DOJ vs. Fed Chair, Apple Repositions Vision Pro, Ben Thompson Joins | Tyler Cowen, Harley Finkelstein, Andrew Feldman, Nathan Nwachuku, Anastasios Angelopoulos

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:33) - We Are Jerome Powell (02:08) - DOJ Opens Criminal Probe into FED Chair (04:15) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (11:42) - Apple's Vision Pro Strategy (26:52) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (29:54) - Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, is a technology and media analyst known for his in-depth analysis of tech industry strategies. In the conversation, he critiques Apple's Vision Pro, emphasizing that its immersive potential is undermined by overproduced content and unnecessary production elements. Thompson advocates for a more straightforward approach, suggesting that simply placing cameras courtside at live events would provide a more authentic and engaging experience for users. (01:07:35) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:23:46) - Tyler Cowen is an American economist, author, and professor at George Mason University, known for his work in cultural economics and as co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution. In the conversation, Cowen discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on blue-collar jobs, suggesting that while AI may reduce demand for certain tasks, overall job opportunities in these sectors will increase due to new projects and developments. He also touches on the role of data centers in the U. S. economy, the potential of AI-generated music, and the importance of aesthetics in urban development. (01:56:10) - Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras Systems, discusses the company's pioneering efforts in AI hardware, highlighting the development of their Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chips, which integrate memory and logic onto a single, large-scale wafer to enhance performance and efficiency. He emphasizes the significance of fast inference in AI applications, noting that the WSE-3 chip can train models ten times larger than OpenAI's GPT-4, and mentions partnerships with organizations like the Mayo Clinic and G42 in the UAE to deploy these technologies. Feldman also reflects on the challenges of innovating in the semiconductor industry, including overcoming skepticism and technical hurdles associated with wafer-scale integration. (02:29:26) - Nathan Nwachuku, a 22-year-old software engineer and co-founder of Terra Industries, is leading efforts to establish Africa's first modern defense prime by developing autonomous security systems to protect the continent's critical infrastructure. He discusses his journey from launching an edtech startup at 17 to recognizing the need for foundational security solutions to support Africa's industrial growth, leading to the creation of Terra Industries in 2024. Nwachuku highlights the company's focus on building surveillance technologies, including drones and sentry towers, powered by a unified software platform to address evolving threats across land, air, and maritime domains. (02:40:07) - Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos, a former PhD student at UC Berkeley, is a co-founder of LM Arena, a platform for evaluating large language models (LLMs) based on human preferences. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of model evaluation, the importance of unbiased user feedback, and the platform's role in helping users make informed decisions about LLMs. He also highlights the platform's growth, its approach to incentivizing user participation, and future plans to expand evaluation categories and integrate speed and cost considerations. (02:53:22) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:58:30) - Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, is a Canadian entrepreneur and lawyer who founded his first company at 17 and later earned a law degree and MBA from the University of Ottawa. In the transcript, he discusses the rapid emergence of billion-dollar brands like Skims and Gymshark, emphasizing that these companies didn't just capture existing market share but created new markets by innovating within traditional product categories. He also highlights Shopify's collaboration with Google to develop the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open-source language enabling merchants to seamlessly integrate with AI agents, thereby enhancing the shopping experience through features like loyalty programs, subscriptions, and personalized delivery options. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, January 12th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill paying accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. A bunch of fun news out of Ramp. They built an AI agent just for internal production.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  For the backend.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we will go into that, but first we got to pay our respects to the big man Jerome Powell.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Pull up the anthem.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  The anthem.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  This is this week's anthem.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  This is.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  We've been blasting it all morning here in the studio.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Yes, it is.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  It will make you emotional.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  It's a very emotional song. It.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  So, trigger warning.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  I guess it's AI generated, but it hits.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should have gotten lighters for this, for sure.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Of course, this is on the back that the New York Times reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of Jerome Powell.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  He took to the.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  He, Jerome dropped a video explaining his side of the story. But instead of playing that, we're playing this.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Jerome Powell.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  We are Jerome Powell.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  I didn't want to cry at the office today, but it's happening. No. Oh, what a story. Powell says the Justice Department served the Fed with subpoenas. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the US central bank has been served grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department, threatening a criminal indictment related to his June congressional testimony on ongoing renovations of the Fed's headquarters. In a statement released Sunday evening, Jerome Powell rejected the notion that the action was driven by his testimony or the renovation. Joe Weisenthal has a post here, he says Powell confirms the Fed has been served subpoenas from the DOJ. Fortunately, we have Tyler Cowen coming on the show today. I'm sure we'll be able to talk to him about that and a whole bunch of other things in the world.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  We will be asking him, should we roll the Fed into Truth Social?

• 2:42John Coogan?

  That's a good, that's one possibility.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Or World Liberty Financial, right? We have options.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Might be the most entertaining outcome.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Let's pull up the Linear lineup and show everyone who's coming on the show today because we do have Tyler Cowen. We also have Andrew Feldman from Cerberus coming on the show and a bunch of other folks. Harley is joining to talk about agent of commerce.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Nathan from Terra, he's building drones in Africa. Excited for that one. And of course Harley.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  And Alan Marina. And Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. Linear is building, is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. We also might have a surprise guest joining at 12:15, just so you know.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  We'll see. Yeah, anyways, watching Sunday night, I'm all excited, right? One more sleep until Monday. And I pull up this video, I've got to watch Jerome.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Give a two-minute talk.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, really, really dark moment. It was funny, Buco, Buco Capital shared, like, if it's illegal to run over budget on a remodel, my wife's getting the electric chair.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  You didn't give me the punchline when you said that the first time. But I knew where it was going, but.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, not.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Very political, very fraught, but it's created a number of entertaining memes.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  People have been standing up, standing up for...

• 4:07John Coogan?

  People have been in standing up for the Federal Reserve Chairman and fortunately, I mean, the administration sees these. They, you know, we know that they're very online.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  You know they're tapped in.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  And they see the support. So we'll see where the story evolves.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Hoser says, "Like if you would let Jerome Powell crash on your couch for a few months."

• 4:22John Coogan?

  AI is really at its best when you need a bunch of, you know, memes and images generated around a current thing. Before we do the next one, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Make the show possible.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Rachel just said, "You just created a million central bankers."

• 4:42John Coogan?

  And Jordy said this to me, I just burst out laughing so hard.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  It is, I mean, Fed Chair, probably one of the worst jobs on earth if you care what other people think about you, right?

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just like every, you know, all the time, people just have this massive fixation on you and they're going to form an opinion immediately.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  But in this case, I've never seen people so united around, which is heartwarming. That's the only...

• 5:11John Coogan?

  And it is, it is weird because like the prediction is that there will not be another rate cut in January. There's a lot of people that would benefit from another rate cut. If you're, if you're long the market, you would probably benefit. But I think people do, are generally still fans of Fed independence and they want Jerome to do whatever's best based on the facts and the data and the unemployment and inflation.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm surprised there's no reaction in the, from, from the prediction markets at all. Cow she still has 94% that the Fed maintains the rate in January.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. You would think this would move the needle a little bit because it's...

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, he is posting a hostage video.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  He's putting a hostage video, saying, "I'm not, I'm not leaving. You're going to have to prime me out with the jaws of life." Merrick says, "Absolute insanity. The Department of Justice just served the Federal Reserve Chair with a grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over a historic building renovation." And interestingly, I don't know that the details of this building, but it's not like... The White House where he lives there, right? It's like, it's just a, it's a workplace, I assume. It's not like it's his personal house.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  He's not, you, based on this, you would think he was using, yeah, you would think, you would think he was using, because, because the other, the, the other, um, who is the woman who, uh, they, they also opened an investigation? I'm blanking on the name. Um, but, uh, in that case, they said like, she, uh, she got a mortgage for a primary residence, but she actually ended up not living there full-time.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Which, um, again, right?

• 6:46John Coogan?

  But at least the, the, the claim.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  That was Lisa Cook.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Hopefully she's not cooked, we'll see. Uh, Jerome Powell is appealing directly to the American people and bluntly stating that the criminal charges are not about Congress's oversight role, but rather about the Federal Reserve's independence in setting the interest rate. American equities traded a premium because of our respect for law, accountability and central bank independence. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do with integrity and commitment to serving the American people on a Sunday evening before market open. What is the market doing? We should go over to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. We have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more, all with great customer service.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  S and P 500 is green.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Green, yeah.

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, uh, I, yeah, I think everybody expected last night, uh, for things to happen. Of course, nothing, nothing ever happens, uh, but, uh, we'll see. In some ways, this, this will just give the DOJ and the admin more confidence in their decision. Although they did come out and say like, uh, the White House had nothing to do with it.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, Trump said, I'm not pressuring. He said something like, I wouldn't even think to pressure him on this particular angle. Uh, he's saying, I might, I might post something on Truth Social about where I think the interest rate should be. He's free to do with that what he will. So, uh, I'm sure the story will evolve and there will be a lot of reporting on it. Uh, Eddie Elfen Bean says, what are you in for? I gave imprecise information to Congress about the scope of renovations to the Federal Reserve's HQ.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Trey in the chat says the funniest thing is the Fed renovation is self-funded.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, by the actual Fed because it makes enough money. I think they make a bunch of money, don't they make money printing coins, coinage? I think that they, or is that the Mint? Is the Mint part of the Fed? I don't know. But I know that, I know that there's a number of, like, there's a number of government programs that are all self-funded. Not all of them are, you know, taxpayer money pits. The CIA's Inqutel, for example, is not from the CIA's budget. It makes money because they invest in companies and they put that money back to work. Very interesting.

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  Bubble Boy says I'm willing to die for the Federal Reserve. So he is Jerome's strongest soldier.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Bubble Boy's getting, standing up. 2,000 likes. A lot of people are coming out in favor of Jerome Powell. Quickly, Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Go check out Graphite.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Geiger Capital, Powell watching stocks turn green after thinking the market would defend him.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Isn't that Biden?

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tough thing is like if you assume that rates are gonna come down, like you don't exactly want to sell assets, or you want to own assets.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  There's this weird dynamic where you might not like what's happening politically, but there's a big difference between what should happen and what will happen, positive and normative analysis. And so if you, you could be like, I don't like the fact that, you know, the Fed's gonna be less independent, but if it means that interest rates are gonna come down, then that's bullish. That's a bullish catalyst. And so you wind up going long. Marco Rubio is finding out he has to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I haven't followed the Marco Rubio meme too closely. I just know that he has a lot of jobs or keeps getting tapped for things. And so I've seen him in an astronaut outfit. I've seen him in, you know, different Venezuelan memes. I don't exactly know where this all came from, but I'm familiar with the concept of Marco Rubio doing everything, I guess. I don't really.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's somewhat depressing because it just means like if you're in the, if you're in the inner circle, you're gonna, you're gonna be, you're gonna get a lot of responsibility. And if you're out, you will eventually get the laser beam of the admin.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Well, gold is through the roof today.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Silver.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Well, hosts a chart. Gold jumped from forty five, ten to forty five, eighty five. Not a huge move, but a huge move for gold, of course. So people are bailing on the US dollar potentially. Silver's also up, says the COBSE letter. Silver surges above eighty five dollars an ounce for the first time in history. It's already up nineteen percent in twenty twenty six. There's been a number of hard tech founders have commented on the fact that silver is actually more of an important material than gold in manufacturing of the semiconductor supply chain, a lot of different AI supply chains. And so there's an interesting narrative of like the knock on effects of high silver prices.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  The nothing ever happens. This is nothing ever happens on steroids. I've never seen so much. Nothing ever happens, says Mike Bird, because the S and P five hundred is up on the news of chaos in the financial markets potentially. Very odd, odd scenario. Anyway, CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stop breaches. So the Apple Vision Pro is in the news because, and I think we can pull up this video maybe of Trung Fan posted this. Mark Gurman was a big fan of this. Apple Vision Pro announced you can now watch a full NBA game in the Vision Pro, not just

• 12:02John Coogan?

  a little highlight reel, not just a trailer. And Mark Gurman asked the question, is the total addressable market for watching tonight's Lakers game in the Apple Vision Pro just me? Or is anyone else tuning in? A couple of people said, I haven't booted mine up for a year. They still have it. They did turn it on. He wound up loving it.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Has this, have they ever done this before?

• 12:23John Coogan?

  They've never done a full game. So they've done MLS highlights. You could watch like an eight minute summary of an MLS game that had a ton of different cuts, not, a lot of people were not fans of that.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  This release cadence needs to be studied.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  It's crazy. And I mean, that's what Ben Thompson wrote about today in Stratechery. He's, he sees all this as like crazy own goals, a lot of really obvious things. Also, the reason that you see this video so grainy like this. So Mark Gurman loved it in the headset. He said it's absolutely wild. It's like watching courtside. Trunk Fan has the video here. You can't record what's happening in the headset. You can't just steal an NBA game. Because, so you need to like put your phone up against it and you don't really experience it here. Because for DRM reasons, you can't just pirate it. You can't just record what you're seeing. So the actual experience is better than this. I actually went to the Apple Store yesterday to try and pick up a Vision Pro to experience this.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  And they were sold out. And I don't know if that means that they were just like not expecting to sell anymore. So they stopped stocking them. But they didn't have one. But, but I played with the Vision Pro.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the real, the real, I would wait to, the real review would be getting the Apple Vision Pro, going to getting, going to the actual game.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Getting the ticket right next to the system that they're using. And then just having the headset on and taking it on.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  At the game?

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the game. You want to see how real it is?

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Tyler, what would you do?

• 13:50Tyler?

  So this is cool because it's like emulating like what is happening in real life. But in VR, you can do like things that like you couldn't do in real life. So like, I want to see what is the point of view like if I'm the ball.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  You'd probably be so motion sick.

• 14:03Tyler?

  I want to be the ball.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  That sounds terrible.

• 14:05Tyler?

  You know ball.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  No one wants to be the ball.

• 14:07Tyler?

  I know ball.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Matthew Ball? Or who's the other ball?

• 14:11Tyler?

  Dean Ball.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Dean Ball?

• 14:12Tyler?

  Dean Ball.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  We haven't gotten Matthew Ball on the show yet. We need him. He's a great analyst. Anyway, so Ben Thompson wrote about this because he's obviously a huge NBA fan. Also, he's a Milwaukee Bucks fan. And the game was the Lakers versus the Bucks. So this is like a royal flush of like the sweet spot for Ben Thompson analysis. He had to jump through VPN hoops to watch the broadcast because it was only available in Lakers home market, which is California, also Hawaii, and I think one other state. So it's somewhat tricky. Yeah.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  You can't.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  You, no, no. If you're in New York and you had a Vision Pro, you could not watch the Lakers play the Bucks unless you had a VPN. Yeah, there's a lot of details here and

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  That's a huge detail.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  I know, I know, I know.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Like I have this, I have this $3,000 device.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  That is just gathering dust.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  And then you make this big deal about this amazing experience that I can have. And then if I'm not actually within the area that the game is actually taking place, I can't.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  I can't experience it. What's the point of VR?

• 15:12John Coogan?

  So there, there are a lot of reasonable critiques like that. Ben puts a lot of those in his piece. Uh, I think that there are logical reasons. I don't think Apple is dumb. I don't think they just made a mistake. I think these are all contract negotiations. And when we look at the history of sports and transitions through various eras of broadcast and new technologies, I think their decision-making makes a little bit more sense, even though I agree from a user experience perspective, what you're saying, what Ben Thompson is saying makes a ton of sense. So Apple clearly reads Stratechery. They've sent him multiple headsets. He bought his own, but they said, they keep sending them to him being like, "Hey, you should try it. Like we're coming out with something new." Uh, so they've sent him the new one, the M5 Vision Pro.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Um, and, uh, and, and he was ready to, he was ready to watch this. He was ready to love this. But he was very disappointed because it, it, it cut from one scene to another. And so that takes you out of the experience. He says, "Do away with all of the pre-show, special announcer, post-show content. Just let me put on the headset and if I put it on 30 minutes before the game starts, I'll just watch the players warm up." And then you don't need any overlays because if I want to know the score, I'll just look up at the scoreboard. Like you're in the theater. Like people pay a lot of money to sit courtside and they're not like, oh, I also need-

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm having a bad experience because I-

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Please, please do give me an iPad with the score on. No, no one cares. They just look at the score. They hear the audience. If there's, if, if something great happens, they hear the roar of the crowd. Um, they see everything. They can even look up at the screen and usually see a replay if they need to. Um, and so all of that should be possible with just one simple Apple immersive camera rig, streamed the whole game and that's it. Instead, they did four different camera angles. They're cutting between them. And every time they cut, you get kind of like, whoa, where am I? Like I just teleported. It's weird.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  So my, uh, my question was like, was like, so Ben frames this as-

• 17:08John Coogan?

  He calls it "Apple, you still don't understand the Vision Pro." He's like taking shots at them. And I titled my piece, "Apple, they actually do understand the Vision Pro." And I think they've heard his response, they've clearly read his piece. He wrote about this maybe two years ago when he got a demo before it even came out. And he said, "The secret to success with this product will just be, put a camera on the field. Let me sit there front courtside." That's it. No editing, nothing else. And then every time they delivered him something that was edited, he wrote a piece about how bad the editing was and how you don't need that and just let me sit there. And so, my question was, there's no one that really disagrees with Ben. Like Ben comes out and says these things. Every time there's an Apple Vision Pro piece of content that comes out,

• 17:53John Coogan?

  he comes out and says, "Too many edits, too many cuts, just let us sit there." And it's not like there's a lot of people that are like, "Ben's wrong." Actually, I love the edits, more edits, like they need to be even correct.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, no one's talking about...

• 18:04John Coogan?

  No, I'm talking about, except for Ben, basically. So, they should clearly listen to him. And no one's arguing that Ben's wrong. But my question is like, why on earth isn't Apple doing this? Why, or at least, why haven't they made it an option? Like, they have the single camera there. They could just be like, "Do you want to watch the edited version? Or do you want to watch just the normal, just sit there in the seat version?" And then Ben would be happy and he'd be writing a glowing review right now. Instead, Apple's not giving what Sir Teckery wants. And they're feeling the pain because they got an article that was not very complimentary to them in the experience. So, I think that this actually has less to do with the technology, less to do with the creative direction and the directorial vision within Apple,

• 18:49John Coogan?

  and more with just straight up contract negotiations. So, and if you go back in history, Ben goes back to some other history. I went back to 1947. So, TV adoption, I didn't realize this. TV adoption went through a fast takeoff. In 1947, there were 16,000 TV sets installed in America. Eight years later, it was 32 and a half million. It's like completely asymptotic, completely fast takeoff. So the technology trend was clear, but there was still financial risk to getting the timing wrong for your league. The NFL is obviously a huge beneficiary of TV today. They make a fortune from the Super Bowl

• 19:30John Coogan?

  ads that are extremely expensive. But in 1949, the Los Angeles Rams, because the Rams are in LA now, but they went to St. Louis and then they came back, but they were in the Los Angeles in 1949, they sort of got wrecked because they jumped too early. So the NFL had gone to all the franchises and said, all the teams, we're giving you the permission to sell your broadcast rights this year, this season. If you want to put your particular teams' home games on TV, you can do that. You can go out and negotiate. You can sell those. It's an option.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  And the Rams said, yeah, we'll do it. We'll take the jump. They were the only one that did it, and it sort of makes sense since they're in LA. There's a lot of production people here. It would be a natural.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  They were a little too TV-pilled.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  They were extremely TV-pilled and they got burned. So attendance dropped significantly. On an inflation-adjusted basis, they lost $2.5 million of today's dollars. And so the Rams had to go to all the sponsors that sponsor the TV broadcasts and say like, hey, can you just make us whole because we're going to go out of business? And they did. And the sponsors basically paid the Rams for the difference in what they had taken in ticket sales. But it was not a good, it was not a good outcome. And although the NFL eventually got through all of this and figured it all out, that was not the case for minor league baseball. Minor league baseball attendance at minor league baseball events, minor league

• 20:52John Coogan?

  events peaked in 1949, right during the TV install base fast takeoff. And so 49 people, 49 million people went to little, went to minor league events that year in 1949. By 1957, the total had dropped to 15 million. So it actually did wreck the minor leagues in terms of like their business model, and they never really recovered. And so The job of a league commissioner is to get the transition right. Like if you transition too early, you'll have a really, really bad year while everyone just says, "Hey, I can just do the new thing, the new technology. I don't need to buy the tickets." If you do it too late, other leagues might have figured out their contracts, their ad sales, their broadcast rights, all this other stuff.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  So Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, who we learned about through his connection to Josh Kushner, of course, he said, "I think it's my job to incentivize our partners to be able to look out into the future." He's not saying, "Hey, my job's to get everyone out of the stadiums and into VR headsets ASAP." Like, the end result is like, there is a separation between immersive rights and presence rights. So there's broadcast rights, and effectively, they're using the same framework. So when they sell a broadcast right, they're not selling the right to, they're selling the right to broadcast with an announcer, with multiple cameras, with different cuts and edits. They're not selling, you're teleported into the stadium.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  And that's something that they might sell, but they haven't sold yet. And I think they're deliberate about this. And so I think when they went to Apple, they said, "Yes, we can do something." Because they did a deal with Meta, and you can watch a number of NBA games in the Meta Quest, and it's the same thing, they cut around. And the reviews are bad. Everyone says it sucks. And so it's obvious that the tech companies should, you know, Google, "How did people like this?" And it's obvious, no, no, people don't like it. But I think the NBA is holding fast, that they're like, "No, actually, our courtside seats are really, really, really expensive, and we want to keep it that way. We don't want it to be substitutive on day one." And Ben Thompson, when he first wrote about the Apple Vision Pro, he said, "I would pay

• 23:03John Coogan?

  thousands of dollars a year for an NBA league pass that allowed me to, in VR, sit courtside."

• 23:11John Coogan?

  And that's less money than courtside seats to every single NBA game, which is effectively what you're selling. So, and then how many Ben Thompsons are there? People with Apple Vision. And so you, so there's, there's financial risk there. I think it can work out. I think that there's a deal and there's a price and there's a number. The install base gets to this level and you price it at this level and

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  I think they're too, I think in some ways they could very easily be two wildly different consumers.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Like Ben is probably like Ben Thompson knows ball. He wants to, he wants to be able to watch courtside for the love of the game.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Whereas somebody that's going courtside at the Lakers or the Knicks, they're going there to be seen watching courtside, right?

• 23:53John Coogan?

  A little bit of that.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  They're willing to like, it's not, you're not just paying to watch basketball, right?

