right there in the scheduler, you sign up for your lab appointment.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:26Speaker 06

  You show up at the lab, your blood drawn, urine collected, you walk out 10, 15 minutes later. In 24 hours, results start pouring in.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:35Speaker 06

  Now, now your app is live.

• 2:25:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:37Speaker 06

  And now all the data is coming in, it's making sense of it. And you test every six months, every six months.

• 2:25:41John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:25:42Jordi Hays?

  I think people, I think people, one of, one of the reasons people underestimated, uh, this kind of category, it was, as it was emerging is so many people got burned on like DNA testing. Open DNA, DNA, like the 23 and me is you test it once. And then there's like zero incentive to retest, right?

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:57Jordi Hays?

  You, you did 23 and me, you have, have the data.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  Well, it depends, are you working on your DNA or not? Have you been modifying your DNA? If you modify your DNA regularly, you should probably be testing your DNA regularly. You never know.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  You never know.

• 2:26:09John Coogan?

  I might've, I might've rewritten my entire DNA. All of it, from, from start to finish, every base pair is different now. Sign me up again. I'm ready to go.

• 2:26:19Speaker 06

  We have to study you if that's the case.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:22Speaker 06

  We're gonna have to bring you in.

• 2:26:23Jordi Hays?

  John, John needs to be studied, honestly.

• 2:26:25John Coogan?

  Generally.

• 2:26:26Speaker 06

  And so.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  What does 25,000 Diet Cokes do to the human body? We're gonna find out. What is 500 Diet Cokes a year?

• 2:26:37Jordi Hays?

  A dollar a day on function and four diet and at least four Diet Cokes a day for John. We're actually running, we're running a split test. We have the exact same lifestyle. We show up at the gym every morning. We work out, we prep the show, we do the show, we hang out with our family. We just, we're gonna do that forever, but John drinks Diet Coke and I drink.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  Mate, you know, your mate, podcast in a can.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  On Andrew Huberman, of course. And we're gonna find out. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna find out. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We have a small bit of breaking news I want to get to before our next guest. So we will be seeing you soon. Oh, one last thing. Give us the numbers on the last fundraising round. I want to ring the gong for real.

• 2:27:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, let's do it. Series B, $298 million raised. 2.5 billion dollar valuation.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:27:26Speaker 06

  The, the thing to think about here is that's basically a dollar for every American adult.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:27:31Speaker 06

  And so what, what that is, is that's a, that's a vote on your health. That's not just.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Have you here, Jonathan.

• 2:27:41Speaker 06

  Long live TVP.

• 2:27:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  For, for the next one, for the C, come in, come in person. We got a seat here for you. Be honored to have you in person.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Be great.

• 2:27:50Speaker 06

  Let's go, brother.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Leading, it's lead, Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Also, if you're running a Neo cloud, you gotta get on Vanta because that's one of the criteria for Cluster Max. I'm not kidding, not making this up. SOC 2 compliance is a big factor in. In actually making it up the tier rankings for ClusterMax because of course if you're training on customer data, you need SOC 2 compliance, you need the

• 2:28:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  The whole process. Anyway, the breaking news that I wanted to get to really quickly is Josh Kushner is partnering with OpenAI. OpenAI, he says, we are excited to announce a strategic partnership between OpenAI and Thrive Holdings. Through our partnership, OpenAI will become an equity holder in Holdings and collectively, we will set out to deliver frontier technology to our customers. For decades, technology has transformed the world's largest industries from the outside in. We believe the AI paradigm will be different in that some of the most profound transformations will now occur from the inside out. We view the businesses that we own and operate as the right reward system to build, test, and improve industry-specific products and models.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  So, the race is on. Is it inside out or outside in transformation? What's gonna happen? These are the new fast takeoff, short timeline, long timeline. Are you an inside out guy or an outside in guy? This is gonna be the defining debate over the next couple of days.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  So, get ready to lock in. We'll be covering it here. We'll probably have some people on who are digging into this, investing in this, have long takes, short takes, who knows? But I want to get to the bottom of what this outside in versus inside out transformation will look like. We've been digging in a little bit, talking to some folks who are building companies, buying companies.

• 2:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Taylor says, deal guy, you go.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  This is the deal guy, you go. It's happening. It's happening. Well, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. We have Cristobal Valenzuela from Runway in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. How are you doing? Good to see you again. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on such a big day. Kick us off with a reintroduction on where the company is today. And then the news. I'd love to know about the news.

• 2:30:18Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Yeah, thank you for having me again. It's been a while. Yeah, so big news. We just released our latest frontier model, Runway Gen 4.5. It's a model we've been working on for like quite some time. It's the best Vito model right now in the world, which is a pretty remarkable fit.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:35Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  So, I think it's

• 2:30:39Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  It's it's it's pretty good. It's pretty fun.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, to be clear, that's that's my audio. I'm at it. It was not not.

• 2:30:46Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  That's perfect timing.

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  But but but let's play some of the video. I want to see this, the demo videos that you put out, the examples, and I want to ask you a bunch of questions about it because it's a it's an extraordinary claim. Google is a serious company. They have a very serious asset in YouTube, and I'm fascinated by. So first, give me give me the the news. Video Arena leaderboard, that's the that's the ranking that you're using. How is that scored? How does that actually work?

• 2:31:18Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  So it's a it's kind of like a way of crowdsourcing, like, performance. You basically ask people in the Internet to vote against two videos, and it's anonymous. So you vote left or right, and then as you keep on voting, you accumulate more votes. And once you vote, you can see like who you voted for, but before beforehand, you don't know. And so over the last couple of months, we've been working for like this entirely new way of, I would say, training both video models and image models in such a way that hopefully we thought it would like all compete others in the arena. And and we got results a couple of days ago. And yes, we managed to basically outcompete all other video models, including both Google and OpenAI, which is which is a very remarkable feat if you think about the scale of resources.

• 2:32:00Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Like, I think it's the era of, Ilya was saying, this is the era of research again, and I agree, but it's also the era of efficiency, like, really good, really focused teams with highly efficient, like, you know, mandates can get really far. And so, yeah.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, tell me about what you optimized for here, because Sora seems it's an incredible model, and it was for like a minute, like, whoa, really mind blowing. Then I feel like I kind of developed an immune system for it, and I can clock a Sora video, and it feels like Sora was very much trained on TikTok, almost, or vertical, vertical social media video. And so what have been the breakout Sora videos? It's been a lot of dash cam footage and doorbell. Nest camera footage and

• 2:32:50Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  They've also

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  facing videos.

• 2:32:51Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  degraded the model dramatically.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  They have degraded the model a lot. Whereas VO3, it felt like it had, it had a little bit of the Hollywood polish, but it was more like Michael Bay. When I looked at it, it looked very saturated. It was cool. It looked good. But what you went for, it feels a little bit more, I want to say cinematic, even though that's kind of an overused term. But talk to me about what your goal was, or even if you, even if you have a goal, when you go into a training run like this.

• 2:33:21Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  It does. So I think there's an explicit goal and an implicit goal. I think in a way, all models, specifically video models that are more visually like clear or like perceptible, have some sort of personality behind it. And I think that personality reflects a little bit, both the point of view of the company and like the way you want to train the models in the first place. To your point, like if you want to make like, like consumer slob and like quick, like shareable stuff, you're going to train the models just from the ground up very differently that for the stuff that we're trying to do, which is a much more professional, like high quality, very controllable sort of like tools. And so a lot of where you're like, basically outlining is, I would say the personality of the models and somehow also reflects the personality of the companies.

