Anthropic Hits $380B Valuation, Become Unsloppable, WSJ Mansion Section | Martin Shkreli, Connor Hayes, Alex Bouzari, Brett Adcock

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:51) - Anthropic Hits $380B Valuation (06:08) - Become Unsloppable (23:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (45:08) - WSJ Mansion Section (58:20) - Martin Shkreli, an American investor and former pharmaceutical executive, gained notoriety for significantly increasing the price of the drug Daraprim and was later convicted of securities fraud. In the conversation, Shkreli discusses his development of a new product that utilizes his network and AI to estimate venture capital positions in various funding rounds, highlighting significant gains by investors in companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. He also touches on the challenges of accessing accurate investment data and the potential of AI in transforming industries, emphasizing the importance of product development and sales over engineering in business success. (01:34:32) - Connor Hayes, a product leader at Meta, discusses the development and growth of Threads, emphasizing its unique content format and the importance of fostering niche communities. He highlights the "Dear Algo" feature, allowing users to customize their feeds by requesting specific content, and shares insights on integrating AI to assist creators in streamlining content production. Hayes also touches on the challenges of creator monetization, advocating for directing traffic to sustainable revenue sources rather than relying solely on platform payouts. (02:03:30) - Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder of DDN, discusses his company's role in solving data challenges for AI implementations across enterprises and nations, highlighting collaborations with Nvidia and Elon Musk's ventures. He shares his journey from France to the U. S., emphasizing DDN's evolution from high-performance computing to AI, and underscores the importance of efficient infrastructure in accelerating AI adoption. Bouzari also addresses the competitive landscape, noting the rapid advancements in data center development in China and the Middle East, and stresses the need for the U. S. to enhance its efficiency to remain competitive. (02:29:01) - Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, discusses the company's advancements in humanoid robotics, highlighting the unveiling of their third-generation robot, Figure 03, and the development of a new, highly dexterous hand designed to achieve human-level manipulation capabilities. He emphasizes the importance of creating robots with human-like form and dexterity to seamlessly integrate into environments built for humans, enabling tasks such as folding laundry and handling dishes. Adcock also outlines Figure's strategy to deploy humanoid robots in industrial settings rapidly, with plans to introduce them into homes once they can perform tasks autonomously and reliably over extended periods. (02:55:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Friday. It's the day before Valentine's Day 2026.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  We're live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  We should have mentioned Valentine's Day.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, earlier.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Two months ago, and then again, one month ago.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  I think most of the audience is prepped for sure. But we have some, we have some ideas, some recommendations. If you're looking for advice this Valentine's Day, we of course, live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune of Finance, the Capital of Capital. And here's an idea for Valentine's Day. Ramp.com. This Valentine's Day, show her you care about your future together by putting all of your couple's spending on Ramp. Because nothing says, "I will provide for our family," like pulling out a Ramp card.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Knows you take, you handle business.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Handling business.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Uh, the big news, Anthropic has raised $30 billion at $380 billion post-money valuation. We've all seen the revenue chart, 10x growth, four years in a row, 100 million, a billion, now 14 billion. Will they do 100? That's the question. Will they be at $100 billion revenue run rate by the end of the year? They're growing on track to hit that, which is crazy and completely unprecedented. But again, they're going after all of SaaS, they're going after all of software, they're going after all of labor, all of white collar work.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  All in your job specifically.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not looking good for you.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  No, we're joking.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Never doom.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Never doom. There's plenty of opportunity. Uh, there are plenty of good potential outcomes. Dario has been on, uh, Dwarash Patel today, and he did something else with Ross Douthat. And so there, there's a number of places where you can go to hear his, uh, his latest takes on the good ending and what he's, you know, guiding towards. Um, be interesting to, to, to follow. The, the, the question is, you know, what happens to the companies that are currently under pressure with the Anthropic narrative? They have to answer this question of, you know, is Anthropic just going to steamroll you? What is your real source of strength?

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not just Anthropic, but the labs.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, every.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  Y C company that is building an AI native, you know, any company that is, you know, slapping AI native on their website.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, everyone's going after the opportunity.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  So we coined a phrase.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  We, we decided to coin something.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  It's time to, uh, coin out.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  And before we tell you the coinage, let me tell you about Cisco. This Valentine's Day, give her the gift of enterprise grade networking this Valentine's Day. So your home wifi never drops during movie night because nothing kills the mood like buffering during a rom com. Get on Cisco.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Head over to cisco.com. Uh, so yeah, we were, we decided, so, so how do you, what is a phrase that you can generally apply to businesses that, uh, can survive and then hopefully thrive?

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  In, uh, during this moment in time.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  And our intelligence is too cheap to meter.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so the, the, the question, you know, earnings cycle last couple of weeks, uh, every CEO has gone on. If basically like, if you had to answer the question, like what, talk about the threat of AI.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  If you just had to answer the question.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Like basically the companies that were just, the entire earnings call was just about, generally about AI.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you're like a core weave or something like that.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  That's a little bit more straightforward, but if you have to answer the question, do you have a durable moat, uh, right now with, uh, AI progress, your stock is probably going to sell off. Uh, but, but, uh, you know, either way, kind of however you answer it. But, um, uh, there's a second question, which is like, are you a true beneficiary? So like, do you have a durable moat? And then are you a true beneficiary? So we, uh, decided to coin the phrase, uh, un-sloppable.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Un-sloppable.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Un-sloppable. So these are companies that we'll get into that have some type of moat in. An era where it feels like more code could be written in the next 12 months than in all of human history.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  I was kind of running the numbers. It seems possible.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  It's specifically not, okay, you're a company that has just spent 10 years writing a bunch of lines of code and it would take a startup a lot of time and money and they would have to hire a lot of engineers and write a lot of code to create a copy of what you have.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  It's like, no.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  So like to rebuild Salesforce as a platform.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  You would have to spend billions of, historically, you would have had to spend billions of dollars.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Hiring thousands of software engineers to, you know, piece by piece, build out all of the functionality. At Salesforce, of course, you could build vertical solutions and get some amount of traction, but in general, the idea was like there was some, effectively, just a, an engineering moat and that there was a lot of code that you'd have to write to effectively compete. So I talked about in the newsletter today.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Set the table first. What's going on in the market?

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so software has undergone the largest non-recessionary 12-month drawdown in over 30 years. It's minus 34%, wiping out $2 trillion of market cap from the peak. This is JP Morgan as of a couple of days ago. AI threat sparks historic software stock crash. Goldman Sachs warns of newspaper-like decline.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  I love the newspaper. What's wrong with newspapers?

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  No.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  Still got it. And then as of yesterday, over the prior eight trading sessions, more than 20% of the S and P 500 had a drawdown of 7% or more in a single session, according to the compound.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  That's a lot. Quickly, before we continue, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. This Valentine's Day, I recommend flying to Manhattan, take her to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, IPO your company, and ring the opening bell together.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Your love just went public.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Good one, John. So, yeah, so continuing. So I wrote, "Everything was great when we were disrupting manual workflows, but as we enter the software singularity, we are having the uncomfortable experience of disrupting ourselves. Assume the marginal cost of software development goes to zero. If you're a software company where your mote was that a competitor would have to spend a billion dollars to hire a bunch of software engineers to write millions of lines of code to create a product, and you have no other motes, it's going to be rough. Thankfully, there are motes that are unaffected by coding agents and effectively zero-cost software development." Peter Thiel, PT, outlined four key sources of monopoly power in Zero to One back in 2014.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  These are proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and brand, or you can think of as trust. Most of these still hold, but proprietary technology by itself is no longer sufficient as a mote.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  In some cases. If you have a patent to a GLP-1 drug, that is a proprietary technology that will give you pricing power probably for as long as the patent holds. And there are patents on certain pieces of technology that even if they can be cloned or re-derived from first principles with your million geniuses in the data center, the first person to patent it gets to reap that value, and that's just the way our...

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  And the issue with software, how many, a bunch of designer friends of mine have like a design patent on a specific kind of workflow.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Can enforce it.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool to say that you have a patent, but it's not...

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, proprietary technology can just be, okay, we have a big software system, but oftentimes it's more like we have proprietary, like something that's regulated, something that's a cornered resource, something that's scarce and will remain scarce. But yes, if your proprietary technology is just, you're the only person with this particular Python script, that's probably going away. But network effects aren't, and some of the economies of scale, some of the liquidity on these platforms is going to be durable. You can vibe code a, I was talking to Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber about this, you can vibe code a pickup app that, you know, looks like Uber, has a map, lets you click the button,

• 8:19John Coogan?

  accepts payment, but if there's no one on the other side of that network to actually come and pick you up, you're... Your Uber clone is dead in the water now.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or if a customer, if somebody does pick it up and the customer has a terrible experience, do you have the, do you have the resources to actually make it right?

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, but Uber works because they spent a bunch of money getting to scale and cloning that scale is difficult. Now, the whole self-driving car thing is separate because you bring.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Unclankable.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're working on that one. That'll happen, but there is, there are a set of businesses that will have to contend with the clankification of the economy, but that's.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so becoming Unsloppable means two things. First, your business actually has to drive its economic power from a moat that is Unsloppable. And second, you need to clearly communicate that to shareholders. Right now, if the market thinks you're just a bunch of lines of code, you're cooked. Tech companies, we think of as Unsloppable. You have hardware, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Cisco, Broadcom, SK Hynix, Western Digital, data centers, so Neo Clouds, things like CoreWeave, Lambda, social networks, YouTube, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, even thinking Roblox, right? They can be not just, you know, they have the network and they can be a beneficiary of AI because if it's easier to make games, a lot more people will make games. Maybe you'll get more usage. Marketplaces, Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash,

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  IP holders, Disney, Netflix, Warner Brothers. I think if you have a lot of IP right now and the cost to produce, great content drops dramatically, you're going to benefit from that. And then platforms, things like YouTube and Spotify as well. I said it's been an incredibly rough couple of weeks for public market CEOs. Really disheartening on the show, CEOs have been putting up some great quarters and then, you know, they're trading down between seven and 20%. There are two main questions everyone wants to know, even if they already sold your stock to buy Adams. One, do you have a durable moat in the software singularity? Two, are you a true beneficiary of AI? Many CEOs are still struggling to answer number one because it doesn't really matter what you say. Just having to answer the question

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  equals a sell-off. And two, this one can really only be answered in the numbers. You aren't an immediate AI beneficiary if revenue is not accelerating. Also separately, there are a bunch of crazy things happening in the broader economy right now. I think Besen, Besen went on CNBC at 4 a.m. They brought out the big dog. I haven't been able to catch it yet.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  It was 7 a.m. Eastern, right?

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 4 a.m. Pacific. Very, very early for us. It's possible to be un-sloppable, but not an obvious beneficiary, but you'll still likely sell off as the market digests and interrogates the actual real-world impacts of coding agents. Some industries will be more resistant to change. Other industries will be revealed to have a secret source of market power that was underappreciated in the before times.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  What I was thinking was Nielsen, this company, it was, you know, in one way Nielsen ratings, Nielsen data, a lot of consumer packaged goods companies use this. I'm sure Matina is looking at how is this Yorba Mate selling in this store? And you go to Nielsen, you pay them, and they give you data, and it just feels like an interface to sales data, but they have this whole network and you just have to pay for it. And it's not really something that you can just spin up. I don't know. What do you think?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  I mean, isn't that kind of like what, what Simile is doing? We had them on yesterday. They're like trying, maybe you can kind of do like polls or something about how a market will...

• 11:51John Coogan?

  That's more for, yeah, prediction. The bigger one is like, is like, you want to know...