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Because you could pay like, you know, a fraction to sit a couple of rows back.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  You're paying to be sitting courtside, right?

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the other, the other interesting angle is, is, is this like region lock thing? It almost feels weirder to allow someone in Los Angeles

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  to watch the LA Lakers play because they really could just buy a ticket and go down to the stadium.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  But maybe you should actually be trying to get

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  That's the whole point. If you're, if you're like a diehard Lakers fan.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  But you don't live in Southern California.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  And then somebody says, hey, with the Apple Vision Pro.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  You can watch it.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Like your courtside, that's great.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. What you actually want is like Ben Thompson's in Milwaukee. He loves the Bucks, but they're playing in LA. He's not going to buy a flight to go courtside in LA. And so you let him experience that game.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  And then when they're back in Milwaukee, he can go get the courtside seats in his hometown. So you almost want to do the inverse region lock, something like that. I don't know. What, what do you think, Todd?

• 24:56Tyler?

  Um, wait, so is that deal where it's just a broadcast, not the actual like live stream? Is that basically every single league? Like, can you do the same thing in F1?

• 25:03John Coogan?

  So

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Because that's also like, I feel like that'd be, everyone wants that, you're in the, you're in the cockpit.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  So, so every deal is unique and there's no, there are some, there are some laws around sports broadcasting and that sort of solidified like the blackout periods and made some of that, define some like legal language around that. But really it's up to the leagues to decide how they negotiate these contracts, whether every game's available, only home games are available, region locking blackout dates. There's all sorts of mechanics where for, for, I don't know how true this is today, but I know that if you have a home stadium and it's full, then you can be much more permissive with the broadcast rights because you've sold out all your tickets.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  But if you're, if you're not selling out the stadiums, then often you won't broadcast as much or you can't broadcast as much. So you'll, you'll be in your hometown and you'll go to watch the game and it won't be broadcast because they want you to just go buy a ticket. And then, and then the equilibrium, like the clearing, the market clearing prices that people that are on the fence who are like, I really wanted to watch the game. I can't watch it here. I'll just go buy a ticket. And then over time you fill it out. Yeah.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be very excited about this.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Please.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Ben Thompson's gonna join the show.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Really? No way. Amazing.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat earlier said, you're Ben Thompson's biggest fan.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  I am.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  And you are.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  I am.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  We are.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Oh, fantastic.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so we're working on getting Ben on.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  To continue the discussion.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. This will be a lot more extra context because he is, he is the expert in this. Uh, in the meantime, let me tell you about app loving profitable advertising with made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. Maduro. We're back in politics land, but don't worry, not for long because we're going into watch land because he was caught rocking a Chapard Ganesh. A fantastic Indian watch that is incredibly, incredibly detailed. Look at all these different Swiss made. This is a crazy. I feel like this is sort of a lost art, you know, maybe Mark Zuckerberg

• 27:14John Coogan?

  should get into this. Wear a watch that has, you know, uh, uh, sweet baby rays on the dial. The sweet baby rays, Chopin dial might go incredibly hard. I would love that. Uh, also it was the Golden Globes. I know Jordy didn't watch because you probably haven't seen any of these movies, uh, but they, they did it in fact happen yesterday. Uh, Rob Report has some images of the best watches at the Golden Globes. Uh, if the Golden Globes were any indication, subtle is officially on hiatus, says the Rob Report. Uh, this year's red carpet made a strong case for statement watches with bold

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Did we kind of call this originally with the show?

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Did we?

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, I mean, no, I mean, we, we, the, the joke early on was like, quiet luxury is over.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  Yes. Loud opulence.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Not loud opulence.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  A lot of these are screaming loud opulence. In fact, I need to return to my, let, let's start with the beginning of this, of the slideshow. Um, we, we need to return to, uh, my, our original statements about, um, about, you know, uh, the, the, the value of loud opulence because I see these and I'm like, I couldn't pull these off with, my life depended on it. Uh, but The Rock was spotted watching a Chopin, much like Maduro. Uh, but this one is the Alpine Eagle Frozen Summit. Look at all those diamonds.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  I like it, but I'd like to see, I mean, could we get at least a couple more?

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Couple more diamonds.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Diamonds on here.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  I think it's a little, it's a little understated. He could have gone with, you know, the rainbow, the rainbow one, the gem set. It's the Rolex with all the dime, the different colored diamonds. Who else is wearing fine luxury watches at? The Golden Globes. Adam Scott was wearing a Vacheron Constantin Traditionnel Perpetual Calendar Ultra.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  This is nice.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  That's a very nice watch. I like that one a lot. I also like this Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra that Glenn Powell was seen wearing.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen notoriously.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  He's an Omega guy.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Omega guy.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  New fund. Maybe this was a nod from Glenn saying like, I salute you.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Hat tip.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  Hat tip.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Yes, he's celebrating the 15 billion. He probably read the Packy piece.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  And he says, you know what? It's time to put on the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra. In terms of Omega Seamasters, this one stands out to me. Gold is a choice, but I think it's working very well here. And you know who else is wearing a Omega Seamaster? George Clooney. Also an Aqua Terra.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  I would love, I would love to know the details of Omega and Rolex and the other brands like fighting over people like Clooney, right? Because, you know, I don't think Clooney's putting on a watch without getting paid.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we have Ben Thompson in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV bed Ultra Dome. Fantastic. Ben, how are you doing?

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 29:57Ben Thompson?

  Good.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show in such short notice. I loved your piece.

• 30:03Ben Thompson?

  I have, I have takes to drop, so I am.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Let's go. Okay. So, I mean, drop your first takes and then I want to know, is there anything to what I was saying that, that Apple actually does read your work and they do want to do it, but they just can't because of some contract?

• 30:18Ben Thompson?

  Oh, I thought you were talking about watches.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Oh, no, we're talking about watches. What's on the wrist, Ben?

• 30:24Ben Thompson?

  I have a Tudor GMT.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  Very nice.

• 30:27Ben Thompson?

  Very basic.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 30:28Ben Thompson?

  But highly recommended. Tudor's a great place.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  And, and it's covered in diamonds, I assume, like the rocks?

• 30:33Ben Thompson?

  It is not. It is very basic with a rubber band because rubber bands rule.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay. Rubber band. That's good. Yeah.

• 30:41Ben Thompson?

  So, uh, I disagree with your take. Please. Um, so my overall view, NBA was on the Vision Pro on Friday. Yeah. They had an NBA clip when they watched the Vision Pro. So I was there when they watched it. So I got to try it that day. Yeah. They took that clip out for the demo that shipped and that was in Apple stores. So you only saw that clip if you were there the, the first day. Yeah. And so there was the rights issues, which I maybe lends itself to your argument or whatever it might be. But it, that was for sure. It was like three seconds. Yeah. It was the clip that sold me on the Vision Pro more than anything. Cause you felt like you were there. It was amazing. Yeah. So they have this, finally have a live sports thing, which is a big deal. They, they demonstrated that they can show stuff live.

• 31:26Ben Thompson?

  And it worked. It worked well. I don't think there was any technical issues. Uh, the cameras are quite small now compared to what they used to be. You could see them on like the sideline table and, and underneath the baskets. So this technology works. You can watch things live in the Vision Pro. And it should be amazing and it sucked. And, and it sucked because you're getting jerked around all the time. Yeah. You're not, you're there. You feel like you're there. It is immersive. The un-immersive part is the Apple part, which is some producer in a truck is moving you around. There's a pre-game show. I don't need a pre-game show. I'm sitting courtside. I can watch the players warm up. Yeah. And the reason why I disagree with your take that Apple knows this. Okay.

• 32:09Ben Thompson?

  And wants to do it is that every Vision Pro video has the same problem. Okay. The Metallica video, super cool. You walk in, the opening scene of that is amazing. Well, there's the little bit where they're in like the, the green room or whatever. But you're walking in, you're walking behind James Hefield and you're in the crowd. And it's like walking through and people are reaching and it's like, it's so amazing. And then suddenly he's going up the stairs and boom, you're jerked to somewhere else and you're seeing him come on this, on the stage. You go back, they cut this MLS video, which they have the rights for. They're overpaying. You want to talk about the F1 deal? Look how much Apple's paying MLS. Like, one of the most absurd overpays in the history of sports. I think they can do whatever they want. They cut a, I love lap tracks, but it's very difficult to hear.

• 32:54Ben Thompson?

  Sorry. They cut like a season in review video. Yeah. That had like fifty-six cuts in it. It's like.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. What do you think it is? Do you think it's, you think it's like? Do you think it's production teams that are just trying to create work for themselves? Because if they go in there, they're like, hey, boss, actually, the people just wanna let, they just wanna put their goggles on and hang out. It's like, well, what are you doing here?

• 33:14Ben Thompson?

  I feel like there's just a lack of confidence here. Like, what I, it feels very like, it feels, when you say it, it's like half-assed that we're gonna go out. We're just gonna set a camera there. Yeah. And you can sit there and watch the game. It's like, no, there's this pressure, in part because it's not popular. We, it has to be a big production. We have to have a pre-game show. We have to have dedicated announcers, to do all these things. The end result is you get six games, which are physically uncomfortable to watch because you're getting jerked around. And like, they could have just the Vision Pro there. Yeah. For every game, and I would pay a lot of money to watch that. They could have it at every concert. And this saw, it's, what's amazing is it, number one, it would make it better. I'm fully convinced of this. Yeah.

• 34:00Ben Thompson?

  And number two, it would solve their content problem, because you could suddenly sell, have tickets to every single concert in the world. To every single game in the world. It's, it, it is a classic tech issue, where you put in the upfront cost, you buy the cameras, you install them, and you have marginal upside forever, everywhere. And, and it's latching on to a major trend, which is live. Which is this idea that when everything's commoditized online, everything's digital, live experiences are worth more and more and more. Like, you go back to like, the Eras Tour and Taylor Swift, like, which has a big topic of discussion at that point. Because like, it, it, this is a, something people are craving.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  And sports specifically are like, pretty immune to, to AI, because nobody wants to watch like, the AI box play.

• 34:44Ben Thompson?

  Right, no one's watching AI basketball, right? Yeah, it's the, it's the human aspect of it that's compelling.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  The thing that was most crazy to me is that it was like, Geo locked to Southern California.

• 34:54Ben Thompson?

  I so I get that I I'm not gonna like beg on them for that because but part of it the reason why it was geolocked is because Spectrum spent all the money to do all this production.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:05Ben Thompson?

  And so of course they get the benefit it's in their catchment area but you don't need to do all that they're overthinking this like literally set a camera on the sideline and do nothing else I will be happy as a clam.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, uh it is expensive to do immersive production at the same time black magic has the Ursa cine immersive that have you seen this thing two fisheye lenses on the front 16k it's it costs thirty thousand dollars and it feels like if this is the case there has to be an opportunity for someone who's a little more agile you know maybe it's Red Bull maybe it's some league that's not front and center to just go and do this either have to pay thirty K upfront and then stream it.

• 35:51Ben Thompson?

  Yeah thirty K is nothing okay like we're all in the tech industry we can laugh at figures like that okay so so but that's an upfront investment like the problem is they tacked on all these marginal costs to this production.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:04Ben Thompson?

  So when you logged on for the game there was a dedicated pregame host and show for the Apple Vision Pro viewers.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  That's almost certainly not gonna be as good as the main pregame show.

• 36:14Ben Thompson?

  I know.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  That where they're paying where they're paying like hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 36:18Ben Thompson?

  What is sitting courtside and watching NBA players warm up and make fifty seven threes in a row because they're incredible.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Ben Thompson?

  Like I don't know if you guys have ever sat courtside but like it's it's um it's amazing.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 36:30Ben Thompson?

  Speaking of watches this is where I spend my watch money okay.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 36:33Ben Thompson?

  It's it's it's an unbelievable experience and and you and they have all like they have like uh for example they have like replays in there.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:42Ben Thompson?

  Which okay yes you can see the better replays you know where else they show replays? I'm the scoreboard. How can I say scoreboard? I can look up because I'm wearing a Vision Pro that's immersive and has this fisheye camera where I can see all around it. I don't need a scoreboard bug down at the bottom. I can look at the scoreboard. Like, I actually during the game while watching it, it was actually kind of hard to see the scoreboard bug because it was way down at the bottom.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:06Ben Thompson?

  So I was looking at the scoreboard in the arena the whole time.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 37:10Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. That's the whole, that's the whole thing. You're there. It's, it's, and so all that stuff, the, the pregame show, they had dedicated play-by-play announcers and, and analysts for the Vision Pro. They had these multiple cameras. They had a production truck who's choosing, how can I upset Ben this time? And they'd be like, the other cameras. You didn't need any of that. And, and, and you, $30,000 is a one-time cost.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Ben Thompson?

  You spend that money once and you put these cameras in every arena for every game, everywhere. And then you, you suddenly have this exclusive selling tickets to live events in a way no one else can. I think it's a huge, like, it seems so clear to me. This is the Vision Pro use case. This is your portal to every live event in the world.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about Meta, Meta's efforts on, uh, live sports?

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Uh, partnership as well.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Specifically with Oculus.

• 38:09Ben Thompson?

  The Vision, the Vision Pro is better. I mean, like, the, the, like, the Oculus has advantages relative to the Vision Pro. Actually, I love Mark Zuckerberg's post when the Vision Pro came out. It's like, oh, we're not surprised. We could have done that, but we didn't. Which was valid. Um, I'm also not particularly interested in the use cases that are good for that. I don't care about gaming. I don't care about a lot of the other stuff. Uh, like, this is, for me, the killer use case, for sure. Like, being able to...

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems like the next, uh, the next Quest, if they stay in VR, will be better. We talked to James Cameron. Uh, and it seemed like he was pretty excited that they might have gotten the same screen from the Apple Vision Pro. Like, yeah, they're two years behind, but you bring that screen into the next Quest.

• 38:48Ben Thompson?

  Which is fine, but there, there's trade-offs for that as far as like number of pixels and the field of view and all those sorts of things. But like, the, the, the, the whole point is that... Thirty five hundred dollars feels overwhelming like for what you get.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:01Ben Thompson?

  Thirty five hundred dollars to be able to attend any sporting event in person is one of the greatest deals of all time.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do you, how do you think they should?

• 39:08Ben Thompson?

  In Taiwan, I used to be in Taiwan, I would fly over for specific games.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Ben Thompson?

  Like, um, and guess what? I would spend more than thirty five dollars on my ticket than not flying the back of the bus at this point. Sorry. Like, and so like, like the, this would, this is, i- it is like, it's like when the, the Apple Watch, they realize, oh, people, it's fit- it's fitness. Remember they watched with all these lists of different things and what you could do, like, remember you could like draw on your Apple Watch to like draw?

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The heartbeat texting to send someone a heartbeat, that never went.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Who's, who's, what, who's the Apple? Who's the Apple exec that's the most hardcore NBA fan? Cause I feel like, I feel like you got a.

• 39:45Ben Thompson?

  Eddie Q. I, so I, I know how much Golden State tickets cost because I sat, well, I, I actually, I was poor. So I was in the second row, behind the seat that was inscribed with Eddie Q's name on it.

• 40:00Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, he would, he would, he would be the, he's the guy that needs to argue for this.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Okay, so do you think this is a next season, they might get it right? Are, are they already pre-baked on the next, on the next, like, they have like four more games? It feels like they could take this, they, they have the footage, like, they could just not edit the next game, not do that broadcast and do exactly what you're prescribing.

• 40:19Ben Thompson?

  I hope so. Look, free advice, Apple, this is your, that's why I made, I, I've written this, so number one, the reason I disagree with your take.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:27Ben Thompson?

  Is because every video they make suffers from this problem.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:31Ben Thompson?

  They're, they are produced in a TV style for a device that is fundamentally different than TV. That's the core problem.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  I- i- is there, is there at least a po- a possibility that Metallica also said, hey, we don't want a substantive effect, we don't want people teleporting?

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  So, it's so funny to think.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  And MLS said the same thing.

• 40:46Ben Thompson?

  But, but they've made lots of other videos. They've made lots of other, like, every video they have suffers from.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, even the Alicia Keys thing.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  Can you, can you, can you imagine if the, if the NBA actually sold a ticket where like, every thirty seconds you had to stand up and go watch from a different, from a different view? It's like, they're like, it's amazing. You see every angle. You're like, please, sir, I just wanna sit and watch the game.

• 41:07Ben Thompson?

  Turned it off. I, I, I, I watched both, I watched half the game on TV, cause it was, it was uncomfortable.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think is the long-term, like, like viewing, like ideal viewing experience? Is it, you have it on TV and you have your, your Apple Vision and you're kind of like? You know, based on how closely you're paying attention, you're either like locked in with the Vision Pro on.

• 41:29Ben Thompson?

  No, no.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Or you have it on the whole time.

• 41:31Ben Thompson?

  I think that a big thing for sure, the biggest missing experience is, of course, I want to be on my phone half the time. Like, uh, like any person.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  Being there in person, yeah.

• 41:41Ben Thompson?

  I do have the, the, the M5 Vision Pro. It's the first time I ever took a demo unit. I've always like declined to do that. But I'm like, there's no way on earth I'm paying for this, but I do actually want to see if there's any difference. The, my actually biggest takeaway is the pass through is much better. This might be, I didn't do a, I didn't do a direct compare. That was just sort of my perception. And to be honest, I haven't used a Vision Pro in a long time. So who knows, uh, how good my memory is. The pass through was really good. I had no issue using my phone at all. It did seem better than it used to be. Um, so, but maybe that might be placebo, just, just to be clear.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Getting screen time, getting screen time through another screen.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, we got levels.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Wait, so your screen time app could potentially show more than like 160 hours a week?

• 42:25Ben Thompson?

  I had 26 hours.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  26 hours today because I was in the Vision Pro using my phone, my laptop.

• 42:29Ben Thompson?

  That's right.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Oh, what a world, what a world. Um, that's funny. Um, well, uh, I mean, are you optimistic about any other Apple Vision Pro? Like opportunities because, uh, I was looking at this $30,000 immersive camera and I was thinking like, I, I was actually advising some friends who they shoot a much more, uh, like, like evergreen podcasts, like these really definitive interviews. And I was saying, maybe you should start shooting. They, they were shooting in 8K because they were like, hey, maybe one day we'll license these to Netflix. We want the extra resolution. We're not distributing in 8K, but we have it now. And I was saying, well, you want to go further? Why not 16K? Why not immersive? Maybe you should get this thing, start recording now. Now, this particular device can only record for like 45 minutes, I think. And then you have to swap the cards or whatever.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  But I was like, maybe you should be doing the flow. Maybe not this year, but maybe next year. Uh, are, are, is there, is there some opportunity where someone who's independent comes in?

• 43:21Ben Thompson?

  There's lots of opportunities like like like and I think like there's there's real enterprise opportunity like for like especially with the pass through and things that you can do on those lines. There's productivity sort of possibilities, but you need like what is the anchor thing? What is it everyone knows that this does? And again, I think the Apple Watch is a good example here. It took them a while to get to that. They launched with the physical fitness stuff, but it wasn't clear that that was the thing for a few years. And now every vision, every Apple Watch thing is fitness, fitness, fitness, fitness. It saves your life and you know, all those sorts of things. And to me, this is it. It is you get live in your living room. That's the Vision Pro pitch.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  That's gonna be fun. We'll just have to wait another five years for them to back down from their their opinions.

• 44:08Ben Thompson?

  It's it but I

• 44:09John Coogan?

  We're gonna find we're gonna find out that they have like You did write this two years ago.

• 44:13Ben Thompson?

  No, I wrote this the day I wrote this the day it launched. I said, what's amazing about this is you don't need production. All I want is to feel like I'm there and it delivers. It lets you of do you know, do you, of course, you don't know you're there. The resolution isn't perfect. There is a bit of tearing if you go super fast, like the peripheral vision's not not not not perfect. But it is, it's it's amazing. It's an incredible experience that that no one else can match. Quest can a little bit, but the the Vision Pro, in part because Apple invented these cameras. Like Blackmagic is making them, but it's Apple's whole format. It's Apple like created the whole thing. And yeah, it like the it's

• 44:53Ben Thompson?

  it just feels like this is a company that it's like a lack of confidence. You let the device do what the device can do. Stop trying to like overdo it. Put your no, step back. Just step back and let it do its thing. And I'm more convinced than ever. I I again, I've been having this take a few times. I wrote about the MLS thing. I wrote after the Metallica thing. I put on the front page of Checkery today. I'm like, look, no one in the world cares about this device other than me.

• 45:25Ben Thompson?

  I'm desperate for someone to read this, so there's no paywall, you don't need to get it forwarded to you, just read this.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  And they had to do the box too. It's so funny.

• 45:35Ben Thompson?

  I know.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  The first one, it was a royal flush for you. I have a meta question about just being in a position to review new technology and having to deal with like the Pepsi challenge. Are you familiar with the Pepsi challenge story?

• 45:50Ben Thompson?

  I am. I'm Gen X, I'm very old.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, so the Pepsi challenge, for those who don't know, they had people taste a little, a one ounce cup of Coca-Cola, one ounce cup of Pepsi, and overwhelmingly, the random people that came and tested said the Pepsi tasted better. And what the result was, is that Pepsi was sweeter, so it tasted better over one ounce, but over 16 ounces, a full can, it was more like 50/50, and people actually did prefer the Coca-Cola. And I feel like with a lot of hardware devices, you put it on for 10 minutes, it's amazing. You put it on for half an hour, it's incredible. But then, then, pretty quickly, the, you know, the big tech executives say, "Oh, that's enough of the demo, let's talk to you about something else." Now write your review based on 30 minutes, and it's a very different experience than two weeks, a month, seeing if it collects dust, seeing if you churned, and I'm wondering just how you deal with that mentally,

• 46:35John Coogan?

  where you have to talk about something, but at the same time, you're not getting the, you know, you haven't been able to spend a year with a product.

• 46:41Ben Thompson?

  No, it's a good point. So my way to deal with that is I generally don't do product reviews.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 46:47Ben Thompson?

  So that makes it, that makes it much easier. I think with the, the Vision Pro though, is a great example of this phenomenon. It is like, the first 30 minutes of using a Vision Pro is one of the most mind-blowing experiences of your life, and it continues to be. I actually, I remember when I first got it, I actually had, gee, I'm stuck. I felt, perfect follow-on from the watch segment, because I found it like a total deuce, this thing. I had my assistant, I had it shipped to his house and had him fly to Taiwan to bring it to me.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:15Ben Thompson?

