Netflix & AI Slop, Saudi Liquidity Crunch, Clawdbot Reactions | Mark Gurman, Miles Brundage, Aidan Smith & Asher Spector, Alex Dhillon, Mitchell Angove, Gabriel Stengel, Sierra Peterson

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:20) - Netflix & AI Slop (18:10) - Saudi Liquidity Crunch (30:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (33:55) - Clawdbot Timeline Reactions (01:02:13) - Mark Gurman is a technology journalist and Apple analyst best known for his reporting on Apple’s products, strategy, and internal decision-making. He is the author of Bloomberg’s Power On newsletter, where he consistently breaks news on iPhone, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple’s executive and product roadmap—often months or years ahead of official announcements. (01:55:41) - Miles Brundage, Executive Director of the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute (AVERI), discusses the critical need for independent auditing of AI systems to ensure their safety and security, drawing parallels to established practices in other industries. He outlines four key risk categories: unintended system behaviors, misuse of AI systems, emergent social phenomena, and traditional security issues, emphasizing the importance of rigorous third-party evaluations to address these challenges. Brundage also highlights AVERI's role as a nonprofit think tank dedicated to developing standards and fostering collaboration among stakeholders to build a robust AI auditing industry. (02:12:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:31:08) - Aidan Smith & Asher Spector, co-founders of Flapping Airplanes, an AI lab focused on data efficiency, discusses their goal of training human-level intelligent models without consuming vast amounts of data. They emphasize the importance of creating data-efficient AI systems to facilitate easier integration into the economy and to address challenges in data-constrained fields like robotics and scientific discovery. Smith also highlights the lab's commitment to foundational research before commercialization, aiming to solve significant problems in AI data efficiency. (02:42:48) - Alex Dhillon, founder and CEO of Outtake, a cybersecurity startup, discusses the company's recent $40 million Series B funding led by ICONIQ, with participation from notable investors like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. He highlights Outtake's mission to combat the surge in AI-driven impersonation and fraud by providing a unified platform that enables enterprises and government agencies to detect, investigate, and disrupt identity-based threats across digital channels. Dhillon emphasizes the importance of reducing the return on investment for digital criminals by swiftly removing fake content, thereby maintaining high digital trust for institutions. (02:55:24) - Mitchell Angove, founder of Feanix, discusses how his company utilizes whole-genome sequencing and AI to help dairy farmers manage their cows more efficiently. By analyzing genetic and phenotypic data, Feanix's AI models predict a cow's life outcomes with about 90% accuracy, enabling farmers to make informed decisions on breeding and health management. Angove also mentions that Feanix has raised over $5 million in seed funding and is rapidly scaling, currently managing close to half a million cows. (03:01:26) - Gabriel Stengel, CEO and co-founder of Rogo, a generative AI platform for finance professionals, discusses the company's recent $75 million Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. He explains how Rogo enhances productivity for investment bankers by automating tasks like building PowerPoints and benchmarking comps, allowing them to focus on interpersonal aspects such as negotiation and client relationships. Stengel also highlights the evolution of Rogo's capabilities over the past two years, noting significant improvements in model quality and integration into various financial workflows, including back-office operations. (03:12:26) - Sierra Peterson, co-founder of Voyager Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, discusses her extensive 21-year career in energy, including roles at the International Energy Agency and the Obama White House. She highlights Voyager's focus on investing in foundational technologies such as energy, transportation, materials production, and AI, emphasizing the firm's recent $275 million Fund II aimed at advancing these sectors. Peterson also addresses the rapid advancements in electrification and solar energy, underscoring their potential to drive global economic growth and resilience. (03:25:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Okta - https://www.okta.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Mark Gurman?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  We're bigger today. And it's Wednesday, January 28th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Will? I am wearing a sample today of this new Ramp quarter zip. And you'll notice here, I included a little pocket here for your Ramp card. It's just right here, always close, right over your heart. Right over your heart. Excited to get this one out in the world very soon.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, this will be fun. I wrote about Netflix. There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Strategery and Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Strategery interview. And they go back, the only mention of AI in like an hour-long interview or something, it's just two little exchanges. Ben Thompson says, is AI slop going to save you? If it overwhelms the UGC platforms? And basically, it's like, you're a refuge. So this is actual, this is real. And Greg Peters just says, I think it's credible. I don't know if that's the reality, so I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible possibility. It's like, maybe that's the bulk case for me. Maybe that's the bulk case.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been trading down over the last couple of months, but in general, it's up. I think it's 4X up since the launch of ChatGPT and is generally like near all-time highs, like the business is doing very well. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue. How will AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood. I mean, I was reflecting on the Avengers. When did the, when did Infinity War come out? Infinity War. That was, what, 2018? I just remember seeing, maybe it was even in one of the first ones. But the whole, the whole CGI process for Thanos, he has this like very distinct

• 2:09John Coogan?

  large chin. So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Is he a mogger?

• 2:14John Coogan?

  He is a mogger. He has this huge chin. This ma- it's actually like-

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  He's kind of like the OG.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. It, he, it looks like chin implants. It's kind of crazy, but it has these like cracks in it and it, it has this like very distinct look, Thanos. And normally, the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face and then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face. I think it's a, I don't, I don't know what type of camera, but it tracks all the points. So when you smile, like it sees that the, that the, that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling and then that facial movement is transferred. So they're recording the lines, they're acting it out, they're giving their facial performance and then that's transferred, all the little subtleties of how their, how their eyebrows move. All of that is transferred to the CGI

• 3:02John Coogan?

  character. It can look a little flat though. Um, so what they did with this is they still have all the points on the face, but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face into a higher res model. Yes. Don't read that. Don't read that. Don't read that. But, but it is a good point.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't even reading the chat. I didn't even see that. You said that.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  I was just looking at this absurd pic.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, it is absurd. It's, so, so all of those are tracking markers. And then the question is like, you have a much higher resolution CGI model. If you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like and the way it moves. And so, uh, Digital Domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, uh, they built a straight up machine learning pipeline, like they used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model. It wasn't, you know, an LLM, but they used a, a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018, the

• 4:11John Coogan?

  movies, obviously you didn't see any of these movies, but, um, I, I don't remember like AI back.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  My, my prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  But but but truly, like, I mean, people, people did make the, oh, it's too CGI, the bill, the explosions are too crazy, it's too over the top. But in general, people weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of two. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic, this is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie. Uh, like, we're fine with all this, and there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of like AI tool. Um, now, obviously Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property, but the the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry. And it will continue to be used. Uh, interestingly, I talked to Jason Carmen about.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  The Carminator?

• 4:56John Coogan?

  The Carminator. About, uh, about using AI tools in filmmaking, because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And and I was like, certainly, if you need to rotoscope out a background. So rotoscoping is where you are basically using like, you're you're cutting out like a subject from the background and then just doing like a background replacement. That's an example of rotoscoping. But it's over motion, so it's moving, so you need to track the hand here, move it over here, track it again, track it again. And it can be very, very time consuming. Typically, this is offshore to like a BPO, and then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it, and they have some software that's used. But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one shot.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver, he wanted to deliver in 4K. And so he went to a team, they, I think he paid them a fortune, they did it and, uh, and, uh, and when they, when they rotoscope a head, they actually like draw new hairs on to like, kind of create this. It's very like artisanal still. Um, but obviously, AI can rotoscope, you see it in the, uh, the cap cut edits.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Where's the rotoscoping Neo Lab?

• 6:05John Coogan?

  It's, uh, it's actually Runway. We've had Cristobal on the show, and pre ChatGPT, Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple of dots on what you wanted to keep, and then add, and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out. And he would sort of use that as, uh, like an intuition for the model to to drop out the background. And you could, and you could do a really, really clear, like, cut this person out of this video, uh, just in Runway. And now that's available in cap cut and edits, and that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where, you know, you'll see the F1 driver like standing up and then it'll like.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  It'll drop out the background and cut in a different background and then the F1 driver drops out and it's like this very like skit so it's a really cool technique. Uh, yeah, you can see is this runway is edit editing tool. So it it basically draws a mask around it. You just highlight like, what do you want to actually? This is an example of like, uh, motion, adding motion to, uh, video, but like you're, you're putting in a little bit of your own, uh, aesthetic taste. Um, quickly, let me tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Um, so, um, so, uh, like, I don't think Netflix should take a hard line stance on AI broadly

• 7:30John Coogan?

  because they want to use AI tools. Obviously, they've been using AI for recommendations forever. Uh, the original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine learning models and that's how you open up Netflix and says, we think this would be good for you based on what you watched. And it is much more nuanced than just if you like, you know, K-pop demon hunters, we're going to recommend Squid Game next. Like, it is, it is machine learning.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  And so many of these rote tasks will be AI enabled and they already are. Um, and there's not going to be, I don't think there'll be a crazy, uh, pushback here, although it's possible that there's some sort of, uh, you know, comms mishap if, especially if a, if a director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI, but there's a VFX house that when the motion capture stage did use AI to up res, motion capture data, like you could see AI being used in matte painting for the background and the director doesn't even know because they just said like, yeah, the background, just make the forest a little bit bushier. And they think that they're hand painting it. After that, they were using CGI and 3D modeling it. Now

• 8:40John Coogan?

  they're using AI and that sneaks in and then all of a sudden they face some backlash. But I don't think that's, I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that, that big of a deal. The bigger question is like, how does Netflix position itself against YouTube?

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  And the UGC platforms is what we're talking about. So Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI. And I liked his stance. He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything. We're going to let you use AI tools right in the Shorts creator. We have VO3, we're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this and the algorithm will sort out if you like it. And if you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff. But for the people that like that, they will be served it. But it's a, it is, it is sort of a balancing act. And there's definitely this like stated preference for like, I don't want any AI on my platform. Now, how real is that? We'll see.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And what we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision, the bigger just like, the decision that's bigger than just like, are we going to in sort of lean into AI or not? Will just really be, do we, does Netflix ever lean into UGC, right? They've been signing some bigger podcasts and they obviously work with independent media companies. But there's a very big difference between just allowing people to like, will they ever have an upload button? It feels like no.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like that could end up being their advantage where there is part of what may, has made YouTube magical since the very beginning, was that anybody could go and put YouTube, you know, upload a video, anybody could be a creator. And I think like, as the amount of content that gets created,

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  10, 100 X's, 1,000 X's because of AI. It's going to be, yeah, Netflix could be this like refuge where you're like, okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free for all.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than like AI on Netflix.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  That's, I think that's a very good thesis. Quickly, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And someone was asking in the chat about the linear lineup. Of course.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Linear is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent, seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And we have a great show. Mark Gurman is coming in person. Miles.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  The Gurmanator.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Person. Uh, and then we have an amazing, uh, lightning round coming up. And I think we got.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Outtake.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  A surprise guest coming on too from Neil.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Fund.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Everett Voyager. And then.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Alex Mitchell and Gabriel.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  Gabe from Rogo. Super excited for that one.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  That's fun. Um, so back to Netflix and YouTube. So, uh, YouTube has been on an absolute tear. In terms of, uh, watch time on TVs, according to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the U.S. for nearly three years. And so this has been the backbone of the case for like, let Netflix buy Warner Brothers, even though they'll get HBO Max. Like you're merging two seemingly big streaming platforms, but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube. So, um, should be fine from a regulatory pers- perspective. Uh.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Um, but the bigger question is like, the, there's this gap between Netflix and YouTube. And at the start, back in, I mean, Netflix is almost 30 years old. YouTube's over 20 at this point. Um, back in 2005, like these were seen as like wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail and the other one was like a video of a guy going to the zoo on his, on his like VHS camera. They felt extremely separate and they felt extremely separate for, for years and years and years. Uh, now they are starting to converge, especially around, um, around video podcasts. I feel like, I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Because the podcast was, I think, invented by Apple or.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I started doing any work with.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, there wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly like this, these were just different types of.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Creators.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  And then there was a big shift.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  It was like, wait, I'm leaving. A ton of attention on the table.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm not uploading to YouTube and that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, there was the pivot to video and then Spotify went really big into video podcasting. They went on a, I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Ek really did around podcasting. So seven years ago in 2019, they acquired three companies Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Anchor's, uh, Mike.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  From Lightspeed's company.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, all three, uh, very interesting. Anchor's more of like a product. Parcast had a bunch of.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's still like, a lot of people were, it was, it wasn't like it was impossible to figure out, but there was quite a bit of friction.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and they knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast, wanted to distribute it everywhere. Um, but they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well. So that did very well. And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people, even, uh, like, uh, some of the Royals also signed a deal. I forget who they are. But, but, but, but they really, they really spent a ton of money trying to get into podcasting. I think they were successful. I mean, we, we, we see a ton of audience on, on Spotify.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  And interesting, the timing, apparently there was, uh, somebody sent me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. You saw that chart?

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy shared this with us.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  That is a crazy chart.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  It actually fully retraced to now, there's like sub, sub 50,000 a year. That feels like you'd really have to, maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  But either way, there was, if you look at the chart, it looks like there was like an insane bull market.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  In podcasts and then a huge correction.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. It does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID. I mean, we talked to the folks that acquired about that. Uh, and they said that during COVID, they saw a huge spike in people, uh, like just going for walks, throwing on AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time. AirPods were getting to like mass adoption. So we were just throwing on podcasts constantly and it really, really grew. Uh, anyway, Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps tools. And GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So there is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough of YouTube getting sloppier by the day, then Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  So I think of Netflix and YouTube as starting out extremely separate, then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  And I mean, Portnoy and and Bill Simmons, both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't there deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix?

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  And the audio is still elsewhere, which is...

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Why, why, why do you remember that? Because Portnoy drilled into your head, he said, if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. You know, video, Netflix, Netflix, video, Netflix, Barstool video, Netflix. And and it's true, like that. And so I would think of Barstool, like if I'm trying to watch a Barstool YouTube video or a podcast, I would just go to YouTube, right? Now Netflix is getting into that. So the so the gap between Netflix and YouTube is getting like pretty narrow. Like they're they're becoming competitors. But there's this question on the AI issue. Do they diverge more and is that valuable? The pure AI feeds like Sora and Meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. I think Sora is around 60, 70 point ranking. But like, it's still too early to call that because the quality will get better and better.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  The audio is still very like clockable when you when you hear it. And there's a lot to be done there. But the struggle will be to create like unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated. I still feel like the K-pop demon hunters moment, the squid game moment, the Alex Honnold Taipei 101 moment, these live events, these like key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the Warner Brothers acquisition is, you know, people still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place there, that's way easier than...

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Well, I did, I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a T-shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that? AI Slot Man? I'm not a fan of that. I like Batman. There are some things that will remain true. So, yeah, I mean, about the upload button, it's almost better to think about Netflix, less as being AI free and more about being UGC free. They're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on 30 years in the business. The AI tools will come, some fully AI-generated content will come, but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think

• 17:54John Coogan?

  that that's important for a lot of viewers. Anyway, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector in full tech search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Yes, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on in the Middle East?

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the Crown Prince's economic overhaul. I saw this headline and was deeply concerned. I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole build out? Like, we were kind of counting on you guys to be, you know, quite liquid while the rest of us are over here in America are levering up. So, seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. This had been reported since back in October,

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  and we can get into it a little bit. They're also raising from, they've been raising, tried to raise money from the Qataris. They apparently asked for something like 10 billion from the Qataris and the UAE. Qataris threw in 10B. Allegedly, the UAE did not, and there's frustration around that.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say, the Qataris threw in 10B and Saudi Arabia was like, "And we deployed it."

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Time to re-up. So, as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1 trillion Wealth Fund called for more collaboration on deals, people said, asking not to be identified. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses. According to some of the people, local families are being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom, they added.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf nation's ability to bankroll expansive projects planned under the $2 trillion Vision 2030 Agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the 2029 Asian Winter Games, and the government had previously pared back spending on other elements of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a Winter Games. That seems extremely expensive to host a Winter Games in Saudi Arabia, if that's what's going on.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  They have, don't they have some mountains?

• 20:38John Coogan?

  They have mountains there? I don't know. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to... Yeah, I know that they have some stuff indoors, and I guess you can just do everything indoors. But again, that feels expensive.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the...

• 20:49John Coogan?

  As opposed to like, just go to Russia and walk anywhere and you can ski.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they have been developing something with NEOM.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. And they're pivoting it, right?

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Which is also, I guess, in the process of pivoting.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Before we move on, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now, a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So, the number of family offices in the Middle East in 2019, 250. 2024, 290. Now we're up to 310 and the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices. They're a big portfolios. The wealth is sizable, said the chief executive officer of the National Center for Family Business in Riyadh.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy and close to 95% of private businesses in the kingdom are family owned. Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Of these, many groups are only just starting to form family offices as they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations. That makes both established and new family offices a prime target for more investment. They're naturally looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface. In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices. That includes private credit, an industry in its infancy in the kingdom as over stretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive

• 22:31John Coogan?

  at this moment. Not expansive, not expanding, exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi diversification agenda, but they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, we got to bring somebody on to learn more about this.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  And I will tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries and more with damn great customer service.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Sheiko says, you're bearish on the US dollar, the token used to buy AKI products? Bold.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  That's really good. Yes. The US dollar is all over the place. Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal horde. I did not see this. This is interesting. There are roughly three. 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland? That's so many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used, one of them, though, is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high-security vault owned by crypto-giant Tether Holdings SA, which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks

• 23:55John Coogan?

  and nation-states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market, the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds. Due to shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above 5,200 now. It was 5,000 yesterday on the cover of the Journal. Gold is on an absolute tear. And yet, relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC Holdings last year, the industry was abuzz about gossip about where they would head next. Few guessed that the answer was Tether. In an interview with

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Bloomberg, chief executive Paolo Adorno described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative to the dollar. Interesting. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. We are soon becoming, basically, one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative, right? E-Gold, even before Bitcoin?

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, was E-Gold actually gold-backed?

• 25:18John Coogan?

  I think that was the whole pitch. It was trying to be digital gold, and I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was very early, late 90s.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tether has a scale now. They also launched their US-focused stablecoin this week to compete with USDC. The new token is known by its ticker USAT, which is being issued by Anchorage. I think we had the CEO of Anchorage on at one point. Maybe it was really quick.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tether's mainstay 186 billion USDT stablecoin, will do the same for the new coin as its designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. So USAT is already available for trading as of yesterday. So we'll see. It would be interesting if like, at what point does USDT de-peg upward? If gold keeps ripping, right?

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Does, I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of Tether? I think that's not what the product is. I think, I think like the Tether stock would own the treasury.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Sure. But historically, when you, when you saw a stablecoin like de-peg, it was based on concerns around the reserves.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I think that the contract is that they will, they'll never give you more than a dollar. So

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. I know. But I'm just saying like stranger things have happened in crypto where

• 26:48John Coogan?

  No, it's always been a very profitable company. So certainly, certainly bullish for them. Banta. Automated Compliance and Security. Banta is the leading AI trust management platform. There's one funny quote in here. So Tether makes its money from its dollar stablecoin that is the giant of the sector with 186 billion in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest and trading profits. Processing the physical metal is crucial, Adorno said. So much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker

• 27:32John Coogan?

  in Switzerland, guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says, it's a James Bond kind of place. It's crazy. That's a great quote to give Bloomberg. It's just like James Bond. The secretive nature of

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Another, another CEO.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  This is a positive. This is a positive reference. It's okay. If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy. The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Such is the scale of Tether's disclosed purchases that some market watchers have pointed to their role in shifting global prices. The purchases likely contributed to gold's 65% rally last year, Jeffries said, describing Tether as a significant new buyer which could

• 28:29John Coogan?

  drive sustained gold demand. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold, with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than 1,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market. Do you think the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold spiking?

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll see. I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Because of the tariffs.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  From the 2020, 2021 era. But I definitely, I mean, you got to be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing

• 29:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  gold watches and other precious metals, just given that your input costs are going. You know, I'm sure they have like one or, you could imagine one or two years worth of supply. So they're not, they can be somewhat insulated. But prices will go up, or at least costs will go up.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. I heard a very funny, very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex and he was calling it a helicopter watch. I sent this to you.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  And he's saying that like

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  This was Army Hammer.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  I think it's Army Hammer. And he's saying

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  It's like obscure situation.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Such a funny situation. But he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of a building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you, someone shows up with a helicopter and they're going to save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is and they know that that's valuable. But if you're

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  You're not going to have time to be like, no.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  It's an FB joy. It's a, it's a Patek. Like, let me explain high horology.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Here's the term beyond.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Aftermarket prices.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always going to trade. And now it's probably going to trade even higher. Yeah. Anyway, Cisco, on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of AI and the economy.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  See you there.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  The whole thing will be livestreamed and we'll be there for a gig.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Paula says SF escape room called the permanent underclass and it's just a room with a laptop and Claude code installed.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  There's something here. That's funny.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Have you ever done an escape room?

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  No, I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun. Nor thought that I would, I, this is how I want to kill time.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster, right?

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Have you, are you in?

• 31:15John Coogan?

  I'm not into them, but I've done them and they're fun. Sometimes it depends on like if it's a well structured one, but I like puzzles. Like it's fun. It's like a fun puzzle, like figure out. But you can very quickly get caught in like, just like overthinking what's going on and being like, oh, it must be some like complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like, like press this lever instead of like analyze the situation or something.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? Cause I imagine you could just say, I imagine there's only.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Take a picture.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  There's probably only, is it like a series, it's a series of rooms?

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, usually you, you start in one room. They're all different, but oftentimes you'll start in one room and then you'll, there'll be a series of puzzles, locks and keys and whatnot. And then oftentimes like you'll unlock something and then you'll progress to another room and then you'll progress to a third room and then you'll finally get out of like a series of rooms. Cause it's a lot of like, they're pretty easy to set up in sort of like a defunct office space or like, you know, storefront that's just kind of like, you know, going in between. It's like the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate. Like you just, you like, anyone can come in and just say like, oh, we'll be in there for like a couple of months. It's not super permanent. The build out's pretty simple. It's mostly just like some, some walls and decorations and like some creativity on the, on the, on the, on the puzzle side.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  Trey says, can you guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends?

• 32:38John Coogan?

  I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room. I think most of them, they aim for like 45 minutes.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe we need to make one.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  One of our guests had to leave the UltraDome and go straight to an escape room. So, you know, there's the, there are escape room fans among the TVPN army all over the place. Have you done one, Tyler?

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I've not.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Are you interested in it? You're a speed cuber, so, you know.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it could be fun. I don't know. I'm kind of in the Geordie camp, though. I've just like never.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Been, uh.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  It's, it's very like, I don't know. Maybe it's great with, it's probably great with like, uh, kids who are maybe like eight to 10, who can do the puzzles, like family event would be fun. Uh, and then it was, it was a common thing, like, uh, when, when they came out, there was definitely like a boom in like, uh, in the, in escape.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  Bobby in the chat says, "Escape room would be a good benchmark for AI." Certainly, certainly humanoid.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  No, I mean, you could go in there, take pictures and be like, "Help me solve this. Help me solve this. Help me solve this." Like, wait.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  I know, but I wanna, I wanna see a humanoid run through it.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Let's call 1X, see what they can do. Call any of them.

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Hit him up.

• 33:45John Coogan?

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

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Moving on. Uh, lots of reaction to Claude Bot. Very much enjoyed our, uh, our interview with the creator of Claude Bot, now Molt Bot, um, uh, yesterday.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  One of.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, incredibly, he had some wild lines, but incredibly refreshing kind of conversation and viewpoint.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just totally counter to the entire philosophy that I feel like a lot of people, at least on the West Coast, are in the way that they're approaching AI right now and the way that America is approaching AI. He's like, we asked, you know, "You think somebody will like, you know, fork what you're doing or clone it?" And he's like, "Yeah, I'm sure they will." Like, "I don't care."