• 2:34:05Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Like if you're trying to sell ads, you're going to do a very different model from, if you're trying to make creative tools. And so I don't think there's one single recipe or one single ingredient. It's more of a, just like taste. Like I think that that word gets thrown a lot in research today, just taste. And I think taste is both the research, like what do you want to work on? Like having vision, like having, okay, when I want to pick this specific problems I want to work on, and this is where I want to solve them, and this is what we've learned over time. That's one form of taste. And the other one more aesthetically is like, what things look good? Like, and that's Like beavers on a construction site.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  This is actually

• 2:34:40Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  That's your taste. That's your taste.

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  Look at this donkey. Hilarious.

• 2:34:45Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Right. Look at the motion of the donkey moving, like the camera, the angles, like the amount of data creation, or team of artists and like filmmakers and like people have spent. It's not, it's not, it's not like trivial, to be honest. I think that's also the taste component. Like shots like this, it's like

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  Some of this is horrifying.

• 2:35:03Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  It's amazing.

• 2:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Really had to summon the demon on this one.

• 2:35:08John Coogan?

  I got to go to a dark place, literally.

• 2:35:10Jordi Hays?

  Have you been inspired by Anthropic at all? It feels like somebody could put you in the Anthropic for video bucket and that like they're just like extreme focus on code and ignoring everything else. And meanwhile, your competitors like are putting a lot of resources towards this, but they're not betting their entire business on it in the way that you are.

• 2:35:30Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Yeah, I think it's a it's like a mesh and areas versus like visionary type of like, I would say bad. It's like you want to have people who who feel like very committed to the vision long term and the way you do that is like you're very focused on like the culture and like that culture eventually shines in the product. I think Anthropic has also that you can you can tell like who works there and like how they think and it's all very cohesive cohesive in a way. I think we spent somehow a similar amount of time like doing that in a way and and I hope you can tell via the models themselves that like that personality comes across nicely as well. Yeah, and I agree like you don't that at the end will be perhaps the most defining part of the companies that like stay in the long run.

• 2:36:13Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Like I think if you just throw money at a problem, you're not going to get too far, to be honest.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  What went into the actual training run? Are you at a are you at a scale now where it's a meaningful capital investment to build a model like this? We saw the scaling paradigm change from like, you know, maybe it's a hundred million dollars to do a big frontier language model run. Then we were talking about billion dollar training runs, bigger and bigger training runs. The results are remarkable, but has it been a remarkable amount of investment to get here or are there more efficient ways to actually get to a frontier result without spending frontier money?

• 2:36:57Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not cheap. Like, this is not like traditional SaaS. Like, so you definitely have to spend more money, more resources. But I think we've proven that like we are not spending tens of billions of dollars to get there and to like overcome the challenges. And look, to be honest, like the model is not perfect. There's a lot of things we're going to improve and we're going to fix and we're going to do larger training runs and we do more over time. But it's kind of a, I would say the expense, the most expensive thing is like the natural intuition the team builds around what kind of works and what doesn't work. It's kind of go back to the idea of research space. Like, you can't throw money at it, you just have to spend enough time. We've been working on RANU for almost a decade. And so there's a lot of you've learned over time about what works and what doesn't that

• 2:37:42Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  informs a lot of the efficiencies on training. And yes, like expensive models will like you'll need more money to train larger and bigger models. Like, if this is the worst the models will be, imagine them in like two years. Like, you're going to get there by training larger models for sure, but also knowing how to train them in the first place. And that's the part that I think is hard to quantify per se. And what I'm really excited about is it's not only what the models can do, but also like the efficiencies are not only on training, but on inference. Like, this is a price point that's very comparable to our previous models. So it's actually very usable and hopefully you'll be using it in real time very soon. And so that level of, I would say, efficiency at inference level, we haven't yet seen it and I think we're going to get there very soon.

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, fascinating. I mean, some of those videos are pretty remarkable.

• 2:38:32Jordi Hays?

  Your unlimited plan is, includes 2,250 credits monthly. How much video can one actually generate with that?

• 2:38:44Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Well, technically, unlimited.

• 2:38:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I was confused because it said, it said there's still like a credit, credit system.

• 2:38:51Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  No, so we have a queue. There's like, we have like compute and you, there's a queue and you get into the queue and you generate us like the queue becomes available. If you would just want to generate like fast, you pay for credits. So, but depending on how anxious you are with like your generations, so it's a measurement of how fast you want it. Um. But eventually you can just literally generate unlimited. It's it's by the way, I think no one else has a plan like that. It's pretty a pretty good deal.

• 2:39:14Jordi Hays?

  What is uh uh like, what are the length of generations that are that are most commonly being done today? And is that a metric that you track? Like, are people consistently? Is it? Is it like a 20 second scene that's the most common today? And are you trying to get to two minutes or two hours? Like, how do you think about?

• 2:39:35Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  So well, technically, you can do you can do like arbitrary durations if you want it. But like the average scene duration in like a short film or a movie is like actually two to three seconds long at the most. And that's actually been trending down. It's like the scene, right? The scene itself, the cut, it's like two to three seconds long on average.

• 2:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Um. Yeah.

• 2:39:54Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  And so when when you actually, when when people mean like, I want to drink a 45 minute like long thing. You don't want 45 minutes of like one camera, like fixed. You want like scene cuts and world and you want the character like a a shot, a medium shot, a long shot and you have, you know? Like, that's a different problem from like creating one continuous long sequence. So the one continuous long sequence for me is less interesting than the like multi-shot approach, where you can create much more compelling like narrative work. And I think we're not that far away from that being a reality. We're like, you can generate consistent narrative work, like really good visuals, really good stories, like with the level of quality of the videos that we're seeing right now here.

• 2:40:36Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  But they're all tied together in a way that just makes it feel like cohesive with each other, you know?

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:41Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Um. And so that's a different problem I would say altogether.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh. There was some debate on the why doesn't the cursor for video?

• 2:40:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Exist yet? Do you have any any thoughts there?

• 2:40:53Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  What's the cursor for video?

• 2:40:54John Coogan?

  Basically, a nonlinear editor, like a Premiere Pro, a DaVinci Resolve, an Adobe After Effects. For video cursor for video, like replacing the actual bones of the software that the that the editor, that the video creator uses. Uh. There's been a couple of apps that have spun up. Uh. Runway, originally, the reason I was using it back in the day was for Greenscreen, uh, for for Chromecast, basically. Um. It was fantastic for that. And it feels like that, building a canvas, building an NLE, that feels like one potential pathway to victory. It's way, it's also very difficult because you can't just fork VS Code. There are no leading open source NLEs. On the flip

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  side, if you wanted to play nice with Adobe, you could be a vendor, Allah, the way Nano Banana is now vended into Photoshop. And that could be a solution. And, you know, there's a variety of ways to win. I'm interested in hearing your approach.

• 2:41:55Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Yeah, that's definitely, definitely interesting question. And by the way, shout out for you for being an OG on Runway since, what, 2019?

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, something crazy.