  Because it wasn't, it was only available in the US. And the, and, and, and I remember, actually, I was going, I think, this is awful, this is so embarrassing. I was going on a ski trip like a week later, so I'm, I'm up there, and I remember I'm sitting in this bar, up in Niseko, and I'm like, all the ski instructors, like, because I was friends with, I had the same guy for many years, he brought all his friends over, and they're all trying this, I, like, I honed my whole demo script. And like, we still talk about this afternoon with the Vision Pro in this bar in Niseko, try it, and it's, it's amazing. It's absolutely incredible. But then...

• 47:53Ben Thompson?

  What do you do with it?

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Ben Thompson?

  Right? Like, that's the big question. What I will say in the Vision Pro's defense is even now, I don't use it very often. Every time I put it on, though, I'm like, this is so cool.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Ben Thompson?

  Like, it retains that aspect of there's something magical about this experience. It's just searching for that ongoing reason to come back, that use case. And that comeback use case needs to be something that only it can deliver. The productivity things are cool. I would, I, I, I, but I really like that.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing that's, the other thing I think is really real is like, maybe from Apple's side, like, they have this device. It has so much potential. It's so exciting. It's so cool. And then it's, it's almost disappointing that like, okay, the use case is just like live sports, right? Cause they're like, we want to create the next computing paradigm. But the reason that it actually is, is an incredible niche is that like, what's more mainstream than bread and circuses, right?

• 48:49Ben Thompson?

  Well, not just that, but you know, but it's a chicken and egg problem. It's a chicken and egg problem. You, like, the way you get those, those productivity experiences and those new things that weren't possible before is you have a large install base that draws developers in to create those experiences. But to get there, it needs to be a market. So you need sort of the initial use case to create, like, this is why the iPhone is the greatest platform ever. Everyone needed a phone.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Ben Thompson?

  Like, so, like, so you, you got that built in sort of advantage so that developers, like, they didn't have to do anything to earn developers. They just shipped a better phone.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. Like, if you create this amazing live sports experience, you get a million people that are using it multiple times a week. And then, and then they're using it, they're watching, they're watching together. It's a social thing. Then they can be asked.

• 49:37Ben Thompson?

  I don't know, social thing.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:39Ben Thompson?

  If you see what I look like, I, I'm grab, I put it on. I don't look very social.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but I'm, I'm talking about more like, maybe you have a FaceTime call open with a buddy in the headset and you're watching it together. You're hanging out, watching the game or something like that.

• 49:51Ben Thompson?

  Well, I mean, I, no, I, I, I, I would just say, I think it's, the Vision Pro is more of a single player experience.

• 49:57Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 49:57Ben Thompson?

  But what is the biggest single player market in the world? Productivity, like when I'm doing work, like I want, I I I'm on my own working on it. Right now, I have four monitors, like I I'm one of those crazy people, like a Vision Pro. I wish I would have brought it with me last summer when I went back to Taiwan. Because I was actually doing work and I was working on my laptop and it was terrible, like, oh, I can't believe I didn't bring this. It was the perfect use case for me to use it, but by and large, I don't need it. But if there were particular apps or use cases that were uniquely enabled by it. Maybe that would be a reason, but you're only going to get those by drawing in developers. You're only getting developers by having an addressable market that is worth putting the investment into.

• 50:41Ben Thompson?

  Which means, if this has always been, this is one of my big theses on tech, it's always been a question on tech. Chicken or egg, what comes first, the device, the platform, or the developers? I was at Microsoft in with Windows eight. I spent a lot of time and spent a lot of Microsoft's money getting developers. That doesn't work. What matters is demand, demand pulls in developers, you need the users, which means you need the core use case. To sell a bunch of devices and then you can start the virtuous cycle. To me, the core use case for the Vision Pro, if anyone remembers it exists, and I'm not sure that Apple executives do. Is live, live in your living room.

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so true, I have a buddy.

• 51:22Ben Thompson?

  Devices and then you pull people in.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  I have a buddy TJ who worked at Apple at one point. Uh, when the Vision Pro was announced, he got it, he was so excited. He was like, I'm gonna spend the next three years building products for the Vision Pro. How long did he last? He lasted like.

• 51:36Ben Thompson?

  Uh, three months?

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, no, no, no, like less, he was like, what's the point of bill, what's what's the point of building for? Uh, he's super talented, but what's the point of building if there's nobody there, you know?

• 51:46Ben Thompson?

  Right.

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's not like.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Are you, are you, uh, you've mentioned the four monitors, are you going in on the fifty-two inch Dell six K monitor?

• 51:54Ben Thompson?

  No.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 51:55Ben Thompson?

  Way too low resolution.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Way too low resolution?

• 51:57Ben Thompson?

  Actually, I lied, no, I'm actually on the fifth monitor right now, uh, just for podcasts, so. I have, I have two four K monitors on my laptop, I have another, I have LG like square screens.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 52:07Ben Thompson?

  It is a rotary low resolution, but then for podcasts, I have a fifty-five inch TV here, so.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, staying, staying on Apple, uh, Gemini, the Gemini Siri news. Uh, dropped this morning, it had been kind of previously reported, so in some ways, it's old news. What are you, what are you expecting out of like this new version of Siri?

• 52:30Ben Thompson?

  Well, the bar is fifty-five feet underground. I expect it to be a lot better. Uh, no, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's, uh, now that the federal courts have approved to Google and Apple combining to rule the world. Google has, Google has the infrastructure to support the scale of Apple. They know how to work together. They've worked together for years. They're very natural partners in that respect. That Google can think big picture about this. Like, I'm sure Apple, the report that Mark Roman had last fall was Apple's gonna pay like a billion dollars, which, again, we're in tech, that's no money at all. Which, but it's tied into the search deal, like, they can massage it. The problem with working with an OpenAI or, or an Anthropic is they need to make money.

• 53:12Ben Thompson?

  And so, like, Apple doesn't, I think there, there's a more sort of, I scratch your back, you scratch my back sort of thing here. Google's talking about, you know, working with Apple's chips, adapting it, whatever it might be. Apple's does bespoke stuff like that. So I, I, I think it makes a ton of sense for both sides, um.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you think it ever flips? And do you think, uh, do you think Google will be paying Apple? Because there's this news also that you're gonna be able to do shopping through Gemini. And so you could imagine a world where you go to Siri, you ask for a product and there's ads in that Gemini result. And, and Google's the one that's monetizing that, so they're passing some of that revenue back to Apple.

• 53:50Ben Thompson?

  It's a good question. I mean, I think when Apple talked about, like, the next generation Siri and Apple Intelligence, I was pretty optimistic about this idea of Apple basically replaying the search.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's my, that's my whole thing. I'm like, I'm like, in some way, if I'm Apple and I'm paying for an LLM to use it to power a product that can basically do search really well, that could eventually have an ads business attached to it, that eventually could have, like, commerce built into it. Like, it's this weird, it's this weird situation where, like, Gemini is effectively helping. Like, that's, that's what I don't fully understand yet, cuz I'm gonna be like-

• 54:24Ben Thompson?

  Well, I think the, the market structure was so perfect for Apple in that they need, like, it's just a default search engine. It's, there's no sort of deep integration into the product. It's just like, when you type in your search bar, what engine is used?

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Ben Thompson?

  And so it's super easy, like, there, there's like a concept when it- Comes to like, figure out who's gonna win in a value chain. Super easy substitu- substitu- v- v- v- ability is good for whoever can plug whatever in. So they could choose whatever they want. So it it made sense that the value flowed that direction.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Ben Thompson?

  The difference with this AI stuff is it needs to be integrated deeply.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:56Ben Thompson?

  And Apple is more on the defensive here. Like, they need to have quality AI features built into the operating system. And so I think the need is more on Apple's part. And the benefit Google is getting, my suspicion, is less that there is less about the ad thing and more they're getting some incremental revenue and they're probably getting a lot more. I mean, Apple's gonna be precious about the data. We'll see how that sort of works. But um, but they also don't need, it's all incremental.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, even even like the internal reasoning rollouts and and all of that that happens in Gemini. Like, the uh, Apple's not gonna be able to claw all that back. So you're gonna have all this like reinforcement learning training on, okay, maybe, maybe you're obfuscating the the the the privacy data, what the person asked for. But all those interim steps of, I went to a website, I interacted with it, I figured out how to click this button. Like, that's that's gonna accrue to Gemini, you'd imagine.

• 55:52Ben Thompson?

  Well, and what it speaks to, I think, is what what would be the red flags that would come up to this deal from an Apple perspective? It's like, well, they're not yet, maybe they need to tough it out and build their own crappy LM. So that in the future, they control their own LM such that if if you get to a world with, say, AR, right? Where I'm I'm actually, lots of dispute about this, but I'm pretty optimistic on just-in-time UIs. Where the idea that something pops up that is nothing but the decision you need to make in that moment for whatever it might be, and then it goes away. Like, to me, this is the uh, the best part of the Orion experience was the the Facebook sort of AR glasses was when I received a call. Because the the the the OS I use there was kind of like Quest just sort of dumped in there.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:36Ben Thompson?

  And it would, it didn't really make sense. You have like blocky stuff and there like an Instagram and stuff. It's like, I I could just look at my phone. This is gonna be better here. But you could be. We got, I got a conversation right now. I could have a notification poppin' right now saying so and so's calling. Yeah. And I could use my little wrist thingy and dismiss it. And it's just there when I need it. It only has one option, accept or decline. And then it's gone. Yeah. And, and I could see that being a future of UI and important for Apple to control. But by not shipping their own, by depending on Google, they might say pretty words about, oh, we're gonna simultaneously develop our own. No, that, whatever. If you're, that's not going to happen. You're gonna be so invested in this other one.

• 57:17Ben Thompson?

  And that speaks to, the value is accruing to Google. Cause they're the ones actually developing and pushing the technology and Apple is sort of trailing along. Given that, I have a hard time seeing, you know, Apple's gonna get more and more deeper into this, using Gemini. Are they gonna be able to credibly go to Google, say, pay up, or else we're gonna switch to someone else? I think that's probably unlikely. So I don't think it's gonna play out like search, but we'll see. I was obviously wrong about this one, so I could certainly be wrong again. Sure.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction to the Manus acquisition? From my point of view, it was exciting. Um, specifically because Zuck has just been spending all this money on talent, but if you look historically, he's been very good at like buying something, scaling it. It's sort of unclear to me so far whether he plans to take Manus from a hundred million dollar run rate to multiple billions, or just leverage the team's ability to build great agentic, you know, effectively workflows, product. Um, how, how are you thinking about it?

• 58:17Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I, I, it's just, I, I have a hard time seeing the meta in the enterprise sort of angle, so.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  No, but I, but I, but even, but even like, but even it's like, like, figure out the best product in this category and buy it for me. Like, that, that kind of workflow, like, that's what I can imagine the Manus team being.

• 58:35Ben Thompson?

  That's my sort of understanding, yeah. It is like, this is actually a really excellent product team that is doing very good work and is worth having on board. And does that mean growing their business into something larger that's a material source to our business? I think that would be a mistake. Um, but I think the idea of agentic workflows, uh, is obviously a very compelling one. Actually, one of my favorite things, Mark Zuckerberg has been all over the place on AI. I think, I did an interview with him like nine months ago. That was kind of bizarre. Uh, it was right when he was. Clearly thinking through, maybe I need to reset everything. And I thought that sort of came across it in the interview at the time. But one thing he did say is actually, what is the largest sort of most profitable at scale agent right now?

• 59:18Ben Thompson?

  Facebook advertising, which I think is a very or or Google advertising thing, a very astute point. You go in, you tell Facebook, I want. I'm willing to pay a dollar forty nine for a customer or nine ninety nine for a customer. Go get them. And it goes out and gets them. Now, is that a full LM denominated probabilistic workflow? No, it's it's it's not really LM's. It is more probabilistic for really post ATT. But the idea that you ask for a job, the the focus is on the job to be done as opposed to specifying how you do it. And that is just by and large for most advertisers, particularly in the long tail, probably at the part of the tail, too. They just don't want to give up control, the better way to do it. And I think there's going to be lots of things like this. I think Google's announcement with Shopify and and this idea of of.

• 1:00:04Ben Thompson?

  You'll ads that are perfectly targeted user, very compelling, makes a ton of sense. Uh, that's where something like Rock, by the way, fits in like super fast inference. So you can generate. Like you think about how advertising works, these auctions that are run and you get ads in the time it takes a little webpage is absolutely incredible. Where the the next step is to be insert generative ads into there, which is going to require very high inference speeds. Um, so I think, and this has always been the most compelling short term AI monetization opportunity is basically Google and Facebook ads. That's why I've been super bullish on both of them. I think it's why Facebook needed to do this reset. Um, and why Google, you know, it's justifiably been sort of going to the moon recently.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Well, uh, what what do you think of Eric Sufer's point that, uh, that you might not actually need to put the ads in the LM responses? In the sense that you could be, you could be going to an LM and saying, tell me the history of the Roman Empire. It knows that you're shopping for shoes, for new shoes, and it shows you ads for shoes in the middle of your Roman Empire deep dive. Just like on Instagram, you can be scrolling one thing and your algorithm can be recommending you a certain type of content. Maybe like dogs, showing you dog videos, but then it also knows that you need luggage for your next trip and it's showing you ads for luggage or something.

• 1:01:18Ben Thompson?

  No, I think I think I think it's a great point. I think Eric makes some good points about like you. You're running a real risk of conflict of interest. Even the perception of conflict of interest. Otherwise, and so I think that's a very good point. And the reality is that's a much larger business. Like just be uh show what you're looking for is inventory. The number one way to predict sort of the upside for Meta over the last several years. The stock market has consistently had it totally backwards. Every time their sort of uh their price per ad would plummet. Because the stock market would freak out. This happened with stories in like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. It happened with with reels a couple of years ago.

• 1:02:00Ben Thompson?

  And what the what the the issue is that the reason why price product plummets is because there's a massive increase in inventory. And when there's a massive increase in inventory, it's just more places to show ads. That is a huge opportunity. You saw huge run ups both times as they figured out how to monetize stories, as they figured out how to monetize reels. And this should be an opportunity of how to like it's it's gonna take a while to figure out how to monetize. You know, maybe it's maybe just an aspect of when they're reasoning, when they're thinking or image generation, that might be an ad opportunity. And it's a big opportunity. A big problem is these folks, I think. The OpenAI has hired so many Meta people, it confuses me why they haven't been on board with this.

• 1:02:44Ben Thompson?

  Like it it's a win, win, win. You get you need money to fund your operation. The best way to make money is to is to show ads. Why? Because you get to deliver a better product to more people. This idea that we're gonna commit to a world where if poor people get a worse product, that's not how tech works. And the reason why tech is amazing is it generates a ton of consumer surplus. You do this upfront investment, and because it's monetized by ads, everyone gets the best product. It's great. And OpenAI, like having this religious devotion for so long about not doing this. If they had launched, they could have launched the world's crappiest ads in twenty twenty three. By today in twenty twenty six, they'd be good. They'd be making money and people would rebel against it.

• 1:03:27Ben Thompson?

  Now they're gonna have to launch ads. They're gonna suck. And people are like, this sucks. I'll just go to Gemini or whatever it might be. Just it it drives me bonkers.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Because it does seem like there's a little bit of like uh uh not to go back to chicken and egg problem, but like the first mover disadvantage. Like the first L L M that has ads, there'll be a whole press cycle about, oh, Gemini is the ad one.

• 1:03:47Ben Thompson?

  Would have been a lot easier if you were the only L L M. Like the the the. It's it's it it risks the entire company.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Ben Thompson?

  Like like they need to get their opportunities in the consumer space first and foremost.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Ben Thompson?

  Because the consumer space needs to monetize via ads.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Ben Thompson?

  And the fact they didn't get there or start to get there, still haven't started to get there.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Ben Thompson?

  Is uh it it's a company imperiling.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Ben Thompson?

  Poor decision.

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  Last question, uh from my side at least, uh predictions, do you think there's anything to the the prediction that OpenAI will buy Pinterest or partner up with a uh social network at a more deeper level than they are?

• 1:04:25Ben Thompson?

  Well, so it's really interesting. This is one of my, I was actually, uh, I was talking to, I've been met when I was in New York a a few months ago and I was at this this office, actually it's me and the semi analysis guys.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:04:37Ben Thompson?

  Great guys, but they were sharing an office with like a hedge fund and one of the guys is like, look, you're responsible for one of our worst all time decisions. And I'm like, what's that? He's like, um, we bought Twitter. I'm like, I never said to buy Twitter. That's a terrible spot, um, unless he's going to overpay for it. And he's like, but then I remembered what it was. It was, I think, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, when Twitter bought Mopub. And my theory at the time was Twitter is just a very poor inventory for advertising. Part of it is it's text based, especially then there were fewer images. There's also a mindset when you're on Twitter, you're like girded up for battle.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:13Ben Thompson?

  And you're like, you're trying to engage, like, it's supposed to Instagram, like Instagram, the ads might as well be.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  The content.

• 1:05:19Ben Thompson?

  Instagram.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:20Ben Thompson?

  Like.

• 1:05:21Jordi Hays?

  X is fight or flight.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Ben Thompson?

  No, exactly, exactly. And so my theory then, but Twitter has the potential to really understand your interests in a really sort of deep way. And so what they could do is they could harvest signal on Twitter and they could manifest it with using Mopub and inventory sort of across a bunch of apps and that would be sort of a very compelling model. Again, who knows if I was right, Twitter's executives or Twitter was incompetent for years and years and years. At one point, I said, I'm never carrying this company again because this is pointless. That's a bit what sort of Apple and did, who did buy Mopub from Twitter and has made a ton of money doing that. But I think that would be the thesis there, which is because we're, people are dumping everything into this LM, we can get all this signal and

• 1:06:07Ben Thompson?

  understanding, what we need is inventory to monetize that signal. And could that be inventory to do so? The theory makes sense. It feels like they have a lot more important things to spend money on. I think probably at the end of the day, particularly post ATT, like O and O, like your owned and operated properties are always going to be the most valuable. I think figuring out how to monetize in chat GPT is probably the best. But it's not, it's not an insane idea for that reason.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  I like that. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show on short notice. We're huge fans here and congratulations.

• 1:06:40Ben Thompson?

  Look, I am on a app, but no one cares about the Vision Pro, but me, therefore I take it upon myself.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  Correct the record.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  The strongest soldier.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Well, if you want, yeah, if you want the, the most, the deepest analysis, the most, you know, the hottest takes on the Vision Pro, of course, sign up for Stratechery, get on the Pro Plan.

• 1:06:59Ben Thompson?

  No, this one's free. You don't need to look, just Apple, someone read this.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  But you know, there's going to be, there's going to be podcasts, you're going to get Sharp Tech, you're going to get Sharp China.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  We should, we should hire, we should, we should get a plane, fly over and drop the, this one, this new one has leaflets.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Leaflets over to Tina, we'll do it.

• 1:07:15Ben Thompson?

  I'm down, let's do it.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  We need to, we need to. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your week and I hope your 2026 is off to a great start.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you, Ben.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Label Box, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box, the label box, every time. They didn't get us.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  They didn't give us that tagline, but it's just simply too good.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Get in the box. Walmart partners with Alphabet's Google to allow shoppers to purchase products through Gemini. So Walmart is jumping in with Google. We're having Harley from Shopify on the stream later to talk about agentic commerce, what's happening there. There's a lot of other news and. Person probably. Whoa, I have the audio on my phone. The Google is posting a video of Wing, the future of retail is landing. They're taking shots at our boy Keller, launching a drone.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  This one, this one, this one hit me pretty hard.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  I know, I know. We love ZipLine, we love Keller here. We love Google, obviously they're sponsored, but.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Can Google just leave one future of X thing for?

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  For someone else.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  For someone else, right? I didn't even know about that. I didn't even know about Wing until today. Was this an acquisition? Wing.com, one of the best domains.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  You're going to be texting Keller like Sam Altman and Elon were texting each other about the future of AI. You're going to be like, the future of drone delivery is in our hands, brother. We gotta, we gotta be wing. No, Google's been working on this for a long time. Obviously, this is going not to be, you know, the only, there's only going to be one company with the technology. There's going to be variety. Tyler, what do you have for us?

• 1:08:54Tyler?

  Just on the point of Elon and Sam. Elon just said on the Apple and Google collaboration, he said, seems like an unreasonable, unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that they also have Android and Chrome.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:09:05Tyler?

  So he's still on the.

• 1:09:06John Coogan?

  He's taking shots. He doesn't like, he's not a fan. Well, we are fans of Plaid here, and so let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. We talked about, about Apple confirming Gemini, very excited for that. I want them to roll this out immediately. I know that it's probably going to be, you know, some normal release cycle with very polished ads and on-stage keynote and a developer preview, and there'll be a whole cycle to updating, but we are in the age of AI. Apple, just ship it today. Just replace Siri with Gemini today. I'm sure a lot of people would be fans of that,

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  but you know, they operate the way they do.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  I pulled, I pulled a little history on wing.com. So started.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Wait, they own wing.com?

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Wing.com. That's what I was saying. It's not only, not only do this is an amazing partnership, but a fantastic domain. So it started within X, Google X, the moonshot factory.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  It really is a factory.

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  The original mission was focused on emergency medical response.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  So they wanted to deliver defibrillators to heart attack victims. The, basically they pivoted away from emergency, emergency services to last mile commercial delivery. They started doing their first like real world trials back in Queensland as early as 2014. It graduated from X in 2018. They later became the first delivery, drone delivery company to receive a part 135 air carrier certificate from the FAA. And they've just been scaling the network since then. So yeah, I guess they're going to be able to serve 40 million people by 2027.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, as an American, as a human, as a technologist, I want more and I want competition, but as a big fan of Keller, it's a, I want him to dominate.

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think, I think Google maybe did this. They knew Keller had the potential for, to be one of the great, the greatest in history.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  But they realized if he didn't have a viable competitor, he could never live up to his.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  So they're inspiring him to grind hard.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  That's what's going on. Okay. Now we understand it. Well, Figma, Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, now Anthropic has Claude code for heart attacks or something like that. Healthcare and life sciences. Claude code. I'm dying. Give me, give me blood transfer.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 1:11:50John Coogan?

  I, I use Claude code this weekend in a funny way. I had, I had it, I was having slow wifi, which of course is a weird thing to go to Claude code for because it uses the internet. So you're going to have slow interaction. I had it, I had to diagnose my, my, I, I gave it a prompt. I said, what did I say? Somewhere here, maybe I lost it. But I basically told it, I told it like, hey, I'm having problems with my internet. Can you just go fix it? It ran all these different diagnostics, pinged Google, pinged all the different DNS servers, ran through everything, ran speed tests, and it came back and told me to turn it off and turn it back on.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  And it worked.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  And it actually worked. And I could have saved myself like 45 minutes of sitting there being like, yes, I'm okay with you using Kearl. Yes, I'm okay with you using W-Ged.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  The entire time, superintelligence was just turning it on, turning it off, and then back on.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  It's Lindy, it's Lindy. It should have just preempted me and just been like, look, dude, have you at least turned it off and turned it back on? Anyway, Tyler, what do you think?