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, I would imagine Simile would actually want that data to update their models.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, like you want to know, okay, what stores are actually turning my product? Which store should I be doing promos in? Which store should I be doubling down on running advertising in? Or what chains are working? Should I push more into? Or even just, hey, I need to go to one chain and say I'm working, like Target's working, so Walmart should carry me? They're not really going to accept just a simulation of that data. They're going to want to know that an independent rating agency sort of rated.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Gold rock. Just bought on sloppable.com. Great pickup.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Quickly, before we move on, let me tell you about Apple Lovin'. This Valentine's Day, use Apple Lovin's Axon.ai to serve her hyper-targeted ads for exactly the jewelry she wants. That way, she'll be extra excited when she unwraps presents on the big day.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Great call. Capping off the newsletter, I said a lot of the software market feels like the office equipment and imaging sector in the 90s. So companies like Sharp, Canon, Panasonic. Revenue was still up and to the right, but widespread adoption of the internet emails and PDFs was on the horizon. Even today, you'll still find a fax machine in every doctor's office, and many of the giants of that era are still around. But if you stayed in those names, you would have missed out on generational gains by simply being long PDF. Had to go long PDF. So yeah, if you look at these companies, Panasonic's still a massive company, and they've obviously adapted over time. But, you know, it's a...

• 13:33John Coogan?

  It's a shift from growth stock to value stock. Investors are less willing to pay for earnings that might come 10 years out because they're worried about those, or 20 years out. Instead, they're asking, what will my return on invested capital be this year? What will the dividend be this year? How much cash will you give me back if I invest for a one-year time horizon, or shorter or longer? Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. This holiday, Valentine's Day, here's an idea. TurboPuffer. Store vector embeddings of every romantic moment you've shared in TurboPuffer, so you can do semantic search for that time

• 14:15John Coogan?

  in Paris and actually find it. TurboPuffer is serverless vector and full-text search. It's built from first principles and object storage. It's fast, 10x cheaper, and it's extremely scalable. So no matter how many memories you're cramming in TurboPuffer, you're good to go. You're good to go this Valentine's Day. Just do it. Anyway, it will be interesting. I think that there will be a reckoning around who is able to reveal a true mote and help people, help the market, understand what their source of strength is, whether it's liquidity on their platform, the network effect, the IP, if they have a real IP that's defensible. But just having a big bag of code right now is a little bit of a weight, since you're seeing so many companies that are...

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Saying, well, I haven't, we, we, our software engineers aren't even writing the code anymore. Yes, we're advancing our products, but so many companies are, are going all in.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  It's also, it's, it's, it's It's wild how long it's taken for the public markets to react to this, this kind of one-shotting concept or this zero marginal cost code.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  You know, coding concept where we were having these same conversations in Q1 of last year, being like, what are the implications when you can just put in the prompt box, build me XYZ tool, right? And it took a while for the models to make progress, but even a year ago, it was pretty obvious that you would get to some point where you could one-shot a big platform. Of course, reliability, still a concern, right? Security is still a concern. Uh, there's a lot of businesses where, um, the, the potential risks of using like a vibe-coded product like far outweigh the, the, uh, the cost of just paying for the product and having something that's reliable, trustworthy, battle-tested.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, but, uh,

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's still a ton of questions about how quickly disruption happens, how quickly market structures change, change. Some things go from monopolies to oligopolies. Some oligopolies are going to go to perfectly competitive. Uh, it's certainly a bull market for YC companies who can vibe-code something that's as good as a public company SaaS product and then go to those customers and say,

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not as good, but as feature-complete.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  As feature-complete, or at least can compete a little bit faster and say, hey, I'll come in with an offer that's 10x cheaper and, um, and, and, and move you over. And that's just going to create some pricing pressure. The question is, what's the rate-limiting factor? Is, is diffusion a real factor? Is adoption a real factor? Or do you, do you need forward-deployed engineers to go help companies transform with, with agent-to-coding? Or do you, or can you, uh, or will this happen inside companies and they'll be building their own platforms? Or, or will they want just a, a cheaper? Product from a new third party that has a different business model that's maybe more consumption based and something where if it goes down on a Saturday, they don't need

• 17:13John Coogan?

  to even fire off a prompt. How long until these vibe coded systems are like self-healing in the way an enterprise platform is and has like a proper SLA? What do you think Tyler?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  I just have a question. Like I'm curious, what do you guys think about this? So it's like, if the market is just catching up now to like coding models being very good and vibe coding, all this stuff, and they're basically like a year late, in one year, what do you think like is going to be the thing that they're like, like, do you think they'll still be late? Is it going to be like, okay, actual like white collar work is you actually can't automate a lot of this stuff and only in a year that they're actually going to like catch up to this?

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a good question. The next, next thing.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, if I knew the answer, we'd be on Wall Street.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  I think we'll, I think we'll be talking about it over the next couple of months. We'll need to see like glimmers of demos. I mean,

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the one thing is, is like coding never felt, so here's the thing. So in coding has been a white, is a white collar job, but has always felt a lot less fake than most white collar jobs. Like there's a lot of jobs, like email jobs, laptop jobs, where there's like six people on a call for an hour and like one person is doing, like really doing the work and the rest of them are just saying like, nothing from my end, thanks, right? And that's like their entire day. Whereas coding, like the best engineers were actually just like grinding all day long, putting in the hours, just shipping, right?

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  And so I think what's interesting, like as, as some of these like more broad knowledge work tasks get more easy to automate,

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Do those people just like they're still going to be doing meetings like at some point these companies, I mean, to date, the AI, the AI job loss has just been primarily from companies, I would say, still processing the Twitter acquisition.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  And saying,

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we just, we need 50% fewer people here.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, this, this sell off is much, much more related to business model, competition, pricing pressure than, than automation and job loss, in my opinion. It's much more that there will just be more, more competition in enterprise software markets, and so you assume that margins will fall. That, that's my read on this. I do have another example, but I will tell you about Gusto first. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. So my answer is the, the unclankable companies. So right now there are industries, think about, think about mining.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Like I have a piece of land, there is gold in the dirt.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  There's another company that comes and their specialization is finding where the gold deposits are on my land. There's a third company that shows up with tractors and people that dig the gold out. Then there's a fourth company that takes the raw ore and refines it into gold. There's a fifth company that is a platform for, for selling that gold onto the market, right? So you have, you have like five different layers of the supply chain to get the gold into the market from the ground. Let's just use that. It could be oil, it could be any, any mineral. Does, does robotic labor, too cheap to meter, change the value of the land?

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Probably not, but if you have a robotic digging machine that can show up and dig the, dig the ore out of the ground, dig the gold out of the ground at a lower cost, well, the company that's been set up. Where their moat was they employed all the best miners and they had systems to know who's good, train them, make sure that they're doing it safely, train them on the tools, make sure that they have the right equipment to dig the ore reliably, work in shifts, all of that becomes attackable. If you're like, well, all I have to do to start a company

• 21:32John Coogan?

  that competes in the gold mining business is place an order with a bunch of humanoid robots and go to the guy who has the land and say, I want to dig the land and I will give you a little bit more than what the other team that's using a bunch of human labor and a bunch of unautomated systems. So I would say that that's probably the next thing that the market would be processing. And the ride hailing platforms dealing with the advent of the self-driving car is probably one of these like clankorification narratives, but that will come to a whole host of industries. The question is just on a five-year timeline, on a 10-year timeline, when will it be real? And then when will the market price it accordingly?

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Because a lot of the pressure that you're seeing in the market is not showing up in the financials. Like, the companies are still growing, they're still producing cash, the business hasn't changed, but the perception of the future of the business has changed, and the perception of the future of the market structure has changed. And so that might be the next thing, if we're just to play out AI broadly. Anyway, Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Let's also pull up the Linear lineup and take you through who's coming on the show today. Linear is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspace on Linear are using agents. It's Friday, we have a lighter show, but we got some great

• 22:58John Coogan?

  guests. We got Martin Scrawley coming on to talk about, take a little victory lap about the quantum computing thing. Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, we hung out with him at Meta Connect. We're very excited to talk to him about the progress-

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Brother Hayes.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  -on that platform. Then Alex is coming on from DDN, and Brett Adcock from Figures coming on to talk about humanoid robots. They launched a new one today. So-

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Finally, on the show. It's gonna be an interesting one. Clavicular has also been-

• 23:24John Coogan?

  In the news? Oh, yes. What happened?

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's see here. Streamer Braden Peters to host boxing match build as test of physical dominance. The Valentine's Day livestream pits two figures from the male self-improvement internet against each other. Braden Peters, the livestreamer known as Clavicular, announced Thursday that he will host a boxing match on his kick.com channel this Saturday evening, February 14th at 7 p.m. Eastern, directly opposite Valentine's Day festivities nationwide. The bout will feature two personalities from the online male aesthetics community, a figure known as ASU Frat Leader, an Arizona State University fraternity member who gained attention

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  for his broad-shouldered build, and a creator who goes by Androgenic, a fitness influencer focused on hormone optimization and physical appearance. Promotional materials build the event as a championship of skeletal frame superiority, essentially a contest to determine which man is more physically imposing. The announcement posted to X by the kick-affiliated account Kick Champ has drawn thousands of engagements and spawned a wave of commentary from users who noted the scheduling choice with amusement, characterizing the event as a deliberate alternative to the holiday. The matchup represents the latest example of niche internet subcultures, in this case, communities organized around male physical self-improvement and body image optimization,

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  crossing over into live entertainment. Mr. Peters, who has built his following around content related to physique and social dynamics, appears to be positioning himself as a promoter within the space. No official venue has been announced. The event is expected to stream exclusively on kick.com. So we'll be interested to see how the news kind of reacts to the event over the weekend. Certainly, this story has gone mainstream.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  You know, it's funny that, so if you haven't been following these... We've been taking these viral clip posts and turning them into professionally-written articles, just as a joke, but Clavicular actually has a profile in the New York Times and it's written like that, and so I think our joke is like over because it's hit the mainstream. Joe Bernstein wrote something that sounds exactly like something that we were joking about. Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, has emerged as a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed men. He wants to take his fixation with looks-maxing mainstream. It's a wild piece. Clavicular is a 6'2", he weighs 180 pounds and has a

• 25:57John Coogan?

  31-inch waist. His biochromial width, basically the span of the clavicle, from which the 20-year-old streamer gets his name, is 19.5 inches. He has a mid-face ratio, which is derived by dividing the distance from pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils of 1.07. His chin-to-filtrum ratio is 2.6. According to Clavicular, these calculations make him handsome, just not as handsome as actor Matt Bomer. And then it goes on to explain the whole looks-maxing phenomenon, and it was very funny watching this happen because Clavicular streams so much that he livestreamed the interview with Joe Bernstein. But of course,

• 26:39John Coogan?

  normally when you do an interview with a mainstream media journalist who's writing a profile, it's like under embargo and you don't know it's coming until it drops and like you don't even really talk about it and the chat is confused. This is a very popular trend on social media these days and the New York Times is breaking it down. But anyway, there's plenty more there. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Really, really wild time on the internet.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, let's, let's, uh, let's go back to the Anthropic round. Uh, Matt Slotnick says LOL at the jockeying behind the scenes to land on this wording. Quote, "We have raised $30 billion in Series G funding led by GIC and Co2, valuing Anthropic at $380 billion post-money. The round was co-led by D E Shaw Ventures, Dragonear, Founders Fund, Iconic, and MGX. Lots of folks getting in. Um, a huge part of this raise is Claude Code," says Boris Cherny, who is the creator of Claude Code over at Anthropic. "Weekly active users doubled since January. People who've never written a line of code or building with it, humbled to work on this every day with our team." That is remarkable growth at this scale, doubling.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Kenneth, uh, having some humble, humble pie, uh, or maybe, maybe showing just how early it is. He says, "Still less annual revenue than AirPods. AirPods, last I checked, were a $20 billion, uh, revenue business."

• 28:19John Coogan?

  Twenty-two billion in 2024. That's a massive business, but, uh, Anthropic will be there in, what, a week or two? Uh, they just broke 20, top 20 in the App Store, and now they're in the top 10. They're number seven. The, the consumer app, Claude, by Anthropic, is climbing in the charts. Uh, ChatGPT is number one for free apps, Google Gemini is number two, and Free Cash is number three, Threads is number four. And I wonder, I wonder how much this is driven by momentum still, but...

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Definitely driven by momentum, right?

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Because it's downloads, so like, it does, so Facebook just can't...