• 2:42:04Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Yeah, so, so my two thoughts are, first, the art of like, NLE and editing and film, it's an art. And it's just a lot of like pacing and like details that are very nuanced and specific. It's, it's about granular details and it's hard for, I would say, a model to, or assistant to automate that level of like, decisions. That's on a purely NLE side, right? But I would say, at least for us, more interestingly, is the question of like, do we need an NLE in the first place, right? Like, do we actually need this primitives? If you think about nonlinear editing, this idea that you're like stacking frames of video against each other and like you're cutting them. Before it was with physical

• 2:42:46Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  racers and now we have digital racers, you're cutting things together. My bet is that you probably won't need like NLEs. Like, that whole paradigm will feel like a fax machine like in a few more years. And so.

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's somewhat what's happening with like the, the, the Devins and the Claude codes and the codexes of video. I just, I do wonder if there's going to be an intermediate step. Or maybe it'll just be absorbed by the current NLEs. I mean, I'm sure that's what your customers are using, right?

• 2:43:17Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Yeah, I don't know. We'll see it play. But I'm not, I'm not too fond of like, you know, pushing like better versions of NLEs out there. I think there's, there's something around how you make videos and how you interact with this AI systems that just naturally allows itself a different. Different primitives and if you think also about the fact that very soon you'll start to see this happen in real time. Like when you make real time like narrative work or videos or experiences, how are you going to call them? Like you don't need to edit things async because you're generating on the fly and you have people interact with them. And so it changes, that's why I'm saying it changes the nature of like those things in the first place. And and there's a transitional period where like you'll you were seeing like N L E is being augmented with A I.

• 2:43:59Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  But I think it's that's transitory. I don't think it's going to pay out like in the long run.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, has has Hollywood capitulated yet? What's going on there? We we had a it's funny, I've been hearing I've been hearing more and more about Suno from from not just guests and friends of the show, but just like random people out in the world. It sounds like every single musical artist now is like using it in some degree, even if they're not willing to talk about it. What what is the the the case in in traditional Hollywood and entertainment? You can't exactly hide that you're using A I video. Uh, it's basically out in the open immediately. Uh, and there's just so much like so much negative energy that gets focused on it, uh, specifically from people that are within the industry.

• 2:44:46Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  You know, you know, I think the the the negative energy is like the water problem with A I, you know? Like it's it's kind of this this unrealistic, like and very noisy, not representative sample of what's actually happening within industry. If you go to a lay, we speak with the agencies, with the talent, with the filmmakers, with the studios, with the production teams. They're on board on A I like years ago, like months ago, like they're fans, they're using it, they understand it. Of course, there's pockets of people who are like like more advanced than others. But I would say that the narrative publicly hasn't yet catch up with that. I mostly because my some people might not want to speak about it. Or it's much more interesting to say like all the negative things that the thing to say the positive things.

• 2:45:30Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Uh, I would say Hollywood already has overcome that and they've they've they're pretty much on board. I would say gaming companies are now where Hollywood companies were like a year and a half ago or two years ago. So that's, I would say, an industry who's now catching up more to what A I can help them and how they can use it. So, yeah, I I would say that some of those narratives are a bit fake, to be honest. Yeah.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show on a busy day. We appreciate it and I can't wait to play around with the new model. We have a benchmark here, Bezel Bench, where we try and recreate a very complicated shot from, that we shot practically with a bunch of different watches with our, with our intern or gap semester, Tyler Cosgrove. And it has a very, the shot's very long, it pulls out, it twists around. It's, it's a pretty complex shot and that's our current benchmark and we'll be testing and we'll let everyone know how it goes. But thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:46:29Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Thank you. Good chat.

• 2:46:30John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:46:31Cristóbal Valenzuela?

  Good talk.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about Julius.ai, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. We have Vincent from Prime Intellect in the restroom waiting room. How are you doing? Great to see you. It's been too long since last weekend.

• 2:46:52Vincent Weisser?

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Uh, master of real figure, finding the one day that we're not live to launch your new news. Tell us what happened on Wednesday, the one day that we were off of streaming.

• 2:47:08Vincent Weisser?

  Yes, I'm so excited to give you a rundown. So basically for, for the broader context with kind of like our broader goals, really creating open frontier models and infrastructure for everyone to create them. And last week we released Intellect 3, which was basically really like a scale up towards scaling RL and post-training and creating like a sort of model, especially for like more agentic tasks. So basically what we did is we took GLM and, and did a whole SFT stage and RL stage to create kind of like a state of the art 100 billion parameter MWE model. And really kind of like that whole infrastructure is kind of quite a challenge, like from like

• 2:47:52Vincent Weisser?

  the RL environments to the broader like code sandboxes and the whole stack to do post-training. That's basically what we built over the last half year. I think Will Brown came on the show to unpack some of it on the verifiers and environment side. So basically, that's kind of like what we released last week and really proved that kind of like we got performance at a hundred billion scale that thus far in the open source, only three hundred to six hundred billion parameter models like DeepSeek, Aron, for example, achieved before. So basically getting to better performance actually at a much smaller scale. And I think in general, it showcases that like open models are starting to catch up. Obviously, I think quite interesting.

• 2:48:33Vincent Weisser?

  In general, seeing the trend that not just with our model, but also more broadly with other releases like DeepSeek today and over the weekend. That actually, they're also on par with like the closed models now. And I think really our goal is, so it was almost like a preview release, but already sort of is we basically released like our early checkpoint. And we're actually scaling it much further, also on more like agentic capabilities. But basically really like making it sort of across like a range of tasks. And really, I think the foundation of this, which is quite interesting, is that we created this environment software. Anyone in the world can create one of these RL environments, which we ultimately then included in a training run.

• 2:49:14Vincent Weisser?

  So basically, different people in the open source contributed actually to the RL environments that we trained on for this model.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  So yeah, give me a concrete example of like this shift of businesses that need to, you know, buy a model that has been trained in a specific RL environment. You know, we've heard the example of like, someone's creating a clone of DoorDash and they're figuring out how to do DoorDash orders agentically. But what else are you seeing? What are some other good examples of when a business would pull this off the shelf from all the different opportunities, from all the different APIs that are out there? And create something, I guess, semi-custom for a specific business use case? Like, what are you seeing out there?

• 2:50:01Vincent Weisser?

  Yeah, so I think what's interesting is like this, I think two buckets. Basically, there's a bunch of these people like creating RL environments for the labs, like the Dordish clones, etc. So basically, to push really capabilities. So I think we're in this paradigm right now, obviously, where ultimately like scaling RL is the main way on how these models improve. Like we've seen it with Opus or with GPT-5 and Gemini, like that was mainly like I think a scale up in RL. But basically, what we are seeing are two things. It's like on the one side, it's like there's a lot of demand for these RL environments. But on the other side, RL is very sample efficient, so you can take an old model and then really create an RL environment for the specific use case you care about and scale capabilities for that.

• 2:50:44Vincent Weisser?

  So I think a good example of this was, for example, a cursor with Composer. Like that was like what's widely believed or unknown, it's like to be a scale up of an open source model. And the RL environment was cursor. Like they basically just gave it like the tools and the things within the harness and application of cursor itself. But they trained basically that model and like really on getting really good at using cursor. And I think we'll see the same play out like across all the applications. Where basically the broader theory is like every application, every company will be an AI company or AI native. And will have an opportunity to really post-train and use RL to make the models work specifically on their application.