• 1:12:45Tyler?

  If Claude was being slow because of the Wi-Fi, then that's an example of like, you know, self-improvement.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Self-impro- oh, it improved itself?

• 1:12:54Tyler?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:12:56Tyler?

  It's boom.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it was a weird issue. Really high ping, really, like, the bandwidth was fine, but the ping was really bad, and so it was very annoying. But it did resolve it, and, you know, at the end of the day, Claude Code did a very thorough job of telling me some time-honored advice. So, thank you to Claude Code. And interesting that everyone's pushing into healthcare. I'm still waiting for the push into legal. I'm wondering if that'll happen, or if that's more complicated than healthcare. I'm also wondering, maybe healthcare is more lucrative, more viable, more... I would love to be in the meetings where they have prioritization of what, who's lunch they're trying to eat off of. Who's plate should we eat off of?

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  The lunch meeting.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  The lunch meeting. Well, New York Stock Exchange. If you want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love the ninth seed. Can't wait to be out there again. We're planning our next trip, so stay tuned.

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Cannot wait. Meta CEO Zuckerberg is launching Meta Compute, planning tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts longer term. This effort will be led by Santosh Janardhan and Daniel Gross, DG.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Back in the mix. SANTOSH will continue to lead our technical architecture, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity and building and operating our global data center fleet and network. Daniel will lead a new group responsible for long-term capacity, strategy, supplier relationships, industry analysis. Let's give it up for industry analysis.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Planning and business. Let's give it up for planning and business modeling as well.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  DG, DG, this is not his first radio. Do you remember the Andromeda cluster?

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  NFDG. That was really, really cool.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Early and right on that.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  So they were, they were doing, was it AI Grant was the name of the program? So they backed a bunch of companies, some crazy companies in AI Grant too. Sort of an incubator, accelerator model, a bunch of early-stage companies, smaller checks. Give me the detail.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Let me just read this. So in the first batch, they had perplexity, cursor, replicate, chroma.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  Chroma too. I think they had, didn't they have Julius?

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Julius was in maybe a second batch.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  It might have been in the second one, but there's so many bangers. If you just go to the site, it lists all of them.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  It's amazing. And, and so what they did was they went and bought a whole bunch of, of GPUs. They built a cluster and they made it available.

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  They had a feeling that GPUs would be.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Be important. And, and it was. So basically anyone in their portfolio was sort of default GPU rich, at least for a little bit, although of course the resources were shared. And I have heard about another accelerator doing this recently. I need to confirm with the head of that accelerator if it's, if it's okay to share, because it's very exciting as well. But I was asking them like, what does it mean to build a cluster at this level? Did you buy land? Did you build a data center? Or did you just go to Microsoft and say, hey, cordon off this little, you know, rack of, of GPUs. We want those to be dedicated, at least instances. And I believe it was more of the latter, but still, you know, not their first radio here. So I think this project's in good hands with DG. So let's hear it for the, the Meta company.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Meta also brought on Dina McCormick.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Who's joined Meta as president and vice chairman to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in and finance Meta's infrastructure.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  This is making wave on Truth Social. I saw.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Government, yeah, governments getting involved in financing Meta's infrastructure. So he's saying, he's like, Sam, they said it. I'm going to say it now.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  It's not a backstop. It's the front door.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Dina was a former deputy national security advisor.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  Well, we have a new sponsor of the show, Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to get their apps, to keep their apps working. I love Sentry. So, welcome to them. Nvidia is investing a billion dollars in an AI drug lab with Eli Lilly over five years. This will be very interesting. We're excited for the Eli Lilly progress.

• 1:17:00Jordi Hays?

  Drug lab sounds.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  It's AI Ozempic. It's the two biggest super trends of the last five years, weight loss and AI. Could it get any better? Well, now it will. We'll have to dig into more of this partnership.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Tom Brady is now the face of the former CEO of Axe's new company, EMed.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this?

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  I did.

• 1:17:23Jordi Hays?

  So, Tom Brady, if you're not familiar, he was the former face of FTX.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  It's a rough one.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  And also.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Was he actually the face? Because there were a lot of celebrities that partnered with FTX. Larry David's in there.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  He was part of, he was part of some of their bigger campaigns.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  He did a bigger campaign. He did a TV campaign. But again, you know, it's hard if you're, if you're a celebrity to.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  But this is an interesting one because so, so he's joining as the chief wellness officer of EMed.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting because this kind of just makes him the face of GLP-1s, right? Which is kind of a beneficiary, like is beneficial to the entire industry, right? If you sell GLP-1s, it'd be like, oh, Tom Brady is.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  He's down.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  I wonder if he's on them. That'd be interesting.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  What his peptide regimen is. Maybe he's just super AGI-pilled. Maybe he, maybe Sam said, hey, I'm an, I'm an investor in Anthropic. And he said, well, I think Anthropic's going to win. I'm partnering up with you. I don't care about the structure of your hedge fund. I don't care if there's a backdoor out of your, out of your trading platform. I'm in on you because of your investing track record. What about that?

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  You know, if Anthropic gets out at a trillion. There's going to be a debate, at least, about Sam Bankman-Fried's legacy. He, of course, invested, what, 10 million for 10% of the company?

• 1:18:41Jordi Hays?

  He owned 8%.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  8% of the company. So that would be maybe like an 80 billion dollar position today, something like that. 50 billion, 10 billion with dilution. I don't know. It was a good investment. Just like getting your business on Gusto is a good investment. The unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses.

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Like us.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Like us.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Paramount Skydance has now initiated what insiders are calling Plan D. They're running out of letters. As they look to upend Netflix's winning bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. Hey, maybe the D just stands for discovery. So, you know, maybe this is actually one of the earlier plans, but...

• 1:19:21Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're saving the best for last.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  Plan W. Never take the L. Skip Plan L, go straight to Plan W. Get the W. We're rooting for you, Ellison. It involves bringing home, banging home to investors the immense amount of regulatory uncertainty involved in the Netflix deal and how that could spell trouble, not just for the transaction, but for Netflix itself. And so if Netflix finds itself in a quagmire trying to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, that could be bad news. And David Ellison wants to make that clear to all of the shareholders that going with Paramount Skydance might be a little bit less bumpy of a road. We will see. From the photo shoots, seems like they're pretty happy together, but we will see what happens.

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  It will be a proxy fight, and I'm sure we will be following it closely.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Some more news from Axios. Besant told Trump that investigation of Fed Chair creates a, quote, "mess." And so basically, last night, Besant was saying the secretary isn't happy, or no, someone else said the secretary isn't happy and he left the president. No. That's kind of a white pill, right? Somebody in, you know, the admin that seems to, you know, have just kind of a steady view on things is pushing back a little bit. Nothing ever happens.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need a secretary of nothing. Just, did anything happen? No, nothing happens. But Vanta happens and compliance happens. So get on Vanta, automated compliance and security. The leading AI trust management platform is of course Vanta. There was a massive debate that raged in a Google doc which was published on Substack. The battle between Jack Clark, who's at Anthropic of course, the co-founder of Anthropic, and Dwarsh Patel, they were going up against Michael Burry. Cassandra Unchained. They had a good discussion and it's been published free to all on Substack where you can go and read it.

• 1:21:22Tyler?

  Highlights.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:21:23Tyler?

  Tyler, yeah, I have some highlights. I mean, I wouldn't, so one thing, it's not really a debate at all. It's just discussion. It's like, there's a bunch of questions and they go and they basically.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  They're just like, AI is amazing. I agree.

• 1:21:32Tyler?

  Yeah, no, it's funny, like, almost all the quotes I pulled were from Burry because the Dwarsh and Jack Clark, I disagreed with everything they said. So it's like, oh, it's like, not that interesting. Like, I already, I already know this.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Boo. Tyler, get your own opinions, bro. I agree with everything you said. I have no.

• 1:21:48Tyler?

  You're absolutely right.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Tyler?

  So one thing I always abstain, Jack Clark, he writes, I've been doing research on the cost curves of various things recently. And the examples he gives are dollars of mass to orbit and dollars per watt from solar.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:02Tyler?

  So it's like, okay, Anthropic is looking at space AI centers.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:06Tyler?

  Right?

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:07Tyler?

  Some other stuff, I thought Burry said his one like policy proposal.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Oh, so just the fact that Jack Clark is doing that research indicates to you that they might be thinking about orbital data centers in the future?

• 1:22:18Tyler?

  Yeah, I mean, cost of orbit.

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:20Tyler?

  Mass orbit and, and, yeah, I don't know what else.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it makes sense.

• 1:22:23Tyler?

  I mean, maybe he's just interested in space.

• 1:22:24John Coogan?

  He might just be interested.

• 1:22:25Tyler?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  He might just be like, I want to go to the moon. I'm bringing Claude with me.

• 1:22:28Tyler?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:22:30Tyler?

  Claude, go to the moon.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  The other, the other interesting Burry take was that he thinks that white, blue collar work might be more susceptible to AI disruption than many people think. He made this point that he's been doing his own plumbing and electrical work apparently. I thought, I don't know if that's how true that is, but he said that, yeah, yeah, yeah, can you read it?

• 1:22:49Tyler?

  I have the quote, yeah, he says, given how much I can now do in electrical work and other areas around the house, just with Claude at my side, I'm not so sure about jobs going away.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Tyler?

  If I'm middle class and I'm facing $800. An $800 plumber or electrical electrician call.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Tyler?

  I might just use Claude.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Take a picture.

• 1:23:05Tyler?

  I love that I can take a picture and figure everything out I need to do.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Tyler?

  Do to fix it.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  So, I mean, this AI.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  That was a big moment for me.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Jordi Hays?

  I forget who was sharing this, but somebody was like, yeah, they just took a picture.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Jordi Hays?

  Like the most insane.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Wiring diagram or something.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  No, it was just a bunch of wires going everywhere and it just one.

• 1:23:21John Coogan?

  Take a picture of your car. It needs engine out service. You're like, where do I screw? I'm doing it myself. Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about AI diffusion and its impact on the job market with economist Tyler Cowen joining in just a minute. First, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database build for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. And without further ado, we will bring Tyler Cowen in from the Restream waiting room. Tyler, how are you doing? Good to see you.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  I'm fine. Good to see you. Congratulations on the Vanity Fair piece. I loved it. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that you were able to to to check that out. It was a lot of fun, very funny getting dressed up all fancy.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  When are you going to be in Vanity Fair?

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  They really.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  Not been doing their work.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  I think I would love to see a Vanity Fair.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Photo shoot with you as the subject. I think you'd be fantastic. We should make it happen.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  A style icon, right?

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Yes, definitely.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, they really should do do more reflecting on conversations with Tyler. The team's grown a lot. Did you just hit a recent milestone? I saw that there was an event. Can you just get me up to speed on on the organization and how long you've been working on the show? Conversations with Tyler is now 10 years. It's a few hundred episodes. And last year we did almost an episode a week. An episode a week. That is fantastic. Well, it's one of my favorite shows. It always has been for I feel like I might have been a decade long listener, maybe maybe not the first year, but I got on early and I've been very pleased the whole time. But anyway, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  We first wanted to have you reflect on this point from Michael Burry that artificial intelligence might displace more blue collar jobs than people are expecting because you can now take a picture of your toilet and learn how to do plumbing, or you can take a picture of an electrical panel and you can do your own electrical work. Does that resonate with you at all? Do you think that that there might be some substantive effect in the DIY community that might have an effect on those trades jobs that previously have been rumored to be very AI resistant?

• 1:25:33Tyler Cowen?

  Well, that's true, but there's still a net job boost coming in those areas because there'll be all these new projects, new data centers, new sources of electricity, and they need plumbers. They're not all going to use ChatGPT to take the photo and try to figure out how to fix the thing under the water, whatever. So the house call plumber, maybe that goes down by 20%, but so many other new things happening, terraforming the earth, whatever, other countries, Africa developing, those jobs will be doing great.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Tyler Cowen?

  That's it, I agree with this example.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. How are you tracking the overall data center boom? There's been this narrative that data centers are the only thing that are propping up the US economy. It feels like we hear about new data center projects every day, the numbers are getting bigger, there's a new zero every time there's a new press release. And at the same time, the overall power generation, the big, big, like US national number is not yet started to move, but it feels like this might be the year where we see more electricity generated in America than before. How are you tracking the overall impact of AI on the broader economy?

• 1:26:45Tyler Cowen?

  We need to do much better, but I think it's wrong to feel that without the data centers, the economy would collapse. Those resources would be used to do something else and different. It might be less risky, it might be more immediate. Actually, consumption would be higher in the short run if not for AI in the data centers. So what we're doing is investing longer term, taking some risk, boosting medium term productivity. I'm all for doing that, but again, without that, we'd make more toys or more hot dogs or more something else, so no big deal.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  How often are you listening to AI music?

• 1:27:21Tyler Cowen?

  I try it reasonably often, but I don't yet listen to it because I want to. It gets closer every time. I would say within two years, I think I'll be listening to it on purpose. Right now, it's experiment and tracking the field, not for enjoyment.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Sure. Do you find the the act of playing the game of trying to generate a song that you like more entertaining than the actual resulting music?

• 1:27:51Tyler Cowen?

  No, I don't find either entertaining. For me, it's a pain.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Tyler Cowen?

  You know, I have a very large collection of albums and compact discs. I can hear literally the world's best music at my fingertips when I want to. And the other is a distraction. I do it as my own investment in seeing where things are headed.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Do you think there's

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  I had someone share an interesting anecdote recently, which is that a you know, one example, a professional singer who who made who's sort of top of their field within country music. They made something like $400,000 last year. Basically, going into the studio and recording sample tracks. You know, basically, a songwriter would make a song. They would sing it and then they go out or this person would sing it and then it would get pitched to other artists to be made into like a hit, right, and actually be produced. And his work literally went to zero because of because of Suno this year. And he doesn't have the ability. Nobody hires like a backup singer to go on tour.

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, you can be a you can be like a studio guitarist and get live jobs. And so their work went from, because now people can just prompt with Suno and say, hey, make make use these lyrics, apply it to this track and make it sound like this artist. And so that's just been kind of an interesting space. And I was talking to another friend yesterday that says, basically, everybody is using Suno at scale. And nobody in the very few people in the industry will are willing to actually talk about it.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:29:23Tyler Cowen?

  You know, I played some for my wife recently and she said, I hate it. And I said, why did you hate it? And she said, I hated it because it was good. And that's where we're at right now.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  That is, that is.

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it's notable too, that it's, it's maybe not, it's, it's not great for like the end listening stage yet, but it's totally good enough for like the sampling, for the professional kind of workflow side of things.

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you think there'll be sort of a legal reckoning, figuring out how all the royalties flow through these models and saying that, okay, there's 1% Taylor Swift in this generative sample and 2% someone else and, and then all of the, the money from like, sort of like a more complex rev share that might flow through these generative models?

• 1:30:09Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know if that's practical. I mean, the Beatles took from Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, everyone.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Tyler Cowen?

  Without paying and the world went on, even whether or not it was fair. And I think we're going to redo that experiment. I don't think it will be all that different. Most musicians don't make from recording anyway.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, makes sense. Have you tried Claude Code?

• 1:30:31Tyler Cowen?

  No, I have not. I've been meaning to, but I've been traveling and I'm finally back home and I will be trying it. Everyone tells me it's amazing.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. People are maybe one, one click behind you. I remember you, you declared oh, three AGI and now people were maybe hesitant to call the game there, but many more people have jumped in with affirmations that Claude Code is AGI because it can do so much more when it actually has access to your, to your full computer. But it is a little bit more cumbersome to get set up.

• 1:31:04Jordi Hays?

  How did you, how did you process Powell's video yesterday?

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:09Tyler Cowen?

  Well, it was terrible what Trump did. Fortunately, most of the markets did not react very much, but gold and silver went crazy. To me, that's a sign that the dollar is much less of a safe haven and Trump is going a bit, you know, what I call the Captain Queegroo and he's just not reliable. And that's very bad, but I don't think it's really going to change inflation or interest rates very much.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Is that just because he'll, Powell will hold steady?

• 1:31:35Tyler Cowen?

  No, because we already wrecked the independence of the Fed, which I'm not happy about. But that's the ugly little truth behind this story.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Tyler Cowen?

  That's why it's not been worse, what Trump did, is because it was already wrecked.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  Why is Fed independence important?

• 1:31:51Tyler Cowen?

  Sometimes the central bank needs to do things that are not politically popular, and they need that shield to do it. But the basic problem is our debt and deficits are so high that over time we will monetize them to some extent and have higher inflation because we prefer that over higher taxes, no matter what we might say. And so the Fed independence has taken away through that mechanism, apart from whatever Trump said yesterday.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Oh, so just by running-

• 1:32:16Tyler Cowen?

  We're in a bad shape. Like, I'm not telling you not to worry, but I'm telling you, you should have been worried to begin with.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Black pill. So, yeah, you're saying that just by running high deficits, that reduces Fed independence?

• 1:32:29Tyler Cowen?

  And that's an old story, but it's now closer to a tipping point, and Trump is making that much worse. So I would say his actions on the fiscal front do more to hurt the Fed's independence than his words, but they're both bad.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through your mental model for thinking through what the right level of debt for a nation is? Some of the numbers get so big, it's trillions of dollars, it feels very abstractly bad. But then if you look at it more like a mortgage relative to, you know, debt to income, it feels maybe more reasonable. Like, how should, you know, nations think about the level of indebtedness that's appropriate?

• 1:33:10Tyler Cowen?

  The United States is a special nation, and we can get away with more debt, which is great for our living standards, but it's bad for our political responsibility because our leaders all know we can get away with more debt. I think what we'll need to do at some point is have half a dozen years of something like 7% inflation, get the debt down. It won't at all solve the problem. The problem will never go away, but it will give us some breathing room, will then lower inflation, maybe have a recession, and start all over again. And it's highly unpleasant, and a lot of people will be thrown out of work and living standards will be lower. But we've already spent that money, we can't default, and that's facing us over the course of the next 10 to 15 years. But I don't think the world will end.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Is America's position in AI the biggest counterbalance to all that, like, sort of negative view?

• 1:34:04Tyler Cowen?

  It is. So if AI would help our economy grow one percentage point more a year, we could just afford the whole thing and we wouldn't even need to inflate.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Tyler Cowen?

  Now, that would not be my best prediction, but it's not impossible that it could happen. And I've been predicting half a percentage point a year, which still puts us right on that border of can we, can't we, we don't know. I wouldn't want to stake the whole house on that. But again, there's some chance we'll squeak by due to AI and assorted productivity gains.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, but why not 1% growth? Why not 2% growth? These tools, they feel amazing. It feels like-

• 1:34:38Jordi Hays?

  Or triple digit, as Elon alluded to.

• 1:34:41John Coogan?

  But it does, you use these tools and it feels like you're more productive. And there's some studies that say, oh, maybe you're a little less productive.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  You can generate documents that don't get read.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Basically. Is that what's going on? Like, what is holding back AI from actually moving the needle on economic growth significantly?

• 1:34:59Tyler Cowen?

  Well, first, about half of our economy right now is just totally perpetually sluggish. Look at government, look at most of the nonprofit sector, look at higher education, parts of our healthcare sector. Add that up, you're at 50% of GDP. To some extent, they use AI already, but in pretty trivial ways. Like, oh, it saves people some time, they don't work as hard, they take more leisure, they hang out more at the water cooler. That's fine, it's fun, but it's not going to get rid of our debt problem. And then you have some startups, you have programming, you have the dynamic parts of our biomedical sector that are already using AI a lot. But the more they use AI, the more efficient they become, and the more the inefficient parts of your economy are left over. And it's just really hard to grow much faster.

• 1:35:43Tyler Cowen?

  Unless you're like China playing catch-up.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:46Tyler Cowen?

  So, the number's hard to estimate, but GDP is a huge mound of stuff, most of which is produced by people who are not, neither white nor black-pilled on AI.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:56Tyler Cowen?

  And it will take things a long time to change.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the legacy of Thomas Piketty and the new debate over Piketty in the 22nd century? I believe, was it 21st century, 22nd century that Dorkesh wrote about?

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  21st or-

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Twenty.

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  Twenty.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  It's in the future. Talking about economic inequality, increasing gains to capital and increasing returns to capital.

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Dorkness did twenty second.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  Twenty second century.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  Piketty did twenty first.

• 1:36:28Tyler Cowen?

  He's too focused on the labor share. I think real wages will go up a lot. If real wages go up, workers are happy. They might be upset that Elon or someone else is a trillionaire, but I don't think that will drive our politics. I think if real wages go up, we'll be fine, people will feel good. So my view is very different.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Wait, but, I mean, real wages will go up, they'll feel good, but then they'll also be upset that there's now multiple trillionaires walking around, and so won't those emotions actually drive the politics? It feels like they do today.

• 1:36:58Tyler Cowen?

  I don't think people are that envious. They're envious about the people they went to high school with, or maybe their brother in law. Most people are not that envious about Elon or Bill Gates or whomever else.

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I was.

• 1:37:09Tyler Cowen?

  Envy is local, for the most part.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was running.

• 1:37:12Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe you two envy each other, right?

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:37:14Tyler Cowen?

  If you envy, you know, the sheik.

• 1:37:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:16Tyler Cowen?

  The richest sheik in Saudi Arabia, I bet you don't even think about him that much.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  He does have a great car collection.

• 1:37:21Tyler Cowen?

  Or if you do, you think about his role in the AI world, which is fine.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:37:25Tyler Cowen?

  But you're not upset that he gets however much hummus and you have less hummus than he is.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  It's all about the hummus. I was doing a thought experiment.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  Don't you think envy is a factor in the current wealth tax sort of discourse?

• 1:37:40Tyler Cowen?

  I think California is a crazy state, but I think it's just more a money grab than envy. And I think there's a very good chance they ruin the greatest engine of wealth creation maybe in human history. So I hope it fails, and soon. Even the risk of it, as you know, is inducing many people to leave or get ready to leave.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the retrospective view on the Laffer curve in light of what's happening in California today?

• 1:38:10Tyler Cowen?