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  There's so many people that have never, there's so many people that have never, uh, tried Claude and hadn't heard of it until recently. And again, the, uh, we know they're putting a lot of paid spend behind the, the anti ads campaign, right? Um, so that, that's gonna be a factor. Uh, Metacritic Capital, uh, was pretty funny. Back in, in May, March of, uh, 2024, he said, "I continue to be puzzled by Anthropic's $18 billion valuation," and then followed up and said, "Uh, market is so stupid. Sometimes I have no words." But of course, the market, uh, the market was right on this one so far. You can just see they were...

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Well, are, are we sure that he was saying it was overvalued?

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  He could have been saying it's under.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  No, I think he was saying it under valued.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I think that's why he's taking the victory lap is because he was at, at the time, a year ago, he was like, why is Anthropic so like, has such a low valuation based on the market?

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  This is almost two years ago.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Oh, this is, yeah, this is almost two years ago.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't actually know.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  I don't know which way Metacritic was going. Cell phone? Ask Martin Scrawley, who's coming on the show in?

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he, he responded. He said the puzzle meant I didn't understand why it was worth only 18 billion.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Always vague posts so that you can take either direction. You never paint yourself into a corner. 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.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  I'm glad this chart is now public because it is bananas. It is ridiculous. It should not exist, says Bruno F, the founder of Magna Digital. $5 billion in tokens managed. Interesting. Yeah, what a crazy, crazy.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Just another pod guy says Salesforce invests in Anthropic colorized. I think when Mark was on, he said they have about a point of Anthropic at going into this round, if I remember correctly.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Again.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  What is this?

• 30:56John Coogan?

  It's a horse giving money to a car. The car goes and buys a rocket launcher. The car blows up the barn and the horse is sad.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  And that does feel like an apt analogy. It's very.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  And Anthropic has been all over legacy media.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. First, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Also, fantastic Valentine's Day gift. This, from this extraordinary piece in The New Yorker, last summer, while Mark Zuckerberg was conducting hiring raids on other labs, Sholto Douglas, the Anthropic engineer and TVPN guest, told me, this journalist, Gideon Lewis Kraus, that a number of his colleagues, quote, "could have taken a $50 million paycheck, but the vast majority of them hadn't even bothered to respond." Well.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Conviction.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  They are early at a $350 billion company and are clearly very optimistic, but it is funny to just.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Daniel.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Money mog.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says, so wait, Claude has seat-based pricing. Does this mean they're disrupting themselves too? Of course, a lot of the concern has been around the seat-based model.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Team playing.

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  But it even feels like that is less of, that is less of a factor than just the overall threat of zero marginal cost software.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, why, why does Claude have seat-based pricing? It's, it's, it's essentially a consumption-based product, but psychologically, if I'm rolling out Claude to a company and I set up seats for a team, I know that there's individual rate limits, so no one, no one individual is going to like blow me up, basically. That's the idea. But this, this goes into like, some people are posting like, if you're getting a job, you should ask what your token budget is.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  But in this case, it's not, it, it, this is Claude. This is not the API. This is not Claude.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Uh, but you know, when you fire up Claude code, like you can integrate your Claude account. And so like, this essentially gives you credits to write code as well. And so, um, the, the, uh, uh, yeah, there's this new meme of like, if you're going into a tech company, like ask what your token budget will be, like what's your inference budget? Um, and so, uh, I mean, these can clearly skyrocket pretty quickly. There's debates over, you know, oh, should I let my employees use like the fast mode or the regular mode or pro? Like, uh, is the work that they're doing really valuable? If they're spending thousands a month, if they're spending tens of thousands a month, like at a certain point, I need to make sure that, uh, they're not being wasteful. And so I think the seat-based plan still achieves a little

• 33:39John Coogan?

  bit of that psychological security for managers. And then there's also an interesting, um, there's probably a pretty bimodal distribution in, uh, the value that, or the actual cost associated with these plans. I would imagine that, uh, there's a portion of, of pro users that use 100% of their inference budget every month, and they cap out and they're frustrated and they might have a second plan, or they might go down to a free plan or, or, or limit their usage. And then there's a whole bunch of folks who just have a seat and never use it, or they use basically like very little inference, or they're just asking things that can be answered by a free, uh, by a free tier essentially, but they just like let it ride.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Zach in the chat says, we have 150 corporate Claude users purchased by seat, 50% max out in week one because of Excel token use.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Good data point.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Dan Primack says, working on newsletter, it may be shorter to list the VC firms not in the new Anthropic round.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  It's a party round.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Josh says, got some logo sniping, it seems. Pay no attention to what price we paid.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  I swear it was early. Yeah, no, this is, this is a very, very good point. Like, if you are a venture capitalist, and you say, I mean, it used to be, if you were an AI VC, and you had AI as a thesis, and you weren't in one of the labs, that was sort of a red flag for your brand. It would be rough to move forward, raise the next round, just from a logo perspective. And now, with AI becoming such a mega trend, it's hard to imagine being a really enduring venture capital firm without one of these logos on the site.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Especially as, as like, this is sort of the, the train leaving the station, since there's IPO rumors. And you, you probably want to grab at least one of the big labs logos. Many of the, many of the firms have sniped all three at this point. Sequoia Founder's Fund, COTU's in a bunch, Andreessen's in multiple, I think. There's a variety of funds that have, have built stakes of various sizes in, in all the different labs and.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  It seems like Josh Kushner is one of the, one of the few that has remained deeply loyal.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  And we do recognize, we just had some technical difficulties, but it seems like we're back on, we are so back.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  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. Slow Ventures is taking the other side of the all-in-on-AI bet. They said, "Congrats to everyone who figured out that foundation models are infrastructure plays, not startups. Now let's talk about what happens when the picks and shovels phase ends, and we're back to building actual products." And Will Manitas says, "Nightmarish degrees of cope."

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Sam was always super bearish on the labs.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  He thought that they would commoditize? Was that what it was? So they wouldn't have pricing power?

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Effectively, yeah, effectively. He said, you know, open source models are going to get really good.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  He was right, they have gotten really good.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  But I think maybe missed that the labs would turn into product companies and stop just being.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  It is.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  The eyes.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  It is sort of interesting, like if you, if you wound back the clock and you were like, my job is just to invest well in tech startup booms from 2005 to 2025. There's one world where you're like, okay, I'm going to go hunt for the Airbnb, the Stripe, the Y C companies, the coin bases, all the like application layer companies, the, the Instagrams, the Twitters, all of these different companies. But there's a different side where you're like, I'm going to buy like Broadcom, Cisco, Nvidia, AMD, and still do really well and maybe even better, depending on when you got in, when you got out. But it's a, yeah, it's a very, like, just because it's an infrastructure play, even if that's true,

• 37:51John Coogan?

  that doesn't mean that it's not a good investment for an investor. There is a little bit of like purist vibes from like a venture capitalist should, or, or certain funds have strategies. And so they say, you know, I'm just going to sit out.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  Slow as a seed.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Series A.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  But, but lean more early.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  And so by the time you're looking at some of these deals, investing at, you know, five, 10.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  20, 30, 40 billion.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  Economies start to be rough.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of funds who have expanded and will invest in anything. Like you're a mining company, great, let's do it. You're, you know, you're, you're buying Bitcoin on the balance sheet, like, okay, let's do it. There were a lot of funds that expanded what it meant to just be an asset manager. And there were some funds that, that stayed very focused and, you know, we'll, we'll see, but interesting. Highlights from the Dario Amadee interview on Dwarkej Patel Jacob Rintamaki, friend of the show, has a quote here. All my lawyers never want me to say the word monopoly. Dario, Dario says, I don't think that's true. I mean, I feel like we're in an economics class. Dwarkej says, do you know the Tyler Cowen quote? We never stopped talking about economics?

• 39:07John Coogan?

  And Dario says, we never stopped talking about economics. So no, I don't think this field's going to be a monopoly. All my lawyers never want me to say the word monopoly, but I don't think this field's going to be a monopoly. You do get industries in which there are a small number of players, not one, but a small number of players. And so that feels like the, like where things are going with both the, you know, expressed viewpoints of the VC firms, investing in multiple labs, that there's a variety of strategies to deploy intelligence, whether it's the best model and get deployment and traction, whether it's on the, on the infrastructure side. I do wonder how many more changes there will be in the

• 39:51John Coogan?

  horse race. It feels like there's a new hot model every couple of weeks and then someone fires back and then they go back and forth and back and forth. And with all the, with all the flow between the labs, talent wise, it feels very hard to corner the market. And it doesn't feel like anyone can patent the transformer or anything like that, which would be a completely different scenario. Can you imagine if Google just had the patent and they were like, we actually filed a cease and desist against OpenAI and Anthropic. They're not allowed to use transformer based architectures anymore. Like, we invented it and we patented it and you can't have it.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  It's ours.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  I don't know. But yes, we live in a world where the little tweaks, the little strategies that go into advancing the models and creating these, these improvements do not seem to be intellectual property. They seem much more like economies of scale and, and process power of being able to, to train at ever larger, ever larger scales, marshal ever larger chunks of capital and do whatever it takes to get to the frontier and stay there. Let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Why do we play this?

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Because the stream, we're having issues again.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  We're working to get it back up. If you can hear us, markets now see a 30% probability of a Fed rate cut by April. More than 80% of easing by June. Over on Calci, we're still seeing the Fed decision in March, 93%.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  maintains rate, no cut. So a cut would be a wild card at 7%, 9% for any sort of cut. So, strong GDP growth, strong job numbers. You know, stay the course would be the logical thing. But we will continue to follow it. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more. Well, Railway takes, automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Let's play this timeless clip of George Hots and...

• 42:04Martin Shkreli?

  Nah, we don't believe in stealth. I'm a really open guy. You are pretty open. I tell you everything I'm doing. Come on, here's what I say. Here's what I say. I'm going to tell you what I'm doing. And you can try to compete, but I'll still crush you. Nah, we don't believe in stealth.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  It's so funny. Also, I don't know why that person cut that to be so widescreen. It looks very cinematic, but I like the quote here. You think the, you think the eggs, you think the, you think the eggs I lay are valuable? I am the golden goose.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile...

• 42:37John Coogan?

  Thinking, thinking people will steal your ideas if you share them is a sign of low IQ. And I agree, we are in the era of agency. And actually going and executing on the idea is the difficult thing. You need to be charisma maxing.

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  And there's still a lot of, there's still a lot of secrets to every business.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  And CEOs can, you can, you can, CEOs can do 100 hours of podcasts and tell you a lot about what they're doing without telling you the one or two things that are actually important. And it's very easy for somebody to come in and try to fast follow. And ultimately, just like, kind of get it entirely wrong, even though it it looks like

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  The right.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  And I think there was a huge incentive, I mean, going back to the SaaS apocalypse, there was incentive for a long time for companies that where their moat was not software, to say, we're a software company, we need to hire the best software engineers, look at our open source projects, focus on all the cool tech that we're building, when really it was a marketplace, or really it was a liquidity provider, or really it was a network effect. And if your network effects business, it can be sort of boring, and honestly, anti-competitive to just be like, look, we can do nothing and win. No one wants to say, no one wants to hear a CEO say that. But we're going to find out who can do nothing and win, because we'll see it show up in the margins over the next couple of financial years.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, over on LinkedIn, George Hots is posting.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  And Reid says, George Hots is the only thing keeping my LinkedIn feed good. He says, hello, corporate participant. You are building the machine that will eat you. You think your fake money will keep you safe. It won't. You think your social climbing friendships will keep you safe. They won't. The only choice is to stop. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. If you keep feeding this machine, it will eat you. The proposed revolutions will not be enough. A global scale, nuclear conflict might, but even then, I'm not sure. The problem was never AI itself. It's the collapse of trust in society. Apps and phones have snuck between every crevice of people, and they are run by psychopaths. The AI will be a further wedge, just another lever to manipulate you. You will not be able to stand up to it, and you will be discarded the second you don't serve it.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Like layoffs, you will die atomized and alone, and you won't understand that you did this to yourself. Uh, brutal. Nice little white pill. Little Friday white pill.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  He's such a white pillar. Well, here's a white pill. First, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Hey, but here is the real white pill. For just $33 million, you can have a private home on a remote resort in Utah. Can you guess where it is?