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, "I'm building this for myself."

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's like, "I have enough, I have enough money."

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, yeah, I'm, I'm super. It's gonna be really fun to to follow along. I have a feeling that he's just gonna keep launching a bunch of random projects because he clearly is just in it for the love of the game. But I do hope that I do hope that he can get a lot more resources and really scale up.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know that he needs more resources. He has more agents and whatnot. Like, the the interesting thing about Claude Bot as a product is you you you download it from GitHub. It installs and it's it it it has all these different integrations and it does something that's very complex and it has, you know, all this safety text and different. There's a website and there's a community page and all of that feels like, okay, yeah, this is like a 10-person startup. They probably worked on this for a year, but it's like, no, it's one person. And it's like three months because the guy is, you know, using agents.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would think that he would build. He his his big complaint was the security inbound. Security researchers asking him stuff.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Bought.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  Bought it.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  I I think I think he will. He should, but yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he said, um, he posted, uh, December 26th, he had his like codex, uh, like dashboard up. So he said he he's done, um, 250 billion tokens, which is like probably top 10 codex users apparently from.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So so I I don't know that he needs way more resources. I mean, uh, he should be able to to to get donations if he needs them, get credits or something. I don't know. Like, the the the the financial strain on that business does not seem. It seems like it's more constrained by his ideas, uh, you know, how he's thinking about designing the system, integrating things, rolling it out.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  Buddy of mine, buddy of mine, Michael, uh, watched the interview and and, uh, he said that he he's had Claude Bot set up. He set it up right at the beginning of January and was initially like just kind of got a little frustrated using it, but has now got it. He's got it set up so that it's able to make phone calls on his behalf, specifically wants to get, uh, Hillstone reservations.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  So he just like basically.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Wait, what's Hillstone?

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  The restaurant.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's just like gonna use it to start getting like reservations at different restaurants.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  It's so funny. Google has a product for that that does an AI phone call, but for some reason it just hasn't really rolled out that or it just hasn't gotten to like adoption. I don't know. There's some sort of there's some sort of like memetic, like, I think people seeing the clip where he's like explaining how he's feeling the AGI really, really hit people.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he also said he's, uh, has it make him a daily brief.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  That feeds into an RSS like on a podcast. So in the morning he can just

• 37:22John Coogan?

  Really?

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Listen to like a five minute podcast on like what his day is like.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Things that he should be responding to. Kind of like, uh, it seems like you could have a more-

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Worst podcast ever. Uh, your enemy texted you something. And you will be, you'll be deeply upset when you see what happened. Everyone's praying on your downfall. No, no. Security is important with, with Claude Bot, now Molt Bot. CrowdStrike is also important. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  A ten, a random 10 person team in Paris just dropped what looks like, it looks like an E, something superior to Claude Bot. According to, uh, Chubby on X, uh, tw- it's called Twin.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  The AI company builder.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  Hugo Mercier.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they raised a $10 million seed round.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  They have over a hundred thousand agents deployed.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  So Tyler, give it a spin. Check it out. Twin Labs.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  There's a community note out here. This is undisclosed advertisement. Um, but Doug over at Semi Analysis Fabricated Knowledge says, I think that Claude Bot is going to be a moment. And yeah, someone's going to do this. And I, I'm still wondering about like, how quickly a business can actually scale when you're getting constantly hammered with TOS violations from every mag seven legal department constantly like, hey, yeah, we noticed that you built a CLI for the web interface on WhatsApp and we don't want you to do that. And you, and it's one thing if it's like an open source repo that people are running themselves

• 39:05John Coogan?

  and can change and can edit and fix and tweak versus- Like, hey, you're a corporation that we could potentially sue or tie up in litigation or go on a press tour around. Like, it's just a very different dynamic.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the prompt injection risk as well.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. It's like, does that liability fall back on the company? That, you know, and I'm excited to talk to Mark Gurman about how he's processing this with what will happen with Siri, the timelines there, what will be integrated, because Apple and the iOS ecosystem should have a lot of the same functional hooks into these products.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember, we talked about this Monday, there was a team that built a product which sold to Apple and became Shortcuts, and then they built Software Applications Incorporated and a product called Sky, and they were pre-launch, and OpenAI acquired it, and it was focused on integrating AI into the operating system. And so you can imagine OpenAI behind the scenes has been cooking on a lot of stuff like this, but this isn't the kind of thing that you can just at OpenAI scale just say, hey, we're going to just ship this and see what happens. Where as a startup or an open source project.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let me 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. There are a lot of people building stuff on MultBot, around MultBot, around the concept. Another, there's actually someone in the chat that's working on a Claude bot for the cloud. He says he has a name. I'm very excited to learn more about his project. I think his name is Jeff in the chat. Brexton says, yes, that was fast. Yup, software is cooked, because Kalen Y. says, introducing MultBot for Teams, one-click connections to all the apps, client-side,

• 40:52John Coogan?

  encrypted, and builds your team's memory. Get your Momo is the product. I wonder, like, this feels like almost something where if you've been building a product that's like this, you should potentially reintroduce it.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  On the back of all the multbot hype and, and you know, if you're a, if you're like a, you know, multi-tentacled agent that can touch a lot of different systems, well, we'll put it in terms that people understand and say, hey, like this is, you know, this is Claude Bot or MultBot for the enterprise and it has these, you know, functions and these benefits and this security approach. But clearly, a lot of people will be focused on this. Let's click over to re-watching the interview with the Claude Bot creator, Peter Steinberger, because I want to hear about his AGI moment, the AGI achieved moment. First, I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve

• 41:52John Coogan?

  with modern small and medium sized businesses. And then we will play the video from Claude Bot creator. I want to see.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  So in November.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  I, I don't know. You know, I wake up every day. I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then it was like, okay, I want to chat with my computer on WhatsApp because, because if my agents are not running, is running and then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them. And I go on like two little prompts. So I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls Cloud Code and then returns what Cloud Code returns, one shot.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And it took like one hour and it worked. And I was like, oh, okay, that's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image. Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I hacked together images. And then I, I was on a trip in Marrakech with like a weekend birthday trip. And I, I found myself using this like way more than I, than I thought, but not for, not for programming. It's more like, hey, we're like, there's like restaurants, because it had Google in

• 43:14Speaker 04

  it and it could figure out stuff. And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it's like super useful. And then I wasn't thinking, I was just sending it a voice message, you know? But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So the reading editor came and I'm like, I'm really curious what's happening now. And then after 10 seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like,

• 43:42Speaker 04

  how did you have to do that?

• 43:45Speaker 04

  And it replied, yeah, you sent me, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file. There's no file landing. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's OPUS, I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to WAV. And then I wanted to use this, but didn't have it installed and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, um, got the translation back and then I responded. And that was like the moment where like,

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like,

• 44:18Speaker 04

  damn, smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Beasts.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  App love it.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  The ad at the end. I love it. Yeah, people were reacting to this. People are not, are genuinely not ready, says Vittorio.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the, um, one way, one way, the reason that I feel, I feel like that is such a powerful moment, and I'm glad that he shared it, is if you give somebody, if you give, if you're talking with a model and you give it a task and then it just hits a dead end, it's just incredibly, like, that's sort of like, people are very used to that right now.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  And it's not that it needs to be that way, but it's just kind of like the steady state.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are used to, like, okay, I, I know what the models can do.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  That's effectively the agent having real agency. That makes it an agent.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  It's saying like, well, I didn't know how to do this, or I was confused. And I tried a number of things until I did, I did what you wanted, right? And that's like what you want out of, that's what you want out of a team member, right? If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task, you don't, they don't just try one thing and come back and, or just say like, I actually can't handle this because the file type is wrong. So convert it, figure it out.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was your reaction, Tyler?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like pretty insane. Definitely, it definitely raised my, uh, you know, chance of permanent underclass.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  I, you know, it's making me a little worried.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, Will, Will says it's over, it's over. We need to move and there are a lot of people quoting this. G. Fodor has the Eliezer Yudikowsky meme and lots of people hear, um, they, uh, lots of people were, you know, interesting that, uh, that, that he uses, uh, Codex here. Uh, Rune said Codex 5.2 is really amazing, but using it from my personal and not work account over the weekend taught me some user empathy. Lol. It's a bit slow. And Yuchin Jin says, every time I ask my OpenAI friend, when will you beat Claude at coding? They say, we already beat them. I think Sam is realizing speed, not intelligence is Codex's

• 46:27John Coogan?

  blocker to a Claude code moment. Cerebrus chips, cerebrus chips might unlock a Codex moment. Yeah, that would be very interesting. Uh, and that's, and that's one of the, like, the models are so powerful now that there's, there's, uh, there, there's so many moments where, uh, you know, it's going to deliver, it can deliver, uh, because it can work around all these problems. But if you're like, I need this done in five minutes, I'll just do it myself.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, like I, uh, 5.2 Pro is like an incredible model, but it just takes like five, six, 10 minutes every time you prompt it.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  It's kind of like thinking or, uh, you know,

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  deep research type model.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. I like the fireworks.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Do some fireworks for Labelbox.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  I like the fireworks. Um, what else is in here? Uh, so you already mentioned this, Tyler, but, uh, Peter's probably in the top 10 users of Codex at the moment. Over 250 billion tokens in a few months is a lot. So how much does that actually cost? That feels, that feels like you're up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  It says it here.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much does it spend?

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Fifty one thousand dollars.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  That's not much. Wow. Yeah. Usage cost, and he has a streak going of 74 days. No days off. Yeah. So $51,000 for this type of result? Pretty remarkable. Uh, so where do we move the goalposts now?

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm so, I'm so.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  What, what, what are you unhappy about?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Peter didn't say.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  I know you're unhappy. I, I know there's going to be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like you can't be satisfied.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Me?

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Me?

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Permanently dissatisfied.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Well, part of it's a bit.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I know.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Obviously. Because I have to, I have to.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  We gotta move the goalposts somewhere.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  I have to provide like an alternative.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Opinion, but of course, we have the goalposts.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Yes, and we need to move them.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  They have been sitting in one place, but I guess, I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  built a hit product.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  An entire, you know, this novel.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Experience.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Uh, that is taking the world by storm and how much, how much did, we know they only spent, you know, a few months on it.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  How much did they actually, how many people actually worked on it?

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  And what was their total, how much did they spend in total on tokens, right?

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Because they're spending some with Codex.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  You can sort of see that from the GitHub commits, right?

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I mean.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  For some sort of average.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can do that.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  But then.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  I mean, just based off the.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  It's like, okay, fifty one thousand dollars on two and fifty billion tokens.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  And a lot of those tokens are probably using Claude Bot to do things, right? Not just, not just building it, right?

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was over how many months, like all those tokens were not just on Claude Bot.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  That was just all of his, like, hundreds or tens of.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  And he says he talks to Opus four five all the time, too, so I wonder what he's, what numbers he's putting up there. But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions, like, it's, it's, it's pretty accessible. I don't know, we need to, we need to find a new AGI benchmark.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Okay, so I, I think, um, maybe it's something like this, right? So I think the main, one of the main takeaways I have from this is just that, um, like, big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing, right?

• 49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Maxum companies are not going to like talk to each other, they're not going to, you're not going to get OpenAI in, in WhatsApp, stuff like this.

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  So it really reinforces the idea.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  But do you think they would go so far as to say, we are not going to allow you to navigate our applications using?

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  Using something like.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  I mean, that's literally happening with like the New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bot. Like you can go to.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but but it's different having your local device being effectively used by.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it is.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  The computer just using itself.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  At at the same time, if if OpenAI has the ChatGPT app, right now, if you go to the ChatGPT website and you say, hey, I found this, I I'm a subscriber to the New York Times and there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link. Can you open the link and turn it into some bullet points for me? It'll just say like, no, no, I can't go over there. Like they they said, don't go. I'm not going, right? Now, if I download the ChatGPT app and it's able to run that and maybe the New York Times can't block it. The New York Times still has the ability to like sue OpenAI and like be a headache. So then.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  They can just say, hey, enforce the same thing.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  Talking about a situation where the user, let's say they have a Mac mini.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  They're running Moltbot.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  They, on the computer.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  They've given Moltbot their New York Times login.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  So it's fully logged in.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  And they're paying New York Times subscriber. I I would be, I think users would be upset if you're saying if the New York Times says, we're not going to allow, we're going to figure out a way to try to.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know how you would go about trying to actually stop that activity, but I'm just saying even,

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  even I can imagine users are going to, users are basically going to demand. I.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  If my data, I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Jordi Hays?

  I want to be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Jordi Hays?

  Even if I'm not physically present with the device, right?

• 51:51John Coogan?

  I I I agree.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  And so I just, I just think it's going to be a really, really, really tough argument. For some of these larger companies to say you can't, you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Yes, I want to get Tyler's response, but first I'm 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. Tyler, what are you thinking?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, so I agree. I think basically where your astronomy is that all these companies need incredible deal guys, right? This is the whole thesis, like the

• 52:23John Coogan?

  Deal guy error.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  With open source, with this like hacker culture, you can kind of always get around these rules. Is it like maybe breaking terms service like def? Yes, definitely. These big companies can't do it. They need more deal guys, right? But it's like hard to find these deal guys. You need the AI to become the deal guy. So you need a Claude bot deal guy. That's the new benchmark.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  That's the new benchmark.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  You know, you're going to make in deals.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Okay. Claude bot AI that can do a deal between two mag seven companies. Here we go.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. Move it to the other side.

• 52:53John Coogan?

  Time to move the

• 52:54Jordi Hays?

  See ya. See ya. Tyler, why do you? I kind of want to take this a little bit further just because I don't know, like how do you actually enforce this? Is is Google Drive going to say you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?

• 53:18Speaker 03

  I mean, you can always do these like bot detection stuff with like whatever it's coming from the same IP, these things. I think it's like kind of a constant race. But like I think the open source stuff will, if you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only only real solution is to have like actual, I think, deals between these like different companies.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that if you if you have an app from a big company that enables you to do something like like Like if if Chrome started shipping with a torrent browser, something that would allow you to manage torrents, which are not illegal, like that's just software, you can just download torrents that are not piracy. Like I can just be like, hey, I put up a torrent of TVP and content, anyone can download it. But just by virtue of the fact that it's so prevalently used to pirate media, they would face pressure from media owners, Warner Brothers and Disney,

• 54:22John Coogan?

  and they would get angry letters and they would strike a deal and say, okay, yes, like, we're not going to enable this. And so even though, so, so if if any of the big tech companies launch an app that enables behavior that other apps don't like, they will have leverage and they all have deals together and they all have legal teams and there's a bunch of different pressures that they can apply. And it's this like constant negotiation, oh, well, you know, maybe we won't renew this deal or this contract, maybe we'll go with someone else. If you're the bad actor, you'll get pushed out, right? So I don't know. I think it's going to be a big, a big debate. I, I, I don't, I don't, I would be surprised if I, if, if any of the big labs just launch something that can actually just go and do

• 55:07John Coogan?

  anywhere and do anything because the pushback.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  But do you think, do you think this is something that will, like, why would this just not happen at the OS layer?

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  I mean, then, then you need Apple to like actually lock in.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  You do.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Which is like.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or Satya.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that's why we're having Mark German on the show to break down Apple's strategy and what they're doing. Anyway, interesting. MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Kimi 2.5 is out and Alex Chima is running it on his desk. It runs at 24 tokens per second with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios connected via Thunderbolt. He went much bigger than the Mac Mini. And Joe Wes.

• 56:01Jordi Hays?

  By the way, apparently Kimi likes to be, refers to itself as Claude.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened here Tyler? Can you break down what's going on with Kimi?

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's always kind of unclear with the Chinese open source models, like what they're actually doing to train the models. So there's like, yeah, so when you ask the models, like introduce yourself, it's like, hello, I'm Claude. So there's probably like two scenarios. One is that they they trained on the outputs of like Opus or Anthropic model, right?

• 56:28John Coogan?

  You'd think that they would just find and replace in the training data though, you know, like that'd be pretty easy to just be like, okay, we're going to scrape a ton of, a ton of responses from Claude. Let's make sure we do a find and replace on Claude so that if it says, hi, I'm Claude, I'm helpful assistant, it just changes that. That's just like an.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you would expect that that Kimi knows that it's gonna call itself Claude.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  So it's like, why would they allow that? Maybe they're just basically like mugging Anthropic, like, oh yeah, we have Claude.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  What are you gonna do about it?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, what are you gonna do?

• 56:59John Coogan?

  We stole Claude.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then there are also some rumors, like very unclear if this is just like completely fake headlines, but like maybe there was some leaked checkpoint that somehow got out to China and then they did a fine tune on it or something.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be pretty, pretty crazy if.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, people have said it before for other models. It's, I'm not really sure how reliable they are, but it seems like fairly, very likely that they just trained on Opus outputs.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  Because you kind of, people said DeepSeek did that originally with, with ChatGPT.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  I talked to one, one technologist about like what it takes to reverse engineer like the GPT-4 API and it's, it's a surprisingly low amount of outputs to sort of interpolate all the weights or something that approximates it. So it's clearly sort of a. Sort of a game back and forth, a, yeah, yeah, just like a constant war.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I, I think it is quite, um, I think it's probably a good sign for US AI labs that, um, the Chinese models are essentially just like completely based off the US ones. Like they're not actually training these models from scratch.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  They're not doing these incredible, uh, you know, training runs for, for much cheaper. Like people say, um, they're actually just, they're basically just like copying off, off the US.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Do you think that's because of just chip restrictions or, or actual like architectural hurdles?

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's probably all of them.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Um, like it's, it's hard to, to figure out the architecture.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  You don't have the chips to, to try these like different, you know, science projects, training runs.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Wow, the, the, the Chinese models lag by exactly how long it takes to, to, to scrape the API basically and do a, do a fine tune. What a coincidence.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Uh, Dean Ball has been on a tear.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Last 24 hours.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Good post.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  He said, "People significantly underrate the current margins of AI labs. Yet another way in which pattern matching to the technology and business trends of the 2010s has become a key ingredient in the manufacturing of AI. Copium."

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Copium.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  And he says.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  This Derek Muller, uh, post was very informative here. "Just look at the market clearing prices on inference from open source models and you can tell the big labs pricing has plenty of margin. Uh, Deep Infra has GLM 4.7 at 43 cents in, $1.75 out. Sonnet is at $3.00 in, $15.00 out. How could anyone think Anthropic isn't printing money per marginal token?" And Dean Ball says, "The reason they think labs lose money is because 10 years ago, some companies in an entirely unrelated part of the economy, lost money on office rentals, WeWork, and taxis, Uber. And everyone thought they would go bankrupt because at that time, another company that made overhyped blood tests, Aronos, did go back, did go bankrupt. That is literally the level of ape-like pattern matching going on here.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  The machines must look at our chattering classes and feel great appetite."

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, you, you could also have, uh, like seen the margins from the whole, uh, open code thing with Anthropic.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Right, where there was, um, Open code, so Anthropic, they have Claude code, right? You can get the Claude subscription and you get like free Claude code tokens. And then you could use those to off for open code and they remove that.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  And the whole reason you would want to do that is because the like Claude code tokens versus like actual Claude API.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Is like 10x difference.

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  So there's like a massive markup to the actual API.

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  So you'd assume that like unless Anthropic is losing just insane amounts of money on Claude code, which maybe they're losing some amounts of money, it's like.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, you look back at the, I forget which interview Dario was doing where he was trying to get people to think about like, you think of each model as a company.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Where you spend all this money on training.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Which is CapEx.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  And then when you're actually running the model, it's very profitable.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  But if you look at the business as a whole, you have massive, massive losses.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  From training.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  And stock-based comp and, and you know, hiring 1,400, you know, of the best engineers in the world. So if you actually look at, on a company, just company-wide, you have, you know, continued scaling, massive losses.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  But the important thing is that the, effectively at the product level, when they're selling the product, they're actually are making money.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So in the S1, good to you and to me, looks like training clearly broken out as CapEx, solid gross margins above 60%, something like that on inference. And then, you know, all of the AI copium can probably subside if OpenAI or Anthropic go out with an S1 that shows really solid inference margins. Yeah. And if it comes out that it's like, oh, their inference margin's like 10% or something, then people are going to be panicking.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, I think these will be some of the most special S1s.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  It's gonna be exciting.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  That have ever graced the capital markets.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  It'll be great. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  And without further ado, we have Mark Gurman.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  The Gurmanator.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  Managing editor of Bloomberg in the UltraDome. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down.

• 1:02:10Mark Gurman?

  Right there?

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, right here.

• 1:02:12Mark Gurman?

  Okay.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Uh, we'll have this microphone for you. You have Diet Coke, so you're locked in.

• 1:02:16Mark Gurman?

  Ready to go.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  How have you been? How's your new year going so far?

• 1:02:19Mark Gurman?

  Oh, fricking great.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 1:02:22Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, had a, my wife and I had a baby at the end of last year.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Gong, gong, gong.

• 1:02:29Mark Gurman?

  I maybe get one of those uh things that you guys make on the Twitter and it's me.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  The card.

• 1:02:36Mark Gurman?

  Baby.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Baby, oh well, we'd be happy to do that.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  We're happy to do it. We never, we never, yeah, we never, we never know. Some people, some people want to be, you know, more low key about it.

• 1:02:44Mark Gurman?

  Oh, I am low key about it. I just figured, you know.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  But, but how do you, how do you rate parenthood? How does it uh, how does it feel being in it versus, you know, all the expectations that, that people have?

• 1:02:56Mark Gurman?

  Just taking care of this individual and they, they're being so reliant on us and getting to, to teach them, but uh, shout out to my wife for being the one really pulling the strings there and taking care. So it's great.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  I feel like, I feel like reporting and parenthood are especially hard to balance in some ways.

• 1:03:23Mark Gurman?

  Still early.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, I would, yeah, no, I would, I would just like, obviously it's completely possible and you're, you're clearly doing fine, but the nature of the work means that like a story is happening and you want to be the first to provide the best coverage. And sometimes, you know, baby's crying.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  And you might not be able to pick up the phone.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  But you get through.

• 1:03:44Mark Gurman?

  You know what? People, people have been hearing crying babies over the phone for uh.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:03:50Mark Gurman?

  For, for forever. So they'll have to deal with it. I just can't wait till we go on an airplane.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:55Mark Gurman?

  I already told my wife, I can't, you know, we're gonna get like banned from American Airlines.

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  No, I've, I've said this on the show before. I, I like, the funniest thing is growing up, I assume that when a baby was crying on the airplane, it means that the parents were bad parents. Like they were doing something wrong.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  And in reality, babies just cry for a million reasons and it's totally possible that there's no solution sometimes. They just need to.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I saw like an Instagram reel of. Of a mother talking about her kid and the kid was crying in the background. I was like, why would you take advice from her? Like, that's such a bad bond.

• 1:04:26Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, it has nothing to do with that.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  And that's not it at all. It's like now, the baby's always crying. It's crazy.

• 1:04:30Mark Gurman?

  They're hungry, they have guests, they don't like the sweater they're wearing.

• 1:04:35John Coogan?

  There's a million reasons.

• 1:04:36Mark Gurman?

  You know, they didn't like my article, you know, like, who knows? But anyways.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:04:40Mark Gurman?

  Let's talk about Apple.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's talk about Apple. I mean, we've been talking about new Siri, expectations there. The big news yesterday was Claude Bot. Have you been, do you think there's anything about, have you been, how have you been processing the Claude Bot, now Molt Bot story? What's possible there? Expectations around AI assistants feel sky high in the open source community? What do you, do you think, like, anyone at Apple's, like, updating on Claude Bot and Molt Bot and what's possible?