  Well, at some tax rate, the Laffer curve is true. We're not usually in that range, but California is playing with fire and experimenting with that range. So I dearly hope they don't do it for their own sake. It'd be great for Austin, great for Miami, maybe good for New York.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, interesting.

• 1:38:28Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what's your personal investing strategy?

• 1:38:34Tyler Cowen?

  Buy and hold. Focus on other things.

• 1:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but but buy, buy what? Because if you buy individual names, you you it can end up being wildly distracting and then you can't focus on the other things that are maybe more productive.

• 1:38:49Tyler Cowen?

  Diversified portfolio. I've thought now of buying some more gold just as a hedge. It's not that I think it will do well, but I see higher risk. And Bitcoin's not really a hedge, so maybe gold and silver. Again, I'm not saying it will make you rich. I'm just saying if everything else falls apart, you'll have something.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08John Coogan?

  Have you pushed any AI model, AI labs to develop taste or smell technology to help with judging, the judging of food? It feels like culinary aspects are particularly AI durable or resistant. But I don't know if that's, if that's something that can be overcome with better technology.

• 1:39:31Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe it's cheaper for now just to use humans and have the AI record what the humans say and judge the food that way. That seems to work well. Like judging food is not hard. It's one of the easiest problems for humans to solve. And humans will do it basically for free. How many food bloggers get paid? Well, they might get some free meals, whatever.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:52Tyler Cowen?

  But so many people do it for free. I just wouldn't put AI money into that for a long time. I'd work on almost every other problem first. You know, Merckor, they wanted to hire some basketball analysts to make basketball commentary better by AI. I'd rather do that than food. It's harder.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  That's very funny. What about this call for new aesthetics? What do you, do you, do you believe that we're in some sort of local minima for the development of new aesthetics? Like, do you attribute this to just broad stagnation? What are the, the key sources that led us to this point where it feels like aesthetically we're stunted?

• 1:40:35Tyler Cowen?

  I think poor taste is a big problem around the world, but especially in America. You look at the older parts of San Francisco, the Victorian homes, they're beautiful. You look at the new buildings, I like some of them, but a lot of them are just awful. Or you look at parking structures, or you look at a new bank branch that goes up somewhere. Awful, awful, awful. Are we really so poor a society that we cannot afford to invest in more beauty? So Patrick and I are trying to get people to think more systematically. What can we do to try to make much more of our world just plain, flat, outright lovely? It absolutely can be done.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Is there, is there an element of the financialization or, or, I don't know, like multi-party, like multi-pronged stakeholders that go into the development of a campus or a building now that maybe didn't exist 100 years ago where one person could just decide that they have some crazy vision for a building and they go and build Hearst Castle and it kind of destroys them over their life, but it's, it's a singular decision? And now a company that builds a property or something, it, it doesn't have, there's not a single person that can be maybe authoritarian about the decision and the taste.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Even if they have the taste, they get overruled by a committee of investors and stakeholders that all, that all kind of put the kibosh on whatever they want to do.

• 1:42:02Tyler Cowen?

  That's one problem, and there are too many veto points. But if you go back earlier in time to the 1920s, say, you look at a neighborhood like Shaker Heights near Cleveland, where the homes are being built by different families for the most part, they're still far more beautiful than homes being built today. So I don't think that's the sole main root of the issue. I think just bad taste is.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  Do you think there's a technology angle where I, it feels like...

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  In the modern era, a lot of young people lament high housing prices, but when I look at their choices, they'll often choose to live in a small studio apartment in a very dense city to be around other people. And when they go to their apartment, it is small, they don't have a library, but they have a Kindle. And they don't have a room to dance or something, but they have a TV where they can watch dancing. And they don't need a movie theater because they just have their phone to watch a show on or something like that. And so the, the number of places, you know, if you were, if you were rich, you know, a century ago, you needed a lot of spaces to do different activities. Now, every activity can happen on the couch with a TV. Do you think that there's some effect there?

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  A black mirror of you, John.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:43:17Tyler Cowen?

  Well, if you do all that and you live in the West Village, you're surrounded by beautiful buildings.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:21Tyler Cowen?

  I'd like there to be more places in the country where you have that choice to be surrounded by beauty, that you don't just have to be all scrunched in, that you can have reasonable living space and afford it, and what's around you looks nice. Again, people have done this in the past, even the distant past.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:37Tyler Cowen?

  Even sometimes in medieval times. So to claim we can't do it now, it's simply a failure of will. There are laws that need to be changed, procedures that need to be changed. But I think the first step is just to wake people up and increase awareness.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the YIMBY movement has a serious amount of energy behind it. And yet, in my lifetime, I haven't seen that much movement on it. Maybe the, the, the ADU law in California is, is moving a little bit, but it still feels incredibly slow to get permits. Is there, i- i- is there a dynamic where landowners, property owners are actually pushing back against that?

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  My, my feeling is that the ADU new, like, support for ADUs doesn't actually really increase the housing supply. Cause a lot of people are like, you'll let me put another structure on my property? Great.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  I'm not.

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't mean I'm gonna, doesn't mean I'm gonna like, suddenly like it's a new single family home, right?

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. What, what do you think?

• 1:44:31Tyler Cowen?

  I think the YIMBY movement could go much further if it could promise it would boost housing and make neighborhoods prettier. Right now, it's like, well, we're going to boost housing, cost will fall, that's wonderful, but maybe your neighborhood will get uglier.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:45Tyler Cowen?

  So you do it in Buffalo, you replace the old with the new.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Tyler Cowen?

  The new's probably uglier.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Tyler Cowen?

  I don't like that. I think YIMBY would have a lot more successes when it can promise beauty.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sorry, on the new aesthetics, I heard a critique or an idea that new aesthetics come from problem solving. And so it's less about the taste and opinion and will and more of there's a specific problem in society in a particular neighborhood and then a design emerges to address that particular problem. And so the critique was that we won't get the new aesthetics until we identify particular problems, or maybe the bland aesthetics are solving for a particular set of problems that are in front of us. Does that resonate with you at all?

• 1:45:30Tyler Cowen?

  Not that much. I mean, I would say the problem is ugliness. If you look at older structures around the world, especially in Europe, but often in the US, they can be very ornate and have all kinds of flourishes and small details that are lovely. Those are not solving problems. They're put there because people think it will make the thing look better. So it's not mainly about problem solving, but I'm not against solving problems, hardly.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Has there been any studies on the effect, the local effect of brutalist architecture? Like, does it make people, like, stay at the office longer?

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  That's interesting.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Or anything? Because I can actually, it's funny, I can appreciate brutalist architecture when it is surrounded by nature.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  In a big way.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  It stands out as contrast.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a nice contrast. And it feels like, you know, a triumph of man in some way.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  But it oftentimes will make a neighborhood much less warm.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  A shipping container home in a forest sometimes can look beautiful if you see it as a getaway.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is there any, like, what made brutalist architecture, you know, be such a force in the world?

• 1:46:44Tyler Cowen?

  People don't like it once they live in it. Personally, as a tourist, I often enjoy it. I think it's interesting or sometimes creative. But it's not the model I would want to seek to spread through the world.

• 1:46:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Tyler Cowen?

  Because to live with it all the time, I think it wears thin on you. Why it ever got as far as it did? Maybe England is the best example. The 60s, the 70s. It's just cheaper. They're in a hurry. Concrete is easy to manage. You have a bunch of planners who think they know better. And a lot of it was a big mistake. And, you know, I would say maybe England got the worst brutalism. Maybe parts of communist society got the best brutalism. Because they really needed the structures after World War II. But I don't think it should be our emphasis moving forward. We want to move away from that.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there's eight billion people on Earth? Because there's a popular-

• 1:47:36Tyler Cowen?

  What's the exact number of people on Earth?

• 1:47:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no, no.

• 1:47:38Tyler Cowen?

  Can you keep telling me?

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  The backstory is that there's a growing conspiracy theory, specifically on X this weekend. A movement of people that are just saying, there's no possible way.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  Google says it's 8.2 billion.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  But this is in contention.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Many people are disagreeing with China's official data.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  One of the arguments is that in certain countries, China, among them, there are incentives to inflate your local population number. So you get more resources from the state. You do that, you game theory that out across the entire country.

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  And there's a homegrown effort in China from people that are trying to prove this. And they're going and they're finding these cities that are just barren.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's dissidents.

• 1:48:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a city that has, you know, a thousand homes and thousands, you know, thousands of structures. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's like a homegrown movement to prove that China does not, in fact, have as many people as the official numbers claim.

• 1:48:35John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 1:48:36Tyler Cowen?

  I think there's a modest inflation there. If there's a betting market on this, I'd love to get in on it.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Okay, that's good. That's good.

• 1:48:43Tyler Cowen?

  I'm going to bet on, you know, eight billion or more. That's my bet.

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:48:48Tyler Cowen?

  But if it's 8.1 billion and not 8.2, that I can believe.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. But back on the architecture question and the aesthetic question. It feels like when people are dissatisfied with the current status quo of architecture or any aesthetic, there's often an-

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Some sort of emotional response to return to a previous era, to just go back in time? And I'm wondering if you think that that's, that that is the solution? We need more art deco or mid-century or all sorts of different, I don't know, Gothic structures? Or go back in time to pull, to just build new buildings that look like they're hundreds of years old? Or you think we actually need something that's entirely new and never before conceived?

• 1:49:36Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, everyone draws from the past. Mostly, I think we need freedom to experiment. It's not that I want everyone to follow my preferred path. The city where I love what they've done with new things and somewhat older things is Helsinki, Finland. So personally, that's what I want. But do I want every city to look like Helsinki? Of course not. Or the modern parts of Copenhagen, I think, are quite striking and beautiful. So those would be my preferred directions. But most of all, it's about simply the ability to raise your hand and say, this is ugly. We don't want to do ugly things anymore. And we all look around for different ways of avoiding that outcome.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the risk is that you just have NIMBYs that say, I think everything looks ugly and I don't want anything to build, I guess. If you have the option to raise your hand and say, that's ugly, we shouldn't build it. I don't know.

• 1:50:24Jordi Hays?

  Earlier on the show, John was sharing how in 1947, there was a very, very small number of televisions in the US.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  16,000. Eight years later, it was 32 million.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  So, so we were talking about how that was effectively a fast takeoffs and a hardware fast takeoff. Do you think we can see something similar in robotics? There's a bunch of different exciting projects, a lot of which we've covered on the show. I saw a video of a robotic hand yesterday spinning a screw perfectly. And it looks like it's sped up like 10x, but it's actually in real time. So it's like spinning a, spinning a screw, you know, 20 times faster than a human can. But, but yeah, so, so I think people, you know, see the current state of humanoids today. They can do cool demos and other robotic form factors, but it doesn't quite feel like,

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  you know, we could have a population of 100,000, 100 million of these in three years, but who knows?

• 1:51:22Tyler Cowen?

  I don't think we yet see the killer app in the home.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:26Tyler Cowen?

  So if I ask myself, what do I want? If I could have a fully functioning robot that would be like a maid or a butler, that would be useful to me. But most things short of that don't quite seem worth it. Do I have a Roomba? No. I don't know. What if there's a mechanical vacuum cleaner that goes around on its own when I'm at work? Fine. It just doesn't seem that necessary. I do my own laundry. Uh, it's a welcome break sometimes. So I think we're still waiting to see the killer app.

• 1:51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Any other technologies that you're excited about this year?

• 1:52:02Tyler Cowen?

  Well, everything in biomedical, I mean, even without AI, progress against cancer.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:07Tyler Cowen?

  I think youngish people today will die of old age and maybe live to 97 or whenever the time is. And that's already in the cards. You don't even have to be a big AI optimist.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:18Tyler Cowen?

  I don't think it will be soon. To me, it seems like a 40-year process where you have some gains coming now, but it's mostly complete within 40 years, that you just won't die of most of the things that kill people. Cancer, heart attacks, there'll be accidents and there'll be deaths by old age.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's an extreme white pill. I love it.

• 1:52:38Tyler Cowen?

  And that's likely.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Tyler Cowen?

  And again, it doesn't have to rely on AGI, though of course AGI can help and accelerate that.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Hmm. How do you think about your information diet, your information consumption? Uh, it's obviously AI augmented, but I imagine you don't start the day with the prompt to an LLM and maybe the, the LLM prompts come in once you've explored or read some source text and want more context? Is that how you're using them?

• 1:53:11Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, you imagine wrong.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:53:13Tyler Cowen?

  I wake up in the morning. I had questions when I was lying in bed.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:17Tyler Cowen?

  Questions when I was falling asleep.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:20Tyler Cowen?

  And to ask an LLM something can easily happen in the first 10 minutes.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:24Tyler Cowen?

  Because I've been thinking and wondering, and I don't get up just to ask the L L M. But once I'm up, it's like, hey, I'm here. Why not?

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Tyler Cowen?

  And if the question takes a while to answer, then I scroll through Twitter, email, whatever. It's perfect. You want to set your queries in motion early in the day.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually do find that often I'll kick off a deep research report before bed because I know it's cooking for me when I wake up. I love that. That's actually a great.

• 1:53:49Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, Iran is in flux, very, very hard to tell, you know, what the outcome will be there. Uh, but if you have a free Iran, how, how should people be thinking about how that would impact world markets?

• 1:54:07Tyler Cowen?

  I think it's unrealistic to expect a free Iran. I would like to see a stable Iran, which has been rare in world history, though Iranians are often very successful. There are so many ethnic groups in the territory and they have expanded or contracted so many times. What they need is stability and some breathing space and a government that's not one of the very worst in the world. And I think the chances of getting that now are pretty high, maybe 50%. But we should set our sights a bit low and not actually reach for too much and let the Iranian people over time, you know, make it as good as they can and not have it be a question of outside influence. So, oh, we're giving you this, we're making you do that. I think that's counterproductive.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  What about the looking back, the postmortem on the tariff and the trade war from last year? Obviously, the markets did very well, even though they were tumultuous during the process. What, what, what's the economic view on the impact of the tariffs in 2025?

• 1:55:07Tyler Cowen?

  Not as bad as we thought, but no gain, no upside. Manufacturing in this country, manufacturing employment, they're still falling.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:15Tyler Cowen?

  Our allies are mad at us. People pay higher prices. When I buy my favorite Rainier cherries from Chile, they're 9.90 pound, 9.99 a pound instead of 6.99 the year before. What's the point of that? So, I'm against it.

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  Against it. Well, uh, we are certainly not against your appearances here. We love having you on the show and we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us. Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:55:40Tyler Cowen?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  And I'm glad your 2026 is off to a great start. I hope you have a great rest of the week. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:46Tyler Cowen?

  Take care.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  Bye. Have a great rest of your day. fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And I'm also going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And up next, we have Cerberus in the Restream waiting room. Andrew Feldman is the co-founder and CEO, and we will have him join us in the TVP and UltraDome. Andrew, how are you guys?

• 1:56:19Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 1:56:20Andrew Feldman?

  How are you guys doing?

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically.

• 1:56:22Jordi Hays?

  And we're thrilled to not just have five minutes today. We have a last, last time you came on, we completely botched our schedule.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Thank you for taking a second shot.

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Giving us a second shot.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  Giving us a second chance. There are many second chances in life, but we appreciate you having, taking one with us. But anyway, how are you doing? How's, how's your new year going? I'd love to just hear the state of the business and the level of optimism going into 2026.

• 1:56:48Andrew Feldman?

  I think it's an extraordinary time to be in. Well, first, thank you for, for inviting me back. I appreciate it. It's always good to talk to you guys.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 1:56:58Andrew Feldman?

  Look, it's an extraordinary time to be in AI hardware. I think we have seen exceptional interest. We've seen validation in the market. We've been telling people for years that fast inference would be a separate category. And so important was this new category that Nvidia spent $20 billion to buy the number two player in it. And so, um, uh, what a, what an exciting time to see. I mean, you were just talking about the guys at cognition, big customer bars and, and what a great product. Blisteringly fast, smart as can be, great coding tools.

• 1:57:41Andrew Feldman?

  It is, uh, what we're seeing, maybe a way to think about it is this, is that we had a GPT moment in 2023 where people first realized that AI was interesting. And in the second half of 25, people demonstrated it was useful.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Andrew Feldman?

  Right, and that that is exploding. They're finding different uses for it. These aren't demos. These are production use cases, and they're demanding vast amounts of AI computes underneath that.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, the fast inference thing is so, it's so obvious that it's become a meme. I'm sure you've seen these where people will be joking about, well, I'm coding and while I wait for my coding agent to come back to me, I open TikTok and I scroll vertical videos. And so I saw one guy made a script that as soon as he sends his prompt, it automatically opens them and then it closes them as soon as it responds, so that he doesn't get sucked into a rabbit hole. But it's like, it's brain rot, but it exposes a real behavior, which is that there's a lot of waiting involved in programming these days.

• 1:58:56Andrew Feldman?

  How cool is it that other people are making TikTok videos about your value proposition?

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:59:03Andrew Feldman?

  How often does that happen?

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Never.

• 1:59:06Andrew Feldman?

  An entire ecosystem is being brought to bear on how shitty the competition is to use.

• 1:59:15Andrew Feldman?

  And what a cool thing.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, since we have more time, I'd love to go back and actually get more of your full story, more of the story of the company, and sort of take us back in time to the initial idea, the first things that you did, all of that. So if you could sort of reintroduce yourself and the company, I think that that would be a really good level-setting experience.

• 1:59:39Andrew Feldman?

  Great. I'm Andrew. I'm one of the founders. With Sean and JP, Michael and Gary, we founded Cerebras in early 2016. What we saw on the horizon then was right.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  There's still gonna be some soundboard here. The overnight success is real.

• 1:59:59Andrew Feldman?

  The overnight success.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  It really has been, right? I mean, people were skeptical at various amounts of times, and I think people are finally getting it now.

• 2:00:06Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, I think that when you build real things, right, you don't get the same sort of rate of growth that you have in a viral software, right? I mean, when you actually build physical things, there's components, there's factories, there's real manufacturing work that needs to happen. And especially when you do deep tech. And what we set out to do, what we saw on the horizon, was a new workload. The AI wasn't the same. It presented fundamentally different challenges to the computer.

• 2:00:46Andrew Feldman?

  And that if we were able to build a new design, we would not be a little bit faster, not one or two or three or five times faster, that we could get to 10, 20, 30, 50x faster on this work. And the way to do it was to solve a problem that had been unsolved in the computer industry for 75 years. And that was how to build a really big chip. You know, most chips are the size of postage stamps. And our chip is the size of a dinner plate, right?

• 2:01:17John Coogan?

  So good.

• 2:01:18Andrew Feldman?

  And so, now, it took an enormous amount of work to build.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through exactly like you incorporate the company, and then you're doing design, and you're calling a manufacturer and saying, "I have this crazy idea." And then, I imagine, like, a year, years go by until the first one comes off the line, you can actually test it. Like, what were those early days like?

• 2:01:44Andrew Feldman?

  They were unbelievably challenging. I think when you do, when you do really hard work, your first one is like that first pancake. You know, it's sort of messed up, make the pancake, and the pan isn't hot enough, and the pancake is all nasty, and it's like that. And we had an idea that we could solve this class of problems that had broken every other effort to build a big chip. And we spoke to backers that had vision and believed in us. And we put together one of the truly world-class chip teams in the industry. There are only about half a dozen world-class chip teams, and we have one of them.

• 2:02:29Andrew Feldman?

  And then we laid out a plan, and we flew out to TSMC and said, "We think we can do something with your process that nobody else has ever been able to do." And they listened, and to their enormous credit, they listened and said, "Shit, that's a good idea," and in the meeting, they greenlit it.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:02:54Andrew Feldman?

  It was amazing.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  What was their... What risks were they identifying? What was their pushback? I mean, even if they say, "Yeah, we'll take your money and we'll build this thing," what are they cautioning you about at that moment?

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, also, yeah, also, I feel like if you're a founder, you get a lot of no's. Sometimes it's with customers, sometimes it's with investors or talent. But if you're building a chip and TSMC says no, like, do you just go back to the drawing board? Like, you gotta give them... That carries like quite a bit more weight than just an investor saying, "I'm..."

• 2:03:29Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, I mean, there's... TSMC is the best in the business, and so we heard no's. When you're interested in pioneering work, when you're interested in fearless engineering, you're gonna hear no a lot because everybody's afraid of the problem that you're trying to attack. And when everybody's failed at a problem, then those who are medium, lack vision, are always like, "It'll never work, it can't be done, others failed."

• 2:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:01Andrew Feldman?

  And it takes a special type of person to say, "Well, just because others fail doesn't mean we need to fail. The world has changed, the tools are better, we have better insight, we can use architectural techniques to avoid some of the things that broke previous efforts." And so what we did is we went out, we studied the previous failures, and we came to believe that we could work around everything that had broken previous efforts. And we brought this back to our investors and they're like, wow, this could be really big. And we tuned it, we tuned it, we flew out to TSMC and they agreed. I think even

• 2:04:45Andrew Feldman?

  when you do pioneering work, you encounter problems that nobody thought of.

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:50Andrew Feldman?

  Right? I like to tell the story that, I mean, imagine before Everest was summited, you get to base camp and there's a team there having tea that just failed to summit. And you talk to them and you go, hey, guys. And they say, there's this part about halfway up that's really, really hard.

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  No one's ever gotten past it.

• 2:05:08Andrew Feldman?

  Right. And you go up, you go up and you come down and you're having tea with the same guys and you lean forward and say, that wasn't the hard part. And when you do things that nobody else had ever done, you encounter things that nobody else has ever encountered. And we had to invent materials, we had to invent packaging techniques. The problem that caused, for example, the B200 to be 18 months late was a problem of the coefficient of thermal expansion that we'd solved in 2017. We saw it, we knew it was coming for them and we'd solved it. The problem that caused the dojo project, the Tesla, to fail, we'd predicted we'd solved it in 2018. We had already encountered these problems, we'd

• 2:05:53Andrew Feldman?

  found ways around them. And, you know, what fun is it to be an engineer if you're doing the same stuff everybody else has done already? I mean, it's only fun when you're doing things.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  What were the early kind of key customers that, because it's great if you can have a partner like TSMC that says, hey, you guys are on to something, we want to be a part of this.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  2016, there's no LLMs, right?

• 2:06:16Andrew Feldman?

  There are no LLMs.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Who's doing AI that's, that might be a potential customer?

• 2:06:20Andrew Feldman?

  That's right. So, early customers included, you know, a visionary group at Galaxia Smith-Klein, not who you think of as likely to bet on us.

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Andrew Feldman?