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Per city?

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Nope. It's at the Aman Luxury Resort. It's in the Wall Street Journal. The residence is the first to hit the market at Aman. In remote southern Utah, Aman Giri Resort, a crown jewel in the Aman hospitality company's portfolio.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they're doing residences?

• 45:39John Coogan?

  They're doing residences. Global, they have a portfolio of global hotels and residences. They're listing the first private home for $33 million. Located just over the Utah border from the small town of Page, Arizona, the hotel currently features 34 guest suites starting at $5,000 per night and 10 tented pavilions at its camp Sarika, providing a temporary escape for travelers. But the newly-built house on nine acres can be purchased outright. Designed by Los Angeles-based firm Masa Studio, the roughly 12,000-square-foot residence has six bedrooms and comes fully furnished. It's the first of 12 planned private homes, which will be about half a mile from the resort.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  OTP says, but does it have a bunky?

• 46:22John Coogan?

  Does it have a bunky, a bunk bed?

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  No, uh, bunker.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Oh, a bunker. Oh, we're gonna get into bunkers. There's a whole piece in the Journal about how to secure a mega mansion. I know you've been asking. We have the answers. Until it's sold, the home is available to rent for $45,000 per night. Before we continue, let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So, residences have been part, residences have been part of the Aman Giri vision since the resort opened in 2009. The decision to offer private residences now was spurred by the success of the 2020 tented camp launch, rising demand globally for hotel-branded residences, and a sense

• 47:11John Coogan?

  that the property was ready to take that step. While future residences will share a cohesive aesthetic, each will be designed to respond to the unique contours of the specific site. In Page, the median sale price was $610,000 in August. There are currently around a half a dozen listings above 33 million, though, all clustered further north near ski resorts. Aman Giri buyer interest has been strong, he said. Particularly among Amon loyalists and North American clients, additional residential plots priced between 5 million and 12.5 million are under contract. And so let's get into Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training

• 47:54John Coogan?

  and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. The mega rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses, and we're going to tell you how to do it for yourself. Anxiety over high-profile violence has the wealthy spending big on armed security bunkers, a bunkie, and even moats. They're building moats. I haven't heard of an alligator in the moat or shark in the moat, but people are in fact building moats.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  That's being an alligator salesman, I feel like is Unsloppable. I think it could be clankable.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  But still, at the moment, Unsloppable.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  But you got to build the you got to build the humanoid robot that can go in the water to wrestle the alligator. And that might be, we'll ask Brett Adcock, is it waterproof? Is it waterproof? Can it go wrestle an alligator or not? Because I don't want it just to do my dishes, do the laundry. I want it wrestling alligators in my moat. So, British music producer Alex Grant was living in an under-construction mega mansion in Los Angeles. One morning, shortly after 9:00 AM, an intruder, armed, burst into the home. He said, Grant said, "He came in and we had a tussle." He was formerly known as Alex de Kidd. Grant managed to call his manager, who phoned the police. Soon, officers and helicopters were on the scene.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  He briefly considered abandoning the project after the 2017 break-in, but ultimately finished the 24,000-square-foot home, which has eight pools, a car elevator, and a nightclub. Wow. But he doubled down on security features, installing a guardhouse, tall gates, and a security system with retina scanners that alert the homeowner to movement in the home. "Later, I found out he had these knives on him," Grant said, who recently listed the mansion, and a neighboring house for 85 million after moving to New York. In an era of high-profile violence, including the suspected abduction of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Arizona home just over a week ago, the wealthy are investing heavily in their Personal security, particularly when it comes to their homes.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Security measures once reserved for presidents and royalty, safe rooms, biometric access controls, laser-powered perimeter defenses, these are now mainstream items in luxury homes. Executive protection teams and armed guards patrol gated enclaves and suburban estates. While tech startups are rolling out predictive threat detection systems built for the ultra wealthy. The shift reflects a hardening view among the affluent. Traditional policing and communal safety are no longer enough, no security. So, security is being privatized and customized. The new emphasis is reflected in sales data. Roughly forty-five percent of luxury homes in 2025 included a reference to privacy or security, up from thirty-eight percent the year earlier. So, break-ins at the homes of celebrities and professional athletes have been putting the wealthy on edge.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  A group of Chilean nationals was indicted last year for stealing items worth more than $2 million from sports stars, including Kansas City Chief players Travis Kelsey and Patrick Mahomes.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  Travis Kelsey. This had something to do with the visa process with Chile, where you could very easily get a tourist visa. So, there was these like, allegedly, there were teams that would be permanently based in the US. And then they would be running kind of the operations. They'd be in the kind of war room and then basically tourists would come for two weeks, hit a bunch of houses and then bounce. And those were the only people that were actually exposed to, or exposed, meaning they were like carrying out the different ops.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Well, the Miami Dolphins player, Tua Tagovaiola? Vi- Viola? I might be mispronouncing that. Said he hired personal security to monitor his house while he's on the road. Says, "Let that be known, they're armed. So, if you try to go inside my house, think twice." The homes of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman have also been broken into. Miami real estate agent Danny Hertzberg of Cold War Banker said he began noticing an increase in emphasis on security in 2020 when high-profile executives were migrating from New York to Miami during the early days of the COVID pandemic. Private jet tracking websites have also been an issue. They sent chills through the, through the high net worth community. Corporations are taking note.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  Companies offering personal security benefits for CEOs increased by 10%. According to Goldman Sachs, one entrepreneur capitalizing on this growth is David Widerhorn, who got into real estate after selling a tech company in 2017. I wonder what he sold. He recently built a heavily secured home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he, in early December, Widerhorn walked through the 8,600 square foot property, pointing out 32 casino-grade AI-powered facial and vehicle recognition cameras. There's also a laser intrusion detection system around the perimeter. Pausing at a steel double gate in front of the house, he warned that the security system kicks in even before visitors reach the front door,

• 52:45John Coogan?

  which is fast, which is fashioned out of three-inch solid, three-inch-thick solid steel and has 13 deadbolts. He said even the landscape was designed as a deterrent. Cacti? Sour orange trees. There are sour orange trees with four-inch spikes and concrete planters on the edge of the property. And just beyond those trees, separating the house and the street, a moat. Gators. A moat. Gators. If you try and run through that bush, it will be a da- a bad day for you, he said. Should anyone get past the trees, lasers will detect motion and the system will call the police. Inside the house, three ear-piercing alarms will go off. And this is an interesting

• 53:27John Coogan?

  thing. The fireplace surround, like around the fireplace, in the great room, it will change colors. It's made out of crystallo quartzite, and it can change colors. So it'll turn red. So you're sitting there, and if there's anything detected on the property, your fireplace turns red above the TV to show you that something's going on. Very interesting that's a visual cue. The home's most fortified feature lies behind a wood-paneled wall, a reinforced concrete safe room with a 2,000-pound door and an air filtration system, built to US Army Corps of Engineers standards. Widerhorn declined to share specifics, but said it cost more than $10 million to build the house. About $1 million was spent on bullet-resistant

• 54:09John Coogan?

  smart glass, and the front entry security features cost more than $1 million. In Las Vegas, clients of luxury design firm Blue Herons are spending between $100,000 and $1.5 million on security features, including safe rooms and bunkers. Blue Heron is now working on new ways to incorporate architecture with security such as exterior window shades that could be closed with the touch of a button to protect the home's occupants. In Surfside, Florida, the developer of the Delmore, a planned 37-unit ultra-high-end condominium project designed by Zaha Zaha Hadid Architects, and with units priced at up to $200 million, has tapped a Washington DC-based security firm to design the building's security.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  The $200 million condo.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is crazy, but I mean, I guess from a security's perspective, if you're in some massive building, you're sort of like diffusing the cost, there's more people that might notice something, there's more security guards, it's almost like a gated community in one building.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm just, yeah.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Probably layers of access.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm just purely thinking, you're effectively looking at a $100 million a floor, right?

• 55:13John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  If you've got a couple of floors, maybe a few, it's up there for a condo.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  That is huge. The firm is working to integrate technology like biometric access, facial recognition, and iris scanning into the design of the project. For instance, when a resident or visitor pulls into the building's parking garage, their car will be scanned for license plate recognition, but facial recognition may also identify the car's occupants and their level of approval to access the building. That in turn triggers the security system to allow the person to unlock only the doors and elevators that they are permitted to pass through. Meanwhile, an AI-powered security system will track movements captured on camera throughout the building, looking for anomalies. Hertzberg said he recently had a client fly in a security consultant to evaluate a roughly $50 million house he had put on under contract.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  The consultant looked into the viability of installing a complex camera and laser system that could sense any movement on the perimeter of the property, including the water. So, lots of interesting stuff. Let me tell you about Cognition, they're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  If you go further down, they talk about San Francisco tech entrepreneur Kevin Hartz said he and his high net worth peers in California are increasingly focused on security. Kevin, of course, has a home security startup.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Hartz said he co-founded his own security company, Sauron, in 2024 after being spooked by an attempted break in at his home in San Francisco. The person first rang the doorbell before making his way around the house, trying some of the doors and windows. When he couldn't gain access, he went to Hartz's next door neighbor's home where he tried to push through the front door. He was arrested by police. That could have been us, Hartz said. The Sauron system, which has only been launched in beta across a few homes in the Bay Area, will differ from other security systems in that it includes deterrent strategies, not only response. For instance, if it senses an intruder, it could include a feature that automatically triggers sounds such as dogs barking or police sirens coming closer. Just the sound of dogs barking feels like a great feature.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  Just OTP in the chat was saying, do none of these people have golden, uh, uh, German Shepherd?

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, German Shepherds. Uh, fun fact about German Shepherds, you can, uh, like a purebred dog might be like single digit thousands, but there are companies out there that will train a German Shepherd for like the military, basically, and then also train them to be pets. So they're, they have that level of training and then you can get up in like a 40, $50,000 range for a dog, which is hilarious. Dog as much as a car, but, uh, uh, dogs are typically listed.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of dogs.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  It's a lot of dogs. It's the GT3 RS of dogs, uh, truthfully. But whenever you look at the list of like, what, what's the most likely thing to eliminate, uh, you know, home and home intrusion risk, like dogs are always at the top. Quickly, let me tell you about another great Valentine's Day gift, 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. And without further ado, we have Martin Scrawley in the restream waiting room. Let's bring in Martin to the TV. Martin, good to see you again. How are you doing?

• 58:26Martin Shkreli?

  Technology brothers. How are you?

• 58:28John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. How are you?

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Excellent. Are you gearing up for the weekend? Are you excited?

• 58:33Martin Shkreli?

  Caffeinated, ready to do more work.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Locked in. The great lock-in.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  What's your daily caffeine stack?

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, we talked with Huberman about this. You're the natural.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Are you a microdose, microdoser? Or do you like do 400 milligrams and then coast?

• 58:48Martin Shkreli?

  I do. I do coffee, several coffees, and then just like keep taking, drinking this all day long.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Is that like a four hour energy?

• 58:56Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  Five.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Five hour energy. Oh, wait, how many hours are they? How many hours are they doing these days? Four or five? It's a lot of energy.

• 59:03Martin Shkreli?

  Five.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, what, what are you seeing in the market? Give us the update on just how you're processing the last week of chaos, whether you want to talk about software, quantum computing, what's going on, what's worth following?

• 59:18Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, so, so I have this new potential product, might productize this, I've been tweeting it for now for free. But it's basically this, something nobody's ever done before, the VC investors, which is I'm using my network and some heuristics, maybe even some AI to guess, uh, kind of what positions people took in rounds. Obviously, for some cases, I know exactly what the cap table is.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Martin Shkreli?

  But in other cases, I don't. So I have this like list of, of gains or, or investors and it's very interesting. So, you know, I started with like, obviously, the joke one, which is FTX, who we have 36 billion today.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:55Martin Shkreli?

  You know, putting in, uh, I, what I guessed was $300,000 in any sphere, which of course is Cursor, at a 4.4, 4.4, you know, million dollar pre, pre, pre-money.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Wait, was that really the pre-money?