• 1:05:10Mark Gurman?

  Well, let me just take a step.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Please, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:12Mark Gurman?

  You know, with Apple and AI.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Mark Gurman?

  So in 20, what is it, 2018, they hired John Jean Andrea. He was this high flyer at Google. He ran AI in search and Apple thought they had a coup here. Apple thought they would hire this guy and really just hit the ground running and be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Just seven years earlier, they announced Siri. In 2011, there was absolutely nothing like it. It was breakthrough.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Mark Gurman?

  But then it just became utter junk, right? Google Assistant lapped it, Alexa lapped it. So they thought they were going to bring this guy in and it'd be a game changer. Turns out, and maybe this will be Tim Cook's fait accompli, but this was the biggest mistake this hire of Tim Cook's tenure. I think it's easy to say. Apple is so behind in AI. There's been so much ink spilled on this and so many conversations on this and I've written about and talked about it half a million times. I think it does, you haven't even scratched the surface about how big of a problem this is for Apple, right? They've completely screwed up AI in every which way and it comes down to just hiring the wrong people and entrusting the wrong people.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  But is it a do nothing win scenario? Because I think we're seeing a situation now where the Mac Mini might end up selling out everywhere.

• 1:06:31John Coogan?

  Stock seems fine. Are you seeing, like, financial impact?

• 1:06:35Mark Gurman?

  Well, the stock, that's the problem, right? When you've had no Real negative hit.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Mark Gurman?

  It's hard to.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Go wartime.

• 1:06:44Mark Gurman?

  Go wartime, right?

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  And acknowledge that there is a failure because all the numbers are folded.

• 1:06:48Mark Gurman?

  It is wartime, right?

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Mark Gurman?

  The numbers are great. Tomorrow, they might report their first hundred thirty-five billion to a hundred forty billion dollar quarter, right? Like.

• 1:07:04Mark Gurman?

  I don't, you know, the problem is, how can you put a hundred forty billion dollars and Tim Cook needs to go retire in the same sentence?

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:07:14Mark Gurman?

  It doesn't make sense. But when you think about the long term, you think about the future.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Mark Gurman?

  These things are going to need to get rectified. And I guess the good news is they are on a path to rectifying it to some extent. This Google Gemini deal is a breakthrough for Apple. It's embarrassing. I mean, it's absolutely crazy that.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  You poached their guy, and then years later, you're paying them billions.

• 1:07:39Mark Gurman?

  He screws you up, okay? You pay him twenty-five million a year for eight years, right? And then now you're paying basically four X that, eight X that, maybe a little bit more, in order to get, you know, the new good stuff.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Mark Gurman?

  And so they'll announce a new Siri next month. The thing with this new Siri is basically a replay of everything they announced in June twenty twenty-four. So it's basically everything they announced two years ago, coming very late. Things like using what's on your screen to fulfill Siri queries, uh, being able to control your apps. And then in June is when the good stuff launches. That's when Apple launches its first chatbot. It's interesting because they've spent the last two years saying, nobody likes chatbots, everyone hates ChatGPT, it's terrible, it's ruining the world. Okay, then you have ChatGPT with nearly a billion, right, active users. So they're like, okay, we kind of got to do this or we're screwed. Uh, so they're doing it.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Mark Gurman?

  And it's actually going to run on Google servers, Google Cloud Platform, Google TPUs. This is great for Google too. And I think some people at Apple think this is going to be like a short-term thing. You know, we're going to partner with Google till we get our act together. No, I definitely think that this is more of a long-term play unless these models continue to get commoditized, which they will eventually, but this is not a 12, 24, 36-month thing. This is, this is longer term, I think, than people expect.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  And Apple can't just go wrap Llama because of the Terms of Service that Meta's put around, put that around. They said you can't use Llama.

• 1:09:06Mark Gurman?

  Well, I don't think they want to use Llama. I don't think they want to work with Meta.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  They don't want to use Chinese open-source models, so there aren't that many games in tech.

• 1:09:12Mark Gurman?

  Well, let's take a step back here. So, they're using Google in the US, right? But they're gonna have to do something in China.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:21Mark Gurman?

  And so you'll see them use a combination of Alibaba and Weibo, I think it's Weibo or Tencent or one of those, different AIs for different features. And so they'll use them. And just because they're partnering with Google Gemini on Siri in this chatbot, doesn't mean they're not using other players. There's a lot of OpenAI and a lot of applications. They launched their Creative Cloud competitor today, and a lot of those AI features are powered by ChatGPT, like some image generation stuff. I still think on an image generation side, you're getting a little bit better on OpenAI than you're getting from Google. And then a lot of stuff internally, like Apple runs

• 1:10:03Mark Gurman?

  on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools. So that's a big one to watch. They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally too, because this Google deal, this just came together a few months ago, they were not going to use Google. Apple actually was going to rebuild Siri around Claude. But Anthropic, they were holding them over a barrel. They wanted a crap-ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year, and at a price that doubled on an annual basis as well for the next three years or so, from what I understand. At the time, Google was really an afterthought because they were in the middle of the trial with

• 1:10:48Mark Gurman?

  the Department of Justice. And then, for some reason, the judge ruled that Apple and Google's deal was kosher, even though everyone knows it's a huge issue and our monopoly and all that. I'm not here to be a judge. I write, I don't make judgments for legal proceedings. But anyways, Apple and Google get off scot-free, they can do whatever they want now, and, you know, they're not being held back at all. And then, obviously, OpenAI, that is a real firestorm for Apple right now. Like, OpenAI, obviously, they're working on these AirPods competitors, the ChatGPT built-in.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Sweet P.

• 1:11:23Mark Gurman?

  Sweet P. Johnny Ive is, you know, running the show and design there. That's a big frickin' deal. Okay? He raided the whole design team, all of the Apple designers that were there under Johnny Ive, not all of them, 95% of them are gone. You know, a ton of them are now working at Love from and OpenAI and other companies, some of them have retired. But the crux of it is, like, how do you partner with a company that's trying to put you out of business, right? So there's no way that they were gonna work with OpenAI, no matter how good the financial

• 1:11:54Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about some of the projections that you've seen, or kind of estimates around, I forget, was it Foxconn was saying, like, preparing? Forty-five million units. Yeah, preparing to be able to produce something like that in the first year. It feels like a massive number, but at the same time, you have a billion users.

• 1:12:14Mark Gurman?

  Talking about the OpenAI earbuds?

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the sweet.

• 1:12:17Mark Gurman?

  You know, it's so interesting.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  And one more thing there.

• 1:12:21Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  That your, the earbuds, the benefit of them versus some of these other AI hardware is like, if you can just take calls and listen to music, like, already you have some functionality that people are using all day long. Sure, sure. So it's not the same as, like, wearing a pendant or having some other little gadget that, like, actually serves no real use case, or at least not a powerful use case. If I can just listen to calls, or sorry, take calls, listen to music, at least there's like some, like, base level functionality, and then you layer on the AI, and maybe it turns into this amazing, you know, super differentiated experience.

• 1:12:55Mark Gurman?

  I just don't see it. I just don't see them selling 45 million units. I just don't see it being a success. The barrier to entry for a new hardware company, as you know, is extremely high. Like, can you even think of one hardware company that just? Came into being and became an immediate success. Like, I just don't see it. And I also think the reason they're doing earbuds is because it's more low-hanging fruit, to your point, and it's easier to accomplish. It's not what they want it to do. What OpenAI wanted to do is they wanted to create an iPhone killer. Instead, now they're trying to create an AirPods killer, and I don't think they're going to be able to accomplish that. Will they look nicer than the AirPods? Probably. Will they have better AI than the AirPods? That's an open question, right? What stops Apple from expanding this Gemini deal to its AirPods?

• 1:13:39Mark Gurman?

  And just basically adding a bunch of AI functionality to the AirPods? They have very fast processors, very tight iPhone integration. Apple can replicate whatever OpenAI is going to do pretty quickly by relying on Google and Gemini and whatever they can cook up functionality-wise there.

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that AI, specifically products, you know, that we had the creator of Moltbot on yesterday, and he was saying, like, there's so many applications, and he was referencing, like, MyFitnessPal. Do I really need MyFitnessPal if I can just take a picture and just send it in to my agent? And it'll track it? And so what I was thinking there is, like, does that make the App Store broadly potentially less of a hurdle with OpenAI is launching, eventually launches, a new phone? And they have a new OS, and they don't have an App Store, they don't have an App Store on day one.

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  It instantiates the equivalence of apps on the fly.

• 1:14:32Mark Gurman?

  Well, if you ask me, you know, we're already in the territory where iOS and the App Store are legacy features, right? Like, the App Store is a legacy world. The iOS user experience, the macOS user experience, where you're jumping between applications, where you're going into something to get information, where you're going back to your home screen to launch another app. Apps are the past. AI agents are already here, and that's the move forward. And whenever OpenAI comes out with a phone, and I do eventually anticipate them coming out with a phone. And when I say phone, I'm not talking necessarily about something you put to your ear, like a classic phone, like an iPhone. I'm talking about, I feel like people are always gonna have some sort of slab in their pocket, right?

• 1:15:17Mark Gurman?

  Because it's convenient, you get the display, you get the sensors, you get the battery, you get the cameras. It's not a replicable experience, no matter how many different gadgets you wanna put on your body.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Like a banana, like a plastic banana, smart banana.

• 1:15:31Mark Gurman?

  That would be fun. Yeah. So, yeah, AI agents are where the the world is going. And I totally expect Apple to move in this direction. This new Siri campo that they're launching at the end of this year, that is a huge step towards the AI agentification of different features on the phone. And being able to, for instance, tell your phone, pull up this photo that I I took at the studio, find photos where I have bottles of water, and remove the bottle of water from the from the from the photo, and email or to text it to Mark, right? Like, the AI agentification of iOS is happening.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and theoretically Siri should have killed like the weather app a long time ago. Because I don't like, when you think about, like, if you're just going to navigate to the weather app and you're traveling somewhere, and you're like, oh, where is this city? Oh, I don't have it saved. I'm gonna search and add it. And then you're like, finally looking at it, and it should just be a prompt.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  You sort of can ask, but then, when you try and click a level deeper, when this in the current Siri experience, you just can't get.

• 1:16:37Mark Gurman?

  That is the big problem with Siri, and the big difference from ChatGPT and Gemini, is it has the going a level deeper problem. There's no back and forth. It forgets context very easily. It has no memory. It doesn't have that tight integration with applications because the app developers, they know Siri is so terrible. You know, here's a question. So, what if I told you that you could call an Uber with Siri, right? Like, you guys probably know that. But like, does anyone use it? I don't have the data. But I can tell you that they announced support for that, and they actually rolled out.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Five years ago?

• 1:17:09Mark Gurman?

  No, 10 years.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  10 years ago?

• 1:17:11Mark Gurman?

  Okay. It doesn't work, because nobody uses it. Because it's too cumbersome.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:17:17Mark Gurman?

  Okay, like, I'm very tech forward, as anyone watching this probably knows. You know, it's right up my alley to have Siri call my Uber for me. But like, I've never done it, because you know what? I don't fricking trust it.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:30Mark Gurman?

  It's not, I don't think it's gonna work. And it's just going to be a time suck.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  And people didn't trust ChatGPT with 3.5, but now on 5.2 Pro.

• 1:17:38Mark Gurman?

  I would trust ChatGPT with ordering an Uber. I would trust ChatGPT with my life. But Siri?

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so on the Siri rollout, it seems like there's a couple of milestones that we're going to be tracking throughout this year. When will, when do you think I'll be able to go to Siri and just say a general Google-able question, you know, give me the history of the Roman Empire, the type of thing that any LLM can just pull up a couple paragraphs on, but current Siri does not have that ability?

• 1:18:11Mark Gurman?

  Okay, I can't tell you that you're going to be able to do it. I can tell you that you're supposed to be able to do it. How's that? I'll speak, I'll speak.

• 1:18:17John Coogan?

  I just mean, I just mean, is that?

• 1:18:19Mark Gurman?

  Like, what's the goal?

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  No, no, I just mean, like, there's knowledge retrieval.

• 1:18:22Mark Gurman?

  End of March.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  And then, and then there's, and then there's like agentification, like making, interacting with the apps, doing all the things like pulling what's in your camera roll together with your iMessage and all that.

• 1:18:32Mark Gurman?

  End of March.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  And that feels harder for both of those end of March.

• 1:18:35Mark Gurman?

  They're supposed to be end of March.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:37Mark Gurman?

  But the latter, in terms of the app manipulation and the AI agent, that's going to be split probably between.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Because that seems harder than just integrate Gemini and just give people the Gemini answers when they, when they ask Siri for a question.

• 1:18:49Mark Gurman?

  You know, it's so funny. I look back to WWC 2024, and obviously I made a big deal about all the delays because of course I did. But then you think about it, it's like, was anyone going to use these, any of these features anyways? Like, we're talking about a few features that were delayed, and you look back at the announcement of these features at WWC 2024, it's like, Apple totally downplayed them too. Like, they gave a few cool demos, but it's like, this is some game-changing stuff if it's marketed correctly.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Mark Gurman?

  So not only did they pre-announce it, not only did they delay it, but like, they didn't even market what they had in the hand correctly, which I guess in hindsight, like, you should have realized that it wasn't that compelling or ready to go if they weren't going to market it. Because I'm telling you, they can market anything.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  How does, how do you see search? Fitting into Siri, because so much of what people are using L L Ms for is search now. And you're seeing more commerce integrations. And I've always thought the labs, like obsession with the browser was interesting because in many ways, like I feel like using L L Ms, it already feels like you're using a browser. It's just kind of a new experience. And and a big question is like, OK, so Google's powering the new Siri. What happens when people start doing searches with high intent in Siri?

• 1:20:08Mark Gurman?

  Do you Google search anymore?

• 1:20:10Jordi Hays?

  I do.

• 1:20:11Mark Gurman?

  I don't.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  I I specifically still Google search when doing like product research, shopping, et cetera.

• 1:20:17Mark Gurman?

  I don't.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  I still go to Google if it's something that I know is fastest in Google. So today I wanted to know what year the Avengers movie came out. And I know that that's half a millisecond in Google. And I know that that's five seconds in any L L M. And so I'll Ctrl T to go there. But for any level deeper, I also wanted to know about the V F X house that worked on it and what technology they used and when that happened, that was an L M query.

• 1:20:46Mark Gurman?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't really use Google anymore. I have my action button on my phone sent to chat G P T. And I'm just like living in chat G P T.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:20:54Mark Gurman?

  You can't ask it the weather. Can't ask it to do anything on your phone.

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:20:58Mark Gurman?

  That's, I guess, the the differentiator for what the new Siri is going to be. They've built a feature called World Knowledge Answers, the internal name. And it's basically a perplexity ripoff or a web search ripoff in chat G P T, which is to to bullet out summaries and information and give you citations and context.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Is it using Google directly for that? Or is it some other?

• 1:21:19Mark Gurman?

  It's an Apple solution.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  OK.

• 1:21:21Mark Gurman?

  It's an Apple solution. But the the what they've been trying to do now is, under the hood, change that to the Gemini model. Again, all this stuff was supposed to come out.

• 1:21:32Jordi Hays?

  Because Gemini is very good at Google search.

• 1:21:34Mark Gurman?

  Gemini is very good at Google search, but there's no Google services in this new Siri. It's literally a model. It's basically like they hired the Google Deep Mind team to develop the model to power its A I in Siri.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I guess what I'm getting at is, is will I ever get, if I'm doing, using Siri to research a product? Will I ever get an ad powered by like a Apple ad network? Because it is a high-intent search.

• 1:22:03Mark Gurman?

  Like ever?

• 1:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Mark Gurman?

  I think the end game for all these guys is to put ads in this stuff.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Mark Gurman?

  You know, one thing that I haven't talked about in a while now.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  And I just feel like that's been somewhat under discussed because people are so obsessed with just make Siri work.

• 1:22:18Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  That if it does end up working really well, then you would have a effectively a search engine.

• 1:22:24Mark Gurman?

  Well, yeah, if it works, they have all the tools to a search engine and if it does work well. Yeah, they'll probably eventually put ads in it. A couple of things that haven't discussed in a while. One is they're, you know, working on a new Safari web browser and you're going to see AI search at the forefront of that. The other thing is the adsification, the advertisingification of of the Apple operating systems that starts this year. You're going to see them up the ad slots in the App Store in search, in search in particular.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Give it up for more ads.

• 1:23:02Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, ads. Any sponsors you want to give a shout out to over here?

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Don't tempt Joe.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  I will do it.

• 1:23:11Mark Gurman?

  And then you're going to see ads in Apple Maps.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:23:15Mark Gurman?

  You know?

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  That's been one of the main differentiators in the different apps.

• 1:23:19Mark Gurman?

  Well, you know, it'll be all AI and it'll be targeted to based on things that you're searching. Like if you see a sushi restaurant, search for sushi, whatever, you may see some search results get elevated. It's kind of like what Yelp does.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Mark Gurman?

  Right? By the way, it's so funny on Siri, like there's this Japanese restaurant in the valley I like. And it's named after a city in Japan or a province in Japan. And it's like, take me to Chiba.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Mark Gurman?

  Right? And I've been, that's the name of the place. Shout out to Chiba.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, boss, you're going to need to get in a boat.

• 1:23:50Mark Gurman?

  Oh, my God. It's like, oh, it immediately pops up, 7,652 miles away. I'm like, I've been to this place 50 damn times. You should know by now, talking about the restaurant.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:02Mark Gurman?

  20 miles away.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:03Mark Gurman?

  Not the city. 8,000 miles away. It's really amazing.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Hiring, chartering an aircraft, sir.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I got a bunch of other stuff in the Apple ecosystem. First, Starlink is reportedly planning to integrate, uh, Apple's reportedly planning to integrate Starlink connectivity into the iPhone 18 Pro.

• 1:24:22Mark Gurman?

  You know, I saw, you saw this stuff on Twitter the last couple of days. There's been no reporting on this recently, by the way. This is another, see, this is one of the downsides to AI. People just spew BS on Twitter.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:24:34Mark Gurman?

  Okay, so Apple already does work with Starlink.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Mark Gurman?

  Right?

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Mark Gurman?

  You can hook in, if you have a T-Mobile iPhone, you can get on to, to Starlink.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:42Mark Gurman?

  So that already exists.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have, I've experienced, I experienced, I think during the fires last year. So, no, all the cell service was down.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  I'm on Verizon.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  If you want, if you want satellite.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Satellite on the 17, but it's not, what?

• 1:24:56Mark Gurman?

  You don't want to be on Verizon.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  I, I should get off of it, but, uh, but it's not, it's not, uh, Starlink, it's the old network.

• 1:25:02Mark Gurman?

  On which? On the Verizon one?

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Mark Gurman?

  You're talking about on the, the Apple network?

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, like, like if I'm in an emergency situation, I can get out like one text message, it's really, really slow and it's clearly going with like, I think ViaSat.

• 1:25:12Mark Gurman?

  The Apple network is just super legacy.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just older.

• 1:25:15Mark Gurman?

  They've got a, they've got to strip that down and partner and rebuild or something. Anyways, the iPhone 18 is going to have enhanced satellite connectivity.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:22Mark Gurman?

  Uh, and they'll, you know, obviously work with Starlink and, you know, whoever, whomever, so that's coming. What else have we got on our plate? You want to talk about John Turnus?

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:25:32Mark Gurman?

  Let's talk about Turnus.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Turn us around, John.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:34Mark Gurman?

  John, okay.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I, so I have a bunch of questions, let's start with like, uh, how, like, wh- wh- what is going on behind the scenes of this campaign? It feels like there's, it feels like, it feels like internally, politics, there could be like people like pushing for him, pushing against him, there's this weird quote that keeps going out that people say he's never made a decision in his life.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Everybody keeps making the most underhanded compliments that I've ever seen.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it's like, yeah, he's shipped a lot of products, but.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  He's never had to make a hard decision, that's the one.

• 1:26:06Mark Gurman?

  Just wait for my profile on Bloomberg.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:08Mark Gurman?

  You'll get the real story soon.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:26:10Mark Gurman?

  I'm not going to give it all away today.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:26:12Mark Gurman?

  But I'm here.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:13Mark Gurman?

  For the company.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  Appreciate it.

• 1:26:15Mark Gurman?

  Got to give the shout out, stay tuned for the article.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:26:17Mark Gurman?

  Uh, subscribe to Power On.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:26:20Mark Gurman?

  Tech bundle.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Mark Gurman?

  Uh, it's great value. Okay, Turnus, he's 50. Mm-hmm. Everyone else on the Apple executive team, late 50s through their mid 60s. Yeah. Turning 66 this year, in the case of Tim Cook. Mm-hmm. You're Apple's board, you like continuity, you like an insider, you like people who know what they're doing, have been there for a while, they know where the bodies are buried. Mm-hmm. Okay? These guys all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. Uh, yeah, at 50, he's the only one who is, if let's say, Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years, you're not going to appoint another CEO who's 65, 70 years old. Yeah. He's the only guy. Mm-hmm. Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. He's the hardware guy.

• 1:27:06Mark Gurman?

  Yep. Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No. No. He's a steady hand, knows what he's doing. He's really the only choice. You know, there was this New York Times report a few weeks ago, basically saying that it could be Greg Joswiak, it could be Eddie Q, it could be Deirdre O'Brien, it could be Craig Federighi. It's for sure not going to be Craig. It's not going to be Deirdre. It's not going to be Eddie, it's not going to be Jaws. The only category that makes sense is an operations person, because you look at the current CEO, Tim, obviously comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long, I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long, he's done, obviously, a fantastic job for shareholders and employees and what have you, would have been Jeff Williams.

• 1:27:50Mark Gurman?

  He was the COO. Uh, so, Sabi Khan, he was named COO, you know, a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say. Uh, so anyways, it'll be Turnus, or Sabi, or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. Um, so, we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are trending towards Turnus. Mm-hmm. Everyone has an opinion that Turnus is going to be the next CEO, fine. I've been shouting this from rooftops the last two years, but no one has given evidence, like, what is this based on? Right? Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility?

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  Do they have a, like, a big baton?

• 1:28:27Mark Gurman?

  They've got one of these.

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  Golden baton?

• 1:28:29Mark Gurman?

  You know what you have? You have white smoke coming out of the... Sure. Well, actually, no, there's no, there's no smoke. There's no smoke. It's very environmentally friendly. Environment friendly, yeah. Um, so, you know, maybe out of the parking garage. White reflection out of the sun, the solar panels. Yeah. A glint off the solar panel. Exactly. Uh, so what? You want evidence? Yes. You want to hear that he's been getting more responsibility? Okay. One, a few months ago, took full control of the Apple Watch engineering team that was co-run with the old COO until he retired. Okay, there's something for you. When they started soft firing the head of AI, the guy we were talking about earlier, they took

• 1:29:10Mark Gurman?

  the robotic stuff away from him. They gave that to Turnus. And then the real news, as they broke last week, is that even though on paper, Tim Cook is running the Apple design teams, it's not. It's Turnus. He took over at the end of last year for a variety of reasons. But you look at who's run design at Apple over the course of history. Well, like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook himself, between 15 and 17, Jeff Williams, who was the number two in era parent for a long time, and then obviously all heard of Johnny Ive.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:40Mark Gurman?

  Now, you add John Turnus to that list. It's a big sign. It's a big indicator because you look at what Apple is known for as a company and its design, right, that design function. And it's not just hardware. It's hardware and software that he's overseeing as the manager of both of those teams. So I would say that is your first piece of evidence that he's getting some more material.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  What does he have to do, since he's the hardware guy, to communicate that he has a steady hand on the tiller as Apple transitions into the AI age? Like, the narrative is that they have delivered on hardware. They have not delivered on AI.