  Truly visionary group and one of the, I think, truly great minds in the application of AI to pharma is a guy named Kim Branson, who runs AI for them. The military and the national labs, they were accustomed to understanding what could be done with blisteringly fast hardware. And so our first, our serial number 01 went to Argon National Labs, part of the DOE infrastructure. And we have projects today with Argon and with Sandia that, and the, I guess Department of War, it's now called, that measure in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 2:07:10Andrew Feldman?

  And so they were early customers and they were willing to take early machines that were a little rough around the edges. And that was our first generation. Then we delivered the second generation a couple of years later. And it, they got better and better. Then we delivered the third generation and then it took off. And we had the rise of inference as a meaningful workload. And suddenly, performance was everything.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Talk about that early critique that I heard that part of what was going to be difficult about this was the fact that when you're operating on the wafer scale, if there's one defect, you throw the whole chip out as opposed to with smaller chips. If there's a defect over here, well, I still get, you know, 80% of the chips.

• 2:08:00Andrew Feldman?

  Right. No, that was, that was the received wisdom, the received wisdom. Remember how this works. I mean, imagine a wafer is like a, a big circle. Imagine it's a cookie sheet your mother rolled out into a circle. She takes a hat full of M&Ms and throws it up in the air and they land throughout this. We'll call those the flaws, right? They're randomly distributed. And say you can't have a cookie with M&Ms. Your mom goes like this and does a cookie cut through the entire thing. And if there's an M&M in it, she has to throw away the cookie. Okay? This is exactly how it works. Now, historically, the bigger her cookie cutter, the higher the probability she'd hit an M&M.

• 2:08:43Andrew Feldman?

  And the more good silicon around it, good cookie dough would need to be thrown away.

• 2:08:49Andrew Feldman?

  This was one of the problems everybody said could never be resolved. And we solved it in 15 months with 12 million dollars. It wasn't even a hard call.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:09:02Andrew Feldman?

  Everybody, to this day, everybody. And it worked like this. It's, there is another way to solve that problem. And that's the way memory has solved it. Memory has lots of identical tiles. They're called bit cells. And in the array of bit cells on a chip, they have redundant rows and columns. And if there's a flaw, they map it out and use one of the redundant ones.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:09:31Andrew Feldman?

  And that's it.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:32Andrew Feldman?

  They're built to withstand flaws, not avoid them.

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:36Andrew Feldman?

  And so we looked at memory and said, nobody's ever done this in compute. But if we built a computer architecture with a million identical tiles, and we took 5% of them and we held them aside for redundancy, we could withstand almost all failure patterns. And so we, we thought about the problem differently. And it, that wasn't, it was top of everybody's mind. They've just been taught that, that big chips have lower yield. They, they don't really understand the alternatives. In the same way, when Google first built their big data centers, they, they said, we don't want servers that are redundant.

• 2:10:20Andrew Feldman?

  If they fail, we'll route around them. We don't want to pay the extra cost of making them high reliability. If they fail, we'll shut them down, we'll get new ones. We'll route around it.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  So does that mean that between, from chip to chip, there might be a slight difference in the number of flops or power that can come out of a chip? Is that, is that like a real thing? Not that it matters practically, but I'm just wondering.

• 2:10:44Andrew Feldman?

  We had to invent a, a way to communicate across that little bit of cookie dough between the two cookie cuts that your mother makes, right? She, she puts the cookie here and she puts a cookie cutter here for her Christmas cookie. And there's a tiny little bit of dough.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:02Andrew Feldman?

  Right? And usually what she does is she lifts all that bit of dough up and rolls it and makes more cookies later. But in the chip world, that's called the scribe line. And they run a laser across it. And that's how they dice the chips. That's how they cut them.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Andrew Feldman?

  They obliterate that that tiny little bit of distance. We had to invent a technique to run communication across those. And we had to use the tools that were already being operated at TSMC.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Andrew Feldman?

  And so, you know, we benefited from the fact that we had this extraordinary chip expertise. Not not just how to write logic to make the chip work, but the backend design, what we call the physical design and timing. We knew EDA tools and we knew manufacturing of chips. And so we were able to think very differently than most companies.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  How does intellectual property play into this category? In so many tech startups, they say, you know, don't worry about patents, worry about your network effect. This feels very different. What's your IP strategy broadly?

• 2:12:11Andrew Feldman?

  Deep technology companies have to worry about technology.

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Why would a statement of the century?

• 2:12:18Andrew Feldman?

  You've been talking to SaaS guys a lot.

• 2:12:22Andrew Feldman?

  Right. They worry about virality and they worry about network effects. We worry about the fact that we can build things nobody else can build.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:32Andrew Feldman?

  And that is a combination of of protecting your IP with patents, with trade secrets, with segmenting your manufacturing so your manufacturers can't see.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:12:47Andrew Feldman?

  The the interaction between steps. It's using all the tools and all the wisdom in your sort of in your toolbox to defend your invention. And sometimes patenting is not the right, right? When you patent, you have to disclose.

• 2:13:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:04Andrew Feldman?

  Right? And if you have to disclose something that is then very difficult to tell if somebody else used, you might want to think about not patenting it.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13Andrew Feldman?

  And so generally, you want to patent things that that you can then measure if someone stole.

• 2:13:21Andrew Feldman?

  And so we have a very aggressive patent strategy, but we also have a very aggressive trade secret strategy and a collection of other tools that we use to defend our inventions.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Talk to me about space data centers. It seems like if it does work, if the heating question is solved, you probably don't want a server rack with a ton of chips in space. That seems like more to manage, more networking, wafer scale compute in space could be a logical extension of that. Are you excited about that? Have you dug into it? Has it been something that's been on your radar from day one?

• 2:13:54Andrew Feldman?

  Actually, I was digging into it this weekend with some friends. I think the following. I think one of the real weaknesses of today's GPUs is by being little tiny chips, it has put a lot of pressure on how you tie them together, right? And this is why Nvidia bought Mellanox.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:16Andrew Feldman?

  Why did it make sense? Because they knew that the individual chip would be far less powerful than a collection of chips. And if you're going to bring a collection of chips to a problem, you have to tie them together. Now, that problem is made more complicated in space, right?

• 2:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Andrew Feldman?

  You would like bigger blocks up in space. I think there are a lot of hard problems yet to be solved with data centers in space. I think we ought to be working on them, but I don't think it's something that you're going to see in production in the three to five year timeframe.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Sure. What about on the topic of cooling? We were just talking to Jeremy from Semi Analysis about how Meta changed their data center design from this H structure that was air-cooled, very efficient. It took them two years. They couldn't do water cooling. Now they're doing water cooling in their new data centers, the tents. What have you learned about various ways to cool? What's special about your product specifically with regard to cooling and energy management?

• 2:15:26Andrew Feldman?

  Right. So, this is not a complicated problem. I love it. In, in. I'm sure, yeah, you want to employ me? You want me to handle it? It's not complicated, right? I got it. I can do it. In Buffalo. Yeah. At a, at a Bills game, there are always three idiots who have their shirt off, right? It's 10 below and they've got their shirt off. Yeah. And, right, they've been drinking hard, but they're not dead. Yeah. Why aren't they dead? Because if you're, if you're in the water. Mm-hmm. And the water's 45 degrees and you're there for eight minutes, you're dead. Hmm. Why is that? It's because water's really good at sucking heat off, off, off heat sources. Yeah. Right? We, we say in, the, the technology, the thermal density of water is really high.

• 2:16:11Andrew Feldman?

  It, it rips heat off you. Whereas the air doesn't do that. So they can stand there with their shirt off and not be dead. Hmm. It's the exact same thing when you're cooling a chip. That water has an ability to pull heat off a heat source that is vastly better than air. Hmm. So you have two choices. You, you can blow cold air over your chip and you don't get the same cooling effect as if you ran cold water against the back of your chip or against the back of a cold plate.

• 2:16:48Andrew Feldman?

  And so it is more efficient by an order of magnitude to use liquid, water in particular is great and low cost, to pull heat off the back of chips. And we were among the first to do it. Google started doing it with their TPUs in, in 2017. Um, it had been done previously in the super compute world exclusively. And now, you know, the new, we do it, been doing it for years. And gamers, I remember you build a gaming, gaming rig, you get liquid cooling if you want that extra juice. That's right. Yeah. That's exactly right. Gamers have been doing it forever because they want to run those GPUs hot. Yeah, totally. And we, we, it's.

• 2:17:33Andrew Feldman?

  Facebook was, they, they learned a lesson and they jumped on it.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  Well, they were optimizing for one thing, which was this energy coefficient. And now they're optimizing for speed and new scale. And so they have a different set of optimization parameters and they adjusted their strategy. What else in the supply chain have you had to find partners for or develop in-house? I know you have experience actually building servers, but how much else changes when I'm racking your product versus an Nvidia product from the energy that's outside to the land, to the building, to the, we talked about the cooling. What else is different? How do you solve those to actually stand up, hold data centers?

• 2:18:15Andrew Feldman?

  Right, so we designed to fit in the exact same footprint as, as an Nvidia

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Andrew Feldman?

  ICL72.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:18:24Andrew Feldman?

  Right? And so we are underneath that envelope. We will fit in any, any data center designed for, for that.

• 2:18:33Andrew Feldman?

  You know, there are fewer little boxes to stuff in because we have a bigger box, but we fit in the standard racks.

• 2:18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:40Andrew Feldman?

  You just roll them in, they're exactly the same as you bought for your Dell servers or your, for your Super Micro servers or your, your Arista switches. These are, we fit in exactly the same. We use the same power. We, we require the same cooling that, that all high-end AI chips now use. And so we, we were able to, we, we were able to, to sort of fit in the envelope that they carved out.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Andrew Feldman?

  To make it really easy for data center operators and owners to roll us in.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  And then on the demand side, are, are customers who want to use your chips asking, "Hey, we'd love for you to rack these with the hyperscalers or set up a deep relationship with a bunch of Neo clouds," or they want to buy and operate themselves, or they want you to buy, to build the data center and just offer basically like an API for them?

• 2:19:38Andrew Feldman?

  All of them, all of the above. We have an API service.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:43Andrew Feldman?

  It's ripping right now. We have customers who buy the hardware and ask us to operate and manage it for them in their facilities. We have customers who

• 2:19:53Andrew Feldman?

  Buy the hardware, they operate it, manage it in their facilities. We have customers that, the whole gamut. You can buy our hardware, you can rent it by the week, the month, the token from various clouds. So it's, the customers have sort of consolidated around either they have demand to buy hardware and operate it on one side, or they're sort of under thirty and have grown up in the cloud world and don't want to think about hardware. They want to think about tokens and then they pay by the token.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  How, what use cases outside of the coding agents you mentioned? Cognition working with you, that one seems super logical in the sense that people are waiting for these agents to complete their really long rollouts, really long, like tons of tokens generated to build a whole app or build a new feature. Where else are you excited about the potential of not just AI this year, but faster AI and faster inference, having an impact that might be tangible to someone like a software developer or even a consumer?

• 2:21:07Andrew Feldman?

  I think some of the use cases we've seen in pharma are extraordinarily interesting. I think.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  So that feels weird to me because if I'm developing a drug, it's going to take me three months to get mouse data. It doesn't feel like a couple of minutes matters. What's going on in pharma?

• 2:21:23Andrew Feldman?

  I think it is exactly because the process is so long and painful and expensive that if you can rip a year out of an eighteen process where the whole patent is only good for twenty seven years, you've made a huge difference.

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:21:38Andrew Feldman?

  And so you can run more experiments in less time.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:21:43Andrew Feldman?

  And the probability that once you run these experiments, you have to go to the wet lab, which is much slower. The probability that the one you select out of the simulation, out of the AI, is a good one and makes sense to go to the wet lab and take to the next level increases dramatically. I think the act of being a researcher. Right, is really one that AI is particularly well suited to help. You want to scan the literature, you want to make sure that whether it's in Chinese or French or English, that if there's a publication about the gene you're studying, that you're on top of it. You want to be able to scan the literature. Yeah. Basically, every question is a deep research report. That's right.

• 2:22:26Andrew Feldman?

  And so you want to go, if you can go from half an hour to two minutes, that's some huge speed up in your workflow. That's right. And so what you're speeding up is the researcher. Yeah, that makes sense. And you're increasing the number of questions they can ask per unit time. Yep, yeah. And that is a very, very exciting application. Yeah, Jordi?

• 2:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Out of your sweet spot, but how do you expect the memory and CPU market to evolve this year?

• 2:22:55Andrew Feldman?

  I think first, memory has historically been an extraordinarily cyclical market, right? I mean, it has had painful troughs and crazy high prices, both. And I think right now, what you're seeing is a tremendous amount of demand for HBM, which is a form of DRAM. I think those fabs aren't easy to build, so additional capacity isn't easy to bring up. And so you've had this steep upswing of GPUs, which are heavily dependent on this HBM.

• 2:23:34Andrew Feldman?

  And as a result, all the capacity for DRAM has sort of moved towards HBM. That's made traditional DRAM and servers more expensive. When it gets more expensive, the hyperscalers panic, or panic may be the wrong word, but their response is to place orders for the full year, which causes the Dell and the server bills to go, holy crap, I need to buy more. Right? And you just watch this uh sort of crescendo of uh of price exploding, right? You just see this huge movement in prices as everybody worries that they're not going

• 2:24:19Andrew Feldman?

  to get it. So they place all their orders for next year early. So it looks like the year is going to be way bigger than it actually is going to be. And you that's what's happening right now.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the the financial management of the business? You raised the 1.1 billion series G uh last year. Are you building the company for a really long time in the private markets, taking it public?

• 2:24:41Andrew Feldman?

  Thank you for the sound. That's perfect.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:43Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong again.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Uh but but where do you see the company going? How do you want to operate? What makes sense in 2026?

• 2:24:59Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, unlike some of our our competitors, we we sought to to run a a business that could be measured on traditional financial metrics. I we we like.

• 2:25:09Jordi Hays?

  I love just taking taking shots on the way into that answer.

• 2:25:16Andrew Feldman?

  Look, I mean, I I think we we do. We we seek to to run a a business that people can look at and understand. And uh, you know, our our gross margins are are are are better than all our startup competitors. We uh we're growing faster and we're bigger. And so I I think that's really um.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Give him the foghorn.

• 2:25:41Andrew Feldman?

  Oh, I I you guys got to tell me like in in a pre briefing what the various sounds mean. So I know what.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  They're all possible.

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  This is this is the heavy tanker ship.

• 2:25:49John Coogan?

  You'll you'll know if it's the wah wah.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  The heavy tanker ship is backing up the truck for big business. We love it.

• 2:25:56Andrew Feldman?

  I I think um. We raised the money because we had a ton of opportunity to continue to invest in the business to produce extraordinary growth. I mean, that's the right reason to raise money. You raise money because the opportunities in front of you are large and many and maybe have a time element to them. So attacking them quickly is of value. And so that's why everybody, I mean, if you go out and raise money from other people, that's why you should do it is because your opportunity set is ripe for pursuit. And so that's what

• 2:26:32Andrew Feldman?

  we did. I think we will deploy it in expanding manufacturing, which is a real value in the acquisition of additional data center capacity, a collection of other things, expansion internationally. These are all things that the business is asking for right now.

• 2:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's hear it for opportunities that are ripe for pursuit. I like And traditional financial methods.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  See those a lot.

• 2:27:02Andrew Feldman?

  When in the past has it been worth a clap to say that you like positive gross margins, that you'd like to

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  You'd be surprised. We've had, we've had some people, we have people come on, they're trying to bait people by saying, I don't care about gross margins. Yeah, they do. They do. We care here and we thank you for caring as well. What can people expect out of, you know, any, any big announcements in the pipeline? And how can people work with you? You don't have to share specifics, but Yeah, I'm interested.

• 2:27:32Andrew Feldman?

  I think you can go to cerebrus.ai and you can try our, you can see how fast it is yourself, right? I think the beautiful thing about the cloud is that it's a dead, dead simple to demo and to try. And we've got a free tier, jump on it, play around. Ask a GLM model, which is a great coding model, just ask it to make a video game for you. Right, and you will see in three seconds, it'll make space invaders for you. That will be real code, right? Ask it to play pool, to make a two-player pool game. Or if you're a physics nut, a three-ball interaction according to laws of physics. I mean, just ask it to do interesting things.

• 2:28:17Andrew Feldman?

  And you will see right away the joy, how fun it is to engage with an AI that is truly interactive.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:28:27Andrew Feldman?

  And I think that's the best marketing. If you go there and you enjoy it, send us a note, we'll follow up. But play with the AI. I mean, it's extremely fun.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Just use it.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We hope you have a great rest of your day and congrats on all the progress.

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Enough time to really chat. And yeah, congrats on all the progress.

• 2:28:47Andrew Feldman?

  Guys, thank you for having me back. It's very much appreciated.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  Anytime.

• 2:28:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon.

• 2:28:51John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon.

• 2:28:51Andrew Feldman?

  All right, guys.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Live.co, we're D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Well said, John.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  And I'm also going to tell you about Console. You see it here on the sticker. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 2:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  We are now entering the, our lightning round.

• 2:29:23Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  The Lambda Lightning Round.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  We have.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  That is real. The cloud is real. It is lightning in the UltraDome.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Nathan from Terra coming in.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  Nathan is in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV pen UltraDome. Nathan, how are you doing?

• 2:29:38Speaker 07

  Very good.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on the show.

• 2:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Love the shirt. Is that a, it almost looked, oh, I thought it was a jacket for a second. Very, very cool.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  Looks great. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company.

• 2:29:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, awesome. I am Nathan, co-founder and CEO of Terra Industries. I'm a 22-year-old software engineer. And essentially, we're building Africa's first modern the first prime.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Wow. And what got you into the industry? What were you doing before? How did you recognize this opportunity?

• 2:30:10Speaker 07

  Um, well, I began my journey in tech when I was 15. Had an accident that made me lose my, lose my sight. Success.

• 2:30:21Speaker 07

  And at some point during the pandemic, I was seventeen at this time, I went on to launch my first startup that was solving like the education crisis, especially in emerging markets. And that allowed me to understand that basically, if we truly want to help industrialize the continent, if we truly want to help push Africa towards like a massive industrial growth, we have to solve much more foundational infrastructural problems. And I said, stick around, you know, what is the single problem that we could solve today that could basically cut across every industry? And that's, you know, what that common denominator was, was, was security. So sometime in 2004, I and my co-founder, Max O'Maduka,

• 2:31:05Speaker 07

  we decided that we want to start Terror Industries to essentially give Africa the technological edge needed to defend it itself, its resources and its critical infrastructure.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Sure. How are you thinking about the first products? There's a lot of defense technology companies that focus on drones or maritime or ground autonomy. There's a whole bunch of different products. It's, I imagine you want to build them all eventually, but do you have a foothold that you want to dominate in first?

• 2:31:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, so for us, we're thinking quite multi-domain. The question for us is how can you protect these critical assets from all sorts of threats? And right now, this evolving threats are coming from the air, from land and from sea. So in the aerial domain, we have our long-range and short-range drones. In the ground domain, we have our centrifuges. And soon in the maritime domain, we'll be deploying some USVs that'll be carrying out large-scale maritime surveillance. All these different systems are being powered by one unified software platform that carries out data intelligence, you know, collecting all this data from all the different systems, synthesizing that data and aligning these security agencies to identify and track threats in real time. So this is basically what we're trying to.

• 2:32:25Speaker 07

  To do, you could almost think of it as kind of like the same strategy that Palantir did in the West. You know, but the major difference is we also have to build out the hardware um um infrastructure. That is collecting this data because there is there is no like previous um surveillance infrastructure that allows us to basically plug in. Our our software platform.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  Um hum. How does the procurement uh process work in Nigeria? How i- i- is there a program of record concept? Are there grants for smaller projects? Uh, what what's the?

• 2:32:57Jordi Hays?

  You guys already have a a a couple million dollars in revenue. It sounds like that's growing quickly.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, how did that come together?

• 2:33:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, when we first started um company, we focused mostly on privately owned infrastructure assets. You know, lower barrier to entry, shorter sales cycle that allowed us to rapidly scale. Um, so um mostly owned by like corporations and billionaires. But over time, we're able to build an impressive enough portfolio that allowed us to then sell to governments and and militaries. So, the the defense contracting model in Africa is like fundamentally very different from how it's done in the West. In the West is quite bureaucratic. It could take you one to two years before you get to like a program of of record. In Africa is quite very network based, you know, and also very solution first.

• 2:33:46Speaker 07

  So, essentially, no one is is is really expecting you to write um um dozens of of of proposals. And, you know, come to office and present them like PowerPoints. They're expecting you already have a solution to your problem. So, in a very funny way, the Android approach of like taking around the um head on. And um having the the actual products to then go carry out live demos on the field. Works perfectly for the uh model of defense contracting on the continent, and that has allowed us to scale very rapidly. And that is something that most Western companies don't understand. You know, go to Western Chinese, they come here with papers.

• 2:34:25Speaker 07

  And they end up, you know, wasting a lot of time and not really being very productive.

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys have a dual-use opportunity? I can imagine people that have various assets on the continent. That could be oil and gas. They wanna, I could imagine maybe your sentry towers are applicable, drones, et cetera. Even for non-kinetic solutions, just surveillance from a security standpoint? What kind of opportunities are you guys pursuing there?

• 2:34:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, we don't do kinetic at all, so we are entirely focused on building surveillance. Because, you know, essentially, the Nigerian army today has enough firepower to, you know,

• 2:35:10Speaker 07

  basically destroy any terrorist group in West Africa. The problem with insecurity in Africa today is not the lack of firepower. It's the lack of intelligence, the lack of visibility, you know, understanding where these attacks are coming from, how it's being perpetrated, you know, looking at previous attacks to sort of like put out a pattern recognition that can help you predict future attacks. This is the major issue. So what terror is trying to do is build that intelligence and surveillance layer across the continent, not necessarily, you know, building kinetics. You know, we don't ever intend to get into kinetics. I think the sort of struggle and war that African governments are fighting against terror

• 2:35:54Speaker 07

  does not require us getting into kinetics, you know, what they really just need is to be. And that kind of takes me into like my second point of like data sovereignty. Because today, when we announced the round, there was a lot of, you know, viral tweets of how Palantir is now in Africa.

• 2:36:14Speaker 07

  We are sellouts and stuff like that. So I want to just make it very clear, you know. This is an investment from, yes, a Palantir co-founder.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:24Speaker 07

  Um, and several other VCs, but this is the technology that is entirely owned by Nigerians, is built by us, is managed by us, is operated by us. We have no direct relationship with Palantir.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:38Speaker 07

  We don't share any data with Palantir. So that's just something to just make very clear.