• 1:00:10Jordi Hays?

  That's still insane because in that era.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  10.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Getting, getting into a great company at four, like if somebody was pitching you a company at four, it was almost bearish.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Like, oh, they're a complete outsider.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they didn't have the comp, they didn't, they didn't talk to anyone smart that was like, hey, you guys are really smart, you can tell, I would price it at 10.

• 1:00:28Martin Shkreli?

  I'm guess, I'm guessing and have, have like various heuristics and obviously like I'd call somebody like you guys and say, actually, I think you want to talk to this guy or that number might have to go up a little bit, et cetera. But that's better than nothing. And right now at Crunchbase and PitchBook and stuff, there's, you just, there's nothing. And so it's a lot of fun. And so that $300,000 investment. They raised 400,000. So my guess was was elevated to 300. I think I can look. It's actually in the bankruptcy document. So eventually we'll get the exact number, but that's a 1.2 billion dollar position in today's money. Obviously, the bankruptcy estate lawyer is just like, oh, what the fuck is this? Any sphere? It sounds like zero.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it does. When you say any sphere in the context of FTX, it sounds like we're a blockchain company looking to do to build a live multiplayer game. Your eyes start to glaze over a little bit.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  How many NFTs did any sphere drop? Not quite.

• 1:01:22Martin Shkreli?

  Anthropic, they'd be up 32 billion now. I'm sure you saw SPF had the.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Martin Shkreli?

  He posted a little thing about that. Thrive is the big mystery player because nobody really sure how much money they sunk into OpenAI, but they also did any sphere.

• 1:01:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:01:37Martin Shkreli?

  You know, so huge, huge gains from Thrive. They were in a couple of later rounds of scale and some other companies. So big, big numbers there. Probably one of the more interesting ones is Reid Hoffman. 50, 50,000, 50 million dollar first check in OpenAI with Kozla, maybe 25.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:58Martin Shkreli?

  25 or 50 and that, you know, worth many billions. And then Yan, Yan Talian, the E A CEO of.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Co-founder of Skype.

• 1:02:06Martin Shkreli?

  Altruism. Yeah, Skype guy. 100 million turns to 11 billion in Anthropic first check with Reid Hoffman. So 11 bill. So a lot of fun to look through these and see like, you know, you can sort of calculate the returns. And of course, VC fund returns eventually they either go public or you can find them somewhere or like, like oftentimes state pension funds and stuff do that. So Anthropic, obviously the big news.

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  It is when, as you break this down, it's so funny that Crunchbase never like tried to roll out even something that was like gen generally accurate. Like it is like very fascinating information and especially now where, you know, Dan Primack was joking like it's easier to list like who's not in Anthropic at this point from kind of the big name funds. And so that just makes this kind of information like more interesting because yeah, it's cool that you're in a company and, and almost anybody, if they work hard enough, can get some exposure to these names, you know, maybe, maybe it's like via an SPV or an SPV and an SPV. But still, this is the information that like is actually like super fascinating.

• 1:03:15Martin Shkreli?

  The other interesting one is Dustin Moskovitz, who is 25 million in Anthropic as part of the effective altruism mafia, was able to make $4 billion, which I think offsets his losses from starting Asana, but I'm not sure.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  He didn't. That's ridiculous. There's no losses from founding a company.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's, that, that, the, the.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Come on.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  The Anthropic position would be worth 2X what Asana is.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Which is crazy, but he doesn't, he's not sitting on losses. Oh, you think he bought it at the top?

• 1:03:42Martin Shkreli?

  Well, he, well, we know he bought huge amounts of Asana with his, with cap, so.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so maybe.

• 1:03:46Martin Shkreli?

  Keep that in mind.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Martin Shkreli?

  Maybe, maybe. I doubt it, but you know.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Martin Shkreli?

  To your point.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  He's doing, he's doing well. So the lesson for folks is, uh, just get a, get a small check in the next Anthropic?

• 1:03:58Martin Shkreli?

  Get, get, get a, try to network on ineffective altruism. I think that, that seems to be the.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the alpha from EA? Like, why, it, it, yeah, do you have a post?

• 1:04:09Martin Shkreli?

  There's a lot of smart people that have no other things to do, so their social setting is like replaced by this, sort of like religion or anything like that. And, you know, this, this cult, and if you're in a, a cult of really smart people, it's prob, probably something that will come of it.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Do you think it's still a cult? Or do you think it's, uh, it's like B2B SaaS now?

• 1:04:28Martin Shkreli?

  I think it's changed a lot. It's like B2B SaaS and, and I think like the, the new cult is.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Cult of B2B SaaS, you're welcome. The water's warm. Come in. It's amazing. We're automating workflows. We're delivering enterprise value.

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  We're hiring consultants.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  We will, we will, we will forget about all the earlier stuff. We will welcome you into improving the economy, raising GDP. This is what we stand for in this cult.

• 1:04:50Martin Shkreli?

  May, maybe the new cult is the, the AI agent, you know, website or whatever the, you know, or whatever's next, uh, in that world where, you know, the AI, uh.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your personal, so, so I wrote in the newsletter today, like somewhat of a, somewhat of a joke, but a more serious topic, become Unsloppable. The idea of, of there are still real modes that exist and the historical mode of just, we had a bunch of smart people working on building this software for a long time. So if you want to compete with us, you have to also spend a lot of money and a lot of time hiring a bunch of software engineers. That's going away, yet you're building what is.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  A seat-based pricing tool and I expect you to do very well with it just because I think in the future individuals will want great access to data to make different decisions and maybe they're, you know, working with agents as well. So like I can see that.

• 1:05:50Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, the agents need the data.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  But, but like what's your personal philosophy? Because you're clearly not, if you were just caught up in the kind of like fear-based marketing of the labs, you might not be building, you know, a seat-based SaaS tool.

• 1:06:09Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah. I mean, data's, data's often firewallled. You know, there's, there's a, you know, we have a guy that just talks to every exchange in the world and, you know, the amount of times he has to pull his hair out because, you know, some exchange in Asia wants to meet yet again, you know, before, before signing the deal. And, and, you know, there's no self-checkout. There's no agent, you know, it's, you, you have to, the protocol is sit-down meeting. And every time you go to an enterprise SaaS company and it says, "Talk to sales," you know, it's, it's sort of like, what does AI do at that point? So I feel like, you know, there's, you know, you also have this trend where, you know, why would you put huge amounts of data into the model the model should call out and, you know, compressing the world's

• 1:06:52Martin Shkreli?

  information into some parameters and weights, it's just not a wise use of parameter space. And I think everybody's been saying this in AI. And, and so the problem is, okay, shrink the whole internet, but what happens when stuff leaves the internet? You know, there's a stock that Bloomberg doesn't have in its portfolio. You guys weren't born yet, I think, but the, it was called a Webvan.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. We know about Webvan.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  My family, my family used Homegrocer, which got acquired by Webvan. And I think the Homegrocer founders probably got liquidity before Webvan crashed. So I think they wound up doing very well.

• 1:07:28Martin Shkreli?

  They killed it.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  Need to check in with them. But yeah.

• 1:07:31Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, so Webvan is not on Bloomberg, for example.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Martin Shkreli?

  Even though it's supposed to be this great tool. And it's certainly not on the web. You know, lots of data gets deleted from Google. And there just isn't this rich tabular data available. So tabular data, I think, is going to actually thrive in the AI world. Because it's just not going to be in the models. Or if it is, the models get tired after a while. It's not going to give you 3,649 SaaS companies with this market cap. It's going to say, here's the top 200. And don't ask me about the next 3,200. Because that's just not what LLMs are really good at. But the frontier technology has sold off very, very hard in the last month or two. And there's a lot of speculation in the quant community as to what's happening.

• 1:08:18Martin Shkreli?

  So there's some funds that ran really well with this frontier tech. So I think that includes quantum computing, but also includes nuclear, drones, space, all the stuff that's sort of next generation things that aren't here yet. And this was like the hottest sector last year. And anybody who didn't have exposure to this underperformed. And there are some quant firms, I think, that were very, very, very overexposed to this. And then New Year started, and in the hedge fund and quant world, January 1st is like a brand new page. Like, nothing matters from last year. You forget everything. And so this factor just flips in reverse. And part of the reason was the calendar, I think.

• 1:09:01Martin Shkreli?

  And now the quantum stocks look like dog poo poo. And they've gone down a lot. And nobody knows what to make of anything. But in the private world, you know, numbers are still, there's still big valuations, still lots of big up rounds so far. So that disconnect will be really interesting as time goes on. There was, last time I talked about photonic computing, there's a new company, Thielfellow, Young Guy. You know, I'm telling you right now, these young guys think that, you know, I'm this old dog that can't learn new tricks. I'm gonna teach all of you young bucks, 22, 25. You come into my space, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you. I've got the dog in me still.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:09:40Martin Shkreli?

  But anyway, OLIX is what it's called, and he's raised 220 or 250 to do photonic computing for, for AI, which, you know, I think is, you know, that's the second company or third company now that's come out and said, we're, we're gonna do it. And he's gonna do it with SRAM, interestingly. So he's got SRAM on board, and, you know, so it's a Grok Plus in essence.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:00Martin Shkreli?

  And I think it's a really good idea, but, you know, execution does, does, uh, does matter.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  What do you think about biological computing? We talked to a fellow who built a neuron in the lab, and it was way over my head.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Feed some protein, sugar.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, sugar. So we liked the protein part of the interview, but didn't get much further than that.

• 1:10:19Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah. I mean, look, that's, that's how we do it. So I don't see why not. You know, I think that, uh, it's a spiking neural network, right? So it's a little different from, from the software neural network, but I don't see why you couldn't do it. I think the reading the output is kind of difficult. In photonics, you have to use like a, almost like a camera, you know, uh, you wouldn't use a camera, but you're using a camera-like sensor. And, you know, that, that's sort of is your, is your readout. What's your readout here? Well, probably in the body or the brain, we're using like calcium levels or like other things like that, as well as synaptic firing. Uh, but if you want to have really good control of that, I don't, I don't think we know yet how that works. But of course, they've gotten

• 1:11:03Martin Shkreli?

  the, these brains in a vat to play pong and do other things like that. So, I mean, it's certainly possible. And, you know, I, I was thinking about this with my, with my girl who, uh, is in the space about, you know, potentially, do we buy a pig farm? And we buy a pig farm, uh, pigs are really interesting. They, they're obviously, the pork part, you know, gets sold to, to meat companies. But what's interesting is different parts of the pig are, are biological drugs. So, uh, uh, there's adrenocorticotropicin hormone, which is sold for a huge price. And then the pig's lungs also make a surfactant that's sold for respiratory disease. And then finally, the brain, we're gonna keep and grow that in a separate, you know, separate container. We're gonna rent it out to Sam Altman at the end.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Slop, slop of the trough. Literal slop. You will be literally feeding slop to pigs. Yeah, play the pig noise 25 times.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Talk about the, what's happening in small caps in, or sort of like the long tail of the market as a reaction to the AI boom. I, I, I texted a friend who-

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm just laughing and 20 years from now, your, your child will say, my, my father made his-

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Money in pig farming.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  His money in pigs.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  It's great. I love it. Yeah, I, I, I texted, I texted my friend saying like, you know, look, everyone is talking about a chip bottleneck. There's this massive AI build out going on. Like, have you looked at TSMC? And he was like, oh, like it's, it's like too big to have like some breakout move. Like, I'm not interested. Like, call me when you're talking about, you know, a $4 billion company that's like deeper in the supply chain. I talked to one person that was like, they found, they were excited about Andorol. They found some tiny supplier to Andorol and they were like, this is a proxy. What, what companies are actually interesting? How do people think about those like long tail, early, smaller cap companies that are still like properly indexed to the correct narrative around AI?

• 1:13:05Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I think they're all, they're all scams. I mean, it's, it's unfortunate, you know, situation. And this is why, you know, actually Joe Lonsill, you know, I think I talked, did I talk about this last time? You know, he, he gave a talk with the SEC commissioner and he basically said, why can I buy TBPN coin? No such thing, by the way.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:13:22Martin Shkreli?