• 1:30:18Mark Gurman?

  No, they haven't.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  And so how is he going to communicate that he's forward-thinking and can be the one to keep him on the cutting edge?

• 1:30:25Mark Gurman?

  Taking a step back, you think about succession at all of these big tech companies, right? Like, who's gonna take over Google one day? Who's gonna take over Microsoft one day? Who's gonna take over Amazon one day, right? Like, it's probably gonna be the AI guys at all of these companies, right? Apple doesn't really have an AI guy.

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:30:42Mark Gurman?

  They're trying to make Craig Federighi the AI guy, but he's not CEO material. He's voiceless himself, so don't get mad at me, Craig. But, yeah, Turnus, can he become the AI guy at Apple? Like, I think it's too early to tell, and I think that is a big question there. Like, do you put a hardware person in charge of the AI era?

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  People have been speculating that Apple would do some...

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Big M and A deal to bring some AI native talent in house.

• 1:31:12Mark Gurman?

  They wanted to buy perplexity.

• 1:31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Mark Gurman?

  So the origin story, they were really talking about it. Like Eddie Q was seriously considering Adrian Parek, other head of corp development M and A reports to Tim Cook. They were looking at this pretty closely. Uh, then they pulled out, why were they going to buy perplexity to power the search stuff we were talking about earlier? Became less important after the Google, uh, deal was about to live.

• 1:31:37Jordi Hays?

  And do you think they would have done it if perplexity hadn't been marked up to oblivion?

• 1:31:45Mark Gurman?

  Uh, I think they would have done perplexity at a reasonable price.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like.

• 1:31:49Mark Gurman?

  Apple doesn't overpay.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the thing, low, single digit.

• 1:31:51Mark Gurman?

  I think they would have done it up to five or six billion.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:55Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, but like at this 15, 20. And then perplexity started, you know, trying to say they're going to buy Google Chrome if it got divested and all that. So, uh, and I think they would have done it if the Google search deal was torn apart.

• 1:32:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Mark Gurman?

  In order to bring a search product to market faster. They like to buy companies to, I'm not trying to do Apple corporate speak here, but this is like legit. They buy companies to accelerate their roadmap. You'll hear Tim Cook use those exact words tomorrow.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Mark Gurman?

  Okay, by the way, but literally.

• 1:32:26John Coogan?

  Tomorrow?

• 1:32:26Mark Gurman?

  Apple earnings.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  This guy.

• 1:32:28Mark Gurman?

  Apple earnings.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  This guy.

• 1:32:29Mark Gurman?

  My God. Come on, head in the game.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  But, but is there specifically a deal that he'll be talking about tomorrow?

• 1:32:36Mark Gurman?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Like he will be asked about.

• 1:32:38Mark Gurman?

  I bet he'll mention the Gemini thing.

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  Cause he was asked that in the last earnings and everyone was like, why haven't you done a mega deal?

• 1:32:44Mark Gurman?

  He says this every.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so he just says, it's just gonna be more of the same, got it.

• 1:32:47Mark Gurman?

  You know, what is fair to say is their pace of deal making has decelerated significantly.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:54Mark Gurman?

  Significantly.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  And so, so he will be, I mean, in the last earnings, he was sort of like managing that and saying like, oh, we're still doing deals, but we're selective and we only do it to.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, they also don't care to announce like 95% of the deal.

• 1:33:06Mark Gurman?

  Well, they're big enough, they have to, you know, like the Golden State Warriors, they want Giannis, but they don't want to make a big trade. They don't want to give up other draft picks, right? They're like. Yeah, the same with the Lakers. This is like my existential crisis. The Lakers like, yeah, we'll trade the picks if the right guy becomes available. Yeah, and they know the right guy's not going to become available, right? Just like Apple knows, these companies are always going to be out of the price range they want to pay.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah.

• 1:33:28Mark Gurman?

  The thing with Apple is like, they're very frugal, money-wise, extremely frugal. The other thing is, is they've been burned countless times with acquisitions. Like, that Beats deal, terrible process for integrating that company.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, and even then, I think it was like a 3X revenue multiple. Weren't they doing, wasn't Beats doing like a billion dollars a year?

• 1:33:48Mark Gurman?

  Oh, from a financial standpoint, it was just like a home run. People criticized that deal, but they made it back in months.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:33:54Mark Gurman?

  Oh, Beats?

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  They made the money, but it was a nightmare from a internalization.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's worth noting, because like, even paying for perplexity at 5, 6 billion, it would have been.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  It's going to be years until you monetize that, probably.

• 1:34:08Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, I mean, Beats was monetized from day one. Obviously, you're selling the headphones, which are terrible, by the way, but everyone loves them. And then Apple Music, they, you know?

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:16Mark Gurman?

  Beats started the whole subscription services business at Apple. And so, if you look at it, Beats is one of the most wildly successful technology acquisitions of all time.

• 1:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:27Mark Gurman?

  And then you compare it to how much criticism it got, because it's, oh, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, whatever, whatever, whatever, and the headphones are crap. You know what? From a financial standpoint, home run. Home run.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Mark Gurman?

  You know? But integrating into Apple's culture is not easy.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Speaking of hardware, what's going on with the robotic arm that will live in your kitchen?

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Pixar lamp?

• 1:34:50Mark Gurman?

  It's the Pixar lamp. As you said, it's, you got this 9-inch display, it's like an iPad display, on a robotic arm. It can float around your desk. It can twirl and turn around. Like, you know what we'll do? A few years when this thing comes out, you'll have me back on. And instead of me actually being here, you'll have this on here.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, maybe.

• 1:35:08Mark Gurman?

  You know, leave my head floating around.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, Meta tried to do something like that with the...

• 1:35:13Mark Gurman?

  Meta tried to do something like that. You know, these things are big in China.

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  They are.

• 1:35:16Mark Gurman?

  It's a big thing in China right now.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting.

• 1:35:17Mark Gurman?

  No one really talks about them, but it's a, it's a category that has some potential.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. But it's years away, just because Apple moves slowly?

• 1:35:26Mark Gurman?

  I think it's, uh, stay tuned.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the foldable phone?

• 1:35:29Mark Gurman?

  That's not years away.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  That's that's closer?

• 1:35:31Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, no, that's decades away. No, that's uh, that's uh, coming out in the fall.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Okay, that'll be fun.

• 1:35:36Mark Gurman?

  I can't wait for that.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'll be.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you gonna be a buy?

• 1:35:38Mark Gurman?

  Twenty-two hundred dollars on it.

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  Oh, it's that can be, is it?

• 1:35:41Mark Gurman?

  It'll be at least, it has to be.

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  Is it gonna be the highest tier, the biggest, the most powerful?

• 1:35:45Mark Gurman?

  For Apple? Yeah, that's gonna, it's gonna sit at the top of the line.

• 1:35:48John Coogan?

  It's gonna sit at the top of the lineup, okay. New status symbol.

• 1:35:51Mark Gurman?

  Sorry, what were you?

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we had Ben Thompson on maybe before the end of the year.

• 1:35:56Mark Gurman?

  Feel bad for Ben. You know, he's a big Milwaukee Bucks fan and they're about to ditch Jonas.

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  The Milwaukee Bucks, that's sports team?

• 1:36:04Mark Gurman?

  Really?

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:36:04Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, that's sports. Oh, okay.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  I do know it's a basketball team, and I do know that it's Ben Thompson's favorite team.

• 1:36:09Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  He was talking about the Apple Vision Pro.

• 1:36:11Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, we didn't know what the, when the Super Bowl was.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  He, he, he was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. Uh, I wanted to demo the, the, you know, you can watch the NBA live.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically Ben, Ben.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  You liked it, he didn't.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Ben's pitch was like, screw the, screw the, the Apple produ- highly produced, you know, they're cutting around all the time and he's like, just, just invest the money to set up like the actual hardware in every single stadium.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Cameras.

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  The cameras, so that anybody can just drop in.

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  So you can just sit there, watch the game like you're courtside.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  You don't need the, you don't need the, the Apple announcer, because you can just look at the scoreboard, you can listen to what's going on.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Mark Gurman?

  So he's saying strip the guys out of it?

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Mark Gurman?

  Look, I watched it.

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:51Mark Gurman?

  It was great.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  You watched the whole thing?

• 1:36:52Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, yeah. Trust me, people at home are not happy that night.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, because you're just sitting there.

• 1:36:57Mark Gurman?

  You put that thing on, crying baby, crying baby, and then you're completely isolated. I mean, I'm telling you,

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Wirehead.

• 1:37:03Mark Gurman?

  VR does not work for, for families.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  It's true, yeah.

• 1:37:06Mark Gurman?

  It just doesn't.

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  It's really, yeah, it is one of the major, because then, I mean, the family people have the disposable income more likely, so then they buy it, but they can't use it.

• 1:37:14Mark Gurman?

  It doesn't work.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Mark Gurman?

  Uh, okay, here's the problem.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Mark Gurman?

  It's like once a month. They've got like five games on the calendar.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that, and that was Ben's point, is like, just set up the infrastructure and sell me a pass so that I can drop into any game and sit courtside.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Because right now they have to pull up with a production truck, they need editors, they need voiceovers, they need pre-game, post-game show.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  He's saying, like, there's, there's, you know, basically one-time fixed cost of like, he, he did the math.

• 1:37:37Mark Gurman?

  Put them in all the NBA's DMs.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he said it's like forty grand. It's like, not like a huge amount of money. And you have no incremental cost per show. You're not dealing with producers and running a live, you know.

• 1:37:49Mark Gurman?

  But they need to decide if this hardware is going to continue to exist before they keep investing in the content strategy. Right? It's a chicken and the egg problem, right? How do you sell this thing if there's no content? But why invest millions in the content if you're not planning to sell this thing anyways and you're pivoting to smart glasses? Don't forget, they were supposed to come out with the Vision Air in 27, a product called N100. They, I forgot when my article came out, it's time is a blur, a few months ago, six months ago? Anyways, they killed that thing.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Killed it entirely.

• 1:38:20Mark Gurman?

  Killed it.

• 1:38:20Jordi Hays?

  And the smart glasses.

• 1:38:21Mark Gurman?

  The Vision team on that, by the way.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  The smart glasses.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  That, was that just completely reactionary to Meta?

• 1:38:30Mark Gurman?

  Oh, yeah. They started toying with the smart glasses in terms of like this non-AR smart glasses, right? First of all, AR smart glasses, that has been the vision from day one for a decade plus. But in terms of like this non-display smart glasses, that is a concept that Meta has really popularized. And, you know, when these things started to gain a little bit of steam in 22, 23 is when they started taking a very hard look at it. And they're gonna do it. And I think they're gonna destroy Meta with them, I'll be honest.

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Mark Gurman?

  Feel bad.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  The styling, the pricing, the features, the integration.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  The integration, to me, to me, the challenge is if you can't deliver me iMessage.

• 1:39:10Mark Gurman?

  Yeah. Apple has the ingredients, because of their login, to destroy any company in any hardware. It's just about them figuring out how to do it and get it done and not waiting too long. You know, the biggest problem with them is they just take too long and over-engineer everything.

• 1:39:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Mark Gurman?

  Like the Vision Pro is the most over-engineered device ever, right? They could have got that out three years earlier with a little bit less fit and finish and maybe it would be more successful today.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there was a cycle where the iPhone was ahead of the curve on so many things, touchscreen. And then you, then in the, like that middle decade period, you had the Android folks being like, "Oh, we've had this Apple feature for a year. We've had this for two years." Now it's like five years.

• 1:39:55Mark Gurman?

  There's, you know how many people wouldn't be caught dead with a non-iPhone, you know, like? Doesn't matter, but AI changes that equation.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:01Mark Gurman?

  That changes the equation.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Especially if it's a Johnny Ive product and it's expensive.

• 1:40:05Mark Gurman?

  Well, you know Johnny Ive, obviously he's done amazing things.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Mark Gurman?

  And the new headphones or whatever they come out with are gonna look amazing and probably work amazing.

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Mark Gurman?

  It's just the barrier to entry on hardware is so high.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Mark Gurman?

  There's so much risk there.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I just, I still wonder if the, like the Claude bot, these like open source agents, I don't know that everyone's gonna adopt those, but something like that, that sort of opens up the ecosystem just by brute forcing it. We were debating this earlier, like, you can't get iMessage notifications on the Meta Ray to Band displays.

• 1:40:37Mark Gurman?

  I have them. Do you guys have them?

• 1:40:38John Coogan?

  Uh, I think we do.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  We have some pairs around.

• 1:40:41Mark Gurman?

  I've got one at home.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  We've used the, the, the, the non-displays a bunch, then we demoed the displays and have used them a fair amount, and it's, it's just a hard sell if you're an iMessage user.

• 1:40:50Mark Gurman?

  A hard sell if you're an iMessage user, but the potential is just oozing with potential.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:54Mark Gurman?

  Like, they've got a, they've got a solid product there.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Mark Gurman?

  And like a couple iterations on that, make them a little lighter, get the display resolution up, work better outdoors.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Mark Gurman?

  It's compelling.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  And, and it, and in a world where you have some sort of agent running on your Mac Mini, scraping all your iMessages and then putting them into WhatsApp or something.

• 1:41:15Mark Gurman?

  You know, maybe I'll do that, maybe you guys will do that.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  It's rare, yeah.

• 1:41:19Mark Gurman?

  It's rare. Nobody wants to deal with that.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Mark Gurman?

  You know, nobody wants to deal with it.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  Even if it's just an app that you download like Napster, you don't think so?

• 1:41:27Mark Gurman?

  People, people don't have time for that.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Mark Gurman?

  People don't care.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Probably not, probably not.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what's the latest?

• 1:41:32Mark Gurman?

  I feel like nobody cares about anything anymore. I just feel like.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Back in my day, we used to care.

• 1:41:37Mark Gurman?

  The world has changed.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 1:41:39Mark Gurman?

  The world has changed. They just want everything in front of them. They want everything in their eyeballs. They all want it set up from the get-go. They don't want to put any work in, and they just want it to start working, right?

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Mark Gurman?

  And I think that's been the Apple ethos from the beginning, which is just like, give people what they need, let it get up and running, and not deal with any of the BS.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in China?

• 1:41:55Mark Gurman?

  Lots going on in China.

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  With Apple? Are they shutting down more stores?

• 1:41:59Mark Gurman?

  Shutting down more stores? No, not that I know of. I don't see Apple just shutting stores at this point. I think the retail arm still is extremely profitable and, and successful.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:11Mark Gurman?

  All the shutdowns.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  But in China, there's less of the, you're, you're not, somebody's not embarrassed to not be using an iPhone.

• 1:42:19Mark Gurman?

  Problem, yes, the problem is, is that Apple hasn't done anything bespoke for the Chinese market. The competitiveness there is just unbelievably, just, it's amazing. It's like no other part of the world.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Are there compelling AI hardware?

• 1:42:38Mark Gurman?

  Yes, yes, I mean, I mentioned the robotic thing, I mentioned, well, like the foldables are taking over the universe there, right? And so, you know, Apple's an American company, launching American devices, European devices, and they're trying to shoehorn it into the Chinese market, and they've never really done anything just for the Chinese market or built around the Chinese market.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  What about the sock?

• 1:43:01Mark Gurman?

  I thought, okay, maybe that was, I mean, I don't know.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  But why, why, it's such a massive, it's such a massive market, why not?

• 1:43:09Mark Gurman?

  Because they're a global company, but I think the foldable is going to do extremely well in China, you know? It might do better in China than it does here.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:43:17Mark Gurman?

  I don't know, I'll be having one, I'll tell you that much.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  What's the future of the iPhone Air?

• 1:43:23Mark Gurman?

  It's like, the price difference.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  Sam Altman's got one.

• 1:43:28Mark Gurman?

  Great.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  But he doesn't care about money.

• 1:43:32Mark Gurman?

  The price difference.

• 1:43:33John Coogan?

  He just breaks it and buys a new one. And he doesn't get paid by OpenAI.

• 1:43:36Mark Gurman?

  He's probably got both.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:38Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, he doesn't get paid, yeah.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Mark Gurman?

  The iPhone Air and the iPhone Pro, it's like negligible pricing wise. It's the same price if you get the battery pack.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:43:47Mark Gurman?

  Right? It's like ninety-nine, ninety-nine plus a hundred, plus, yeah, right? You're not even going to get the battery pack.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Mark Gurman?

  So, I don't know, like, you look at the features comparison, you look at the cameras, I mean, most people are going to always pick the Pro over the Air. There needs to be more of a price gap.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:04Mark Gurman?

  Between the two. And eventually, you know, those two lines are going to merge. It could take five years, but like, eventually, you're going to be able to get a Pro. As thin as an air or an air with the same bells and whistles as a Pro. I mean, you look at the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air today from a perform.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  These are different laptops and they're exactly the same.

• 1:44:24Mark Gurman?

  Yeah. So what you've got the

• 1:44:24John Coogan?

  I have the Air.

• 1:44:25Mark Gurman?

  The Air, he's got the Pro.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  And they're identical.

• 1:44:27Mark Gurman?

  It's the same thing because the chips, right? The big differences between the two are it's a little lighter. Okay, the display is terrible on that thing compared to that thing. Like if you use, like I tried out the 15 inch MacBook Air. Okay.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Mark Gurman?

  The thing is sleek and slick and awesome.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46Mark Gurman?

  But like I've been ruined visually by how amazing the display is on the MacBook Pro.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Okay, maybe I gotta upgrade.

• 1:44:50Mark Gurman?

  Okay, and so, you know, you have to think about the different changes.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:54Mark Gurman?

  You want to talk about big things happening at Apple this year. It's that new MacBook Pro.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Mark Gurman?

  Right? You've got the OLED, you've got the thinner, you've got the touch.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:02Mark Gurman?

  Cannot wait to drop $4,000 on that thing.

• 1:45:04Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a touchscreen?

• 1:45:06Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait to get my fingerprints all over. When somebody, if somebody's looking at my computer and they touch the screen, I'm just like.

• 1:45:15Mark Gurman?

  Isn't it the worst thing ever?

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Like, I like.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  You gotta be carrying a polishing cloth. You gotta be carrying the Apple official polishing cloth.

• 1:45:22Mark Gurman?

  20 bucks.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Apple could make a Pixar lamp that. Well, Apple make one of them.

• 1:45:27Mark Gurman?

  That's funny.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Apple makes a Pixar lamp that just kind of polishes your touchscreen.

• 1:45:31Mark Gurman?

  That'd be great in AI for screen cleaning.

• 1:45:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:34Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, you know, the Apple polishing cloth, they got so much, you know, flack for that thing. Like, you would think that it was $75, but it was $20. Come to think of it, like, it's really not that big of a deal.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Also, I know someone who is OCD and is obsessed with keeping their screen perfectly clean.

• 1:45:49Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  And I was like, what's the secret? Like, you must have some secret formula, like Windex or something that you're using. And he's like, no, just the Apple polishing cloth. Like, that's the one that works.

• 1:45:57Mark Gurman?

  You know what? I need to get one of those.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  I was like, that's a glowing.

• 1:45:59Mark Gurman?

  You know, one did come with my Vision Pro, so.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:02Jordi Hays?

  They threw one in as a bonus.

• 1:46:03Mark Gurman?

  Isn't that nice of them?

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  That's so nice of them.

• 1:46:05Mark Gurman?

  $34.99, you get a free polishing cloth.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  That's 20 bucks off. Uh, yeah, maybe, maybe the, the turnus narrative can center around, like, as the models commoditize, like, the hardware becomes more important. You want to be able to run different models locally. And so pushing that, like.

• 1:46:23Mark Gurman?

  The hardware's great, the chips are great.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Mark Gurman?

  The software, I'll even tell you, is.

• 1:46:29Mark Gurman?

  Maybe not. It's between good and great.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:31Mark Gurman?

  Okay, I'm not gonna say it's only good.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:33Mark Gurman?

  I'm not gonna say it's as great as the hardware.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:35Mark Gurman?

  But it's good enough.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Mark Gurman?

  How's that? The AI is like

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Mark Gurman?

  the worst in the industry.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, right now, you're seeing people go out and buy Mac minis to run AI.

• 1:46:45Mark Gurman?

  Okay, let's think about it. You see these people on Twitter doing that, right?

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Mark Gurman?

  How many extra Mac minis do you think were sold because of all this jazz? I would guess, I would put the over/under on 500 units.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  500?

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Nah.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  I thought it was 10,000.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  I've seen it on Instagram.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  There's 40,000 GitHub stars.

• 1:47:00Mark Gurman?

  Okay, if it's on Instagram, maybe I'm wrong.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's 40,000 GitHub stars. It's clearly a big

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  60.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Maybe it's in the thousands, but yes, I mean, it's a quarter million, a quarter or something like that.

• 1:47:08Jordi Hays?

  And I think so much of it is just performative.

• 1:47:10Mark Gurman?

  Go on the Apple online store.

• 1:47:11Jordi Hays?

  No, people

• 1:47:12Mark Gurman?

  Go to the Mac mini.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  They're in stock.

• 1:47:14Mark Gurman?

  Are they all in stock?

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  They're in stock.

• 1:47:16Mark Gurman?

  Look at the ship dates.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  Funny thing, two weeks ago, I go to the Pasadena, uh, I go to the Pasadena Mac store. You know what's out of stock? Apple Vision Pros.

• 1:47:25Mark Gurman?

  What?

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  No, to me, to me, a lot of, a lot of the buying, I think, is purely status oriented and just signaling. No, no, selling the Mac mini and people just saying, I want to signal that I'm AI native and I'm at, I'm at the

• 1:47:39Mark Gurman?

  They're gonna use it for two weeks.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:42Mark Gurman?

  And then forget about it.

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I, I think that's gonna be, uh, a real thing.

• 1:47:45Mark Gurman?

  I mean, how many people actually need to live in these type of workflows?

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  Not many, just the hackers. Which is a niche community.

• 1:47:52Mark Gurman?

  It's a niche community. It's a great community.

• 1:47:54Jordi Hays?

  But it has made me think, maybe I should start using Apple's native file system and like actually bring my data out of the cloud, out of Drive and store it locally.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  You don't need to because, uh, Claude Bot will go and access your

• 1:48:10Mark Gurman?

  So what's the deal with the Mac mini?

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  Uh, it's shipping. Order now, pick up in store today. It's available. Order by 3:00 PM. Delivers two hours from the store.

• 1:48:20Mark Gurman?

  They haven't been all the stores?

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Tomorrow, it has, yeah, it's everywhere. They're, they're widely available. They're widely available.

• 1:48:25Mark Gurman?

  So maybe I am right.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Available tomorrow at the Americana brand. Today, it's the Apple Glendale Galleria at the Grove.

• 1:48:32Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  It's literally available at every Apple store.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Max Minis a year.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:35Mark Gurman?

  I think that's it?

• 1:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:37Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so it doesn't take that many if they're projecting out, hey, we're gonna sell It's not like they, I would imagine they don't have all of them that they're going to sell this year sitting in stock already.

• 1:48:50Mark Gurman?

  I'm curious how the Mac quarter is going to go tomorrow, right? Like, there might be a little bit of a drag on that.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Yeah, what should people pay attention to?

• 1:48:59Mark Gurman?