• 2:51:29Vincent Weisser?

  So even if you take examples of like, say, a Figma, right? Like if they want to make their platform agentic, really they need to create an RL environment around Figma and post-train on that environment to be able to serve that within Figma. Like kind of like out of the box, like the closed models won't be perfect at like really navigating and making those applications agentic. So I think that's the broader theory. I think really. It's also it's like it's so like the the capital requirements are are much, much lower than I think the big labs want to believe you like in a sense where it's like you can for like hundreds of thousands of dollars like post train a model, right? It's like to to be much better on your application. And then also to you are able to like

• 2:52:09John Coogan?

  Big labs hate this one weird trick. Post train a model for a hundred K and create a better. So I mean, that's basically what you're saying is that is that if I'm Figma as an example, and I could use a frontier model that's really expensive and beefy and it knows everything about knows some stuff about Figma, but it also knows about the Roman Empire. I can go in RL on just my particular application and have a smaller model that's fine tuned on open source, you know, open source model and and get better performance than with the big beefy, you know, do everything Omni model. Is that right?

• 2:52:46Vincent Weisser?

  Exactly. And I think really you get better performance, but also at a lower price point potentially, right?

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:50Vincent Weisser?

  Because you can really specialize the model to be extremely good for you use case. So I think you could see this with like cognition, post training their own model with like um cursor post training their own model composer. And composers also it's like it's much cheaper to serve. It's much faster, like same for for the more cognition was building. So I think what we're seeing and we're and we've started to work with like dozens of customers on like helping them basically do post training in RL.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15Vincent Weisser?

  I think um we we're basically starting to see a huge pull in in terms of like enterprises realizing that like if they want to get a specific capability, RL is the way to get it and and ultimately enables them quite capital efficiently like to to train those models and serve those models. And then really get to like a point where even in deployment, like all the interactions from the user help improve the model. So I think with the cursor example, like every, for example, cursor tap interaction, every yes and no that a user gives to the model is updating the model every two hours. So that's what like Drakas talks a lot about.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  Two hours.

• 2:53:48Vincent Weisser?

  Like online RL. Yeah, like like they basically like continuously training the model in two hour interval and pushing updates every two hours to person tab. So basically, every user using cursor for the last two hours is um is being post trained on, so to speak, like with kind of like an online RL loop. And I think that's something which we'll see more and more, that basically applications will do their own RL, their own post training.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:11Vincent Weisser?

  Um actually, then and and it's like really how we on hobble basically towards AGI, right? It's like the the question is like, why haven't we say automated?

• 2:54:20Vincent Weisser?

  Like specific valuable knowledge work at, and I think the answer that also like Scholter was speaking about, for example, on with the example of like automating Texas and accounting for number, right? It's like no one has really created our own environments, whole strain on them, and then serve the model in the application where the end user is. And then ultimately, the the end user's interaction with the agent can improve the model further, right? So I think that's really the paradigm that we see play out, which I think is really paradigm of like thousands of models or like millions of models that like basically continuously improve and where actually the applications win to some extent through distribution. Ultimately, they own the the end customer interaction, right? Where it's like even the cursors and and permissions have like an advantage there

• 2:55:04Vincent Weisser?

  over folks who basically just model providers and who don't interact with like millions of developers. And I think we'll see the same play out like across all the different applications. And it's something like you know, the Satya talked about also in the context of like Copilot and Microsoft, right? Like they own distribution, they can like create the cursor for Excel or like PowerPoint or other things, right? And then whole strain on all those interactions. So I think we'll see this like play out, I think, across like all the different verticals. And I think it's like a border trend, you know, just like every company needs to become AI native, right? Like and own also to just keep owning the distribution. Like they don't want to give all of it up to the to the big AGR labs.

• 2:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:55:42Speaker 03

  Makes sense. We got a question from our intern Tyler, if we can shoot over there. Yeah, I guess I I saw you guys talk about this a little bit online. But is there any like point of you guys training your own base model?

• 2:55:55Vincent Weisser?

  Yeah, so basically, I think one interesting release in this context was like, today, we actually released, like we supported RCI in in their base model release, which is like kind of like catching up to the Chinese base models. So basically, we we supported them in training a small MOE base model, which achieves like pretty sort of results. So we released that, I think, like an hour ago with them. And and we're actually now like ramping up with them to towards like a much bigger base model. So fully like pre-trained from scratch. So we actually just had like 2000 B300s going live, I think, yesterday to ramp up like towards like a much bigger.

• 2:56:40Vincent Weisser?

  Um, pre-trained. And I think like, it's really, I think like the broader pattern is like, since kind of like Lama had some reorgs and changes, and Mistral became sort of like a forward deployed European enterprise player or something. I think there's really no one left outside of China right now to go end to end in the model stack. I think others like Reflection, I think are trying to also pick that up. But I think there's very few players, I think, outside of China. So I think that's our broader goal is really like serving like the world globally, but also like the West and the US with like an end to end pipeline, right? That's like from data to pre-training, to mid-training, to post-training, like the full stack and making that accessible to like enterprises and people who are like training on models. So I think like, there's a huge, I think, pool

• 2:57:25Vincent Weisser?

  where a lot of enterprises or even like sovereign, like nation states, et cetera, like you can't train on Chinese open models, but they also, they can't rely on closed models. So I think there's a huge gap in the market right now that we're trying to fill of really like serving kind of like that whole segment.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Do you have anything else, Jordi?

• 2:57:43Vincent Weisser?

  No, this is great.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  Um, I, I want to know one last question about, you know, what, what will the market structure look like in uh, maybe a year or two around like implementing these RL environments for companies? Because when I, when I see, you know, you say every, every company is an AI company. I, I believe that's somewhat true. Uh, and I believe every tech company, maybe every founder-led tech company under 10 years might be able to say, okay, yes, we're going to go and train, fine tune a model and turn our, our application into an RL environment. But if I'm, you know, the Coca-Cola company, uh, you know, I might not be at that level of like going and building RL environments

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  for every business process. I'm probably more of a buyer of this AI as SaaS almost. Uh, so how do you see that kind of breaking out? How do you see like a truly legacy, you know, non-tech company adopting a fine-tuned LLM or an RL, or RL'd model?

• 2:58:49Vincent Weisser?

  Totally. No, I I think there's like early adopters and later like later doctors. I think Coca-Cola might be more like later doctors might not need to adopt it early on. But I think they are adopting it just like in in less obvious places. It's like ultimately, I think they're initially just like using the AI tools that use us, for example. In a sense where it's like, say, customer service, right? It's like is is a like perfect example of like where you get a lot of gains out of post-training. And then like they might put like like basically the AI native customer service platforms might use us to post-train even Coca-Cola data.

• 2:59:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:21Vincent Weisser?

  Um, to serve them a better like model. So I think what we'll see play out, I think, is really um, just like making like a a lot of that like so accessible to your point that it feels more like using SaaS. Where I think like one element of it is like we are like launching also like our whole like like RFT platform, basically, and and offering to make it extremely like easy and plug and play. But then there's also like a forward deployed element, right? Where you can outsource a lot of that stuff to our team. And I think the other element is like really like we're walking walk in in terms of like making our own thing kind of like agentic and autonomous, that you could basically just use like an autonomous AI researcher to do all of it for you. Right? Like that you basically just like plug it into your system and like the AI even like creates AI for you.