  Or that triples.

• 1:13:24Martin Shkreli?

  TB, TBPN coin or whatever. Coin you make up on the spot. I could, I could put millions in it, lose all my money. There's no investor protections. But if I try to buy Andorol, God forbid, you know, uh, you know, you know, you guys blow the whistle and Matt Grimm stops everyone from, from buying it and so forth. The, um, hi, Matt. But the-

• 1:13:44Martin Shkreli?

  In all seriousness, I think that that's something we have to fix. I mean, because you end up having people chasing kind of really low quality companies. There's companies that just change their name to AI and hope that somebody buys them.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Martin Shkreli?

  Same thing with Quantum and other things like that. And I feel like two things should happen. First, we should let people buy privates. But, but, but two, more privates should go public. And I think like demystifying and making it less scary. Like if, I started to convince Replit to go public because there's a drug company called Replimune. And it would be the same ticker. It's like, you can't go public without them. So you have to buy Replimune.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:22Martin Shkreli?

  Invest the drug and you can go public. And Elon had to buy United Steel because they had X for like 100 years.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:30Martin Shkreli?

  And, you know, now X is available. So he just waited for them to get bought out by somebody else. Perfect timing.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:14:36Martin Shkreli?

  In all seriousness, you know, going public is the best thing ever. It's the freest, cheapest capital of all time. We obviously have seen down rounds from privates in publics. But, you know, that's mostly for like boring SaaS. Once you have AI, you know, you're going to have, you know, a million times revenue. Obviously, the difference between the two is hard to say. But I think, I think if a company like Replit went public, like you'd be surprised at the valuation you could get. I think you can, there's enough demand out there that I think some of these guys should start going public.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Did you have the same read on a lot of people that Michael Grimes going back to Morgan Stanley was incredibly bullish for late stage?

• 1:15:10Martin Shkreli?

  Really big deal. Obviously, great techno songs.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Incredibly bullish for late stage tech and the IPO window being firmly open.

• 1:15:20Martin Shkreli?

  I think so. I think you're going to also see other people from DC, you know,

• 1:15:26Martin Shkreli?

  rotate back and, you know, it was a really great thing for, for these people to actually truly make a sacrifice. Because, you know, I don't think there's that much upside in DC. And, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing thing for them to come, you know, do something good for America. And then now you have, you know, people like, you know, folks like Anthropic and OpenAI, where their capital needs are larger than the private space, to be frank. And, you know, I think that the ability for them to raise, you know, 100 billion or 200 billion or 300 billion, the markets could realistically support that. Whereas I think the private markets are really starting to stretch. Like you said, I mean, that Anthropic list of investors, the exclusive syndicate was, you know,

• 1:16:10Martin Shkreli?

  virtually a long list of every big fund.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Jordi, what else?

• 1:16:17Martin Shkreli?

  What else? Eleven Labs, eleven billion.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Amazing. Good new morality. Do you use the product?

• 1:16:23Martin Shkreli?

  So we, so my, my company, our first six to nine months, I think we spent trying to make a better Eleven Labs.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:16:31Martin Shkreli?

  And, or, or a compete.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Martin Shkreli?

  Truth, truth be told, we, we couldn't make an equal, so couldn't make a better one. But it was sort of my, my, my fast lesson in software, which is, you know, the only thing that matters is, is sales. You know, product and second most important in engineering is like last. But, you know, if you, if you, if you don't have distribution, you don't try to sell the product. It's not going to sell itself and it's a sober lesson of those guys, like very aggressive. For the longest time, if you did a one word or two word sentence in Eleven Labs, it wouldn't output it at all. There were hallucinations or all this stuff. They just pushed, you know, they fixed all that stuff, of course, but, you know, they pushed really, really hard on sales. And, and that sort of fixes everything.

• 1:17:15Martin Shkreli?

  And, and I think that, you know, it's some of the best VCs I've ever talked to said, you know, when are you going to launch your product? And I said, oh, it's not ready. And they said, just launch it, just launch it, just launch it. And, you know, get off the uncomfortable like stage fright and just start selling and you'll get more feedback and so forth. So they, I think they took that to heart really early on and just, you know, they didn't have better technology necessarily than other guys. I think they just sort of, you know, realized, okay, who needs to buy this stuff? Let's go build, build the infrastructure around that. Just incredible success. I mean, I, I, I tip my hat to them.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the moat that comes not from software engineering? Because generating code is cheap or soon to be free, but training spend. So if, if I spend, if I spend a hundred million dollars employing a bunch of great software engineers for four years and built some elaborate software system and you can just vibe code it for two orders of magnitude less cost in tokens, you clearly have an advantage against me. But if it's going to cost you a hundred million dollars to do the training run that I did for a hundred million dollars, is that a durable moat?

• 1:18:27Martin Shkreli?

  I doubt it. You know, I think it's I think it's product and sales and brand and things like that. I mean, it's trad business. So there's going to be a lot of people replicating products and then they fail and they're going to wonder why. And, you know, it's it's the rest of the business, you know, there's there's that's you're talking about 10, 20% of your your organization. I mean, you really have to get the rest of the organization excited about product. And and I think you're going to find one interesting thing that'll happen probably is that folks from embedded entrenched industries like certain manufacturing and certain materials businesses, things like that. They're going to spin out themselves and say, I'm going to solve the problem that's been plaguing my industry, but I'm not a programmer. Uh, it's like that that, uh, I'm not a rapper YouTube, uh, you know, and and, you know, I'm starting a software company, but I'm not a programmer.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:10Martin Shkreli?

  But I I know that our whole oil industry has had this huge well software problem. I'm going to build the well software. And I think startups like that are actually going to not only create tons of wealth for themselves, but they're going to actually help the economy. And that's where, just like the internet, you know, helped GDP, that sort of solution is where, you know, you're going to see GDP needle move. And it's going to be, it's a wonderful time to be like the nerdiest best guy and say equity research or something like that. Because you know, you you might have an inkling, like a rival might have an inkling that, oh, you know, finance is going to be changed by AI. I'm going to try to point my my apparatus at this and and figure it out. But if you're the guy that's like, I know everything about, you know, this type of little narrow thing, you're going to really crush it.

• 1:19:51Martin Shkreli?

  Because, you know, you you really know what the problems are. So people coming out of industry, there's a rival of ours called Rogo. Rogo is a AI company focused on finance, old Wall Street guys. They have a much, much better chance of succeeding because they're they did the job. They they know what what to do. And I think you're going to see so many people come out of the S and P 500 that just said, oh, I was working at Eaton or or Fluor. Or like companies that are just like big, you know, uh, Pulte Homes or whatever.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:19Martin Shkreli?

  And they and all of a sudden, you know, they they're they're starting software companies that solve the key problems in that industry.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. So maybe so maybe more more companies, but fewer, uh, computer science background founders.

• 1:20:33Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, so many of these problems can be solved, I think, without.

• 1:20:38Martin Shkreli?

  Knowing every single data structure and things like that. I mean, obviously, you know, there's just going to be people, it's going to be a barbell, right? Like, there's going to be people who still need to know how to make an FPGA and program an FPGA. And, and, you know, when Elon said that, you know, he sort of set a lot of people on fire over the last few weeks, when he said that you're going to see AI write assembler, or even machine level code, you know, compiled assembler. And, you know, that's, that's a pretty wacky idea. And the thing about wacky ideas from Elon is they tend to be right. So it's definitely, you know, one of these things that, you know, is kind of mind blowing that, you know, if you think about AI safety, you know, you know, tell the, tell the program, you know, give me a program that does SAS for oil wells. Cool, here it is. But by the way, you know,

• 1:21:22Martin Shkreli?

  in the, in the compiled assembly, which you can't read, because you don't, you don't speak binary, you know, there's this thing that says, you know, I'm, I'm taking 5% of the revenue and sending it in crypto to my.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  I like that. That's your AI doom scenario. Just, just slight, slight fraud. Flipping 5% off. Just clipping a grift.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you, do you expect layoffs on Wall Street? Because with, with all of the broad fear right now among white collar workers, I'm not seeing the layoffs that are explicitly, you know, hey, you were doing this thing for the company, and now we're just running this agent to, to do that. And so we'll see you later. We are seeing, hey, you were doing this thing. Now AI can help you do it a lot better. So our expectations are going to rise. We are going to expect you to do more and be more productive, but

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  you still have your job. What, what, what are you kind of hearing from people at different finance firms about how they're adopting AI and how they're, how they're feeling about job security?

• 1:22:34Martin Shkreli?

  I think in general, you know, one of the things you learn in founder school after your fourth or fifth time is that, you know, you're supposed to hate firing people and you're supposed to learn to like it over time. Nobody likes it. You know, it's the worst thing ever. And, and the funny thing is like, if you become more productive at work, the company doesn't say, oh yeah, well, let's get rid of you and save whatever amount of money because they're already making money with you employed. So the fact that you're becoming more productive means that, you know, whatever the margins were, they're probably improving. Could they improve even further by getting rid of you? Maybe. But I think there's this like slow atrophy maybe, but I think in general, we as humans want to employ other humans and we kind of want to be productive. I mean, nobody wants to

• 1:23:16Martin Shkreli?

  needlessly employ people, but I think that there is this idea of, okay, machine can do your job. We have this at my, my office all the time. And, you know, I say, Chris, you know, I wrote a program to do your job. Good news. The, you know, you don't have to do it anymore, but there's a new thing you have to do now. And, you know, our company just got twice as efficient. It's wonderful. And if the day came where there's literally nothing for Chris to do, then, you know, maybe, you know, that would be, you know, that could be the day that made sense. But

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  But I think the thing is, there's always, there's always an incremental thing for a company to do. Yeah. Like, no startup founder has ever thought, great, I Out of ideas. I did it. I built, I built the six products that, that our customers really need. And there's just no other way for me to expand the opportunity set. It's time to kick back. Yeah. I mean, yeah, those businesses die though. Yeah, they do. You're either building

• 1:24:07Martin Shkreli?

  I mean, I mean, you're gonna, I mean, if that person has a couple more hours a day now, it's great. You know, go meet with, you know, some potential recruits, go meet with some potential customers. I mean, there's, there's always something you can do. And I think that's gonna happen in finance. Adoption of AI has been very slow. And it's probably gonna stay that way. Finance people are really stuck in their ways, which is a good thing and a bad thing if you're selling software to them. Once they get stuck in your way, you're very, you're very happy. But, you know, the You know, there's, there tends to be a heavy dose of contrarianism in certain industries. And I'd say, you know, across the S and P 500, there's this sort of like, ah, you know, technology, uh, we'll use it eventually. And that eventually takes time.

• 1:24:50Martin Shkreli?

  And that's why the first people to adopt this stuff i- i- in great ways is not only because it works really well, but also because they're used to doing it as developers. Developers love AI and they've embraced it, you know, very quickly. Virtually all programmers now use AI. There were a couple of holdouts even at our, our company, but they eventually just gave up. And I think you're going to see the same thing in other industries. Finance is tough because like, there's this mystical idea that the trader, um, is this like, random, you know, far into the bu- bell curve, like, super talented person that just knows, has this like weird zen kind of ability to tell what stocks are going to go up and down. And then the other end of the barbell are the quants. Uh, and the quants sort of feel like AI is not, not, not good enough, but many of them

• 1:25:32Martin Shkreli?

  under the, what I've heard is many, many quants are, are getting new ideas from AI and also implementing them with AI. So I do think that-

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you work at a hedge fund now, you can just ask, you know, your favorite LLM, how should I hedge AI and just implement exactly that and you're guaranteed to, to outperform. No, I'm kidding.

• 1:25:51Martin Shkreli?