  Well, the China number, to your point. The iPhone number is basically everything tomorrow, right? Either they grow 10% as they say they will, or they won't. Either Tim Cook gets to keep his job or he doesn't. No, just joking. But you think about like the product, right? Like, they didn't do much iPad or Mac last year, right? This year is going to be the biggest year for the Mac in a long time. New MacBook Pro is about to launch, same design as those ones with the faster chips. You've got the iPhone chip-powered, low-cost MacBook, which is going to destroy PCs and Chromebooks

• 1:49:43Mark Gurman?

  and be like just this utter game changer. You've got the touchscreen MacBook Pro end of year. You've got a refreshed Mac Mini, you've got a refreshed Mac Studio, you've got the M6 chip. You've got the first new monitors from Apple in four years.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Where will those sit?

• 1:49:57Mark Gurman?

  The monitors?

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:58Mark Gurman?

  In terms of? They'll sit on my desk.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, but is it going to displace the Studio or the Pro XDR?

• 1:50:07Mark Gurman?

  The one I know about is going to replace the Studio. But there's a new XDR also.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:50:13Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  Because the XDR, remarkably long-term. Like, I cannot believe how-

• 1:50:19Mark Gurman?

  Why is there no camera on that thing?

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Because it was created 15 years ago. Like, it's so old and you go and you look at like, you could YouTube search for the Pro Display XDR right now and there's guarantee a new video, why you should buy one in 2026. It's still good in 2026. Like, it's still the best option.

• 1:50:39Mark Gurman?

  I mean, the display is just remarkable.

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  It's just amazing that it didn't commoditize fast enough.

• 1:50:43Mark Gurman?

  What are you guys using here?

• 1:50:44John Coogan?

  We're mostly Studios.

• 1:50:45Mark Gurman?

  Studios.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  We don't have a lot of XDRs, but we have been eyeing that new Dell monitor that Michael Dell has been rapaciously pumping on X.com.

• 1:50:53Mark Gurman?

  I saw it on Twitter, yeah.

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:50:54Jordi Hays?

  Why?

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  He's so enthusiastic about that thing.

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you've answered this 100 times and I'm sorry, but why would they never do a TV? Is it just commodity space?

• 1:51:05Mark Gurman?

  Commodity, margin, differentiator.

• 1:51:09Jordi Hays?

  You don't think people would happily spend-

• 1:51:12John Coogan?

  They're gonna buy a Pixar lamp before they buy a TV.

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, for me, for me.

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  You got the Apple TV. I've heard that's good.

• 1:51:18Jordi Hays?

  As somebody who's like, you know, been an Apple. I can't describe myself as an Apple fanboy anymore, but as a teenager and a kid, I was, right?

• 1:51:26Mark Gurman?

  What the hell happened?

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the photos.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  The photos.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Ruined Jordy.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  It just like, you know, a 20 year relationship just over.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  But I do think there's enough people out in the world that if you made a 10, if you made the $10,000 TV, that they would buy it.

• 1:51:46Mark Gurman?

  You know, the.

• 1:51:48Jordi Hays?

  Because, because when I'm buying a computer, a TV, sure, it's different, but when I'm buying a computer, it's not.

• 1:51:54Mark Gurman?

  The upgrade cycle.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Look at the premium on the Samsung Frame TVs. Those are flying off the shelves and they're not better than an LG.

• 1:52:01Mark Gurman?

  So my TV in my living room, I bought in 18.

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Mark Gurman?

  What are we in 26 now? Eight years?

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Apple would figure out a way to deprecate the hardware. This is what they do. They're the best in the world at it.

• 1:52:11Mark Gurman?

  If they did, they would do it.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Mark Gurman?

  They were, they were.

• 1:52:14Jordi Hays?

  They're like, Tim's like, where's my TV? He's like, sir, we haven't found a way to deprecate the hardware.

• 1:52:20Mark Gurman?

  They got pretty down the road on a TV about 10 years ago and then they, they killed that thing. They had teams working on it. It was a big deal. Um, but then they went off and did a car and went off and did a Vision Pro. Like, if you think about like their two big moon shots over the last decade, they were both utter failures. The car obviously is just like your quintessential failure. Yeah, pretty much. Um, but you know, they did get some good stuff out of it, right? Like, I would say the saving grace for Apple's AI, and you've said this a few times now, has been the AI chip and the AI hardware. The only reason they have an AI chip, the neural engine they launched in 2017 was because of the Apple car. That was designed to power the AI needed for a self-driving car and they shrunk it down for the phone.

• 1:53:00Mark Gurman?

  So if the Apple car project didn't get ignited, you know, back in 2014, 15, they would be even further behind in AI than they are today. And so give a shout out to the Apple car team.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:53:15Mark Gurman?

  And you know

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  I'm still pulling for an Apple car with a naturally aspirated V12. Can you imagine?

• 1:53:20Mark Gurman?

  It'd be crazy.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Be great. Real wheel drive.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Gated manual.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  Gated manual.

• 1:53:25Mark Gurman?

  I think they would have just destroyed Tesla if they just didn't set their bar so high.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:29Mark Gurman?

  When we talk about over engineering.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:31Mark Gurman?

  Can you imagine like a Model Y or a Model 3 or even an S, whatever? Just like with that Apple interior and the Apple ecosystem, the Apple interface.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:38Mark Gurman?

  Like, why did they have to go bananas, remove the steering wheel, remove the pedals? Everyone facing each other, like, why'd they have to go to... They overshot it. Why'd they have to go like all Apple on us?

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:48Mark Gurman?

  Right? Like, why couldn't they just do, just do a car?

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Just be a luxury brand.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Just be a luxury brand.

• 1:53:55Mark Gurman?

  Would have been amazing.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, and we got a sock instead.

• 1:53:57Mark Gurman?

  We got a sock instead.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Well, the sock project shipped, okay, so you gotta give it a sock.

• 1:54:02Mark Gurman?

  It did, and you know what? That was a success.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:05Mark Gurman?

  Sold out, got people talking.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Mark Gurman?

  You know, we did a review of the sock on Bloomberg and people ate that thing up.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  They loved it. They subscribed. That's great.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Where's your sock?

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  Smashing down the table.

• 1:54:16Mark Gurman?

  I've got socks, I've got, you know what I have? I've got sushi socks on right now.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. He's a sushi fan.

• 1:54:22Mark Gurman?

  No, not from Apple.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  No, no, your favorite restaurant in the valley.

• 1:54:25Mark Gurman?

  No, no, these are from my mother-in-law. Yeah.

• 1:54:28John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:54:29Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, we kept you super late.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, we kept you much longer, but thank you so much. This is so much fun. I'm so glad you're in LA.

• 1:54:34Mark Gurman?

  Do I get to do the gong?

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  Hit the gong. Give us a number. How long you been writing? How long you been following Apple?

• 1:54:41Mark Gurman?

  Uh, writing since '09.

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  '09! There we go. Hit the gong!

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Boom! With authority!

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  The Gervinator!

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  The Gervinator!

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's do this again.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta do this again soon.

• 1:54:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll be following your coverage tomorrow.

• 1:54:59John Coogan?

  Yes, tomorrow. Lock in, everyone, and let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I was, I was so close to hitting an ad read during that. I held myself back, so I'm giving myself two. I'm gonna tell you about vibe.co, where D to C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 1:55:28Jordi Hays?

  And...

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  We have another guest in person, live on the TV in Elton. We have Myles. Welcome to the show.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Please grab a seat. I think Mark Gurman took his Diet Coke, but you're welcome to one of mine if you get there. But please introduce yourself for everyone who might be watching.

• 1:55:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, so thanks so much for having me. My name is Miles Brundage. I lead a new organization called Avery. It's called stands for AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute. And the basic idea is that AI is becoming critical infrastructure and, you know, everyone is depending on it, but we don't really like make sure that it's safe and secure the way that we, you know, audit critical infrastructure. And, you know, we need something analogous to the cybersecurity industry, which popped up to kind of make the Internet secure. We need that for AI systems.

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many emails have you sent to Peter from Multibot in the last 48 hours?

• 1:56:24Speaker 05

  I haven't actually.

• 1:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Because you, on the show yesterday, he was like, his number one thing was like, he's like, I need somebody to just handle the inbound from security researchers. And I just can't, not even Multibot can handle processing all the inbound.

• 1:56:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, security researchers are quite interested in that. But yeah, so the basic idea is, you know, we're kind of like a think tank that is trying to figure out how to build that new industry. We think that, you know, it's good for improving safety and security outcomes if you have this rigorous auditing, specifically frontier AI systems. We're not so much focused on kind of the down streams. We're like upstream, how do we make sure that this is infrastructure the whole society can can rely on and not have to rely on companies doing their own kind of testing or kind of like, oh, do I trust the CEO's vibe? Like, that's not a good basis for for trust in a technology. And so, you know, we just kind of launched recently and we're, you know, kind of excited to talk about our work.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  So it's a nonprofit?

• 1:57:14Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  For now? Are we thinking for profit conversion?

• 1:57:17Speaker 05

  I've been through, you know, enough, you know, one kind of controversial nonprofit to for-profit transition was enough for my life, I think.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Talk to us about how you're breaking down, I mean, the issue of just AI security, AI safety, you can go so many different directions from, you know, the GPT-4O psychosis to fake news to paper clips and gray goo and, you know, a thousand years in the future. What is What's most interesting to talk about, what's the most important to talk about? There's also just like security issues as we see.

• 1:57:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, so we kind of break it up into four categories. So there's a kind of unintended system behaviors. And so that includes things like hallucinations, you know, on the, you know, on the kind of more extreme ends, like big misalignment, deception type, type things where the, where the AI system is kind of taking actions that are unaligned with the user's intent. And then there's misuse of the AI systems themselves. So kind of, you know, someone trying to carry out a cyber attack with Claude, which, you know, has been confirmed to occur, you know, and Anthropic was like, hey, like, you know, people connected to the Chinese government are doing this, so.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:25Speaker 05

  Very real issue. The third category is what we call emergent social phenomena. So that's kind of like, kind of emergent interactions between, you know, the human and the AI that lead to these like.

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  Psychosis.

• 1:58:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, psychosis, addiction, you know, kind of like, you know, degraded, it kind of like learning, those kinds of things. And, you know, these are all kind of different categories, but ultimately, you know, you should look at all of them. And then the fourth category is kind of, you know, normal security issues. And so that includes tampering with AI systems, theft of AI IP, AI IP, which, you know, there've been a couple of confirmed cases of that, like, you know.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Kimmy's.

• 1:58:57Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about Kimmy.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  What's going on there? Are you talking today on the story?

• 1:59:02Speaker 05

  So people are saying that, that, you know, there was some kind of like theft of like the model. That's, it seems to me like the more likely explanation would be kind of one of two things. One is disillation, like they're kind of, you know, they sampled from the, you know, the Claude API. And the other is just that there's a lot of samples already on the internet. And so they did kind of general scraping. And then, you know, the way that these systems often work is they, they've read a bunch of stuff from the internet and they're kind of selecting a persona of like, okay, what kind of thing am I? And like, they see a bunch of stuff on the internet where like AI type things are saying, I'm Claude, I'm ChatGPT. And that it'll just like default into that persona.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the feedback loop of the, the pre-training, now that we have an internet that is aware of AI and L L ends is fascinating. I, I keep thinking about that New York Times interaction between. Uh, who was it? It was a New York Times reporter who wrote about interacting with uh GPT-4 in Microsoft. And he was like mean to it. And then that that article obviously was very well shared. And so it got baked in the pre-training. He says that now if I go to a new LLM and it finds out who I am, it's like sort of adversarial. So this is weird. And I've noticed, I've noticed, you know, it's really a, what is it? The the Rocco's Basilisk a little bit? Like I've noticed that I'll go to LLMs and because I write a lot on the internet and I'm obviously live streaming, there's transcripts all over the place.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Do they pick up on who I am and what I do much quicker than I think most people?

• 2:00:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Uh, it's hard to be anonymous. Yeah.

• 2:00:30Speaker 05

  Do you say thank you? I do not. Um, but I'm also not mean either. Okay, okay. I'm kind of like a, I'm like a neutral actor when it comes to, like, I don't say thank you, but I'm also not like braiding them. So when I did that thing the other day, when everyone's like, oh, like ask chat GPT, like, you know, what, what is, you know, like, oh, make an image of what your experience is. Like being my like assistant or whatever. It was like, it was like a, it was like a, it was like cozy, like sitting in a chair, like reading a book or whatever. So it was not like, oh, I'm abused or whatever.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Talk about where you want to take the output of the work. Obviously, think tank, I think, Washington policymakers. But also there's a a feedback loop of if you put out a really insightful statement or analysis, the labs might absorb that directly. Who's the main uh audience?

• 2:01:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're trying to be kind of a hub for various stakeholders, so not just policymakers. You know, some other key ones are, as you mentioned, AI companies themselves, both upstream, the frontier AI developers, also downstream, like enterprise customers. Might want to know that, you know, they're, they're, they might be like, oh, well, I had meetings with, you know, Sam and Dario and so forth. But like, I want, you know, I'm about to make a $10 billion kind of contract. Like, I want something more substantive. Investors, insurers. Um, and so that's one of the things that, you know, we, we just put out a big analysis with, with various folks on, you know, how do you drive demand for this auditing, you know, make sure that it's high quality? And, you know, I think some of the most, the like most honest signals, so to speak, come from the private sector more so than regulation.

• 2:01:57Speaker 05

  Like, I'm pro some kinds of regulation, but like in some sense insurers are a great case where their incentives are very aligned to not kind of misprice the risk. And they might, you know, be supporters of high quality audits. And in fact, like one of our donors is the AI underwriting company, which is like one of the other players. I know you had Testudo on recently. They're like one of the other players in this.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Uh, so. The, the, even though a big tech company might come to you to read an analysis, they're not the ones that are actually funding the nonprofit.

• 2:02:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  From a more disparate.

• 2:02:32Speaker 05

  So we, we're trying to avoid like depending on, you know, depending on industry too much. Although like, you know, very pro there being kind of like companies that are making money off of this and kind of selling their services to industry as long as they're good disclosures of conflicts of interest and so forth. But we, we, you know, since we're a think tank, since we're doing a lot of policy analysis, we want to be kind of as, as pure as possible. So we, we don't have any majority donors. So far, we haven't taken any cash from frontier AI companies. We do take API credits so that we can kind of like, you know, audit their, audit, you know, their systems also kind of like, you know, use, you know, OpenAI's models to assess anthropics and vice versa, that kind of thing. So we have like, you know, six frontier AI developers who've provided credits.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Cool. What about, I, I've been grappling with this fact that when the AI safety question came up, it was driven, and Dario touched on this in his essay, how it was driven a lot by these like sci-fi doom scenarios. And I think a lot of people in tech sort of looked at AI as a tool, sort of incremental. Okay, yeah, it's autocomplete, it's knowledge retrieval, it's Google search, whatever. And then, and then we wound up getting AI safety issues, but they manifested in very different ways than what was actually predicted. No one was predicting the GPT psychosis necessarily or some of the other things. People were predicting, oh, this will like swing the election and, and drive like everyone will be falling for fake news.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Videos that are fake, they do go out, but they get debunked pretty quickly. Like, I feel like we've responded pretty well to that, but then there's been a whole other host. So how do you think about the timeline of risk and how you want to, how far you want to look into the future?

• 2:04:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, you know, the, the way that we think about it is that, you know, on the one hand, like, you know, people at, at my organization, Avery, have various perspectives on these things. Like, I personally am on the like, AI is going very quickly and we could see some crazy stuff very soon.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:20Speaker 05

  End of the spectrum, but I don't think you need to believe that in order to be pro, you know, AI auditing. I think, you know, if you just kind of compare AI to, you know, other normal technologies and people sometimes say like, well, AI is not this, this supernatural thing, it's a normal technology. Well, A lot of those normal technologies are audited for safety. Like if you buy a power bank, it probably has been, you know, audited against like, you know, underwriters laboratory standards for electrical safety. So, you know, it doesn't catch on fire and stuff like that. And so I think like even just getting to the normal technology, you know, level would be an improvement. And then, you know, the case for auditing is like even more crazy if you're like, okay, someone could take over the world with this.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What were the biggest points that you agreed with in the Dario essay? Was there anything you wanted to push back on?

• 2:05:03Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, I would love to hear more about auditing as one of, you know, Anthropic's policy platforms, but I, you know, but, but, you know, more seriously, I directionally broadly agree. I mean, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm maybe not the target audience as someone who, you know, has written and read a zillion kind of like, these are the three, five big issues and AI risks and here's what to do about them. So like broadly, I agree with this is very serious stuff and, you know, we should take this seriously.

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  Jordi?

• 2:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you, how do you, uh, yesterday we were talking about, uh, the risk of, I think people talk about sort of agentic AI systems and sort of getting on some runaway path where it's taking actions out in the world. And I don't know if there's enough discussion around maybe how an AI system like that could actually recruit everyday humans, potentially millions of people to kind of like join their cause. How are you looking at that risk in the, in the context of overall AI psychosis, right?

• 2:06:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  These, uh,

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  Jordi had a good point about like the just turn it off doesn't work if there's like 10,000 people that are like,

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Like camped out on top of the data center.

• 2:06:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I haven't thought so much about the kind of like recruiting angle, but what I will say is that it is important to audit, not just like the models themselves, but also like how are they used? Do these platforms have good practices for like detecting if there's some crazy shenanigans like that going on? And I mean, just, you know, an example, you know, this, this Claude code thing where it was being used by these Chinese hackers, that's like not the, like the individual interactions were okay, you know, because they were basically like decomposing the prompt and like, Various subcomponents that are benign. And this was kind of like a known issue in the research was like, well, you know, if the if the model is just refusing stuff that looks like it's obviously malware or whatever. Then, you know, that's one thing, but if if the user kind of breaks it down into small chunks.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:58Speaker 05

  Um, then that's a big problem. And so.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  And the risk is if you say like, it's gonna, it's gonna be easy to make it refuse to say, build me a bioweapon.

• 2:07:05Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  But if I ask just like, how do I learn about pipetting?

• 2:07:08Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  And then how do I, how do I learn about this particular step? And it doesn't know.

• 2:07:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and potentially like across multiple accounts.

• 2:07:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:15Speaker 05

  And so like, how do you kind of stop that in a way that is kind of like, you know, preserves privacy, obviously?

• 2:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Not even just multiple accounts, but multiple.

• 2:07:23John Coogan?

  People.

• 2:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Models.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  Models. Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, it's like, it's a super hard problem. And yeah, I mean, I would say like, I'm interested. And again, like, you know, we, I think it, you know, might be that we need to kind of just accept that like models, you know, more than like a year old or so, like, given how how fast kind of things get cheaper and get open source, like, we should just assume they will be like maximally misuse in the worst possible way and just focus on like the very newest ones. Um, but you know, for the very newest ones, I think, you know, we need to get better at detecting those sorts of things. Because right now, some of the companies will say, we found this stuff. Other companies, it's not so clear that they are actually like trying to.

• 2:07:59Jordi Hays?

  So politicians have focused in on the the sort of risk or reality of rising energy costs.

• 2:08:07Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Are you frustrated that so much of their attention is is on that versus some of these other issues?

• 2:08:12Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, I think the, I think the energy costing is more of a real thing than the water kind of issue.

• 2:08:19Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 2:08:19Speaker 05

  And so like, I, so I don't think it's crazy to to worry about that, but, um, but yeah.

• 2:08:24Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly taking up mental bandwidth and and just like dominating the narrative when maybe there's

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Could be focusing on things.

• 2:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Bigger, bigger risks.

• 2:08:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I mean, the, you know, I, my, you know, the things that I personally focus on are like, you know, there should be some kind of, you know, articulation of what what what counts as safe enough or secure enough, like, and, you know, there's starting to be things like this and you know, California and New York that say, okay, you know, you, uh, you know, they may, don't say exactly how safe, but at least you should share, you know, whether you've measured catastrophic risks and share. That you have a safety, you know, a security policy. Eventually, we should kind of ratchet up the standard there. But, you know, some set of standards, then you need some evidence that people are actually following those standards. And that's where auditing comes in. That's where, uh, kind of, um, you know, kind of transparency and, and publishing system cards, those kind of things come in. And you need some set of incentives. So, uh, to like, make sure that people actually, you know, get, face some penalty.

• 2:09:17Speaker 05

  And so doing all that in a way that doesn't crush, you know, small businesses and focuses on, you know, the very frontier of, of the AI systems. That's kind of what my focus is more so than the energy stuff.

• 2:09:26John Coogan?

  What is an actual good audit or benchmark look like? You can't just do like bad stuff per million tokens, I assume. How do you actually, uh, get to some sort of quantitative metric that's tractable?

• 2:09:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  Understandable, but still valuable and not gamable.

• 2:09:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're kind of going through this transition right now from the earlier period, period where like the strongest safety case you can make was, you know, what people call an inability argument. It's like, the model's too dumb to be worth worrying about in cybersecurity or bio. And so like, kind of just like show that it's too dumb. That was kind of like the early wave of safety analysis. And like, we're starting to move into the world where actually like, have you taught it to behave well? And like, let's just assume that it's capable because they're getting very capable. Are the mitigations good? And then it's mitigations at the model level, like refusing stuff. There's mitigations at the system level, like you have a classifier outside the model that kind of like blocks certain, you know, outputs and so forth.

• 2:10:25Speaker 05

  There's kind of at the platform level, like detecting, you know, multiple fraudulent accounts that are, you know, coordinated and kind of like trying to steal the, uh, you know, kind of like trying to sell the model and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that, uh, you know, they're starting to be work. Like, for example, there are organizations like Meter and Apollo Research, Secure Bio, Transluc, et cetera, that are kind of looking at different aspects of that. But right now, it's like largely voluntary and, you know, they're, they often only look at a very small subset of those risks. They're not really looking at the full, the full gamut.

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations on the launch. I want to ring the gong.

• 2:10:59Speaker 05

  Right here, right here, right here. We love an AI nonprofit.

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on down to the TV Pin Ultra.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. That's right. We have some slight changes to the linear lineup. We're shifting some folks around. There's some breaking news. We're going to bring on different guests. We're starting our lightning round at 1:30, but in the meantime, we can continue through the timeline. Does that sound good, Jordi? Sounds great. Bubble Boy is talking about Claude Bot and the race for Mac Minis a bit over the last few days. I think it's become a very scary phenomenon, a very scary realization that explains this crazy phenomenon. Put simply, building a gaming PC will be nearly

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  impossible in the next five years. In fact, it already is for the vast majority of consumers. But I will go one step further. In the next 10 years, having any type of personal computing device will be unattainable. Fab capacity will be allocated to its most productive and profitable use, which is cloud and AI data centers. Even today, most of the software you run already won't work without an internet connection, but now with the opportunity costs being so high, consumers will be shafted and the only option will be moving to the cloud. It's looking increasingly like the only hardware you will have is some terminal that connects to the cloud with no workloads running directly on your own hardware. Your device will just have the most basic single-core processor and four gigs of RAM at most. That

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  probably sounds like the specs on the Sweet P AirPods or whatever the OpenAI AirPods are. What's interesting is I was digging into the amount of leading-edge capacity at fabs like TSMC that are currently dedicated to

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  To AI workloads or creating GPUs that can run AI workloads. And it's about 50% right now. It's about 50/50. So TSMC, obviously fabs Nvidia chips and TPUs, I believe. But also they do Apple silicon, which is not really used for, you know, frontier LLMs in the cloud. The question is like, how much more can the frontier AI labs eat into that? If, is it just a bidding process? And if Nvidia goes to TSMC and says, hey, we want to buy 80% of your capacity. And you got to tell Apple to take a hike. Would they actually do that? TSMC has been a little more conservative. Ben Thompson's been writing about this a lot.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  That TSMC has been a little bit slower to invest the CapEx to build the next AI fab. Or the next frontier fab. Because it's something like $50 billion in CapEx. And if the AI trend sort of slows down, they could be caught holding the bag since this is a multi-year build out. But it's interesting that the, the energy narrative, we are constrained on energy. But we're only using like 1% of energy in the West on AI. And data centers that can power AI. We're using like 50% of our, of our, of our fab capacity on AI. Crank up both, but one requires actual building of new capacity. If you want to see an order of magnitude increase.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  The other requires, if you want to see an order of magnitude increase in energy, going from 1% to 10% of energy used for AI. You can just slide chips around the board.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with the bubble of voice. Like even stuff like gaming.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  Like on the Meta Quest Xbox edition, like there's no actual like, you're not playing the game on the device. It's like streaming.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  So I think this is like very.