• 3:00:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:03Vincent Weisser?

  Like like, and I think like, like, I I think that's the next paradigm is really making uh, like making in general training models, like a fine-tuning models, post-training models, like as accessible as vibe coding is today, right? In a sense where it's like, I think with vibe coding, like literally every human on earth is able now to like code some stuff up. And I think we'll see the same play out with AI over the next 12 months. And that's one of the big things that we're playing into. We're kind of like pushing towards like autonomous AI research.

• 3:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:30Vincent Weisser?

  Where AI can do most of it for you.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us on the show. Congratulations on the progress.

• 3:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Very, very.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon.

• 3:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Vincent.

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:00:41Vincent Weisser?

  See you, guys.

• 3:00:41John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto, rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And I'm also going to tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. Our last guest of the show is Ben Hylak. Did he do the Jaguar rebrand?

• 3:01:04Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 3:01:04John Coogan?

  That's him. Ben, welcome.

• 3:01:06Jordi Hays?

  It will follow him forever.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  Grab a seat, hang out. Good to see you. Oh, you brought hats. Fantastic. Thank you. Please, uh, grab a seat, introduce yourself, introduce the company. What's the news?

• 3:01:19Ben Hylak?

  Yes. So my name's Ben Hylak. Um, yes.

• 3:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Hey, let's take a second for the flow.

• 3:01:24Ben Hylak?

  Thank you. Thank you. I actually-

• 3:01:26Jordi Hays?

  This is kind of like a vintage Silicon Valley flow that you don't, somewhat of a lost art.

• 3:01:30Ben Hylak?

  You know, I appreciate it. You guys have great hair as well. You know, I felt a lot of pressure. Um, you'll notice I'm not wearing a hat today and it's because I did notice actually I kind of, uh, I discovered a blow dryer, I think around, uh, nine months ago, 10 months ago. So that was a big-

• 3:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Your life's never been the same.

• 3:01:45Ben Hylak?

  It's been, never been the same since. Um, but, uh, yeah, my name's Ben Hylak, as you guys know. Uh, I'm the CTO of a company called Raindrop. So really simply put, um, we monitor agents in production. So, uh, we were building a product ourselves, uh, probably around two years ago now, which was like a coding agent. And, um, we realized that there was just this huge gap of like, if you're using Sentry, if you're using traditional analytics, um, you know, uh, they're covering like the things the users are clicking and almost everything that's happening in your product. If you're making an agent, it's just not covered. So you just have no idea what's going on.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  These agents are going absolutely wild.

• 3:02:22Ben Hylak?

  They're going crazy.

• 3:02:22Jordi Hays?

  They're going haywire.

• 3:02:24Ben Hylak?

  You know, what's been insane, I think one of the things that's been like really kind of critical to our growth in the last couple of months has been realizing that, um, as agents get better, this problem gets worse. So that, that was not necessarily intuitive to us in the beginning. You know, you think like, oh, well, agents are going to get better. Maybe this problem becomes less important, but it's like, actually as they become more capable, they can use more tools.

• 3:02:44Jordi Hays?

  More valuable.

• 3:02:45Ben Hylak?

  Exactly. So for example, if you take a company like Replit, it's like, you know, maybe a year ago or two years ago, um, uh, or when they first launched, um, you know, you couldn't quite get as far, right? Maybe you could just get like a personal website or something. And, and so if it messes up at that point, it kind of gets stuck. It's like, okay, maybe it's not the end of the world. But now with Replit, you're able to build just like real applications. Like people are building real production applications. So now if you get to a point where it gets stuck, something goes wrong, suddenly it's like, it's a real issue. Um, so that was not intuitive, uh, before, but.

• 3:03:16John Coogan?

  So, uh, agent's a pretty overloaded term at this point. Uh, I, I think of- You know, when I fire off a deep research report in chat GPT, that's an agentic workflow to some customer service agent that's happening completely behind the scenes and the customer might not even know that they're dealing with an agent. And then there's coding agents. There's a few that you mentioned. Are you dividing the market and trying to focus on an early landing zone first? Or do you want to do all of those?

• 3:03:45Ben Hylak?

  Yes. So we focus on essentially, and I will say, I agree, the word agents overloaded. We're very hesitant to use it for a really long time, and then we realize it actually matters.

• 3:03:53John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:03:54Ben Hylak?

  So we focus on products that have some sort of user input and some sort of assistant output eventually. So that's sort of our focus. So what we're not focused on is, for example, like, we're not going to focus on like specific like ML pipelines or things like, you know, maybe like translating text or like summarizing text even. It's like, we want to see like the user, the user is sort of like, has some sort of request, the assistant is responding to that request. And we do map essentially everything that happens in between that initial, you know, user input and to what the actually, what the assistant actually responds.

• 3:04:30John Coogan?

  And then what's the go to market for you?

• 3:04:32Ben Hylak?

  I mean, it's been a little crazy, actually. We've had a lot of inbound. So some of our biggest customers have been inbound. A lot of it has been like, when we first launched, I think, like, I guess this was like six months ago or seven months ago now, agents weren't as big of a deal. And so I think in the first month or two, we had a lot of customers who were like, okay, like, I have evals.

• 3:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Thanks. We'll need this.

• 3:04:53Ben Hylak?

  Yeah. But it didn't really make sense for them. And a lot of them came back in the last, like, like a month or two after that. And like, holy shit. Okay, now I get it. We need you. Like, so it's actually been a ton of inbound. We do, we don't really pay for advertising, anything like that. You know, if we see a really crazy failure in the news, we'll reach out to that company, obviously, and be like, hey, this is something we can help with.

• 3:05:12John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. How are you thinking about the, you know, target, like, the best type of customer? Are you segmenting it by size? Do you want to go enterprise upfront because they're implementing agents at scale? Or are you more likely to see immediate results of the startup that just kind of gets it and they can hop on really quickly? Like, Are you thinking about prioritizing if you are at all?

• 3:05:35Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that we really look at the entire range and I think that we see and have always seen startups as being a really core part of keeping our company healthy.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:05:46Ben Hylak?

  You know, I've I heard a while ago that like Posthog has this metric where they look at like what percentage of Y C companies in every batch are using them.

• 3:05:52John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:05:53Ben Hylak?

  And so that's why we started with startups like they're always they're able to move faster. So for example, like when a new model comes out, this is actually a very specific example. So G P T five introduced intermediate reasoning, right? There was kind of one of the first models to do this where like it's going to make tool calls, it's going to look at the results of those tool calls, think about it, and then make more tool calls, take that, think about it, right? You know, more tool calls. It sounds small or subtle, but actually it kind of means that, you know, if you architected these, your system, your pipelines in the wrong way, you just couldn't use that like and it really helped. So where startups will just like just just throw everything out.

• 3:06:32Ben Hylak?

  That's the next day, right? And they'll they'll ship a whole new thing in a week. You don't see like, you know, like if you look at like the biggest enterprises, they're not going to do that.

• 3:06:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:41Ben Hylak?

  So you can learn really fast by with startups. That being said, on the flip side, I think that the problem we're solving is actually most painful for enterprises. Right? It's like the the the the most critical, high stakes environments are where like failures cost the most in every single sense.