  It's a little bit scary for some quant funds because you, you do have to wonder if, if, you know, the thing you've been doing for 20 years that's your profit center is, is going to possibly be done by somebody else. Um, you know, that, that is a little worrisome. And then, you know, eventually, and certainly there are firms, I can, I can name them, but you can just guess the big, the big sort of institutions on the street that they're increasingly thinking about and, and even in some cases, deploying transformers to do analysis. And I don't see why, you know, the hard part about being Warren Buffett was discipline, right? Is, is saying no to so many things. And if, if you can put that in the prompt or put that in the, you know, i- i- in, in whatever, the context that you just say, listen, I really only want the best, you know, the highest quality companies,

• 1:26:36Martin Shkreli?

  the best returns, say no to everything else. And, you know, I, I don't see how that's, you know- Impossible. If you just copy the Buffett, you know, strategy, you might be better off. A lot of the mistakes in investing come from overdoing it in, in things that, you know, in FOMO and things like that, and resisting that FOMO and saying, you know, I'm just gonna sort of buy, buy these types of companies and do my thing. So I, I do think like investing as a whole is sort of gonna start to change a little bit. Mm hmm.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  Lightning, I have, I have four questions.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  I've got one and then, uh, there's a lot of performative AI usage happening right now. The people that are, you know, ordering a new Mac mini on DoorDash, ordering 10 Mac minis on DoorDash. We were, we were joking around.

• 1:27:17Martin Shkreli?

  My girl just did this.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, like, who are you looking to for founder style roles? Like, what do you think truly the most, like, like the best founders are doing, like, ideally, like the most important, working on the most important thing at the company, which could be a recruit, could be a customer, could be getting a raise done. Uh, it could be going, going on a long walk and, and just thinking about the business. But there's like heavy amount of delegation and ideally they're like delegating to people that are using a bunch of AI. But like, uh, do you have any sort of like internal fear around, am I using this stuff as efficiently as I should be myself? Uh, are you looking to anyone and saying like, okay, they're

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  actually really tapped in because just buying a Mac mini and setting it up and, you know, having it running and texting it, you know, here and there is not necessarily qualify you as like actually tapped in.

• 1:28:16Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah. I, I wonder if there's a way to, you know, to, to, to not annoyingly reach out to customers with AI. And I think that, you know, we all get that email. Like I just hit block on all of them. The, hey, I noticed that you're doing this. So now I'm gonna, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, uh, I'm a vendor that's offering you that. And I think that's, you know, gonna result in not too many sales. But I do think that these things have some yield. And I wonder if there's a really good way. That's sort of in the back of my mind worries me. And then I, at this point, I wonder if LLMs can do, can replace recruiters, right? Where they say, who's, who is the best at, you know, time series tick programming or something like that. And LM says, John Smith here, Dave Smith

• 1:29:01Martin Shkreli?

  there, you know, they're all named Smith for some reason, and Will Smith there. And I think those, you know, At some point that might happen. Of course, some of that's just human knowledge where people whisper amongst each other that, you know, oh, you know, this is the best person at this kind of investing. But I think that, you know, because we're all like blogging and like putting stuff out there, you know, we may also just be able to, you know, ask that person who's the best person. So I feel like there's definitely new ways, creative ways to use AI that, that, you know, people are coming up with all the time that are really surprising and shocking. And, you know, they're all like secret sauce, I think, for, for most people, but, you know,

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on the recruiting.

• 1:29:39Martin Shkreli?

  Was our secret sauce for a while.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on the recruiting front, I met a guy a couple of years ago who like only his entire recruiting business for years had been work Brazilian fintech engineers. Like he had just done a decade and all he did was help companies hire the best Brazilian engineers that liked working on financial services companies. And like he had carved out a great business and I do wonder, I don't know that identifying who the great ones are. It's like, maybe you did a certain number of years at, at New Bank and then you popped over here and then you popped back and like, you can probably pick up some of that stuff. But then what is the value of just like actually having like, how durable is the personal relationship with those people that you've placed over a long enough period of time?

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  And can you continue to basically extract rent because like they will respond to your texts and not the like, you know, millionth, you know, AI text that, that, that is constantly kind of chasing them. Anyways, lightning, lightning round, John.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  I'll just do one. Neo Labs bullish, bearish? What do you think?

• 1:30:41Martin Shkreli?

  I'd say bullish, you know, it's a contrarian view, I think, because I'm especially looking forward to JT, J2 Rex, Neo Lab. I think these are really smart people.

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  Are they product companies or are they research companies that will get acquired in?

• 1:30:57Martin Shkreli?

  I think they're gonna all have a crisis and have to figure it out.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's the, here's like the, the, the, the, the kind of bearish take on Neo Labs. The, the, from an investment standpoint, I get it because I, I would say like really, really elite, smart team, there's somewhat of a capped downside. If you invest $50 million, you could probably get 50 of, of worth of, you know, some, one other lab that's actually working down the line out if it doesn't work out. But these people were like working on something like, you know, hey, these LLMs aren't really learning in real time. They're just kind of like in a certain state and I'm gonna leave this lab and go work on that problem. Meanwhile, the lab is still working on that problem. And we've also seen as different labs have different advancements,

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  the other labs can like quickly just catch up, right? So like one person has a breakthrough. And so my question is like, if a Neo Lab raises $100 million and like actually has a breakthrough, then they just have the problem of like, are we actually gonna be able to sell this better than the labs that will probably figure out how to do this than the big labs that'll figure out how to do this in the next, maybe two months later, but they have, you know, a million customers already. So like, that's the bear case for me is like, even if you have this like breakthrough, you don't have the like sales, distribution.

• 1:32:16Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, no, I mean, the, the bear case is what do these people know about business? Um, you know, and they're, they're starting a business, right? So it's, it's kind of a scary thing, but I think that, you know, look at biotech and some other industries, you know, this is pretty common. And ultimately, I think they're, they're doing the hard part. You know, the easy part is you get a bunch of good looking guys like you guys and, you know, you get, you get them to start selling positioning product. But I think the hard part is, yeah, how do you do continual learning? How do you do a new form of AGI? It's a little past most of our pay grades. And I think, you know, there probably will be a crisis where like the real ones will be separated from the fake ones, but that's just human nature anyway. Like there'll be some funding crunch and then somebody has to like emerge

• 1:32:59Martin Shkreli?

  with that dog in them and say, no, I'm gonna raise another 200 million. I'm gonna come out with something tonight and we're gonna do it. And for that type of, you know, crazy, you know, person where, and then there's gonna be folks like, I don't wanna name a certain AI company that folded, but I'll throw in one that did, which was, was the guys who made Hey Pie inflection. Uh, they sort of, you know, had that outcome that you're talking about and. You know, but there'll be people like, like that see that, you know, valley of death and say, no, we have to finish this. And I think that probably the one of the biggest things that people have to remember, but they don't because they don't care. Is that the, the investors' money is sacred. And if you, if you're just thinking about it as, oh, what's the worst that happens, you know, I, I lie down and Sequoia loses their money and this and that.

• 1:33:43Martin Shkreli?

  You know, I take that really seriously and everyone should. And, you know, I think that the handful that do, you know, will see their, their runway dwindling and saying, ah, we really got to do a product here. And, and, and tough it out and figure it out. And I think those will be the, you know, future, you know, future leaders.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  To hop on the stream. Always a great time chatting with you.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:34:05John Coogan?

  Uh, have a great weekend.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Enjoy your lock-in.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the caffeine. Enjoy your fifth five hour energy.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  Tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. We have Connor Hayes, the head of threads in the studio. While he comes in, I'm going to tell you about Okta. There's 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. The vanguards.

• 1:34:39Connor Hayes?

  The vanguards are out today.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, they're out today.

• 1:34:41Connor Hayes?

  Well, they're out, they've been out, but they're out here.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  Well, they're out. Like months ago, months ago.

• 1:34:46Connor Hayes?

  I have to ask you guys before we start.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:34:49Connor Hayes?

  How are you recovering from Klav getting brutally blown by the ISU frat leader? I just want to know.

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  It rocked, it rocked men everywhere.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Rocked my world.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Every, are you okay? I mean, I think the reason that that resonated is every, everyone's experienced that, right? I get that, I get that every day. I get that every day.

• 1:35:08Connor Hayes?

  Don Cogan has never been dream.

• 1:35:10Jordi Hays?

  No, John, maybe, maybe he hasn't.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  I think it was predictable.

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  I wasn't that surprised.

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  But we did this morning, sauna.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  True, true.

• 1:35:18Jordi Hays?

  The whole team was in the sauna after our workout this morning and this guy must've been an Xbox builder. It was just ridiculous.

• 1:35:24John Coogan?

  It was one of the widest backs I've ever seen. See to shine to see.

• 1:35:28Connor Hayes?

  That's why you need the meta vanguards on so you can capture that.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  That's a, that's a feature that could be a hit is you, is it basically like a real, real time video model that reduces, if somebody's coming up to frame hog you, it just kind of reduces them down.

• 1:35:44Connor Hayes?

  There's like haptic feedback that sends you out of the frame.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  I mean, those are some frame mogs right there. You call them frames, right? They're, they're fantastic. Uh, how, how is life? What, what is the day to day like for you?

• 1:35:56Connor Hayes?

  The day to day changes a lot. Um, we're doing, you know, threads, I think a format like that only works if you are at the center of cultural relevance. And so that brings us into a lot of stuff that's going on in the world. We were like all over Super Bowl last week. I'm here this week because we're doing a bunch of stuff with NBA for the All-Star game. Um, so that's been really, I mean, that's fun. It's work, but it's fun. Um, and then the rest of the day is like, how do we make the feed better? What are we doing on, you know, content understanding? Are models good enough to like, you know, do something like the Dear algo feature that we just launched?

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  That. First, uh, Super Bowl NBA, like obviously we all know that social media content production is power law driven at this point. There's a few creators that take it really seriously and they have expert teams. Obviously threads is like a little lower barrier to entry than a polished two, you know, hour long YouTube video or something like that. But, uh, are, are you shaking hands and kissing babies to get people on the platform? Is that what that is?

• 1:36:56Connor Hayes?

  I haven't kissed any babies. I have shaken a lot of hands actually though. Um, we, yeah. So we have a bunch of program. It's actually one of the benefits of doing this at Meta is we have such an infrastructure of working with creators and partners. And, um, I think we talked about this actually when I saw you guys in September, like the big learning for us was the people that rock at Instagram don't necessarily succeed on threads out of the box. Um, it's kind of a, it's a very different format. The cool thing about it.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got really good at making pictures and videos. And now you basically need to be really good at captions that can stand on their own text.

• 1:37:29Connor Hayes?

  It's wit, it's like insight, it's things like that.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Timeliness.

• 1:37:33Connor Hayes?

  But if you're good at that, to your point, John, the barrier is so low. Like, I was on a flight here two days ago, and I think I fired off like fifteen posts on the flight replying to people and whatever. And I'm not sending clips to a production team and having them edit it. So that's the beauty, I think, of the format.

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. How is the AI spam revolution keeping you up at night? Or is there, does Meta have strong infrastructure there where you can kind of just like out of the box identify things?

• 1:38:01Connor Hayes?

  Very much so. Yeah, I mean, we like, I think as a company have made some good decisions in the last decade of taking these things that are like, basically, infrastructure that you would need for any service you build, ads, financial services, integrity, detection and monitoring. And we build central teams out that do that for the company and then build it in such a way that it can be applied to any app.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:22Connor Hayes?

  So we just benefit from all the work that the central teams do. We have some folks inside Threads as well. But maybe what you mean, though, is like the agent, like agents coming into social spaces?

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  I guess a somewhat tangential question is just like, when GPT-3 dropped, it was like, okay, like, it can write text. And then the surprise to me was deep research, agentic coding. I had sort of priced in like, it's going to be able to write a couple of sentences. And yet, I find myself when I'm on a short text-based platform, not following AI accounts. Like, I'm more likely to go to a fully AI product when I want something that's more like a Wikipedia page and a deep research report. A utility. But when I'm actually scrolling a feed of short news items and posts and commentary and hot takes,

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  I, it's not even that I'm like anti-AI, that I would, I would never follow someone who is using AI to post. It's like, no, like, no one's actually solved that piece of the puzzle. There's still some human element that's encoded in.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  You know, sixteen words that are hilarious based on this moment and this experience and this audience, and that's just stuck around a lot longer than I thought it would.

• 1:39:37Connor Hayes?