• 2:36:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point to make. Uh, obviously, as you scale the business, you're going to need to hire a lot of people. Uh, what, where are the great talent pools in Nigeria or Africa broadly? What's the Stanford? What's the Waterloo? What's the Y Combinator? Uh, where will you be sourcing candidates from?

• 2:37:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, first off, you know, Nigerians are some of the smartest people you could ever meet, you know, very underrated talent base.

• 2:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:08Speaker 07

  Um, there's, there's already a lot of like software talent on the continent, mostly because of that finted boom of, you know, the.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  M-Pesa.

• 2:37:17Speaker 07

  Exactly. M-Pesa, Pesa, sort of wave. So there's, there's a lot of existing software talent. And in terms of hardware, you know, there's, there was basically an, um, a hidden, um, hardware base, you know, that have been working mostly with the military. They have been doing a lot of side projects. They have never been able to kind of commercialize their skills at scale. And, you know, what we essentially went, um, um, um, did was we, we went to these communities and we hired the entire communities. You know, um.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Community acquisition.

• 2:37:52John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:37:52Speaker 07

  You know, so for us, really, in scaling talent is, it goes beyond Nigeria.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:58Speaker 07

  Because, um, part of our strategy is we, we want to build a decentralized manufacturing network.

• 2:38:02John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:03Speaker 07

  You know, so having a factory in each sub-region, you know, our manufacturing base right now in Nigeria would serve West Africa.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:09Speaker 07

  Um, in the next couple of months, we'll be opening a, a factory in East Africa to serve the East African region. And the reason that we're doing this is, you know, first of all, it's, it's, it's much easier in terms of, of supply chain and logistical networks. But second, you know, um, the threats that are being faced in, in each of these regions are actually quite different.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:28Speaker 07

  You know, in, in. In West Africa, you have to rest mostly in like the Saharan, you know, very hot climates, very desert climates. Um, you're mostly deploying mostly aerial and ground systems. But when you come to East Africa, you know, you have issues, for example, with mostly in the maritime, you know, with the Somali pirates, um, where you would mostly have to deploy, you know, maritime systems. So you, you can't essentially have one centralized factory building for the continent. You know, Africa is too big for that, too big, too complex. You have to basically use this decentralized manufacturing network. So each factory we open would tap the local base of the region it is distributed at.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  Sure. Uh, give us the information on the round. You raised some money. We want to hit the gong for you. How much did you raise?

• 2:39:15Speaker 07

  Eleven point seven five million dollars.

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:39:21Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  And thank you for taking the time to come chat with us here.

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. I'm sure, I'm sure you'll be back on very soon and uh, congrats to the whole team on a very cool milestone and getting a great group of people involved. You got 8BC, of course, Valor Equity, Lux Capital, SV Angel, Silent, Mickey Malka,

• 2:39:40John Coogan?

  Alex Moore, let's go, let's go. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:39:47Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. You see the ticker with the crypto prices in the bottom of the stream. That's from Phantom. And before we bring in our next guest, I'll also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So up next, we're going over to LM Arena. Anastasios, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hey brother, how's it going? Nice to see you. It's going fantastically. It's going extremely well for you. You raised some money recently. Let's kick it off with a big gong smash. How much did you raise?

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  A hundred fifty million.

• 2:40:35John Coogan?

  1.7 plus.

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  Pretty good stuff.

• 2:40:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, great stuff.

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  Now, what do you do?

• 2:40:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, okay, okay. So, our friend was just joking around, this accountant here. They were saying, Almerina raised at a 1.7 billion dollar valuation and they were using the Michael Burry.

• 2:40:53John Coogan?

  Very rude, very rude.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Very rude, very rude.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  We're friends with you, taking shots.

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  They're just joking around, but it's okay because you're here to tell us why that's a deal of a lifetime.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, explain.

• 2:41:03Speaker 03

  Well, this evaluation's a big problem. Evaluation's a big problem, people don't know how to solve it. You have all these different AIs, the space becoming more complicated.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:10Speaker 03

  You have different modalities, different models that are doing, all these people competing in coding, competing in, you know, software engineering, competing in the general chat. You have models from China, models from the US. Who are you gonna pick? Let's say you're a consumer, you're a developer.

• 2:41:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even a business, you're gonna make a decision that you're gonna, you're gonna make a decision, you're gonna spend millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars on that. You gotta make sure you make the right decision.

• 2:41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, procurement, procurement's a big market. And, you know, all these problems are huge. I mean, and the ultimate problem is, how do you help people find the best solution for them? And as a neutral platform, of course, it needs to be separate from the labs, it needs to be a third party that does this. We're positioned well to attack it.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  So I imagine, I mean, independent, we were joking around that if you ever wanted to return the capital, you could get one of the labs to pay you 10 billion dollars just to put them in permanently, hard-coded at the top of the rankings. You'd be out of business in 12 months, but you'd walk away with a pretty penny.

• 2:42:07Speaker 03

  Well, that's the thing.

• 2:42:08John Coogan?

  I don't think that's what's happening. How do you make money?

• 2:42:10Speaker 03

  It loses value if you do that.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So how do you make money then?

• 2:42:15Speaker 03

  Well, what we do is we help labs and enterprises get analytics on how well their models are doing. Help them understand the strengths and weaknesses of their models in different domains, like math, coding, instruction, following, multi-turn. Think about it like a full-body scan of your model. And what distinguishes us from the standard benchmark is that it's all live, so you can't overfit it because there's constantly new data coming in.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:42:35Speaker 03

  And it's on real users. So we have tens of millions of real users that are coming to Almerina using our app for like this huge diversity of different tasks. And that's, of course, the data that's used as the basis for these analytics.

• 2:42:47John Coogan?

  Yep. Talk to me about the proliferation of different L M arena categories. I imagine there's a exponential curve there as different models have different capabilities. We're not just testing math and science reasoning and chatting ability.

• 2:43:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:05John Coogan?

  There's so many of these. So how fast is it growing? How are you setting up your system to handle potentially tens of thousands of different benchmarks and models? Like, how is that growing and scaling?

• 2:43:16Speaker 03

  That is a great question, and I think that we're honestly still developing what that, you know, big roadmap looks like. But that being said, here's where we're starting. We have a bunch of different categories. I mentioned a few earlier, like math coding, instruction following. But we've recently also dug in a little bit more to look at different types of users, basically almost like user research. Expert users. What are experts saying about all these different models? We have a leaderboard for that. Occupational categories, law, medicine, you know, business. Which models are best for these different categories of usage? Marketing. We have that information on L M arena so that it's a one-stop shop for you to understand the different industry economically valuable industry level performance of these models.

• 2:43:57Speaker 03

  But if you really think about it, the long-term vision of this sort of thing, it's almost like every individual should have their own evaluation. Which model's best for you?

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:08Speaker 03

  You know, the technology brothers.

• 2:44:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

  Technology brothers eval.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:11Speaker 03

  It needs to have its own kind of thing because you're doing your own tasks and they might be very different from what I'm doing. And so eventually the future, you can imagine, of building a technology like this, we're building the infrastructure to do this, is to have evals for every individual person on earth.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  How do you incentivize people to participate on the voting side, the ranking side? The human element's really important in terms of grading different L M's. What's the current incentive structure? How is that evolving? What are the challenges that come up with running a multi-sided marketplace like this?

• 2:44:43Speaker 03

  Very good question. Incentives are really, really important. If you think about incentive is almost like a little hack into the human brain that tells you how to move, how to operate.

• 2:44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:54Speaker 03

  Right, so that's why games are so powerful. Games can get you into an incentive system that's just like, hey, I'm Flappy Bird, or I'm doing my Candy Crush, and I'm just swiping, swiping, swiping. We do not really incentivize users on Alom Arena to vote. And that's part of the power of the platform.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:10Speaker 03

  Is that unlike, let's say we were to pay people to vote, we don't do that. The reason we don't do that is because we want them only coming to do their real job. They come because they get value out of the platform, and they vote only because they want to, because they're intrinsically motivated, because they've got something to say. You can imagine, if you incorporate incentives, that it might hurt the leaderboard. So we're very careful about the way that we go about that. However, we are exploring, how can we design the incentives in sort of incentive-compatible way?

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:41Speaker 03

  In order to preserve the integrity of the leaderboard while also rewarding people to vote. That's on our minds, but not yet done.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  How confident are you that you can encode Big Model Smell into a, you know, the taste, the vibes into a ranking?

• 2:45:57Speaker 03

  Well, if you look at the leaderboard, it's there. It's there for you to see.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it does reflect it. And it goes to show how powerful human preference can actually be, that people are seeing things that you wouldn't necessarily anticipate. And that's why, when, you know, model developers develop their model, the big problem is, when I put it out to the real world in the wild, what's going to be the performance like? I don't know unless I see it. And that's because people react in these, you know, strange ways when they see a model for the first time. That's part of the power of this platform, is that it puts it in front of those people, and then we give analytics to try to understand how different individuals, you know, what are the different usage patterns, and who's voting for what. And so you can code things like Big Model Smell, identify, you know, but it's not uncommon that model providers will find out through us

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:49Speaker 03

  that their model's really great at math, or really great at coding, and they didn't even actually ever know.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  What does it take to get a model on LM Arena? Is it something that the lab is giving you preview access to? Is there an application form? Do you already have relationships with these folks? Is there an open call?

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  So we have a contact form on our website that you can use if you want to, you know, submit a model. Of course, we have capacity constraints, but we try to be judicious and let, you know, everybody, everybody participate in the battle. Um, and to, um, yeah, in terms of paying.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Someone was asking DeepSeek R4.

• 2:47:25Speaker 03

  Pay to get on the leaderboard.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  Deep, DeepSeek R4. Well, what, what does it take to get a model like that on the platform?

• 2:47:33Speaker 03

  We'd love to get DeepSeek R4 on the platform. I don't know, maybe it's already in progress.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Um, how much does hardware matter here? Uh, we were just talking to Andrew from Cerebrus about the speed that comes from that. Uh, there's an element where, uh, plenty of people would rather use a dumber model if it's 10 times as fast or vice versa, right? Uh, and so you have to create an apples to apples, uh, situation most likely, or at least, uh, pre-cash the results so then you're not noticing speed. But do you think that speed trade-offs will become a bigger piece of what you do?

• 2:48:08Speaker 03

  For sure. Yeah, there's no question about it. Really, what the, the ultimate question that people have is how do I, for myself or my organization or whatever, choose along the pretty frontier of speed, performance and cost?

• 2:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:23Speaker 03

  But those are the three things. And usually it's performance and speed, number one and number two.

• 2:48:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:27Speaker 03

  Because everybody's spending so much money right now.

• 2:48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31Speaker 03

  That it's like, you know, ring the gong again, so much money.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 2:48:35Speaker 03

  There you go. Gonna gong! Money being spent, baby!

• 2:48:41Speaker 03

  Now, the issue with that is... There's gone twice, let's go.

• 2:48:46John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:48:46Speaker 03

  The, uh, the speed, if you don't equalize it, you can get biased in the ratings.

• 2:48:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:50Speaker 03

  Right? So we want to be able to disentangle speed versus performance, and that requires us equalizing.

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:55Speaker 03

  But if you go to direct chat mode, you can use the model, see it just as it is, and we're planning on expanding the leaderboard to get more of the speed in there, the latency, um, as well as costs, so that people can make all those trade-offs right in our platform.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:07Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever do anything at the application layer, or does it just get too chaotic because, you know, UI is a new variable and there's all these other factors?

• 2:49:17Speaker 03

  I mean, this is applicant, Almarina's an application, no?

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure, but I'm, I'm talking about like, you know, two legal AI tools and, and trying to,

• 2:49:25Speaker 03

  I see, yeah.

• 2:49:26Jordi Hays?

  If you go down the procurement route and you're, and that becomes, I don't know, I don't know if that becomes a big, uh,

• 2:49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could see like a G2 cloud type of business here as well, although I have no idea if that is, makes any sense for you, but.

• 2:49:39Speaker 03

  Totally understood. But, but, so the thing is that it's hard to do that for our users, right? Because then we need to build 10 different product services or 100 different product services.

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:48Speaker 03

  And that's one of the exciting things about ecosystem right now, is that it's actually the fundamental product surface where, uh, things are evolving very quickly and also a lot of value is being aggregated, right? There's a reason why, you know, number one revenue stream of OpenAI is consumer, right? It's a consumer application.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:05Speaker 03

  Um, and you know, other companies have different strategies, but ours can't, simply cannot be to replicate every application.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:12Speaker 03

  So what the value that we hope to provide again is to help people understand the different trade-offs of different models, evaluate them for their use cases, procurement, so on and so forth, and that might mean helping enterprises, link together with their feedback, um, you know, understand their users better, perhaps, you know, warm starting from the large user base that we have, uh, and giving them those analytics and tools to help them make decisions. That's how I can imagine us moving into the application workflow.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Will you ever create a romance benchmark?

• 2:50:42Speaker 03

  I think it's a good idea.

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  How quickly?

• 2:50:44Speaker 03

  I think it's a good idea.

• 2:50:44Jordi Hays?

  What models make people fall in love?

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  Comedy benchmark would be hard.

• 2:50:47Speaker 03

  Let me ask you, are you, are you asking that for any specific?

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  Got him.

• 2:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Got me.

• 2:50:53John Coogan?

  Lonely.

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  We talk about, we talk about comedy, you know, comedy bench, that's, it's something we, we try to test internally.

• 2:51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they usually end up being, they usually end up being funny because they're so not funny that it's, that is.

• 2:51:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pretty brutal. It's pretty brutal.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  Or, or, or if it is good, it's like recycling, like clearly it went to Reddit, copied the top joke and then just regurgitated.

• 2:51:15Speaker 03

  Well, did it ever make you laugh? Has it made you laugh before?

• 2:51:17John Coogan?

  Yes, but accidentally. But when it's accidental, it's amazing. Uh, it's the best.

• 2:51:21Speaker 03

  I see, yeah.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  Uh, where, where did the idea for this come from? Uh, like, what, what was the inciting moment to start the company?

• 2:51:28Speaker 03

  Well, the, so there's the start the company and there's the idea. I've been personally working on Al Marina for almost three years now, along with Wayland and Yon. And there was actually a big group of students at, uh, at, at Berkeley.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:40Speaker 03

  This came from an academic project. I was doing my PhD on like theoretical statistics, theoretical machine learning. You know, kind of abstract. I was in a basement proving theorems. I had no idea that I would be.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  He built it in a basement of scraps.

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Scraps.

• 2:51:53John Coogan?

  He built it in a cave of scraps.

• 2:51:54Speaker 03

  There were rats, rats in the ceiling.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:51:57Speaker 03

  You know, not kidding.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  I'm glad you have a hundred and fifty million dollars for a new office. Hopefully it's nice.

• 2:52:01Speaker 03

  No. Go Bears, baby. And so what ended up happening is that I got looped into this project that was happening at Skylab, which is, you know, Yon and Joey Gonzalez and, you know, Luca and all these people at Skylab were working on it. Um, that's the lab where Databricks came out of and AnyScale and Ray and so on. And they were working on like, how do we evaluate? Early days of ChatGPT. You know, there was model A and model B. They were doing, one was doing better than the other on the benchmarks. Then you would chat with them. And it's like, hey, these benchmarks are not reflective of how good it is at talking to me. So how are we going to measure that? It was in the context of one of their early open source models called Vikunia that they had developed. And so the, the sort of pairwise preference, hey, chat with the models and see which one you like better.

• 2:52:46Speaker 03

  That strategy emerged from there, but it started with Amazon gift cards. It didn't start from organic usage. It started from passing around Amazon gift cards to people at Berkeley. And then it sort of, you know, popped and then it went down and kind of sat at thirty users a day for a little while. And then it grew and grew and grew in large part due to Wayland's sort of consistent effort and Twitter and so on. Awesome. Up until the point where it became a, this juggernaut.

• 2:53:08John Coogan?

  True overnight success.

• 2:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Juggernaut mode.

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  To see it over here. And thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:53:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  Congrats on all the progress.

• 2:53:15Speaker 03

  Hey, great to see you guys. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

• 2:53:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you too.

• 2:53:18John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Turbo puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  Shopify.

• 2:53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:32Jordi Hays?

  Which is relevant to our next guest.

• 2:53:33John Coogan?

  It is, it is. We'll bring them in in a second, but DeepSeek founder is running a hedge fund as well, in addition to building DeepSeek. Guess how much they're up? 57% last year. Massive year. That's high flyer, boasting the potential war chest for a company that's already shaken up the global tech landscape.

• 2:53:55Jordi Hays?

  Is this good for the AI?

• 2:53:57John Coogan?

  It's good for the open source community. It's good for academics. What do you think, Tyler?

• 2:54:02Tyler?

  Oh, I have some other breaking news.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  Give me some breaking news.

• 2:54:04Tyler?

  Okay, so Anthropic, they have Claude Code, they launched CoWork, which is Claude Code for the rest of your work.

• 2:54:10John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:54:11Tyler?

  So it's like everything else.

• 2:54:12John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:54:13Tyler?

  Yeah, it's basically, it's like a local app.

• 2:54:14John Coogan?

  Oh, it's a local app, so you don't need, oh, you don't need to do the terminal stuff anymore. You can just use it in an app with a prompt box.

• 2:54:20Tyler?

  Yes, and then it can interact with all like your local files, whatever, and then...

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  This is gonna be really, really big.

• 2:54:26Tyler?

  I don't know if you guys have used the Claude Chrome extension, but it's like super good.

• 2:54:30John Coogan?

  I have, yeah.

• 2:54:31Tyler?

  The computer use is super good.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:33Tyler?

  So yeah, this is very exciting.

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Get ready for some threads, people. People are gonna be breaking it down on all the fun things they had to do. I fixed my wifi in under an hour by rebooting it. But no, seriously, I was listening to Doug Loflin from Semi Analysis talk about how he uses Claude Code in a knowledge work setting, and it's fascinating. So he'll kick off one deep research report about one company that he's researching, then a few more, and then he'll do a deep research report on top of that. But instead of it all living in the Claude web UI, it's just creating markdown files that then he stores in Obsidian, and then he can run these meta deep research reports on the other deep research reports that he's put together, interact with whatever's going on in the Semi Analysis private data

• 2:55:17John Coogan?

  world, all the data that they've collected, interact with their Slack, they have a Slack bot that interacts with it. And so he was, he was talking, he was very, very one-shot by Claude Code and was saying, everything is a skill issue now. Everything is a skill issue now. Much like generating AI voices. But thankfully, we have 11 labs.

• 2:55:38John Coogan?

  Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Well, Star Wars has already begun in reality. Ask a ski resort in China, there is a robot that's skiing. This feels like it should be AI, but I believe it's not. I believe this is real. This is remarkable. You know, you don't have to go skiing anymore, thanks to AI. Cancel the skiing trip. I have a ski trip coming up at the end of February.

• 2:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Cancelled.

• 2:56:06John Coogan?

  Cancelled, I'm sending this guy instead.

• 2:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just watch the video stream. You don't have to put on the boots.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  Realistically.

• 2:56:13Jordi Hays?

  Go get cold, you don't have to sit on the lift, you don't have to be in lift lines.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Yep. You've seen, you've seen the, you've seen the drone that will follow you as you ski and takes really cinematic video?

• 2:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  How could it be more cinematic? Get the camera at waist height.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  And you can go, you can go way harder. Hit, hit the double black, hit the cliffs, right? You don't even have to worry about rocks, right?

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  No, he's tumbling down on the skis. This is fantastic. I love, I love the idea of having a robot follow me with a camera. I don't know what else you would use this for. Ski patrol, surveillance? I, I don't know why they built this, other than it's really cool and fun. But the obvious, the obvious use case is Red Bull viral videos, probably.

• 2:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so the use case here is obviously, this is the new ski patrol. There's thousands of these on the mountain and they monitor your speed in real time. And if you were going, if you're skiing recklessly, it just skis into you and explodes. And so instead of ski, instead of, instead of getting your pass pulled, you just get your life pulled. It's over.

• 2:57:20John Coogan?

  Makes kind of sense.

• 2:57:20Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, that is, that is this dark sci-fi future.

• 2:57:25John Coogan?

  I have a prediction from Guillermo from Vercel, but first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. Guillermo says, there's definitely a non-zero chance that we get, quote, "Generate your own GTA 6 in a few minutes before GTA 6."

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  I think that mechanically it's possible, but the humor is what makes GTA so special. The writing and the character development. I mean, also the mechanics are very unique. It's not just a walking simulator. I don't know. Have you played GTA?

• 2:58:00Tyler?

  Yeah, I mean, but Sholto's game looks pretty good. He put out a screenshot of it. So I trust Sholto to make GTA.

• 2:58:06Harley Finkelstein?

  Are you sure it's not just an image gen outfit? He's like, look at this crazy game I made.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  I mean, the Grok folks are known to to put up some some viral videos espousing video game development, but clearly video game development is here. It's going to happen. But we have our next guest and guess what ad I have to read before he comes on? Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social and on marketplaces and now with AI agents. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about. We have Harley from Shopify in the TV.

• 2:58:40Harley Finkelstein?

  How do we do? Wow. That is, was that planned? That was amazing.

• 2:58:45John Coogan?

  No, it's somewhat random, but we timed it up perfectly, but we're very excited.

• 2:58:49Harley Finkelstein?

  Speaking of random, I've never done an interview in my life. I'm at NRF, the biggest retail show in the world. There are 40,000 people here. This is the Shopify booth behind me. There's going to be random people walking by.

• 2:58:58John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:58:59Harley Finkelstein?

  I see that snowboard there, that little Easter egg. That's where it all started. That's where it all started, right?

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  Wow, I love it. I love it. So you're in person, but today we're talking about.

• 2:59:07Harley Finkelstein?

  Where's NRF? Is that Vegas? Javits Center, Javits Center, New York City.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Cool. That's fun.

• 2:59:12Harley Finkelstein?

  Everyone, it's just, it's sort of the the largest conference actually on the planet for retail and commerce. It used to be more about the traditional retailers, but we've sort of hijacked it and made it about modern retail, direct to consumer, technology companies.

• 2:59:25John Coogan?

  You're kind of behind enemy lines there. I mean, you do have POS system, so it makes sense.

• 2:59:29Harley Finkelstein?

  We have a POS system, but actually, and they've given me the keynote four years in a row, which is pretty cool. And today for my keynote, I brought up Emma from Skims, which is amazing. And Ben Francis from Jim Shark. We talked about basically this idea that there'll be more billion dollar brands built in the next 10 years than the last 100 years. And both Emma, I mean, think about Jim Shark and Skims. They're like 10 years old and they're they're dominating. So it was it was really fun. And we made some big announcements.