• 3:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much of the Categories of agents that you're excited about that are maybe underhyped today. Coding agents. Coding agents are like sufficiently hyped, I think.

• 3:07:08Ben Hylak?

  Coding agents are and for good reason.

• 3:07:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for good for good reason, but like, and maybe maybe they're deserving of more hype.

• 3:07:15Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:16Jordi Hays?

  But but what what other category? You know, I think I think people have been sold on the A I B D R.

• 3:07:23Ben Hylak?

  Yes.

• 3:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Haven't exactly, maybe companies are getting a ton of value from it and they're getting so much value, they don't want to come on T B P N and talk about it.

• 3:07:30Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Because they don't want their competitors to know. But and then obviously like C X feels sufficiently

• 3:07:37Ben Hylak?

  Sure.

• 3:07:38Jordi Hays?

  hyped, but what else are you seeing?

• 3:07:40Ben Hylak?

  Man, it's, there's so many different things. Like, I think, um, you know, speak, for example, language learning. I think the better, like, as models get better, that experience just actually starts to become really, really, really viable. So like, that's an example of something where it's like, yeah, it existed a year ago, it existed two years ago, but like, as voice models get better, as like, the models themselves get better, it can, it's actually not just like, you know, if you try to use ChatGPT, for example, to learn a language, you sort of can, but if you ask it to like, critique you, for example, um, it just never will. Like, if you say something wrong, it just isn't going to stop and be like, hey, look, actually, like,

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  Still glazing. You're absolutely right.

• 3:08:16Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:08:17John Coogan?

  Donde esta la biblioteca is the most complicated Spanish sentence.

• 3:08:21Ben Hylak?

  It will, it will, right? You're fluent. Exactly, you're fluent, you're fluent. It's like, yeah, you're pretty much good to go. And, um, even if you can get it to the point where like, if you can really, really like, prompt it into critiquing you, it'll just like, start critiquing everything, you know, which is also not what you want as like, you're learning a language. So like, it turns out, and I think we see this with a lot of products, that like, getting something right is actually a lot of details and really, really understanding that domain. So I think we're seeing that in literally every domain, like, whether it's like, marketing, whether it's like, even just like, the idea of having a personal assistant, like, notably, we don't have that yet, which is crazy, right? Like, we, we have these assistant models, but then none of us actually have an assistant. We can just chat and be like, hey, send this email.

• 3:08:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:58Ben Hylak?

  Right? I don't. And so, I, but I think we're starting to see products actually like, nail that, like, uh, smaller mostly, but.

• 3:09:05John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about, um, just, I, I, I don't know if, I don't know if like, if you're Sentry for AI agents, does Sentry actually handle this? But just types of AI failures that happen for more infrastructural reasons. So just, the GPUs are on fire. Or like, there's just not enough GPUs in this particular cloud, and you just see a spike in demand, and so you just can't provision more. Like, those types of more, more tactical errors, do you help with that?

• 3:09:30Ben Hylak?

  Sort of, would be the answer. So, um, I think it's actually really interesting, is that one thing we realized about evals is that they don't. Catch those sort of issues like you know, you're kind of testing just like the model. What is the model responding? But then there's all of these things that happen in between like I remember really, really early on when we launched. One of the issues that a customer caught was like their file upload was broken. So a bunch of users all started complaining about like, oh, like the file uploads taking too long. It's like, okay, well, it's not like an AI problem, but it is.

• 3:09:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:57Ben Hylak?

  Um, and so we see that with like tool calls. Um, we saw, uh, one of our customers had an issue, sort of what you're saying, which is that like they started having like they, they have their own GPUs. They started having like an infrastructure error and, um, it was mixing up responses between users. And so users all started complaining like, hey, uh, that's not what I like. What are you talking about? That's not my system. It was like an increase in that in like.

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  I don't know if you're talking about meta, but I think that happened in.

• 3:10:19Ben Hylak?

  It wasn't meta. They're not one of our customers yet, but.

• 3:10:22John Coogan?

  But there was a situation where like people could share. It was, it was not that bad, but it was something like, uh, I could share my chat with you. But if I shared it with you and I didn't know that I was sharing it, it would go out everywhere. And so, yeah, stuff like that happens.

• 3:10:33Ben Hylak?

  Totally. There's all these sorts of things. So you can actually catch those sort of problems. It's actually one of the, one of the things is like, uh,

• 3:10:41Ben Hylak?

  that ground truth is actually really, really important because if you just see like a few errors, like let's say you have a tool call, like your agent calls tools. Like, yeah, that's going to error once in a while, right? Like that's might not be the biggest deal, but especially once you, if you can see when it actually starts to affect users, like that's really, that's really powerful.

• 3:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Um, what about, uh, degradation of models under the hood? I feel like people, I don't know if it's just a meme. I've noticed it here and there. I'm not, I'm not benchmarking everything every night, like some big companies. But it does feel like that sometimes, right? It feels like, it feels like sometimes I'm like, wait a minute, they, I used to respond in this many tokens. Now it responds this many. It used to look HD, now it looks standard definition, like.

• 3:11:19Ben Hylak?

  I, I know, I agree with you. Uh, you know, I think, I think it's real. I know that I, I can't say too much. I know that at least on one occasion, that I, I think people were led to believe that there wasn't a thing. I, I know that there was.

• 3:11:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:11:32Ben Hylak?

  So that's it. You know what I mean? I, I can't say who is a big company. Um, and because I, I noticed this and I thought.

• 3:11:38John Coogan?

  I can't say whose hands were caught red handed, but I caught some red hands.

• 3:11:41Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and like it, it was like, I thought it was a cursor problem. It was like some really absurd behavior and then I went into ChatGPT and it was doing the same. Oh, I just said, but, um. But anyway, yeah, like I, I think that the reality is that like every single one of these providers are like having these sort of problems and they're trying to optimize costs. They're trying to like make changes and like, so I think it's natural.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  And some of them I understand where I'm like, oh, okay. Well, yeah, realistically, I haven't used that in a long time. I came back. I kinda sure I don't really mind that you put me on the lower tier.

• 3:12:08Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  I just hope that for the people that actually like went and built businesses around this that are using it at the API level, that are hopefully paying for the service at a high gross margin to you, you're not degrading the service behind their backs.

• 3:12:20Ben Hylak?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:12:21John Coogan?

  Right. So, anyway, uh, who did the deal? Anybody we know?

• 3:12:26Ben Hylak?

  You want to hit the gong?

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  You want to hit the gong?

• 3:12:28Ben Hylak?

  Oh, let's do it. Yeah.

• 3:12:29John Coogan?

  Hit, hit the gong. Uh, tell us how much you raised?

• 3:12:33John Coogan?

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

• 3:12:36Ben Hylak?

  Uh, we raised, so we raised 15 million dollars total.

• 3:12:39John Coogan?

  From who?

• 3:12:40Ben Hylak?

  Uh, Lightspeed.

• 3:12:41John Coogan?

  Who did the deal?

• 3:12:42Ben Hylak?

  Bucky.

• 3:12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go.

• 3:12:43Ben Hylak?

  Let's go.

• 3:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again for Bucky.

• 3:12:44Ben Hylak?

  Let's hit it again for Bucky. This one's for you, Bucky.

• 3:12:49Ben Hylak?

  Clean hit.