• 2:14:47Jordi Hays?

  I think this is like definitely true.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  It goes into cloud.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so like it's the interesting thing is that it's it's sort of like the you will own nothing and be happy thing like the average consumer might just be happy with that because they're like, yeah, it works. I don't care where the workload happens. Of course, like the George Hots of the world want the tiny box. They want to be able to run it permissionlessly. They want to be able to run their own model. And there's always been difference.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  As well.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, not your keys, not your coins, that whole movement. There's always been a lot of debate around, you know, the sovereignty of your individuality. And I think that will continue. And I think that the I don't think the Mac Mini is going to go out of stock. I think that many of the trends in Apple hardware availability will continue. And I think Apple has a lot of leverage at PSMC to continue manufacturing their devices.

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  While we were talking with the Germinator and Miles, the Fed announced they voted to keep rates steady for the first meeting of 2026. This was predicted by Kalshi. So no no real surprises here.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we yeah, we were tracking the Kalshi market on this because there was that big back and forth with Jerome Powell. We were playing the We Are Jerome Powell song. And it seemed like there was incredible amount of pressure to to pressure Jerome Powell into potentially cutting rates. It seems like the guidance is that there will not be a rate cut. And there was another piece in the Journal about some of the forerunners for the next Chair of the Fed. There's four people that were in the running that I saw, but none of them were completely like chainsaw.

• 2:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Trump has basically said there's a bit some problems with each of them. He also says, I'm worried that when I'm interviewing them. They're gonna say one thing, then be a little bit more independent, and say, "Take the job."

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  And also, it's a balancing act, because if you install someone who is not, who doesn't bring credibility to the market, you don't get the, you don't get the desired outcome. So, you can't just have someone that, that cuts, cuts rates to negative 50% as some people might like. Meta also- Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Meta also reported earnings-

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Beat on bottom line and top line. Stock is up 4% after hours, expanding 2026 capex.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:20Jordi Hays?

  What I'm seeing, I'm trying to get up to speed here. Tesla had reported earnings as well.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  What's Tesla doing?

• 2:17:28Jordi Hays?

  Tesla saw negative revenue growth, I believe, for the first time, but the stock is up 3.7% after hours.

• 2:17:39John Coogan?

  And Microsoft also beat consensus on top and bottom lines, and the conference call starts at 2:30, in just about an hour. Shares fell 4% in extended trading Wednesday after the software maker posted slowing cloud growth.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  But a nice little markup on OpenAI.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Excludes impacts, okay.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we'll, we'll try to put together some more information here in the near future. We did need to give a shout out to Colin and Samir. We went on their podcast at the end of the year.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  This was a lot of fun.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Talked about-

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  They posted the full two hour thing.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  They ripped the full two hours on X.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  I wasn't sure. So Colin and Samir have, have a number of very interesting formats. They have a podcast feed. They, I watched a recent video that they put out. It was like, you know, 10 lessons. It was almost like a YouTube video trailer for a full episode. And, and I was, I was wondering, like, we talked a lot about a lot of things. How, yeah, how, what, what will this actually land? How will they edit it? What will they be thinking? Good to see the full hour and 50 minutes up on the timeline. I love it.

• 2:18:57Jordi Hays?

  And-

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  Oh, they got Max Sparrow in there. This is a nice little intro. I like this edit.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's quite nice. So go check it out. Super fun conversation. We love those guys.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, us talking about our business, the business of media, the next chapter.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Anti-scale strategy.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, some stuff we've mentioned here.

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  And we have a surprise guest today.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  The new NeoLab Flappy Airplanes is going to be joining the founder. Aiden has been on the show before.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, during the Teal.

• 2:19:26Jordi Hays?

  So excited to have him back on and get the update there.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Emily.

• 2:19:30John Coogan?

  Before we move on to Emily Sundberg, I gotta tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Yes.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Barry Weiss, everything she says internally immediately becomes external messaging. Tough, tough job, but she put in, she was talking with the team and saying she wants to put a huge emphasis on scoops.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  This is about CBS.

• 2:20:00Jordi Hays?

  CBS, yes, not.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  So she's the editor in chief at CBS, but she was acquired in through the Free Press. So the Free Press is operating. The CBS is operating and there's a, there's an effort to sort of merge the two. Free Press, obviously very fast moving startup culture. CBS has been around for decades. So the, the, the quote that has hit the timeline is Barry Weiss also said that the network CBS will now put a huge emphasis on scoops, but not scoops that expire minutes later. But investigative scoops and crucially, and crucially scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation. Where this is where we can soar and where we'll be investing. She continued.

• 2:20:44Jordi Hays?

  People are, people are, people are roasting this, but I think, I think one fires me up.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, you just look at the modern media landscape, there are a lot of scoops of ideas that are, they create these like, everyone watched that podcast, everyone is repeating that idea from that person, they set the tone, they introduced this concept, this philosophy, this thesis, they unpacked it for two hours exclusively in this one place, you gotta go there to get it.

• 2:21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it starts a conversation that wasn't happening, it's not just like, here's some fact, that then immediately get copy and pasted everywhere, that's what she's talking about, scoops that are expiring, it's not about, you have to start a conversation that wasn't.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I go to Dwarash Patel, the Leopold Oshinbrenner, you know, it wasn't a scoop, I guess, but situational awareness was posted as PDF, but also, you know, made available in a multi-hour sit-down podcast where he unpacks those ideas that flew around, that started a conversation about where AI is going, its impact on the financial markets. Andre Karpathy, same thing, on Dwarash, there's been a number of things where certain ideas, certain scoops, certain explanations have recontextualized things, and I think that CBS has the production horsepower to bring a really polished product together, but if

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  there's something that's been already revealed, the facts are out, and then you just do, you're re-instantiated on CBS, that's not like must-watch necessarily for the modern media consumer, so, I don't know, I think, I think it's a reasonable thing to say, even if it's sort of a funny phrase.

• 2:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Keep running through the timeline, I'll be right back.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Okay, so, Miles says that when Google hit a $500 billion valuation, they had $90 billion in revenue and $20 billion in profit, OpenAI is raising at $800 billion with $30 billion in estimated revenue in 2026, and negative $30 billion in free cash flow, Anthropic is raising at $500 billion with $20 billion in 2026 revenue, and negative $15 billion in free cash flow, was Google just free money? Why did these price so differently? Uh, mainly growth rate. Let's see. Uh, Miles says Google is growing at 20% at 90 billion revenue with significantly better quality revenue and had profits. Yeah, but I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI are growing at 1,000%, right? Or 500% or 300%. Uh, the growth rate

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  really does matter. And I don't know, maybe there's, there's some sort of, uh, you know, excitement just around, uh, the AI bubble. But Tyler, what do you think? Anthropic at 500 with 20 billion in 2026 revenue and negative $15 billion in free cash flow.

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  I mean, they've 10x'd it like three times. I could, I could see a few more 10x's.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  I'm, I agree.

• 2:23:34Speaker 03

  I could see OpenAI.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:35Speaker 03

  Couple more 10x's.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:23:36Speaker 03

  DeepMind.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:38Speaker 03

  I want to see Demas in the, you know, in the hot seat.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:40Speaker 03

  You know, like two or three more 10x's. He's CEO.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  I want him up there.

• 2:23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, get him up there. I, I still think it's so funny that he was like, we're not doing ads. It's like, that's the easiest layup to be like, we'll do it when we're gonna do it. I don't know.

• 2:23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Also, like, he is actively being funded by ads.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and they did put out that, they did put out that note that, uh, that Google's AI-powered search is now powered by Gemini 3 Pro, right? Uh, and then they've also monetized those. So maybe there's not ads in Gemini, but there's a Gemini-powered product that has ads in it. And so I feel like that's.

• 2:24:15Speaker 03

  I think it was just kind of a, like, free dunk.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  It was a free dunk.

• 2:24:18Speaker 03

  No one's really gonna fact check him.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  But, but the more nuanced dunk, and we're gonna have Eric Sufer on the show to, to discuss the rollout of OpenAI's ads product, is that, uh, I mean, Ben Thompson earlier today said that, uh, it, it, expectations were low and it did not meet them, just in terms of the robustness of the AI product, how they're pricing it. He compared it to Netflix's early rollout of, of, of ads.

• 2:24:37Speaker 03

  The ad product.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  The ad product, specifically saying like, you're gonna pay, uh, CPMs for impressions based on like, you know, these categories. Like, it's not just gonna be this robust Facebook level, like, you black box that just gives you, you put dollars in, you get dollars out. Like, everyone wants like the ATM machine. When it comes to ad products, truly, I mean, like, it sounds silly, but people, like, advertisers really want this, like, massive scaled self-serve platform that they can just go and, and, and partner with. And it feels a little bit more bespoke, a little bit more incremental. And it, and, and truthfully, a lot of people are saying like, they should have started working on this earlier. They, we should have, they, they should have, uh, You know, been building along this line earlier, but of course they had a lot, a lot of other stuff to work on. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Uh, moving on, back to DeepMind. Google bought DeepMind 12 years ago yesterday. Uh, they, it was such an insane steal. Rune said they bought it for a buck fifty, lol, insane steal. The numbers were so much smaller back then. In the opening episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, have you seen HBO's Silicon Valley? We talked about this, right? Stressful, so you never watched the full thing?

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've never, I've never actually watched it. Just because I, a show like that would be like before bed. And it just reminds me of-

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  It worked, yeah. There were some hilarious, hilarious moments in that show, though. Uh, in the opposite, in the opening episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, the protagonists offered a four million dollar valuation for an insane new technology, which is so absurdly large to him that he throws up. It's like, four million dollar valuation really does feel low nowadays. That is, that is like, pre, pre, pre-seed. Like, there's nothing that. YouTube, DeepMind, and Android were acquired for less than 2.5 billion dollars combined. What a time. That is wild.

• 2:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Insane pickups.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Insane, insane pickups. Um-

• 2:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't actually think we covered this, but the update on the SpaceX IPO, they're timing it, uh, they're looking at a June IPO, so, uh, not too far away. And Elon is apparently trying to time it to planetary alignment and Elon Musk's birthday. So, Celest-, uh, the Financial Times says celestial calendar meets high finance as billionaires' personal impulses shape plans to raise 50 billion in record listing. Uh, I think he's, he's allowed to, to plan his IPO around his personal impulses. This is, this is his baby.

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  Some numerology, some good, uh, some good vibes. He's just managing the vibes. Before we move on, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the Phantom card.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I don't think there's many other, uh, Musk's birthday is June 28th.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  And on June 8th and 9th, Juniper and Venus will be, quote, "within a little more than one degree of each other in the sky."

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  Sorry, you said his birthday is June 28th?

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  With Sunday, markets closed.

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  So he's not gonna be able to do it.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  He's gotta delay it a year. He's gotta, he's gotta wait a full year until.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, hopefully not. Um, but, uh, yeah, a few days later, Mercury will also align diagonally with the two planets. The unusual demand highlights Musk's personal imprint on SpaceX, of course, uh, where major corporate decisions have often reflected the billionaire's beliefs and priorities.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:11Jordi Hays?

  What, what corporation has a CEO, a founder CEO where the, the, the, the founder's beliefs and priorities don't shape the corporate decisions?

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  They're trying to, they're trying, they're trying to like, they're trying to like spin this. Uh, it's not, it's not really hitting.

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's odd.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh.

• 2:28:36John Coogan?

  There's another, there's a massive scoop in the Wall Street Journal from Kate Clark. She says SoftBank is in talks to invest a lot more money in OpenAI. Um, this is surprising tons of people because everyone said Moss is tapped out. He can't possibly marshal the capital. He'll have to sell everything.

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  He's like David Goggins.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  He's David Goggins of, of buying OpenAI shares.

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's not gonna, it doesn't seem like he's gonna get it from Saudi.

• 2:29:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:03Jordi Hays?

  So where's he?

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, he has, he has other stuff. He can move around. He can sell other positions. Like, SoftBank's a massive organization and, uh, and.

• 2:29:11Jordi Hays?

  He's going all in.

• 2:29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. So SoftBank's in talks to invest up to 30 billion more in OpenAI, Japanese conglomerate.

• 2:29:18Jordi Hays?

  So pull, pull up this video, uh, from Buco Capital, you know, cause I think it, there's a chance that, there's a small chance that Masa saw this and said, I need, I need to own more.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  Are these actually Sora videos? Are these just like random cling like nonsense?

• 2:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Buco says 2 trillion in CapEx for this, by the way.

• 2:29:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Get this off the screen. I'm not a fan of this at all. This is bad. Uh, SoftBank Group's shares closed 3.7% higher in Tokyo trading Wednesday after the Journal's report on the latest talks over OpenAI. So the Tokyo markets are bullish on getting more OpenAI shares. Uh, this is of course the hundred billion dollar round that will have a post-money valuation of eight hundred and thirty billion if it succeeds in raising the full amount. Deal talks are ongoing. SoftBank is already one of OpenAI's largest shareholders, the stake that grew to eleven percent in December when it invested twenty-two point five billion. Uh, in a statement at the time, SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son said the firm was deeply

• 2:30:17John Coogan?

  aligned with OpenAI's vision. You'll love to see it. Um, on the other side of things, Jim Cramer

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Jim Cramer, he's now a Jemmy boy.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  Saying, I still pay for ChatGPT and Gemini, but I have been favoring Gemini of late. My two neighbors at the office are canceling ChatGPT. I like how much Gemini knows about me and is friendly, but not cloying. And it's not a suck up. Well, you know, five point three is coming soon, and I think that the, uh, the conversational element, the, the textural flavor might be coming back. And they might be, who knows, maybe they fine tune right on Jim Cramer's tweets to let him know that, hey, we're not, we're not, we're not, uh, afraid of pushing back on you, Jim, if we need to. Uh, OpenAI will do whatever it takes. Anyway, we, we have our next guest available.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Who, who do we have? We have Asher.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:31:09John Coogan?

  And Aiden from Flapping Airplane.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  In the restroom waiting room. Let's bring them in to the TV pen. Ultra jump. Hello.

• 2:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:31:18John Coogan?

  Welcome back, Aiden. Uh, good to see you. How are you guys doing?

• 2:31:22Speaker 06

  Hey, guys.

• 2:31:23Aidan Smith?

  We are doing awesome. It's good to be here.

• 2:31:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Welcome back.

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Big, big day.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  Big day. Please take us through it.

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  While you guys do the update.

• 2:31:31John Coogan?

  Tell us about the name first. Let's all do the flap for Flapping Airplanes. What a name.

• 2:31:36Speaker 06

  Well, so, you know, we are, we're a new AI lab. We're focused on the efficiency problem. We're trying to train models that can be roughly as intelligent as humans without adjusting half the internet.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:46Speaker 06

  In, in order to do that, we want to think at least a little bit, in a way that's a little bit biologically inspired. We don't want to build a bird, right? We know, obviously airplanes are fantastic, but, uh, to maybe help them flap their wings is, is the right metaphor for what we're doing. Yeah, exactly right.

• 2:32:00John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:32:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where does the milk fit in?

• 2:32:03Speaker 06

  I'm not here to comment on the milk. It's a big part of our shared culture, but I can't say more than that.

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  I love it. It's the most, probably the most underrated drink out there.

• 2:32:13Speaker 06

  I actually do agree with that.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Not enough people are taking advantage of all the benefits.

• 2:32:17John Coogan?

  You know, we got so many milk ads throughout my whole life. The Got Milk campaign was fantastic and then it sort of just disappeared. They haven't been running that.

• 2:32:25Jordi Hays?

  I went, yeah, I went through a phase where it was like borderline a gallon a day.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  Go mad. Yeah, there's a phrase for it. Anyway.

• 2:32:32Aidan Smith?

  I'll be buying Gary's securities. I got a lot of milk coming to the.

• 2:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Unlimited milk, new perk.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Okay. So yeah, take us through, well, like the status of the company, like, uh, how far along are you? How big's the team? Uh, what, what, what are you thinking in terms of like release time? Are you, are you planning on sort of going heads down age of research mode, SSI mode? And, and releasing something when you've hit some, some major milestone or do you want to be more iterative with it?

• 2:33:04Speaker 06

  So, okay, so we're, we're about two months old. The team is now 11. We're super excited. We've got people we really love. We're both brilliant, but also just wonderful people. We're really excited about it. I think, I think we are sort of in the middle. We're definitely age of research mode. Like I think the goal is not to commercialize, not because we're not commercial people, like my background, even Adrian's background, Ben's background, all, all reasonably commercial in some sense as opposed, in addition to deep research.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:33:26Speaker 06

  Um, it's just that when you like, when you get revenue, you have to focus on it. Like you have to focus on providing for customers. And that makes it harder to build, you know, deep technology.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:35Speaker 06

  So, you know, our, our goal is to try to, to find the biggest market we can to solve the most important problem we think we can solve, which is the data efficiency problem before doing anything of that. At the same time, like our approach is probably to be a build, building a little bit more in public. We'll release some research artifacts at least, and I think we'll be, we'll be cool reasonably soon, but you know, who knows exactly what the runs will finish or how, how many times the craft will they work.

• 2:33:57Aidan Smith?

  Our biggest training run today. So, you know, bad timing next launch for our maintenance.

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  There we go. Uh, walk me through why data efficiency and why the data efficiency a problem is important. It sounds all good. Oh, you get a really smart model and you don't have to ingest the whole internet, but everyone can just ingest the whole internet. Like you can download it, you can scrape it. There, you know, there's plenty of models that are trained on it. So break it down.

• 2:34:22Speaker 06

  So exactly, I think the goal is not necessarily in the long term to not train on the entire internet. I mean, it's research, I don't exactly know.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:30Speaker 06

  I think the idea is that like, this is not needed, right? And the fact that it's not needed suggests that we're actually missing something. Because currently for the existing technology that we have, it is necessary.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:40Speaker 06

  So why do I think it's an important problem? You know, to the extent that AI has been hard to integrate into the economy. And, you know, we always see, you know, these Bloomberg articles that are like, you know, oh, like chat and search are working and coding is working, but like, what else is AI really doing for me? To the extent that's true, I really think it's because models are much less data efficient than humans. But like, if you wanted to learn a new task or put it in a new vertical, it like, it takes thousands of times more effort than it does to just tell a human what to do. So I think if you can make a model a million times more data efficient, it's like a million times easier to put into the economy. I also think there's just like tons of cool stuff that you can do in really data constrained regimes if you can learn to learn with less data. For example, whether it's robotics or scientific discovery or even something like trading, which we have to acknowledge is like

• 2:35:23Speaker 06

  the most valuable next token prediction problem in the world from a pure economic perspective. These problems have very limited data and, you know, existing AI systems aren't quite as good as them as they are in other things. I think that, you know, learning to learn with less data is just tremendously valuable in all these domains.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  Talk to me about like fragmentation and steerability if you achieve sample efficiency like you're planning to. Do you envision a world where you're sort of creating some sort of base model that is so sample efficient that just with like a basic prompt or a few examples, it becomes incredibly effective at a specific task and sort of replaces like the heavy duty training data runs and the RL environments and these massive data collection efforts to do some sort of fine grained task at a very, very high level to sort of like five nines of efficiency? Is that what it looks like? Or is it more like you will wind up vending a sample inefficient model that's for specific use cases?

• 2:36:25Aidan Smith?

  Yeah, so what do we think about this? It seems like the reinforcement paradigms of today are actually just shockingly inefficient. You don't really get much generalization across tasks. You teach a model through one kind of of learning and then you teach the next one. It's kind of like whack a mole or something. And we look at this, we think this is kind of crazy. I mean, the first time I really saw RL scale, what it brought me back to was actually good old fashioned AI. Back in the dawn, you know, this primordial age of AI, when people were kind of hand designing these convolutional filters for eyes and noses and things. And then they were like, wait, just throw data at it, just throw scale at it. What are you doing? And in this really weird way, we're kind of looping back onto that where it's like, oh, just make another environment, bro. Just make another environment. Just one more, just one more. The next experiment on the AI will not be just, you know, environment slop.

• 2:37:08Speaker 06

  I mean, I think, I think, I think it is a piece of it. Like, I do think that there's a long tail of tasks in the world, right? And like, there will always be a place for people to produce custom data. It's just like a question of how much operational difficulty it takes. And like, one route is just to slog through the operational difficulty constantly. You incur a variable cost. Another route is to do a bunch of fixed cost investment into trying to make that variable cost lower. So the last thing I'll just say to answer your question, I don't really think we know what the end goal looks like entirely. Like, you know, AI is a big space, like, you know, human level intelligence is not the ceiling. It is merely the floor on what is possible. Like, if you can train models with vastly less data and possibly more compute in very different ways, like, what is going to happen? Like, we actually don't know. Like, I think, I think it's actually unlikely that they will uniformly dominate frontier models, even in the very best case scenario for us.

• 2:37:53Speaker 06

  They're like, going to know less facts, they're going to be different, they're not going to have memorized all of Harry Potter. Like, that's actually a useful skill in some ways. But I do think they'll be different and weird. And like, they'll have have interesting capabilities that that will find, you know, really valuable ways to use. So, so, yeah, I think it's an experiment we're really excited to run.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you expect the economics to look like in a more sample efficient environment? It feels like, obviously, you're not paying for a bunch of reinforcement learning environments and a bunch of data. But it also feels like the the the training cost might be lower. Is that the correct assumption? And then what does inference look like? Does that, does it get cheaper? Is it a smaller model? Can it run locally? Are there any other downstream economic impacts that you think might come from a new architecture?

• 2:38:37Aidan Smith?

  I mean, there exists this whole smorgasbord of companies right now that are basically doing reinforcement learning for you.

• 2:38:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41Aidan Smith?

  Or are taking your big pile of corporate data and making it useful in your model.

• 2:38:44Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:38:45Aidan Smith?

  And this is great, but it's actually a huge pain. And both sides of the deal are upset. You know, the companies that are doing it are like, please give us more data. And the, their clients go to them and like, say, this is all we have. Like, how can we possibly give you more here and the results are not meeting what we want? And the demand for better data efficiency here is just huge. And we really believe that even winning here will have massive impact.

• 2:39:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. I also, I don't, I don't claim to know exactly what the economics are going to look like. You know, for example, if it's going to be accomplished with models that are smaller or bigger, like, I don't know. I actually, I slightly suspect bigger. Um, like, I'm not sure it's actually going to make inference costs easier. Um, I mean, if you look at the brain as a comparison, you know, the brain spends a lot of flops per token relative to what a current model does. Um, so, so, you know, we don't have to use the brain as a model, but it's like an interesting data point. So I don't, I think it's a little bit for, for us to say anything definitive about economics, but I, I'm certainly intellectually interested in these questions and haven't been thinking about them for a while.

• 2:39:35Jordi Hays?

  How are you, uh, approach, like, are you guys going to be spending all your time locked into the office just doing your own research? Or is this, or do you have opportunities to go out in the world, find companies and organizations that have been disappointed by existing solutions and say like, how do we kind of re-approach this problem? Right? Cause you're saying like, maybe it's not just more data.