• 2:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, what what what's the key to building a billion dollar brand if you're starting in 2026? It feels like it's incredibly crowded and yet there's a new breakout brand every year. Uh, what advice are you giving to people to get started other than just hop on Shopify?

• 3:00:08Jordi Hays?

  There's multiple new breakout brands.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  And let that take out a lot of them.

• 3:00:11Harley Finkelstein?

  There's a lot of, yeah, I mean, there's so many.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:13Jordi Hays?

  And companies are growing, uh, the, the, the way the, the bar has been set with, with new e-commerce brands is insane. Like best in class is like, okay, you're doing 200 million in your second year.

• 3:00:24John Coogan?

  I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 3:00:25Jordi Hays?

  And there's so many examples of this and it just, it just goes to show.

• 3:00:28Harley Finkelstein?

  Wow, you guys are hard creators, doing 200 million dollars and no gong for that.

• 3:00:32Jordi Hays?

  No, no, of course we're hitting, of course we're hitting the gong for that.

• 3:00:35Harley Finkelstein?

  So let me say something, uh, I brought on, my, my first time I was up on stage, I brought Richard from Mattel. Uh, Richard Dixon, who's now CEO of, of, of the Gap. Because basically what he'd figured out was that Mattel has this treasure trove of IP in their vault. And he was like commercializing all of it. And so he just, it was amazing that a company from 1945, I think, uh, was basically, you know, dominating.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:58Harley Finkelstein?

  Uh, the next year I brought, uh, Kat Cole from AG1.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:02Harley Finkelstein?

  You know, and obviously you guys know the story well, but one SKU, 600 million dollars, right? Like unbelievable.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  Another gong.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Another gong.

• 3:01:11Harley Finkelstein?

  I mean, this could be a lot of gongs in this one. Uh, and then last year I brought someone you know, Sarah Foster from Favorite Daughter, who's been on the show, who effectively, I mean, Sarah and Aaron created a hit Netflix show to sell more apparel and succeeded with it.

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:25Harley Finkelstein?

  So this idea that, uh, so I, I think one major thing, if you look at all of these different incredible brands, what they've done is they didn't just take a bigger piece of an existing pie. They effectively were TAM creators. I mean, shapewear existed, there were companies like Spanx out there. But the way that Kim and, uh, and Emma built, you know, SKIMS is totally different what Spanx is. It is like, almost like a cool version of, of an old school product. Um, and then we announced four big things, which, uh, which I'm very proud of. The first is that it's fairly clear.

• 3:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, John, something, something went down the wrong pipe.

• 3:02:02Harley Finkelstein?

  Crazy. This show is so unhinged. Also, it's at the end of the show, I think, right? So getting more hinge as it goes.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  I'm like five Diet Cokes deep at this point, so anything can happen.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I just, I didn't, John was doing such a good job keeping it together.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  You got me, you got me.

• 3:02:18Harley Finkelstein?

  That's okay. That's no problem.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 3:02:19Harley Finkelstein?

  So the first thing we announced was, actually Sundar announced it yesterday on stage, but with Google, we are making it possible for every agent to connect to every single merchant. We created this protocol called Universal Commerce Protocol, which effectively is this universal language is open sourced so that all merchants can speak directly to every single one of the agents. And the best way to explain it is, up until now, it was really just about like a single transaction. So I can buy something on ChatGPT or Gemini or Microsoft Copilot.

• 3:02:50John Coogan?

  It could only do like a single item at that time. It couldn't really build a whole car.

• 3:02:53Harley Finkelstein?

  But there's no concept of loyalty or subscription or bundling or, you know, if it's furniture, for example, please don't ship it to me on Thursday. I'm not home Thursday, send it Friday. So this idea of creating this universal protocol that we co-developed with Google means that now merchants can actually tell these agents exactly how to show their products on these on these agentic tools. And it should be as good as it is on the online store. So that's, that was a really, really big one. The second thing we announced also with Google is that now we're actually expanding, you can sell everywhere commerce is happening from an agentic perspective. So we're going beyond the agentic storefronts of just ChatGPT, which is what we said, you know, in Q3. Now it's also, we're going to

• 3:03:33Harley Finkelstein?

  be working with Gemini with AI, with AI mode in Google search and also with Copilot. And maybe the last one, which I wouldn't bring up on any other show than TPN, is that we're actually bringing agentic commerce to every brand, whether or not they're on Shopify. So if you're not on Shopify, but you want to have your product syndicated and indexed, you can do so with our agentic plan. And that seems to be the talk of the show, which is, I think is amazing.

• 3:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Very interesting. Right, right. Because that's, that's.

• 3:04:02John Coogan?

  A ecosystem. I like that.

• 3:04:03Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 3:04:04Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. I mean, if you're, if you're going to, I think if agentic is going to do what a lot of us think it's going to do from a commerce perspective. You have to give consumers all the brands. We obviously want them all on Shopify, but there's some brands that want to participate now, but it may take some time for them to migrate over. So this idea of opening up to anyone, we think is a big opportunity.

• 3:04:23John Coogan?

  Very cool. Walk me through the customer experience journey that might shift over this year. We were following the Agentic Commerce thing so closely that we were, you know, we were cheering for ads in ChatGPT back in, you know, June, when they were kind of like, maybe we'll do it. We were hoping that Black Friday would be the day that people were purchasing things in LLMs. Didn't quite happen yet. It's still in the experimental mode. I was using the shopping feature in ChatGPT to do shopping research.

• 3:04:55Jordi Hays?

  John's saying we want the commerce fast takeoff.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  But yeah, but I'm wondering like, like the early adopters, is this going to be a more techie community that's buying their next TV in an LLM? Do you think it'll jump straight to the SKIMS and the, you know, the Tacovas category first? Like, how do you see this actually rolling out?

• 3:05:17Harley Finkelstein?

  Look at you with all your direct to consumer brands. Way to go.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  I got it.

• 3:05:20Harley Finkelstein?

  A couple of things. I think, I think it'll likely be something that like, most people use some of the time and some people use most of the time. I don't think it's going to cross the threshold of most, most the way e-commerce does now.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just going to take time.

• 3:05:35Harley Finkelstein?

  It's going to take some time. I do think though, that, you know, this is, these are on very, very small numbers. But if you look at the velocity, I was asked, as I was coming on stage today to do the keynote, the keynote after me was the CEO of PepsiCo. And he said, oh, you know, last year you talked about, I asked you if, if Agentic was overhyped, you said it's underhyped. And I said, and he said, well, you know, and I said, do you still believe it? I said, well, if you actually look January 2025, the last NRF to this NRF, we've actually seen a 14x increase in orders to Shopify stores coming from some sort of agent. Now, that doesn't mean the transaction happened.

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  Dropping off the link.

• 3:06:11Harley Finkelstein?

  Wherever it was, they may be going to the online store.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:13Harley Finkelstein?

  But 14x is dramatic. And again, it's on a very small base. We processed 90 billion, you know, last quarter. So it's a small base still, but I think it's going to ramp up quickly. What I think is really cool is I think you're going to see companies that are going to actually have these drops. I think once you start seeing these, like, for example, last night I did an N R F event with Tom Sacks, who is the designer behind the Mars Yard 3 shoes, which I think is the coolest sneaker in the world. He runs Nike Craft. Imagine, imagine he actually dropped something directly on one of the Agentic applications. Now you obviously have people that go there specifically for it. You now may decide, okay, that experience is pretty good. I'm now going to book my entire ski trip, everything I need for my ski trip directly in the application.

• 3:06:58Harley Finkelstein?

  So, once you have a good experience, I think the actual friction reduces, you'll keep having it over and over again. But the thing that we felt was missing, and this is the reason why I think this U C P protocol is so important, is it was very difficult to do merchandising inside of these applications. And this protocol allows you to do a lot more of that. You can say, like, back to Cat Cole and A G One, it's obvious that anyone who knows, studies the company, subscriptions play a huge role in the A G One business model. Well, you, you know, up until U C P happened, you couldn't actually do subscriptions. Now you can. Or this idea of bundling, you know, for Jim Shark, it's a huge part of their business is if you buy these, you'll also buy these as well. You can do that as well.

• 3:07:39Harley Finkelstein?

  So I think all of these things are sort of in line with creating a much more delightful experience in the chat. And, and I think ultimately what it leads to is like, this will be merit-based shopping, which will be different than I think some of the traditional retailers who were kind of leaning on their balance sheets to spend money on ads. You can't really game the system in this, in that way. You actually have to be, from a context perspective, the right product for the right consumer.

• 3:08:04John Coogan?

  How do you think creative assets will change or maybe stay the same? I've noticed that a lot of L L Ms, when you Pull link, it'll actually hydrate that link with an image of the product that you're looking at. I imagine that a lot of people were previously thinking, well, everything's going to collapse down to text. I just need the facts and the data. But now maybe the creative, the photography, the videos, that actually just gets pulled into the chat apps that folks are using and it stays important. How are you thinking about that evolving?

• 3:08:34Harley Finkelstein?

  I think you're probably, you're not going to, I mean, the idea of SEO won't exist in Agentic because again, it's merit based and it's mostly based on the context history you've had. But I do think though, you're going to have, these brands are going to have people at their companies who are thinking a lot about like consistent updates to UCP, consistent updates to the catalog. So they may pull something off the catalog and say, we don't want to sell it anymore this way. So I think there's going to be, I don't know if there are going to be actual jobs, but there's going to be people inside of the company, potentially in the, in the merchandising department, who say, actually, the way that we want to sell this, the way we want to describe this to these agents is a particular way. And then because of UCP and because of Shopify catalog, it gets easily disseminated across every single one of these Agentic applications. So the experience just gets

• 3:09:17Harley Finkelstein?

  better and better. I think you have to be a little bit of a techno optimist, you guys obviously are certainly there as I am, to believe that even if the experience is not incredible right now, it's likely just going to get better at this ridiculous pace.

• 3:09:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are the folks that you talk about, the brands that you talk to, the leaders of those brands, excited about ads coming to chat surfaces? It feels like new unexplored territory whenever there's a new ad product. That's opportunity for fast-moving brands. But what are they worried about? What are they excited about? What's the mood?

• 3:09:50Harley Finkelstein?

  Most of the, most of the excitement is actually around this idea of like, is there a potential for this to level the playing field? Meaning, you know, if I've done a bunch of research historically on, on the, on Agentic application, like about James Purse, or about, you know, Tom Sacks, or about the stuff that I love, the brands that I love, and then I'm going on a hiking trip, it probably should not show me a generic. Pair of boots, it should probably show me on running because it knows to some extent that I actually favor direct to consumer brands or more modern retail brands as well. So the excitement actually is around like, is this going to introduce more brands that otherwise are unknown to more people or, you know, True Classic Tea, for example, which, you know, if you're looking for a black t-shirt, I suspect on a search engine, you're not going to see True Classic Tea come up that much, but it's an incredible product and ultimately

• 3:10:35Harley Finkelstein?

  it can be found on these agentic tools in a way that it probably couldn't historically. That seems to be a lot of the excitement. The other excitement is e-commerce as a percentage of total retail is still sub 20%. You've heard that, literally, you hear that the show all the time that people are like, well, you know, we're inside the Shopify booth now and people that are more traditional say, well, when's this going to eclipse 25%? There is a chance, there is a school of thought that says that one of the things that agentic might do is increase that penetration rate at a faster clip, kind of ala, you know, COVID did, because people that may not be big e-commerce consumers may be searching for recipes on Chat GPT and through that process may end up actually starting to buy stuff there as well.

• 3:11:18Jordi Hays?

  But the other thing is like, I think some of the time you go to a retail store, you're going because you want to have a conversation about the product in a way that you just don't get with a website. A website is like a beautiful catalog and if you go around in the right order and you look at the FAQ and maybe you talk with support and all the, and hopefully they respond quickly and actually give you the insight, like then you can get to the purchase decision. But so a lot of people will just be like, I'll just drive by the store and get it. But I feel like LLMs can provide that, they can give people understanding on a subject or a category or a specific product that allows, that gives them the confidence to make a purchase, right?

• 3:11:57Harley Finkelstein?

  Well, actually, I'll go one step further. I think it's actually a better version of that because it's an unbiased discussion, an unbiased conversation. I mean, the bias is based on your context history and based on merit as opposed to being based on, you know, what spiff is that particular salesperson getting today in a commission structure? So it does, I mean, you know, it's so cheesy, of course, but like when I describe it to like my mother where this is going, I explain that this may very well be the greatest Shopper in the history of retail who knows everything about you, knows your sizes, knows in certain, you know, in European fashion, it's this size, but Americans like that knows where you're located, knows where you travel to, and can provide this unbiased, objective recommendation. And then, once you build in checkout, which we're doing with our Agentic storefronts,

• 3:12:42Harley Finkelstein?

  right into the chat, it becomes this really delightful experience.

• 3:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:47John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 3:12:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it will be, yeah, the most transformative year for the way online commerce happened.

• 3:12:55John Coogan?

  How can we follow the numbers here?

• 3:12:58Harley Finkelstein?

  I can keep coming on and telling you the numbers. I will tell you that I did say on stage to 5,000 people about an hour ago that I do think like, this is a golden age of retail. And I think you're going to see brands, there are brands right now that none of us have heard of, that in six months from now, we'll be like, I can't believe we didn't know that brand existed. And I think that type of velocity, you know, there's going to be so many more of these SKIMS, and Gymsharks, and ALO Yogas, and Vioris, and Tacovus, and AG1s, and Favorite. Like, you know, we know these brands because we kind of live in this world, it's what we're interested in. But for the most part, most consumers don't know, and I think they may end up knowing them a lot more readily through the Agentic evolution. And Shopify wants to power the whole thing.

• 3:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's going to be so fascinating following this ramp relative to mobile in previous booms.

• 3:13:45Harley Finkelstein?

  That's right. Or actually, social commerce would be another one, because there was uncertainty around it, and then ultimately, actually, social is a wonderful place for discovery.

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  There were a lot of experiments where you'd be able to shop under YouTube videos or under Facebook marketplaces.

• 3:13:58Harley Finkelstein?

  Currently as well. It turned out it was a great place.

• 3:14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:14:00Harley Finkelstein?

  That's right. It was a great place for discovery, but the transactions still took place on the online store. This is different, because a transaction happens embedded.

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be fascinating to follow. I think we're in for a fast takeoff. It's going to be a good year. A great time to be in business and a great time to be at Shopify. So congratulations on all the success and progress.

• 3:14:18Harley Finkelstein?

  Thank you very much. You guys are the best. Thank you for having me on. And I like to be in a live broadcast from wherever.

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. It's going to be a massive year.

• 3:14:23John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Harley. Goodbye. And you know their other partner, we got to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google is powering all of that. It's Google's most intelligent model yet, Gemini 3 Pro. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. You can build right there.

• 3:14:43Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this last week. California state reservoir levels are now at 130% of normal, holding 7 trillion gallons of water. It's remarkable. Ally Bell says, "God wants us to feed Claude." And every model, every data center, there's plenty of water to go around.

• 3:15:01John Coogan?

  Ashley had the same idea. Ashley Vance says, "God is rewarding us for building AI." All the water, all the water for people. Super happy. Tyler, you have some breaking news?

• 3:15:10Tyler?

  Yeah, so, okay, so earlier on the show, I was reading into the Jack Clark blog. I was like, "Oh, maybe Jack Clark is pointing to something that Anthropic's going to build space data centers." I posted that, he responded, put me in the true zone. He said, "No, you should not be reading into this or any Anthropic grand strategy." And he totally ratioed me.

• 3:15:29John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, got destroyed.

• 3:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Brutal mogging.

• 3:15:36Tyler?

  So, no, yeah, no Anthropic data centers in space.

• 3:15:39John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, it's funny, I was, we were talking to Andrew from Cerebrus and I was kind of giving him the layout. Like, I'd heard from other people that, like, that Cerebrus would be a unique beneficiary of space data centers if it happens. And he was like, "Nah, it's not really on my roadmap in the next 35 years." But we will see, you know, everything could be pulled forward if there's, you know, new, new advances there. Space, you know, payload to orbit comes way down. There's a bunch of ways that that can be exciting, but.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Hadrian raised additional capital at a $1.6 billion valuation. Their Series C 2, this was.

• 3:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it. They got T. Rowe Price, Altimeter D1, Stepstone.

• 3:16:25John Coogan?

  We got to get Chris back.

• 3:16:26Jordi Hays?

  1789, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, A16Z, 137.

• 3:16:31John Coogan?

  Delian Company.

• 3:16:32Jordi Hays?

  All, all the absolute boys back in.

• 3:16:37John Coogan?

  What a run from Chris, power.

• 3:16:39Jordi Hays?

  What else we got? This post here from Horse Hater.

• 3:16:44John Coogan?

  Horse Hater.

• 3:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Went very viral yesterday. I didn't, I didn't like this post. The whole post is horses. Don't like.

• 3:16:51John Coogan?

  Boo, we love horses here.

• 3:16:55John Coogan?

  Horse hater was asked why and horse hater replies, they are evil creatures. I don't know that they're, I, I know that there is only malice in their hearts.

• 3:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Completely false.

• 3:17:05John Coogan?

  Fake news.

• 3:17:06Jordi Hays?

  It's exposing yourself for not spending time.

• 3:17:08John Coogan?

  Why is there no community note on this?

• 3:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should, we should community note this.

• 3:17:11John Coogan?

  I, I'm gonna write a community note right now. I'm gonna get kicked out of the program if I do this.

• 3:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Horse hater hates horses. Huge surprise.

• 3:17:18John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Alexis Ohanian says, uh, is sharing an article, luxury watch prices hit a two-year-high in the secondary market, partially due to, and maybe almost fully due to tariffs.

• 3:17:30John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, tariffs were a big part of the story.

• 3:17:32Jordi Hays?

  So if you like spending more money on watches.

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  The show is probably doing a lot of work.

• 3:17:37Jordi Hays?

  If you like spending more money on watches, you'll love tariffs.

• 3:17:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:17:41Jordi Hays?

  But Alexis says, a great anti-AI bet I've been making is in human craftsmanship, human excellence, collectibles will keep thriving. So if you needed, if you, if you needed a reason to buy another watch, this is it.

• 3:17:53John Coogan?

  This is it. But it's interesting because he said, he frames it as an anti-AI bet. It's sort of an anti-AI bet in that it's not a beneficiary of AI, but it's still, it's, it's a very AGI-pilled bet in the sense that in, in a moment when AGI, AI is accelerating, maybe humans' craftsmanship is more valuable than ever. And that the, it's sort of an anti-slop, but it's, it's, it's still aligned with a, with a bullish view on AI broadly. So he's not saying, I'm, I'm not, I, I don't think AI is gonna work, so I'm buying watches. He's saying, AI will work and so I'm buying watches.

• 3:18:28Tyler?

  Yeah, I mean, humanoids are gonna have to be stunting.

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  They will. They will need some, something on the rest of your humanoid and why not an FP Journe or a Patek Philippe.

• 3:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so, so it's interesting, uh, uh, watches, babbling goods, right? More desirable as they get more expensive.

• 3:18:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:18:44Jordi Hays?

  That means that if a robot can make a Swiss watch, like right now Rolex might cost $2,000 to make, right?

• 3:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Some parts are automated, some is, uh, you know, handcrafted, and suddenly Rolex can...

• 3:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Make the watch for, you know, fifty, fifty bucks just due to automation. It does, they don't automatic, they're not automatically going to say like, okay, let's bring the prices down, right? Because the price is part of the product.

• 3:19:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:19:11Jordi Hays?

  So I do think it's a, I do think it's a good business.

• 3:19:13John Coogan?

  There is a little bit of a potential scoop here. Bobby Goodlatte replies to Alexis Ohanian here and says, yep, I love that both Zuck, we all knew Zuck is into watches, and Sam Altman are both into watches, shows that they still value handcrafted objects. I didn't know that Sam Altman was into watches. It makes sense, he's into cars, we know that, but we'll have to figure out what's on the wrist.

• 3:19:36Jordi Hays?

  He likes to, he likes to double, does he do like a Jacob and Co. on each wrist?

• 3:19:39John Coogan?

  I haven't, I know, I, truthfully, I've not seen a photo of Sam with a hitter on the wrist. I've seen him in the Koenigsegg, I've seen him in the McLaren F1. I know that there's a car collection there, but I haven't seen anything hit the timeline of a wrist check. But maybe 2026 is the year of the Sam Altman wrist check. I'm sure his PR team would love that going out on the internet, but I would support it and I will fight for you. I will be your strongest soldier, Sam, if you want to drop a little, little photo on the Instagram of the, of whatever's on your wrist. Anyway, fantastic show.

• 3:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Great show, folks. Great show, folks. Thank you for hanging out with us today.

• 3:20:19John Coogan?

  Well, there's one last scoop that we should, that we should talk about is from Kylie Robinson over at Core Memory with Ashley Vance.

• 3:20:26Jordi Hays?

  She's got another scoop?

• 3:20:27John Coogan?

  Uh, no, this was just from the weekend, we didn't talk about this, but XAI staff has been using Anthropic's models internally through Cursor until Anthropic cut off the startups access this week. Everyone's using Anthropic, apparently. So this went viral, got 7,000 likes and.

• 3:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think at this point, if you are a lab and you haven't had your access to Anthropic cut off.

• 3:20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Polish up your resume. Because. Clearly, they're just going to do this to any company that is a meaningful threat.

• 3:20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's another dynamic where you can be using the model because you think it's good, but you can also be trying to distill the model because if there's good data that can be pulled out, you might just say, okay, we want this capability that's uniquely available at this model endpoint, so let's grab that. There's a whole bunch of reasons why this could be happening, but it is dramatic.

• 3:21:15Tyler?

  Yeah, I was just going to say that was like the original deep, deep-seek controversy. People thought they were distilling from ChatGPT.

• 3:21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, GPT.

• 3:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Before we go, I got to give a shout out to Cooper in the chat. Every single day when the market closes, he comes in and he says, "Time to like the stream."

• 3:21:31John Coogan?

  I love it. Thank you so much.

• 3:21:32Jordi Hays?

  It's a movement. It's a movement.

• 3:21:34John Coogan?

  Thank you, everyone, for watching. Thank you for leaving us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:21:39Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back tomorrow. We can't wait.

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  And thank you for subscribing to our newsletter, tbpn.com. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 3:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Just one more sleep.

• 3:21:44John Coogan?

  Goodbye.