• 3:12:50John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, we're big fans of Bucky up here. So I just wanted to get him a shout out.

• 3:12:53Ben Hylak?

  Us too, us too, us too. I think when, the moment we met him, we're like, okay, like he matched our energy, like great vibe.

• 3:12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he's doing great.

• 3:13:00Jordi Hays?

  How's building the team going?

• 3:13:02Ben Hylak?

  Uh, it's going, it's going. Uh, I think we're really, really picky, we've realized. Um, and so it's really hard. Um, and I think hiring in San Francisco is really hard. Um, we have a great team. Uh, it's honestly really, really small still. Um, we're.

• 3:13:16John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to get out of San Francisco, you could book a wander with inspiring views. I'll tell you, many of these dreamy beds top to your cleaning 20% of cost of your service. It's a vacation home, but better. You could do an offsite there.

• 3:13:25Ben Hylak?

  We could do our offsite. That's beautiful.

• 3:13:27John Coogan?

  You do your offsite, no wonder.

• 3:13:27Jordi Hays?

  I once used a, a team offsite as a recruiting tactic. I said, we are going on an offsite in two weeks.

• 3:13:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:34Jordi Hays?

  I posted a picture.

• 3:13:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. You want to come?

• 3:13:36Jordi Hays?

  We got an amazing hire.

• 3:13:38Ben Hylak?

  Totally, totally. We'll do it. I'll do it.

• 3:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Creates emergency.

• 3:13:40Ben Hylak?

  We're doing it. So if you're watching right now, uh, well, I'll post the picture soon of, of the house.

• 3:13:44John Coogan?

  Okay, fantastic, fantastic.

• 3:13:46Ben Hylak?

  Uh, but we have an amazing team.

• 3:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I, I figure if you're, if you're picky and you're in San Francisco, it's like the most ruthless, like talent war constant.

• 3:13:55Ben Hylak?

  You know, the other thing is that, that I think when you hire amazing people, they have zero tolerance for working with people that are not amazing.

• 3:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:01Ben Hylak?

  Um, and so I, I think you can't even fool yourself as a founder if you start like, you know, whether you're work traveling, whatever. It's like if they're just. You know, if it doesn't fit, like, everybody, everybody knows and feels that and.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  Have you had to bring anyone's soup? Are you familiar with this?

• 3:14:14Ben Hylak?

  I'm not familiar with this.

• 3:14:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so apparently the AI, this is from Ashley Vance, this is a scoop just dropped on Core Memory on the podcast. So he had Mark Chen, OpenAI's research chief, on the show as part of a post Gemini 3 sit down to get the update from OpenAI. And he said, I knew the AI talent wars were rough, but not this rough. Zuck is out there apparently delivering handmade soup.

• 3:14:37Ben Hylak?

  Wow.

• 3:14:38John Coogan?

  And OpenAI has soup counters? And so I guess.

• 3:14:43Ben Hylak?

  Wait, they count how much soup is served? Soup counter, what are you talking about?

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  I don't even know what this means, but.

• 3:14:48Ben Hylak?

  Oh, I see, I see, like they count how many times.

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  No, no, I think it's like a counter.

• 3:14:51Ben Hylak?

  I'm kidding, it's like a, just like a cafeteria. Right?

• 3:14:55Speaker 06

  Aggressive. What exactly is this tit for tat?

• 3:14:58John Coogan?

  We can, we, we can play this on the show later, but, but yes, I mean.

• 3:15:02Ben Hylak?

  No, no, my, my, my partner has cooked meals for someone.

• 3:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you have to come up with creative ways, for sure.

• 3:15:07Ben Hylak?

  Thing where, um, you know, we, we do typewritten, I'll write a note on a typewriter, you know, when we do our offer letter, right? So that adds something a little.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 3:15:15Ben Hylak?

  No way. Are you messing with us? I lo-, no, I'm serious. I love typewriters.

• 3:15:19John Coogan?

  No, I, I like that. It's just a way to prove.

• 3:15:21Ben Hylak?

  I actually value this message.

• 3:15:23John Coogan?

  All the text is AI generated, I'm sure.

• 3:15:25Ben Hylak?

  Of course, yeah. I'm just copying from chassis receipts. No, I think it's like a little bit of a proof of work thing.

• 3:15:31John Coogan?

  You're not just the newest hire, you're a revelation.

• 3:15:33Ben Hylak?

  This is a statement. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:36John Coogan?

  Having fun. Well, that's great. Congratulations on all the progress. Very excited. I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon.

• 3:15:43Ben Hylak?

  I will.

• 3:15:43John Coogan?

  Giving us plenty more updates. And it's been fun because, I mean, I believe that we started tracking your journey via your viral joke post about doing the Jaguar rebrand or something. But we've always had fun featuring your posts. It's great to have you here.

• 3:15:58Ben Hylak?

  Live in person.

• 3:15:59John Coogan?

  Yes, live in person.

• 3:16:00Ben Hylak?

  One, one year ago today, I remember, roughly one year ago, I was sitting in a parking lot and I, I was listening to, this is the first time I ever heard of you guys. You were reading like one of my tweets and it was just so surreal that like people from the internet are reading my tweets. Like, I think one of our customers sent it to us, actually. We had printed, we had printed it out. Print it out, yeah. So I called my mom today, I was like.

• 3:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Telling I was like, I'm gonna be on the, I was like, you're not, you're not gonna know what it is. But remember that, those guys that were talking about that tweet?

• 3:16:22John Coogan?

  This was the whole, this was the whole shtick was like little love letters to Silicon Valley folks. Just like little messages of just, hey, we, we've found something that you did fun. Cause anyone can like, anyone can repost, you know, it, it's, it's easy to send a small thing. It's very hard to actually print it out, sit down, talk about it. Uh, but we appreciate your post and we appreciate you coming on the show.

• 3:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate you guys.

• 3:16:41John Coogan?

  And hanging out today. So thanks so much.

• 3:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 3:16:44John Coogan?

  Close out the show and we'll talk to you in just a second.

• 3:16:49John Coogan?

  While he's walking off, let me tell you about getbezel.com shop over 25, 26,500 luxury watches.

• 3:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Super intelligent for watches.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  Authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. I also need to tell you about eatsleep.com exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. I had a rough night. Kids have been all over the place, but I still got 92. 98.

• 3:17:13Jordi Hays?

  98, 98, 98.

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  That is remarkable. Um, well, is there?

• 3:17:19Jordi Hays?

  There are a bunch of, yeah, we'll see if.

• 3:17:22John Coogan?

  You want to go through some breaking news? Buco Capital bloke is on the timeline. You can feel the panic behind the urgency and intensity with which people are defending Nvidia. It feels visceral and quite intense. You can tell how much is riding on this. Uh, it makes a lot of sense. Um, what, what else did you want to?

• 3:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I thought it was notable pager duty has fallen to a 1.1 billion dollar market cap. And they're at 500 million of ARR. So trading, they're not growing anymore. They're trading at 2.1x ARR. It's profitable, uh, according to Jason Lumpkin over at Saster. So yeah, rough time out there if you're not growing regardless of the revenue scale. Uh, two days ago, we, we shared that Enron back November 29th. 2001 Nvidia replaced Enron in the S and P 500. I saw this post go out from our incredible team and I immediately Googled the fact.