• 2:39:56Speaker 06

  I think we're going to start with research. I, I think the main thing is like, when we work with companies, we want to make sure that we are like fully devoted to actually providing genuine value for them, like, and not just using them as like a step stone to, to do interesting research. So I think, I think for now, until we feel like we have some technological edge, we'll be very, very focused on research. I do think over time, to your point though, like, it is helpful to research to actually be able to go out into the world and see what the problems people are facing are. And, and we actually do plan to do that, but just not like into anywhere.

• 2:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what, we talk about fundraising, uses of funds, uh, GPU poor, GPU rich, like, well, you know, the, the AI talent wars, like, what, what are the constraints on, on your progress here?

• 2:40:37Speaker 06

  Well, so, I mean, first, I, I just want to say, we're really grateful to our partners. I mean, they've shown a lot of trust and faith in us and we're going to do everything in our power to reward that faith. So it's, it's, it's humbling. It's really exciting where we're really grateful to work with them.

• 2:40:48Aidan Smith?

  Thanks, Goli, for the milk.

• 2:40:49Speaker 06

  Yes, I'm going to buy a bottle. It was, it was a, I say not.

• 2:40:55Speaker 06

  So on what the compute is for, I mean, the good thing about doing foundational research is like the stuff we're doing is often so weird that like it doesn't need to be done at gigantic scale first because with very high probability, it's going to fail at smaller scale. And like if it starts to work at smaller scale, like if it's really working, if it works so well that you know, you should, you should see pretty strong signs of success. So you actually, you need much less compute to like get a 10x win, at least to get it off the ground than you need to get like a 10% win. So, you know, that, that's good. I mean, the, the raises is primarily for compute is, is to answer your question.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:41:27Speaker 06

  On, on the talent wars, you know, I think, the way we think about it is, and this is very much informed by my experience as a member of, of this organization, Prada, and my brother's experience as a co-founder, we're, we're really not completely caught up in the same talent war as everyone else. We're trying to find the next generation. We're also hiring experienced people and like, I think that has resonated with experienced people, but like, you know, we're, we're trying to reimagine new ways of doing things. Like, I like, don't really think that having trained a trillion parameter model before is like the thing that's going to make someone successful at that. Like, obviously being a good engineer, being smart, being excited and curious about the problem, these are things that are tremendously valuable. And like lots of people, you know, have that. But I, I don't, I don't know if like, you know, five years of experience is, is really the thing that's most important.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  Love it. Uh, well, congratulations. A hundred million, 180 million dollar raise, 1.5 billion dollar valuation. I want to ring the gong for you.

• 2:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Do it. Super excited for you guys and the whole team. I'm sure you'll be back on, uh, very soon and enjoy the research.

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a very nice day.

• 2:42:31Speaker 06

  Thank you so much, guys. We're big fans of the show.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Alex Dillon from outtake.ai. He's in the restream waiting room and we'll bring him in.

• 2:42:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  The TVP N UltraDome.

• 2:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Made it. Alex, what's going on?

• 2:42:48Speaker 08

  How we doing, guys?

• 2:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Great to see you.

• 2:42:51Speaker 08

  Great to see you as well. I'm excited to be back.

• 2:42:53Jordi Hays?

  It's been a minute since we caught up.

• 2:42:55Speaker 08

  It's been almost a year, guys, yeah.

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. What's, give us the latest.

• 2:43:00Speaker 08

  Oh, man. Well, we're excited to be here because we're announcing our $40 million Series B, so let's fucking go.

• 2:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Let's go.

• 2:43:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's been a, it's been a crazy 12 months for us. I mean, we, frankly, if you just look at what's happening in our space, the number of impersonations, scams, fraud, has frankly exploded. The number of people that are tackling that in an effective way has not exploded. And so Outtake is increasingly like the one-stop shop for, I'm proud to say, not just enterprise, but government as well at this point.

• 2:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Yeah, reintroduce the company, like, what are, because there's, there's, there's so many different problems that you're tackling, and I'd love to help people understand, like, how you guys are approaching it at different verticals and for different customer types.

• 2:43:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, 100%. I think the one-line abstract version of Outtake is our job is to make fake things on the internet very expensive and make the real things very obvious. And so what that means for enterprises or governments that we work with, all these institutions have public surface areas where they represent themselves, right? If you're, if you're a commercial bank, you have a website, an app, ads, you run an ad libraries, employees in public directories. All of these are surface areas that you use to communicate with the world. Bad actors know that. They try to man in the middle and effectively try to take over those communications, attack you, attack your employees, attack your customers.

• 2:44:32Speaker 08

  Our job is to go find that fake, fake content, remove it as fast as possible, and make sure that you remain sort of a high digital trust institution.

• 2:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we had Peter on from MultiBot yesterday, and he's had so many issues. In the last part of it, he was like doing a really haphazard rebrand with not a lot of planning, and had issues with, I think, his GitHub account getting taken over, as well as an X account.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, as soon as he stepped off the account handle, someone else sniped it.

• 2:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Using a bot.

• 2:45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, using a bot, yeah. It was like, it was superhuman speed.

• 2:45:04Speaker 08

  I think that's you guys are touching on exactly the right thing there where it's like, you know, cyber used to be this thing where you're like prepping for the attack and you're like, okay, I know like as an institution, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get popped, you know, once a year, once a quarter, it's my job to sort of reduce the blast radius. And so it was really about building these like insanely powerful walls, right? That's not, that's, that's no longer the attacker slash defense paradigm anymore. Like you're just under attack at all times, like you are constantly under siege. Like you should pattern match more with a virtual drone swarm where yes, the bot will snipe your handle the minute that you let it go. It's not that someone's gonna think about it three quarters later. And so that's kind of the fundamental shift in cyber right now where the economics of attack

• 2:45:49Speaker 08

  have sort of gone to zero. Obviously defenders need to adapt.

• 2:45:56Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how you guys are, because you guys have customers and you're kind of, you're basically monitoring the situation for them on the internet. Yeah. It's, it's monitoring as a service, but also the like takedown element. Talk about the kind of partnerships that you're needing to do your work with individual platforms. Let's say somebody sets up a fake account for, for Joe Rogan and they're selling like supplements through that account, trying to make it look real using AI Joe Rogan. You can, you can report these things, sometimes there's a lag. Talk about like speeding up that process because part of, part of what will make this, what you said, like expensive to be fake on the internet is if things get taken down

• 2:46:40Jordi Hays?

  far, far faster, which means like machine on one side coordinating with machine from the platform to make it so that, you know, you're not running an AI ad of Joe Rogan for like 10 days before it gets taken down.

• 2:46:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Like the KPI that I think about as a North Star for Outtake is how do I reduce the ROI for a digital criminal, right? And, and, and you, you kind of hit the nail on the head of the way you reduce that ROI is how long can their attack be active? If it's, if it's fleeting, then they put in a lot of effort to put something in together. Or maybe not too much effort with Gen AI. But but if it's taken down before they get any reward, then then outtake is doing a job. And and you touched on another really important thing, especially in a in a world of like vibe coding. Something that I like to say a lot is is is outtake is a company that you cannot vibe code, right? Like you you can sure you can start to put together the capabilities to try to search a little bit.

• 2:47:35Speaker 08

  But to be able to search in depth with high quality classification across all these platforms, you know, whether it's social media, clear web, dark web, you know, forums, Telegram groups, areas that are really hard to get into and actually extract what you need at scale and detect what you need at scale. Incredibly difficult, but even more important and certainly not even frankly, a thing that that software fully solves on its own is the capability to be a high trust partner to all these sort of counterparties, right, where you just mentioned when we go and report something, it's really important that whether that's a social media platform or a domain registrar, they know that outtake is a high trust institution has vetted that report is is high confidence.

• 2:48:16Speaker 08

  By the way, that we the way we provide that confidence is we use our agents to basically go do cybersecurity investigations on absolutely every single thing we report. We did, by the way, 20 million last year.

• 2:48:27Jordi Hays?

  And 20 million investigations, you mean?

• 2:48:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's like try to try to comprehend, you know, how many? How many humans that would have taken, by the way, and also to show you a sense for sort of scale and speed. Of that 20 million, about 80 to 90% of them happened in just Q4 for us, right? Which, you know, for us ends this month. And so that's like 18 million, 17 million of those investigations are happening sort of just in the last three to four months. So maybe that gives a sense for like how much we're investigating, how much more we're investigating sort of as a company at the moment.

• 2:49:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and and somebody might ask, why? Why is this not happening at the platform level? Like, why wouldn't Meta do this or Google do this or X or TikTok? And maybe break down why you need a third party because of kind of the I can imagine there's a really big like incentive misalignment where like if you're if you're Joe Rogan, you don't want somebody popping up an AI account selling supplements using your name and likeness, but Meta is sitting there being like, well, we want more account growth and we want more ad spend on the platform. Like, yes, this is a problem we're trying to handle, but it's not even top of the list, I imagine, because it's like driving usage, it's driving new content, it's driving revenue.

• 2:49:42Speaker 08

  Yes, I think you're pushing at a really important point here.

• 2:49:48Speaker 08

  You know, now, working with a lot of these platforms, I think I have a lot more sympathy for them than I might have at the beginning. I might have, I might have said, yeah, you know, like, there's not enough people that care about this. I would actually tell you, having worked with a lot of these teams, they care deeply. I think their problem is the scale at which they work, right? So, these platforms are trying to ensure, and by the way, I think rightly so, ensure that they don't infringe on free speech. And they don't unfairly punish people, they don't put too many guardrails, on the one hand. On the other hand, of course, they want to prevent all these problems that we're discussing. And so, I would take has this unfair advantage, frankly, where we're not trying to do this at the scale of 3 billion, 6 billion people, at least not today yet, right?

• 2:50:29Speaker 08

  What we're able to do is say, hey, we're working with the best-in-class Fortune 2000 institutions, the federal government, state and local agencies, which is a much, much smaller set of institutions. And so, our models are actually quite fine-tuned to say, okay, for this specific institution, like, what is real, what is not? By the way, risk is different for all these institutions, not only between the institutions, but within the institution. Let's say you're talking about, again, a commercial bank. The way that it assesses risk on social platforms is quite different than the way it assesses it on websites. And so, you almost want, like, distinct models that are fine-tuned for different surface areas. All that to say, you want to be hyper-specific on how you classify risk.

• 2:51:12Speaker 08

  And that's a very, very hard thing to do at the scale of these massive platforms. I think that's actually the fundamental issue, it's really just a tech skill question for them.

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  What do you think might change on the consumer side? I saw an Instagram reel of someone highlighting just an AI video, and he was sort of pushing for a digital ID, or some integration with a social security number. There's obviously the WorldCoin, World Labs project, eyeball scanning. There's different things that you can build trust. Jordi likes to, if he finds an Instagram profile, just scroll back and make sure that they were posting in 2017 before AI existed, so that they could...

• 2:51:49Speaker 08

  There you go.

• 2:51:50John Coogan?

  So, you can see, okay, well, it looks like the same person, probably a real person. What do you think's going to change on the consumer side of, like, proving your identity online?

• 2:51:59Speaker 08

  You touched on a few really interesting things there. So one, Jordi, that's great. That's actually one of the signals we use for our agents to sort of check like, you know, what is the history of this profile? The, you mentioned World. So, you know, we actually have a direct partnership with World ID. We actually had launched, I would say, a research experiment project with them called Verify, where we took what they sort of built, where, as you pointed out, scan the iris, give you a unique way to prove that you are a singular and unique human. And what we were really curious about is like, what does that mean for, obviously, consumer, which by the way, I think it means a lot of things.

• 2:52:41Speaker 08

  They're doing a lot of incredible work with platforms like Tinder, for example, where it's like, hey, I want to make sure I date real humans. Though frankly, you know, side note, it seems like AI dating is also doing quite well. So maybe there's a genuine market for that as well. Our chat, Ryan in our chat just said TBPN wasn't posting before AI.

• 2:52:59John Coogan?

  Not true. Look at my YouTube channel. I started in 2020.

• 2:53:03Speaker 08

  You guys are my favorite AI bot.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, sorry.

• 2:53:09Speaker 08

  All that to say, those kinds of consumer credentials actually can and will bubble into enterprise workflows. Something that Outtake did was say, okay, you know, wouldn't it be powerful if you could project your security? And I'll define what that means. Right now, when you, when we interact with other institutions, you actually don't know if that institution, you know, has a great security protocol. One way they could prove that to you is every email they send, they would cryptographically sign, right? And so there would literally be in the header, a signature that says like, hey, at the moment of send, I literally swiped my pass key that we all have on our computers. And it was physically me. And I can show you with a badge that this was therefore definitively me, the human,

• 2:53:54Speaker 08

  et cetera, et cetera. And I'm projecting to you that I'm a high trust person to email with. And so something that Outtake is very actively exploring, when I talk about, you know, making real things obvious as part of our mission, is exactly that layer. It's like, okay, how do you go beyond just finding and removing things? But how do you help authenticate and prove to the world what is real? I think frankly, that's like, when we think about our $40 million Series B and like, why I think we're on this trajectory to be a public market company is It's it's the the real prize, the the real prize for us is like, how do you become a trust layer for the internet? Like, how do you say, hey, we've spent so much time mapping the landscape, removing what's fake, that actually, we are the best source of truth in what's real, right? That's really what we think about.

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, I will.

• 2:54:41Jordi Hays?

  Who did the who did the round?

• 2:54:42Speaker 08

  Iconic.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  A more serious note, who did the round? Very, very iconic group to get in the mix.

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure you'll be back. I don't know. If I was a bet if I was a betting man, I'd say a couple more times this year with the momentum that you guys are on. So, congrats on the milestone. And and yeah, thanks. Thanks for fighting the bad guys.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon.

• 2:55:11Speaker 08

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  See you.

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  Goodbye. App loving, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. You heard the axon klaxon. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 2:55:24Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Up next, we have Mitchell.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  Mitchell from Phoenix. We're going back to milk. Do you know what this company does? Let's bring in Mitchell. I'll have him explain it. How is this company?

• 2:55:34Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:55:35John Coogan?

  You're the second milk related company of the day, the flapping airplanes guy. Loosely, loosely. But please, I'll let you explain, introduce yourself in the company, please.

• 2:55:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course. Second milk related. I don't even know what that is.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  There was just an AI lab guest who was drinking milk. And so I made the guess. Anyway, sorry, continue.

• 2:55:52Speaker 09

  One of our products. No, but awesome. Unlike me on here. So, yeah, of course. Mitch, one of the founders of Phoenix, we're kind of using AI, like you said, to help milk, but mainly to help dairy farmers manage their cows. So, at the end of the world, make milk that that other gentleman gets to drink.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is the is the dairy farm market extremely concentrated at this point? Like, are you like, almost prosumer? Or is it like, pure enterprise? You get in like, the three biggest dairy farm aggregators, and then you're done?

• 2:56:22Speaker 09

  It's maybe not three, but it's absolutely much more consolidated since you know back when it used to be guys with a couple of cows in the back of the yard. Now our average dairy farmer is 3,000 cows and doing tens of millions of revenue.

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:33Speaker 09

  It's really big business.

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  How do you actually plug in, get data, drive outcomes? Like what, what, what, what are you tracking? Do they have ERPs? How, what's the actual deal?

• 2:56:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, it's really interesting. As we've scaled dairy farms over the past like 30 years, data collection has become a big part. Like you walk onto one of these dairies, there's computer vision happening there. There's color, like all of the cows wear Fitbits. I mean, they're not made by Fitbit, but same thing.

• 2:56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:56Speaker 09

  You know, all that sort of. So there's a hell of a lot of data collection being there. Um, kind of up to date, most of it just goes to nothing. So that's where we really come in using a lot of that data there to actually help with insights.

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:07Jordi Hays?

  What, yeah, break down like, I would love to just, uh, like the specifics of like what, what the actual product does, how, how it's driving results for, for the farmers.

• 2:57:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. So when we go onto a dairy farm, we collect genetic information on every single cow. So we literally hold genome sequence, all 3,000 something cows on a dairy or wherever many there are. We then combine that with what I call phenotypic data, but that's the physical data, the computer vision, the Fitbits, the weather, how much milk every cow is making, how much she's eating. All of that data. So we feed that into a big AI model, which then makes predictions on the life of a cow. So when she's a day old, I can predict with about 90% accuracy what her life is going to look like, you know? How many, whether she's going to get sick, when, how, how much milk she's going to make? Is she going to get pregnant? When, how? That sort of stuff. And we use those to just make the farms a lot more efficient as far as their day-to-day management.

• 2:57:58John Coogan?

  And then what's the pricing model? Are you doing per cow?

• 2:58:01Speaker 09

  It's SaaS. Yeah, it's like per cow per year.

• 2:58:04John Coogan?

  Per cow per year. Okay.

• 2:58:05Speaker 09

  And then, yeah, so if we see, we got a cow.

• 2:58:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, and then what, what, what interventions are farmers taking? Do cows like trade hands in the secondary market if a cow is particularly valuable?

• 2:58:18Speaker 09

  They do actually. Cows sell for millions of dollars.

• 2:58:20John Coogan?

  Millions of dollars per cow?

• 2:58:21Speaker 09

  Yeah. I think the, the highest is now over tens of millions is the best cows out there. Yeah.

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  And is that for like breeding purposes? Somebody like a cow?

• 2:58:30John Coogan?

  Elite line?

• 2:58:32Speaker 09

  They really just make semen their whole life is pretty much it.

• 2:58:35John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 2:58:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I mean, what we really look like is actually kind of how it works when we go onto a dairy. There are farm workers show up and ask the computer, what should I do today? And our computer will tell them. So we are really managing the day to day on the entire farm, just so much more. I mean, nothing against our existing farmers, but you know, much more efficiently when you're able to look at both predict everything out with ninety percent accuracy. And you're looking at every single piece of information.

• 2:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Dairy dairy super intelligence.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  It really is.

• 2:59:03Jordi Hays?

  It's here. What uh, how, how big is it like, how many farms are you guys active on today? Is, is, is the primary like bottleneck now, just like having enough people to, to sell the product?

• 2:59:18Speaker 09

  Uh, well, actually I'm the person who sells, so I'm literally every single farm we close, I'm the person who spokes to them, but supporting them, you know, is quite a lot. So, um, obviously that doesn't scale forever either, but yeah, so we're on close to half a million cows now. So, I mean, that's about five percent. Yeah.

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  That's pretty good.

• 2:59:34Speaker 09

  We only launched in August, so we have scaled to like, I mean, last year we did about two and a half million. I did two and a half million last week. Um, so, yeah, we're going pretty fast as far as scaling. And really what I need now is just people to join. I mean, at the end of the day, it does still, even though it's an AI doing it, it requires people.

• 2:59:53Jordi Hays?

  How many dairy cows are there on earth?

• 2:59:56Speaker 09

  Um, on earth, there's like a hundred million in the US, there's like ten million.

• 3:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:00:01John Coogan?

  Job's not finished.

• 3:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Job's not finished.

• 3:00:03John Coogan?

  But you raised some new money, tell us about the round.

• 3:00:06Speaker 09

  Yep, so we did our, you know, our seed round raised, you know, over five million. We got some.

• 3:00:13Speaker 09

  Got some great vessels that came in, so, you know, let's buy initialized over water, these sort of people who are really helping us scale up this mission. And, um, really just making the bulk of agriculture much more efficient.

• 3:00:24John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:00:25Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. I, I like, yeah, being able to walk up to the computer on a farm and just say, how do I, tell me what to do.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  Increase this cow's milk yield.

• 3:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  Computer, milk this cow, is basically what's happening. Yeah.

• 3:00:41Speaker 09

  Kill this cow, move this cow, milk this cow, treat this cow.

• 3:00:44John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can, I can imagine the farmer of the future walking around with a headset on, just like seeing, you know, little, little AR pop-ups.

• 3:00:52John Coogan?

  Very cyberpunk.

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cyberpunk. Cyberpunk farming is here.

• 3:00:56John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 3:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to meet you.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you later. Goodbye. 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. And we have Gabe from Rogo up next.

• 3:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Coming through.

• 3:01:18John Coogan?

  This is the first time on the show with some amazing news.

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  How you doing, Gabe? Welcome to the show.

• 3:01:22Speaker 10

  What's up, guys? How's it going?

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  What's up?

• 3:01:24Jordi Hays?

  We've been looking forward to this one for, I feel like, a year at this point.

• 3:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm shocked. It's your first time. Thank you so much for, for taking the time. Uh, since it is your first time, uh, please introduce yourself, the company, and the news.

• 3:01:36Speaker 10

  Stan's great. I'm Gabe Single. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Rogo. Uh, Rogo is a gen AI tool for front office investment bankers, investors, private equity professionals, you name it. Uh, the kind of mental comp folks have is Harvey for finance.

• 3:01:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:01:50Speaker 10

  Uh, we just raised a $75 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital.

• 3:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Incredible. Um, what, uh, I want to get right into it.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Do you agree with Pat? Is AGI here?

• 3:02:08Speaker 10

  More or less, you know. AI is smarter than a lot of people I know. So it depends on your definition of AGI.

• 3:02:15John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, then, in the investment banking context, uh, a lot of the value that an investment banker brings is interpersonal negotiation, contacts, a Rolodex, understanding subtext, what the motivations of a certain CEO are, uh, stuff that might not just be, be scrapable off the internet. Uh, what, what, where, where does Rogo actually plug in? What's left for the human being? What's the future of investment banking look like?

• 3:02:43Speaker 10

  Look, we want the best dealmakers to be more productive. And there are guys right now who are slinging phone calls all day long. Five minute, five minute, five minute, five minute. Someone like a Blair Efron at Centerview. You know, that guy is so productive because he has a team of junior bankers underneath him that know what they're doing. There should be a lot more dealmakers. There should be folks who are able to go out, advise companies, help with M and A, restructuring, et cetera, and focus on the human part of the work. The connectivity, the reading folks, the negotiation, rather than, you know, spending time building PowerPoints, spending time, you know, benchmarking comps, all of that kind of stuff.

• 3:03:21Jordi Hays?

  How is the product evolved over the last year, specifically with new model advancements, reasoning, et cetera? We, I have a lawyer buddy and just like the difference in how he perceived Harvey 12 months ago versus today is like just totally night and day. Like back then, he was like, yeah, like it's cool. And now he's like totally one shot buy it. And I'm imagining that something similar has probably transpired with you guys as well.

• 3:03:54Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think especially in the enterprise, there was a little bit of that first movers disadvantage early on where you were kind of bottlenecked by just the model quality. And everyone had ideas for how they wanted these tools to transform legal work, finance work, healthcare, et cetera. But if the models were incapable of doing it, or it was just, it wasn't quite at the threshold where you could do serious work, I think, you know, people felt a little spurned by those products. And I mean, if I look at Rogo today compared to two years ago, it's like two years ago, we were the most incompetent intern you would ever hire. And if you had hired a human intern like that, you would have fired them. The benefit is Rogo gets a lot better, a lot faster, and then it stays that way. And then it's going to be a lot cheaper than that human intern.

• 3:04:35Speaker 10

  But the products changed enormously, both in actual capabilities and ability to move across what a banker's doing, PowerPoint, Excel, file drives, SharePoint, Data Rooms, et cetera, but also integrations into the back office, right? Like people don't realize, but to be an investment bank, you not just have to be, you know, creating Excel models, calling people, but who's thinking about the conflict checks? Who's thinking about all of these kind of back and middle office tasks that help an investment bank run? And over the past two years, we've really embedded across a lot of those workflows too.

• 3:05:05John Coogan?