• 3:18:20John Coogan?

  I was like, there's no way. Someone has made a terrible mistake on our team and we are doing fake news unironically now. We used to have some fun, but apparently this is real.

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  It's real.

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  It's real.

• 3:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Jensen was like, I'll take that spot.

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  November 29th. Obviously, that's not how it works. It is, it is much more mathematical than that, I believe. Standard and Poor's picks the largest companies and after certain ebbs and flows of the market, they swap folks in and out.

• 3:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  But this went pretty viral, 5,000 likes. But what is really interesting is of course, the, the, the Nvidia Enron, like comparisons are just so silly to me. Obviously, it's like, you know, the, the discussion is like, is like, will it go from being the best business in the entire history of the world to being like, you know, somewhat competitive and have to deal with like minor competition from other people. It does not seem like it's some ridiculous Enron situation. That's like so, so insane. People are just having fun with that headline. But what is incredible is this, this branded shirt he's wearing. Look at this thing.

• 3:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 3:19:28John Coogan?

  So awesome. I love it.

• 3:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Not enough people trying to go snipe vintage Nvidia merch.

• 3:19:33John Coogan?

  It's a great shirt. It's a great look and I feel like it's got to make a comeback. The button down, this is the pre Silicon Valley, I'm just in a t-shirt era, but it's post suits, you know, it's like, we're not suits. We're working in technology. We're still going to throw on a collar, but we're going to dress it down a little bit. No tie.

• 3:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Guys, scroll up, scroll up on this for a second.

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, keep going, keep going. Oh, who's not, who's not following Tyler? You gotta follow the account. This is not my account.

• 3:20:01John Coogan?

  I think this is a, this is more of like a burner account situation.

• 3:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's a scraper that we use to, for.

• 3:20:07John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 3:20:08Jordi Hays?

  You gotta correct that Tyler. Come on.

• 3:20:11John Coogan?

  That's not.

• 3:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Gorkum over at Fall had an absolute banger. This was a chart showing ASML sells fewer than 500 units per year and generates 37 billion in revenue. Is there any company in the world with a wider moat? And Gorkum said, Series A pitch meeting. Sorry to cut you off, but what happened in December 2024? This is just like a slight dip in the chart.

• 3:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what did happen? Why did their revenue drop in 2024? I actually don't know. Was it just so much pull forward from 2023 or something?

• 3:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they they were developing some hubris. They decided to get complacent.

• 3:20:54John Coogan?

  Yes, I mean, I certainly understand the the the the concept. Okay, according to the CEO, customers in Taiwan had delays and weren't ready to take delivery yet. And orders got pushed back at the same time. China raced to get as many machines as possible before export controls tightened. Okay, that makes sense.

• 3:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Sash Zatz says, uh, Oxford Dictionary didn't get the memo. Apparently Ragebait named

• 3:21:15John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:21:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think I think it I

• 3:21:19John Coogan?

  No, no, no, that's appropriate that it would be the word of the year, but it is so funny that you you posted this and then and then Oxford Dictionary.

• 3:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is true. Rage, according to the BBC, Ragebait named Oxford Word of the Year 2025. It certainly feels that way on the timeline.

• 3:21:37John Coogan?

  Your post, one million views on this, 3.6 thousand likes. People really, this really set the agenda for a little bit. Wow. Congratulations. What a banger essay. Uh, should TVPN do a Word of the Year? I like that. Or, uh, Motion?

• 3:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Motion.

• 3:21:55John Coogan?

  Motion might be our Word of the Year.

• 3:21:57Jordi Hays?

  Word of the Year.

• 3:21:58John Coogan?

  Motion's a pretty good Word of the Year. Motion named named Word of the Year 2025 by TVPN.

• 3:22:05Jordi Hays?

  If you have it, you'll know.

• 3:22:07John Coogan?

  You'll know. We'll call you.

• 3:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Tyler has motion.

• 3:22:10John Coogan?

  In other in other breaking news, uh, Keith Raboy is is taking shots at Airwallex. Uh, Airwallex is now on the other side of a billion dollars in ARR. What I love about this chart is that, uh, isn't that we hit a big milestone?

• 3:22:22Jordi Hays?

  This is the founder, Jack Zhang.

• 3:22:25John Coogan?

  It's how fast the business is accelerating. It takes more than six years to 100 million ARR. What does Airwallex do exactly?

• 3:22:31Jordi Hays?

  I think they provide, uh, payment rails for a bunch of American fintechs to handle international.

• 3:22:38John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. And, uh, and so Keith Raboy. Been on the show multiple times. Says, "Cool growth chart. Have you disclosed to US customers like Rippling, Bill.com, Brax, Nirvan, that you're quietly sending their customers' data to China? Airwallex has become a Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data, like from AI labs and defense contractors. You must already know this, but your China-based ops, infrastructure, and investors create legal obligations to assist with CCP espionage upon request. Through Airwallex, Beijing can assess supplier payments for AI labs so they could know who's using what models.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  Payroll data for defense contractors, personal data for employees abroad. That's obviously not good. Obviously, many companies do business in China, and that's not inherently a bad thing. But your company has become a guaranteed vector for data transfer to the Chinese government. And that's a different thing entirely. You have multiple points of vulnerability: people, legal structure, cap table. What's happening? You route global payments for US companies in critical sectors without disclosing that you're under a Chinese jurisdiction. You moved your HQ to Singapore? Well, that seems like a step in the right direction, maybe. But your largest operational footprint is in China? Okay, no, so maybe one step back.

• 3:23:57John Coogan?

  One step forward and one step back. And hundreds of your engineers in mainland China touch production payment systems. You are subject to Chinese law that requires Airwallex employees to support CCP intelligence requests and quietly hand over data when asked. You hid this from your customers, but you are well aware of your obligations to China, and that's why you insist on protection of Chinese data access to your contract. Thanks to you, the Chinese government now has direct, covert, legally enforceable access to sensitive financial information. This is a big story. This is a crazy scoop from Keith Raboy. And I will be interested to see where this goes, how quickly they can remedy this. This popped up.

• 3:24:44John Coogan?

  Couple of years ago, during the Clubhouse era, the Clubhouse backend, I believe, was at one point, you know, was working with a Chinese company, or maybe it was that there was a company that did like peer-to-peer audio streaming that was based in China. And so if you were building a competitor, you might use that company.

• 3:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so. I became familiar with Airwallex through the 20VC episode that Harry did with Jack, the founder.

• 3:25:13John Coogan?

  Is it ripping? I mean, it seems like the business is doing really well.

• 3:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:25:18John Coogan?

  Well.

• 3:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 3:25:20John Coogan?

  Well, what else?

• 3:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Sure we'll hear more about it. We got to get on with Menlo Park.

• 3:25:27John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, thank you so much for listening.

• 3:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Hanging out with us today.

• 3:25:30John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow. Please leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:25:33Jordi Hays?

  The break, the Thanksgiving break was absolutely brutal for us, I would say, every single day.

• 3:25:40John Coogan?

  But hopefully you had a great Thanksgiving.

• 3:25:41Jordi Hays?

  Wake up and just twiddle my thumbs, wishing we were podcasting. It's great to be back. Hope you had an amazing break or a little holiday, and we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:25:50John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 3:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:25:52John Coogan?

  Goodbye.