  Can you share a little bit about how your customers are actually using Rogo? Specifically, like, we saw this massive boom with Claude Bot, now Molt Bot, and it felt like a lot of people were just excited about Claude Code over WhatsApp or Telegram, right? And it's like, these models existed. We didn't get a new frontier model. We got a new way for a lot of people just to interact with these models. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a shift from the laptop crew maybe doing more of those compliance checks, more of those, hey, let's pull some comps or pull some data together, over their phones specifically?

• 3:05:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we are about to roll out our mobile app, which we've been kind of long in the tooth doing. But I hope that that, you know, we start to see more of the phone crew. The reality is, the most important folks in our ICP, they're just on their iPads and phones all day anyway. You know, when I was a banker, I didn't even realize my MDs had computers. They were, you know, never had them, never in Excel, that kind of thing. I think you'll see the UX of these agent tools start to evolve into like, some sort of ability to manage, you know, your agents and tasks and the kind of UX around like your army of bankers or lawyers or whatever it is. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  What about other integrations? Are you seeing folks, like, is there, you know, demand for like the Slack type of integration? We're in a war room on a particular deal and we're adding Rogo to pull stuff in into that context?

• 3:06:36Speaker 10

  Except it's gotta be Teams if we're talking about investment banking. But yeah, all of those things, right? Like, you should have a data room that is being populated by an agent and a data room that's being diligence by an agent. It should be completely integrated in all the places where your data already lives. I think the complexity for our business is, you know, when you have a kind of a Claude Bot or Claude Code running around on a desktop unconstrained, there's security risks. You know, I was using Claude Code to create a fake data room that we would then demo in the Rogo product. And as part of that, I gathered every prior fundraising deck we had, all of our financials cap table, and I asked Claude to organize it and it deleted. All the files. And I was like, can you, can you please undo that? And it was like, no, I'm sorry, that was, that was irrecoverable.

• 3:07:21Speaker 10

  It's like, if I did that with one of my clients, I would not, you know, we would not be raising this round. And so there's a lot of, of nuance in figuring out how to take these agents, which are most powerful when they are unconstrained and do have access to your files and your desktops and your systems, and making sure they can be deployed in a way that's thoughtful and secure and so on.

• 3:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how are you thinking about integrating Rogo with like legal, like legal workflows? And, and just like, like, at what point does a lot of this stuff really converge? It feels like, you know, there's kind of an old, an old pair, like kind of paradigm around these, the way, you know, a company gets bought or sold that will evolve.

• 3:08:06Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, especially in places like private credit, there, there's, there's a blurry overlap between what is, you know, legal work and due diligence versus investment work and due diligence. I would say when I look at some of the like prior generation comps for me in this space, Thomson Reuters, FAX at Bloomberg, et cetera. They actually really subdivided the legal verticals and products from the finance. I mean, Thomson Reuters actually sold off all their finance assets to Refinitiv and into L Seg. I think it was partly because it was actually, you know, there, there's less synergies often than people expect. I think if we're just talking about private equity, private credit, yes, a lot of synergies between those types of workflows, but like,

• 3:08:48Speaker 10

  you know, a lot of what investment bankers are doing, or, you know, the, the top private equity folks, top public markets investors, they're kind of outsourcing all of the legal work to someone else. Like, that's not even under their umbrella.

• 3:09:01Jordi Hays?

  What about headcount planning? How are, how's the industry kind of thinking? It's probably one of the more. Awkward conversations for a lot of people involved, but.

• 3:09:14Speaker 10

  I mean, it's not, it's not taking teachers' jobs, right? Like, we're talking about investment bankers, and investment bankers are going to get more productive. And so firms are excited, people are excited, bankers are excited. If you're a junior banker, you will be generating fees yourself earlier in your career rather than later. If you are a bank, you're going to expect higher fees out of your existing bankers with fewer resources, but it's going to change the trajectory of what it means to work in finance. And you'll go from being the automation piece of the bank, where you're just churning out materials, to having to think about, yeah, how do you go out and do deals on your own?

• 3:09:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

• 3:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, like, do you think we'll see an acceleration in overall deal making? Like, are there, are there, are there, are there deals, how many deals don't get done just because it's going to be such a huge headache, like?

• 3:10:04Speaker 10

  There's a lot of deals that don't get done because it's such a headache. I mean, especially in the private markets. Like, think about all those mom and shop businesses throughout the US, or even, you know, businesses in emerging markets that can't pay Goldman Sachs $10 million to run a process, can't pay JPM $10 million to restructure. Especially in the US, where all of these assets have been getting picked up by private equity firms that just have sourcing arms that call, you know, your local roofing business in Minnesota. You know, now those businesses should be able to get banking services themselves, actually run a fair auction and get a better price, and it should result in a more liquid, more transparent, more efficient private market.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  Go to deal sleds. What you got for us? Recommendations for up and coming bankers, the next generation? What are they putting on their feet?

• 3:10:54Speaker 10

  You know, I have one pair of deal sleds, and it's the ones my parents got me when I got my job as an investment banker at Lazard, and they're Ferragamo loafers. Those are the ones I wear to this day when I have to go into, you know, whatever investment bank or.

• 3:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, somebody should make some shoes that are just like Mac Minis, just walking around, you know, walking around the office.

• 3:11:14John Coogan?

  Silicon Valley bankers.

• 3:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Really signaling, signaling, like, you know, I'm with it.

• 3:11:19John Coogan?

  That's really fun. Yeah.

• 3:11:20Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what's the biggest bottleneck right now? I'm assuming you're, you're going to hire a bunch of people from this round. Where, what's, what, talk about the use of funds, all that.

• 3:11:30Speaker 10

  We're 100 people today, primarily in New York. We're opening a London office and then probably APAC later in the year, trying to get to around 200, 250 people, equally split across, you know, product and engineering and go to market. And most of our go-to-market post-sales, what we call kind of like forward deployed banking is ex-finance, ex-bankers, ex-investors.

• 3:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:11:53John Coogan?

  Where's the name come from, Rogo?

• 3:11:57Speaker 10

  Our lawyers, our initial name was Athena, and our lawyers were like, you can't do that. There's probably a thousand products called Athena. So John, my co-founder, and I spent months trying to come up with a name. And, you know, at some point, we're just looking up old Latin words, and Rogo means I ask in Latin. And so we thought that was a good one.

• 3:12:16John Coogan?

  I love that. That's great. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

• 3:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great. Great to finally meet, and congrats to the whole team.

• 3:12:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:12:23Speaker 10

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:12:24John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. And our last guest of the lightning round, Ciara Peterson from Voyager Ventures.

• 3:12:33Jordi Hays?

  It's energy time.

• 3:12:35John Coogan?

  Restream waiting room. Let's bring her into the TV panel room. How are you doing?

• 3:12:38Speaker 11

  Hey, guys. Delighted to be here. How are you?

• 3:12:41John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 3:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you. First time on the show. Would love an introduction on yourself and the firm, and then we can get into the news.

• 3:12:49Speaker 11

  You bet. So I'm Ciara Peterson. I'm one of the two founders of Voyager Ventures. We are an early-stage venture capital firm investing in the foundational technologies that power civilization. So this is energy, reputation, materials production, advanced compute, physical AI. These are the biggest markets in the world, and the ones that are foundational to ongoing growth in the long term and competitive advantage in the near term. I have been working in energy for my entire career. That may start 21 years ago at the International Energy Agency.

• 3:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success.

• 3:13:23Speaker 11

  Exactly.

• 3:13:25Speaker 11

  Long time coming. And I mean, that's really the story of our backgrounds, myself and my co-founder at Voyager, Sarah. I've been working in energy and industrial modernization and climate stabilization now for decades. Between us, we've built five climate tech and energy companies. We've been active in policymaking at the International Energy Agency, as I mentioned, and also in the Obama Office of Energy and Climate Change back when we had one. And we built, yeah, exactly. We built companies that were responsible for financing more than $3 billion worth of distributed energy assets. So a lot of

• 3:14:05Speaker 11

  solar. We've been active in the research programs at Harvard and MIT, advancing everything from energy market research, which was my graduate focus, and Sarah's at MIT in industrial biotech. And we've been investing now for 10 years plus. I actually got started as an angel investor in 2015 in energy tech. Those companies did well. And so we teamed up to launch Voyager in 2021 and raised a $100 million debut fund. We've recently

• 3:14:33Jordi Hays?

  John's going for the gong.

• 3:14:35John Coogan?

  How much did you raise recently?

• 3:14:36Speaker 11

  Hey, no, that's not the big, the big news.

• 3:14:38Jordi Hays?

  We got a bigger number.

• 3:14:39Speaker 11

  We announced a 275 fund too, so.

• 3:14:46Jordi Hays?

  We were waiting for that. Very cool. I want to talk about energy because I feel like your, your timing here is great. I feel like people in are spending way more, you know, it's gone mainstream, both at the national level and in politics.

• 3:15:04John Coogan?

  Just in the last few weeks, we've had Scott Nolan on to talk about, you know, nuclear fuel production and then a separate company that turns that actually into fuel pellets, trisulfil. And like, there's a, there's a company in every part of the stack. Are there any particular subcategories that you're tracking that you're particularly interested in? And then I want to talk about the financing of all this as well. But what, what do you think is the most like breakout success in energy these days?

• 3:15:32Speaker 11

  Oh yeah, I mean, we're energy maximalists. I have been working in energy for my entire career.

• 3:15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:36Speaker 11

  And when you, and when you think about what's truly foundational to power and civilization, it's energy. Like that is the foundation of all of it. And so, you know, we, it's actually a really exciting time to be investing. And given advances, particularly in electrification, I mean, we're seeing the cost of solar drops so fast. You have to look at a log scale. It's amazing. And what that means in terms of, you know, distribution of energy at a worldwide scale is incredible. And for creating, you know, a truly global and resilient energy system. And that's, you know, enables near-term stability for users of electricity and long-term prosperity at a global scale.

• 3:16:17Speaker 11

  That's like, this, this is a technology that will power the next era of progress and beyond. And so electricity, massive. Advances in electrification, massive right now.

• 3:16:28John Coogan?

  Are you optimistic about American solar? It feels like the, in terms of solar panel construction and manufacturing, China's doing so well that it's been really hard to get a foothold. We, we, we've talked to some teams that have, you know, taken Chinese-built assets and

• 3:16:44Jordi Hays?

  T1 Energy.

• 3:16:45John Coogan?

  T1 Energy is interesting, but I haven't seen as much, as much excitement from the startup world around really scaling solar. But then you have, you know, huge voices like Elon is a solar maxi. There's lots of people that are very, uh, very, you know, uh, just, uh, beating the drum on like the fundamental physics of the sun is so much energy, we're going to capture it at some point. So it feels inevitable, but it doesn't feel like there's as much of a boom or narrative being driven. But what are you seeing?

• 3:17:16Speaker 11

  Oh, it's totally inevitable. You can't argue with the numbers. I mean, 90% of installed energy generation for the last year that we have record is 2024 is renewables. That is at a global scale. That is certainly true in the United States as well. I think it's just under 90%. And I mean, that's regardless of political whim. That's regardless of, um, you know, overall organizing policy approach. And that's just simply because solar is better. The, it's cheaper, it's better performing, it, you know, it enables a true distribution of electricity like we've never seen before. And coupled with advances in batteries, that's the unlock. You can, you really create a transactive energy system, which we've never seen before, and it really will be fundamental to power and growth for decades ahead.

• 3:18:01Speaker 11

  So huge, yeah, huge believer in solar potential now. And in combination with electrification, both of energy generation, also in end-use applications. I mean, electricity now is the most frequent way in which anybody around the world accesses power. That's exciting. It means that power is programmable and it enables a new era of machines to be made, which is extraordinary in terms of extending human capabilities into ways that we've never had before. When you couple that with automation and artificial intelligence, like we're just seeing the foundations of so much innovation right now to really, one, boost systemic

• 3:18:46Speaker 11

  stability in a rising vulnerability and volatility market. We have framed trade relationships, geopolitical tensions, physical risks that are tensing given climate change, and when you can control your inputs in terms of electricity, in terms of your means of production, and you can take advantage of advances in advanced manufacturing to create better products, you can really control your own destiny. That's exciting.

• 3:19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about financing hard tech companies, energy companies, these like capital-intensive companies at the earlier stage? It feels like more and more founders are going to need to get familiar with venture debt. It's been sort of a cautionary tale from the software startup era, oh, venture debt, that's what will burn you, that's what will really put you in danger if you misplan and then you get over your skis. But how do you think about the role of venture debt or debt instruments or more complicated financing schemes for some of these companies?

• 3:19:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think one of the things that we're quite excited about is the sophistication of the financing instruments that are available to early-stage startups. I mean, it used to be that you had to burn super-high cost of capital venture or private equity on assets, and that didn't make sense for anybody. You know, now we're seeing really tailored and interested bespoke, non-dilutive financing, all types. And I think it's a recognition of the scale of these markets and the durability that they have. And you know, it's Long-lived and reliable yield. I think we're also seeing though, and this is something that's been a recent development,

• 3:20:28Speaker 11

  ongoing sovereign interest and recognition in these technologies as being tools of the national interest. Forty-four percent of our own portfolio is either in partnership or in active conversations to sign a deal with the US government. That's extraordinary. I mean, you see in QTA last year, I think became one of our second most frequent co-investor.

• 3:20:53John Coogan?

  It used to be completely unthinkable. It was like you'd never go to the government, they'll never buy anything. Like Palantir was this weird company that was like off in the dark, just doing one deal and they were the only ones. And then Andereau sort of did it again. And then all of a sudden it was like every company has some sort of deal with the government.

• 3:21:08Speaker 11

  Yeah. Because when you think about what are the inputs and tools of sovereign advantage, of competitive advantage? It's controlling your destiny in terms of energy, controlling your destiny in terms of supply chains for inputs to manufacturing, industrial capacity, and then increasingly compute capacity. It's a national asset. And all of that hyperscaler stat that all relies on electricity.

• 3:21:34Jordi Hays?

  What about, like, what are the prospects for making, bringing the solar supply chain to the United States? We have, like, earlier we mentioned T1 Energy, which was kind of a weird setup in the way that it was created and now operated by a new company. But can we, I think one of the reasons that maybe Americans and the tech industry isn't so excited about solar at this moment, or at least broadly, is that we're not making the panels here. It doesn't feel like something that is, that we really own.

• 3:22:11Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know that we're not excited about solar. When you look at the solar deployment.

• 3:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm just saying like the attention is almost entirely on nuclear. Like nuclear.

• 3:22:23John Coogan?

  It feels like that now.

• 3:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Like I'm just saying from when you, when you think about.

• 3:22:25John Coogan?

  Casey Hamer would like a word, but.

• 3:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure, but think about, I would just say the number of entrepreneurs that have come on the show this year that are talking about nuclear, the nuclear deals are, and I'm not saying it's like warranted, but I'm just saying like nuclear is certainly.

• 3:22:43John Coogan?

  Well, it feels like, at least to me, and you can give your feedback on this take, but it feels like nuclear was, was potentially economically valuable, viable, the technology worked, but there was a regulatory blocker in place that made it very, very difficult to actually just stand up the technology. With solar, there's no, that regulatory blocker doesn't exist. It's more of a market force of China manufactures them really, really cheaply. And like it's the DJI drone question versus GoPro, like where, like we just need a ton of people, a ton of manufacturing capacity, a ton of CNC machines, we need like a massive facility. And that's more of a capital formation.

• 3:23:26John Coogan?

  And then are you willing to go up against the Chinese manufacturing engine that's so critical?

• 3:23:31Jordi Hays?

  My point is just that energy is critical.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:23:34Jordi Hays?

  Solar energy.

• 3:23:35John Coogan?

  It still feels blocked. Yeah, you're right.

• 3:23:37Jordi Hays?

  A pretty big part of it.

• 3:23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:38Jordi Hays?

  So I would imagine we want to make as many of these as we can in the US.

• 3:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:23:42Jordi Hays?

  So I was curious, like.

• 3:23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, please.

• 3:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Update on the, on the effort there. I know you've invested in it and curious.

• 3:23:49Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think we're seeing a reexamination of global supply chains for critical aspects of ongoing sovereign advantage and industrial competitiveness. Solar being one, critical minerals, another, access to novel battery technologies. And these are all aspects of an overall industrial policy that's increasingly favoring domestic production and control of energy producing assets and manufacturing inputs. I think, you know, to your earlier point, like any technology is going to need to clear the global clearing price and the massive production in cost.

• 3:24:31Speaker 11

  It's been extraordinary for solar production, for panel production. It's, you can't get much cheaper.

• 3:24:40Speaker 11

  There's kind of nowhere to go.

• 3:24:43Speaker 11

  That's exciting. I mean, you think about that as an input to other industrial processes. That's, I mean, it's truly extraordinary opportunity to have abundant energy that doesn't rely on your fossil fuel supply chains. It's truly distributed and can be programmable. I mean, you couple it with energy storage. I mean, you just have a whole new paradigm in abundance for electricity.

• 3:25:06John Coogan?

  Be exciting.

• 3:25:06Jordi Hays?

  Very exciting.

• 3:25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:08Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, you guys, uh, stage agnostic, pre-seed?

• 3:25:15Speaker 11

  Over early stage.

• 3:25:16Jordi Hays?

  All early.

• 3:25:17Speaker 11

  Yep. Yeah. So we raised a 275 million and it's more seed series A. So it's 275 million for, uh, seed and series A. We went out to market with a 250 target. We were oversubscribed on that. I had a 90% first close. There was a lot of excitement.

• 3:25:34Speaker 11

  Yeah. Thanks, guys.

• 3:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:25:35Speaker 11

  It's been great.

• 3:25:36John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 3:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, excited. I'm sure, I'm sure a bunch of your companies will be on and, and, uh, congrats to the whole team.

• 3:25:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Good to meet you.

• 3:25:43Speaker 11

  Likewise. Always happy to talk energy.

• 3:25:46John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Bye.

• 3:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon. Cheers.

• 3:25:49John Coogan?

  Um, did the Klein team just join Codex OpenAI? Jason Liu asked the question.

• 3:25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think a lot of the team members did. Uh, Pasha, remember there was a whole controversy about, you know, the smell, imagine the smell.

• 3:26:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, he was good Klein.

• 3:26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So he moved over, I think a number of the, of the like lead engineers that moved over.

• 3:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Will Brown says it's a very rare reverse windsurf and.

• 3:26:15Jordi Hays?

  The tradies said, well, they certainly didn't decline.

• 3:26:18John Coogan?

  Decline the, uh, ask, yeah. Interesting to see these, uh, the, you know, the, the, the really, the really headline grabbing, um, the, uh, the really headline grabbing AI trade war narrative has sort of calmed down, but everyone's hiring, everyone's poaching, everyone's trying to build their teams.

• 3:26:37Jordi Hays?

  It's a war.

• 3:26:38John Coogan?

  Working through. Uh, anyway, uh, there are.

• 3:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a post here. Somebody is calling out Augustus Rico. They said, he has no couscous.

• 3:26:51John Coogan?

  Greed.

• 3:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Greed.

• 3:26:53John Coogan?

  He, I, to be fair, I've never seen the man eat couscous. He might not have any couscous. I think they were trying to say conscience. Uh, but yes, Augustus has stumbled into such a funny life. I'm really, he's, uh, yeah, he's, he's, he's grinding through it.

• 3:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Picked, uh, something more controversial than pretty much anything else.

• 3:27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, but he's, he's.

• 3:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly more, somehow more controversial than defense.

• 3:27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's just odd. It just triggers all sorts of people. I wonder, um, I feel like the, the fact that he's able to go on podcasts and communicate so clearly. He's one of the Joe Rogan CEOs and your parlance, like, uh, that's allowed him to get through it. It feels like if he were on his back foot and not able to just say, hey, I'll talk to anyone for an hour. I will just talk, talk, talk. That, uh, if there was a negative news cycle about him, it would be a mu- much harder situation, but I don't know.

• 3:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Last post for the day.

• 3:27:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Emily Sundberg went mega viral, sixty two thousand likes.

• 3:27:59John Coogan?

  I did not see the likes on this. I didn't realize.

• 3:28:01Jordi Hays?

  He says, the logo for Sydney Sweeney's lingerie line looks like it's for a salad dressing company that launched in twenty nineteen.

• 3:28:09John Coogan?

  Sir.

• 3:28:10Jordi Hays?

  This is for Siren.

• 3:28:11John Coogan?

  Si- oh, it's Siren.

• 3:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Siren.

• 3:28:13John Coogan?

  That's wild. And.

• 3:28:14Jordi Hays?

  It does, it does give off a little bit of Sweetgreen.

• 3:28:17John Coogan?

  So, so.

• 3:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Sweetgreen launched way before twenty nineteen.

• 3:28:20John Coogan?

  Wait, wait. So, oh, oh, wait, wait. Is that the company that she was referring to? What is she actually referring to? Because I saw Dirt quote tweeted it, uh, and that's a media and technology company with a similar logo. And Dirt says, just says, hey, and got sixty six thousand likes as well. And Emily says, bro. But, oh, I guess it's Sweetgreen that they're, that she's actually referring to? Salad dressing company? Isn't Sweetgreen like a salad company?

• 3:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, she's just, she's just, she's just posting. Alex Conrad says someone blended Kava and Grazza branding and chat.

• 3:28:55John Coogan?

  Does have a little Grazza in there.

• 3:28:57Jordi Hays?

  But I think this, I think this company will do very well. Uh, I think Sydney's like one of the most commercial people in Hollywood, right? She's like just leaning in. She's got, uh, a, you know, somewhat short moment in time to create a lot of value and, and, uh, certainly a lot of the brand activations that she's done have broken through. So I'm bullish, I'm bullish.

• 3:29:22John Coogan?

  To go back to the Claude Bot thing, like, like this, uh, Siren clearly exists in a very different part of the economy as Sweetgreen. Like Sweetgreen, I think of as like you walk down the street, you see it. Maybe if they start opening a ton of retail stores, but like in terms of. Are you flash banging me? Why are you flash banging me?

• 3:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Because the chat earlier was going crazy. They were trying to throw me off. It was insane. I was barely hanging on. It was brutal.

• 3:29:48John Coogan?

  Everyone loves, uh, everyone loves the flashbang. Uh, fun fact, Sydney Sweeney is launching her lingerie brand on, you guessed it, Shopify.

• 3:29:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:30:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic news. Uh, well, the last thing before you plant the bomb. Uh, we have a new ad read for Railway. I already did it. I'm going to do another one. Railway Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 3:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, said John, uh, we'll close it out. Nathan, uh, is highlighting Bloomberg article. The, the title of the article, Nvidia lacks clear successor for superstar CEO who built company. And Nathan, of course, says, man is barely getting started. And I agree, who's, who's asking, who's, who's even asking this question?

• 3:30:44John Coogan?

  This is like, this is. Driven the stock 10x and it's the biggest company in the world and they haven't, like they have massive margins, the cash flow. Like there's been no mistakes, like literally like nothing. 62 years old. He's got another 30. He's got another 30. He's going to be riding Nvidia straight into singularity. And we will be too, here on TVPN.

• 3:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last post, last post.

• 3:31:05John Coogan?

  Okay, one more post.

• 3:31:05Jordi Hays?

  Eric, Eric, uh, Soufert says.

• 3:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Pinterest dropped nearly 10% yesterday on news that the company is cutting roughly 15% of its workforce to focus on AI. Eric, I believe, is coming on the show tomorrow.

• 3:31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Really like talking with him about all things.

• 3:31:25John Coogan?

  We're gonna dive into this, we'll dive into OpenAI Ads.

• 3:31:27Jordi Hays?

  GPT Ads.

• 3:31:30John Coogan?

  Pretty remarkable. I wonder where Pinterest will land. There's been rumors or pitches for an acquisition. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:31:38Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:31:38John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. TPTN.com for the news and services.

• 3:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.