  Well, that's like the, I don't, I don't know how much you guys talk about this on here, but I think like the word of twenty twenty six in AI is gonna be taste.

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:43Connor Hayes?

  And that's what you're getting at. It's like a model can produce output.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Connor Hayes?

  But taste is the thing that differentiates good from great, even on modeling, right?

• 1:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Connor Hayes?

  You can have all the data in the world and inject it into a pre-training run.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Connor Hayes?

  But actually, the best labs are the ones that have people with taste that can hand-select golden sets of like, what is the best response for this thing, or what's the best image aesthetic for this thing? Um, I think it's the same with like text-based posts, like, um, it has to be real-time, it has to have a bunch of cultural understanding. I do think models will get really good at that at some point. Um, my, the thing that I'm most excited about though is like AI-assistive in the creative process. So like, if you're an NBA creator, half the stuff that you do is just clipping content and being like, did you see that Victor Wimbenyama dunk?

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:28Connor Hayes?

  Half of it is like weighing in on it and having an analysis that like comes from your point of view and feels native to you. That first half, if we can like automate for people and make super easy to do because they have a workflow that's like, watch all the NBA games, give me the content that I should be posting, and then I'll add on my little flavor on top of it. Like, that would be amazing.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Also, fact.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because timing, timing with this stuff is so important. I mean, we, we, this is obviously a big part of our business is like, if you're getting to stories, you know, later than everyone else, it's just way less it's becomes, goes from interesting to not interesting at all. Uh, and so I think for creators that wanna build an account like that, uh, any type of tool that allows them to be faster in that process is.

• 1:41:11Connor Hayes?

  It is crazy, though. Like you, I don't, um, you know, have you guys had, uh, GeoRainbow on here?

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  We have.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  I would love to have him on.

• 1:41:19Connor Hayes?

  Okay.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm worried he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna dox us.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  We've given out so many little teasers with images.

• 1:41:27Connor Hayes?

  He, I think, I, I meet and love a lot of creators. He is like the most impressive content creator I've ever seen. Like, he's incredible. But he, I saw an interview with him recently and he's like, oh, yeah. When I was like a teenager, I had a Steph Curry fan page. I think it's still up and it had like 50,000 followers. And you meet all these kids that are like in their twenties. They were raised in a version of the world where Instagram was at the center of the universe. And they create like fan accounts that get super huge. And then it's like, then what do you do with it? I guess you get really fucking good at geo guessing.

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I like we, we, we have some people on the team that are, you know, super early in their careers. Maybe this is their first job. And when we talk about, and a lot of the work is like selecting content, editing it, you know, distributing it on the right platform. And it feels like, like very much like manual labor, like you're watching content. And we've stressed continuously that it's actually, it's very important training for doing almost anything. Because it's like developing taste. It's like developing consistency, speed, being organized. You know, being able to get like immediate feedback on the work that you're doing. Like the feedback loop is super tight.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  And so we've consistently said like, hey, we don't expect you to be doing this in five years. But like for now, take it extremely seriously because if you can get really good at this one thing, you might be able to apply it in, you know, a bunch of other domains.

• 1:42:55Connor Hayes?

  It's kind of crazy. It's like today's mailroom, basically like.

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  No, it really is. We went in this, we went in the CIA mailroom.

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  When we were on, we were doing a tour of the building and we were like, hey, can we see it? And it felt like exactly the mailroom out of, like the same mailroom as like, you know, 30 years ago.

• 1:43:12Connor Hayes?

  I was at their event last night for All-Star and they were the most excited I've ever seen agents about TDPN being on the CIA roster. Like ear to ear smiles when I brought you guys.

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're great.

• 1:43:24Connor Hayes?

  Congrats on that.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  That rainbow story is funny. The first social media account that I ever got to somewhat of scale was an Instagram for my dog that I got to like 20,000 followers.

• 1:43:36Connor Hayes?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  I, I, I'm going to get in trouble here because I used a bot to, to automatically follow anyone who liked the page or leave a like on.

• 1:43:47Connor Hayes?

  No.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  Eventually the bot got shut down, but it already like went up.

• 1:43:51Connor Hayes?

  What's the account?

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can ban it. I don't care. I don't want to post any more photos of my dog. I was bored at the time. But, uh, but it was an interesting thing of like, how do you solve the cold start problem? And I'm wondering about, you know, now there's a lot of platforms where I feel like there's an audition process. You can go on to a completely blank account and if you bring a banger, some heat, like the algorithm will, will audition you with like 500 random people and be like, retention was really great. Let's show this to more people, show this to more people. Is that the way Threads is set up right now?

• 1:44:21Connor Hayes?

  We do a bit of that. Um, yeah, exactly. It's like you, you basically take any piece of content on the platform. You sample it to some people and then you very quickly try to understand, did this do well in this sample? The smaller the sample though, the wider the airbars are. So you have to keep auditioning.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:38Jordi Hays?

  So it's like cycles of auditions?

• 1:44:39Connor Hayes?

  Cycles of auditions. And then, um, you know, some people fail the audition, but.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  What happens to those posts?

• 1:44:45Connor Hayes?

  What happens to those posts?

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  They languish on a server. 500 views, like.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. Like, do they just, they just don't end up getting served to many people? Or they have to get served later because?

• 1:44:56Connor Hayes?

  No, well, cause we also, we have a really tight, uh, window of eligibility for recommendations. Like we want the app to feel very real time. So something you posted three days ago won't be eligible to be recommended to someone who doesn't follow you in the app.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Connor Hayes?

  So it all has to happen very, very fast. Um, the bet on, on Threads, this is like a talk track that I give to every creator. That's like, what do I do? It's reply to people.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Connor Hayes?

  The feed loves that. The feed kinda loves reply guys. And it's just not just replies though, like are you driving a conversation?

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:26Connor Hayes?

  The best, um, actually he was at our event yesterday, Draymond Green, number one example. If you want to go look at someone's replies on Threads, he, I asked him if he searches his name and he's like, no, man, you just show me haters.

• 1:45:39Connor Hayes?

  His feed is just people being like, Draymond is the worst. I hate him on the Warriors. And he'll be like,

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  I disagree.

• 1:45:44Connor Hayes?

  I looked at your profile picture. You should talk to your mom about how ugly you are. Oh my God, Draymond. He gets a lot of joy out of it, but that's his brand and his character. And when he does that, it shows the world, I'm on Threads, I'm doing something that's true to me. Um, I think the people who don't do as well are the ones who kinda just, it's not organic. It doesn't feel like them. It doesn't have personality and replies are like a good way to get that out there.

• 1:46:06Jordi Hays?

  What it, what's, what's Threads' relationship like with the rest of the app ecosystem? Early on, you guys opened the. Floodgates brought a bunch of people in. I'm sure you looked at like retention, who's actually staying here? How do we get more people like this? But like, what does that relationship look like? Are you like, because I'll see like a meta, a pop up for like meta Ray-Bans, right? Right? When I open the app and then maybe I scroll a few times and then there's like some threads content that's pushing me over. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:35Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, I mean, we, we, uh, we promote the app, the content from the app in Facebook and Instagram quite a bit. I mean, I'm sure anybody watching this who uses Instagram has probably seen some of that. So that's, that's the main point of integration that we have. When we built threads, there was a bunch of like foundational decisions that we had to make in the beginning, which were like, you know, what app, what app binary do we build on top of? Like, we actually just took Instagram and we're like, because on day one of threads, when it was like a very thin app, it was like 300 megs or something in the App Store, because we just had the IG code base. I mean, we've like made it more efficient from then, but it's like, what namespace do you use? Like, we, we mirror the Instagram namespace. Um, you can have a threads only account, but you can only have a threads only account that isn't a name that's on Instagram, you know?

• 1:47:19Connor Hayes?

  Like, we made it one. So there's a lot of natural tie-ins to Instagram because of that. We were backed by them effectively in the beginning. But now, like, a lot of our users come from that integration in the Facebook app. We, we, and you can sign up for threads from Facebook without an Instagram account. Like, we're trying to make it stand on its own, independent of the IG history, without like disrespecting the fact that that's like the best marketing channel you could ever ask for. So we, we try to own that up.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Talk about collabs. I was scrolling this Instagram creator. Have you ever seen the Let Him Cook guy? Have you seen this guy?

• 1:47:54Connor Hayes?

  No.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  He does this incredible thing where he'll bring the video in, he'll be like, you can't cook an F1 driver. And the song plays and he goes in and it transitions from like a tire to the road. And it's like this amazing editor. And I was scrolling and I just, uh, and one of them is just him, uh, doing the same like motion graphics effect, this amazing edit, and Adam Mosseri is sitting there with him. And it's very clear that he like collabed on this and they have shared namespace on them. And I've, and I've seen there's a bunch of different ways, but that feels like an interesting. Uh, you know, it's very popular in podcasting. You have a big guest on.

• 1:48:28Connor Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  A bunch of their audience comes to yours. What does that look like on threads for someone who's trying to sort of network their way to broad account growth?

• 1:48:38Connor Hayes?

  Yep. Um, we do a bunch of this. Uh, I'll give you a couple of examples. Like, uh, yesterday I actually put up, it's like kind of mortifying, uh, video because I did a training session with lethal shooter, the, the NBA shooting coach.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Connor Hayes?

  I thought I was gonna crush, by the way. I was like.

• 1:48:52John Coogan?

  You know, you can edit the video.

• 1:48:53Connor Hayes?

  I was.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  You can edit out the misses.

• 1:48:56Connor Hayes?

  I walked onto this basketball court. I was like, I am going to be the greatest shooter of all time. And it was so humbling and horrible. But like, we did it. We did that thing. He was amazing. Um, but that's like, you know, I put some content up, he'll repost it. He has a bunch of fans from Instagram that are on threads and like, he's actually really good on threads. He's, um, his mentality is very like, oh my God, there were so many one-liners. He was just screaming at me the whole time. But it's very much like, you can only be great at a thing like shooting a basketball if you are centered as a human. And he posts like motivational quotes like that on threads and stuff and people love it. So that's one thing where it's like, not only is he doing well on the platform, but I do something with him and show everybody there. Like this is big.

• 1:49:38Connor Hayes?

  We also then have a bunch of like more homegrown talent where it's less like, take someone who's huge on IG and bring them to threads.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Connor Hayes?

  There's a guy, um.

• 1:49:44Jordi Hays?

  There's always, there's always been alpha, just getting, being one of the first.

• 1:49:49Connor Hayes?

  One of the first.

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  10 million users, but then taking it more seriously than any of the, anyone else.

• 1:49:53Connor Hayes?

  That's this guy Yo Rush on threads. He's like, they call him the mayor of NBA threads. He was just like at home. He's an NBA fan. Threads came out and he just started posting and people liked it. And like, he was with us yesterday at this thing we did in LA. Him and his wife are here for the weekend. They're coming to a bunch of events with us. Like, you know, we want people like that to, I think it's really important if you have a content app to have homegrown talent too. You can't just be transitioning people from other places. Like you need to show everyone on the app that you could be successful here too. If you just like do the right things and reach the right audience.

• 1:50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  How, what's your, what's your philosophy around creator payouts? How do you think creator payouts on, on other platforms have worked well? Clearly they work well on YouTube. Our, our point of view is like making a great YouTube video takes an insane amount of work. It's in the incentive of the YouTube platform to pay people because, so they can quit, you know, quit their job or put more resources to it or buy gear, all these things where our, our. I haven't felt like creator payouts have made X a better platform at all.

• 1:50:58Connor Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Because it incentivizes people to just churn out low-quality content that might rage bait people into engaging, but isn't actually making the platform better.

• 1:51:07Connor Hayes?

  Yeah. I have pretty strong opinions on this in a bunch of priors. I agree with the way that you just positioned that. The way that, at least right now, I'm thinking about this on Threads is I want to be in the business of directing traffic to the places where you make money in a sustainable way. I don't know. We've tried different versions of this at Meta. X has obviously had their version. I've never seen in an app like Threads, a sustainable creator payout product work well over time. YouTube works well. And then you have the Substacks and Patreons of the world that are more subscription-based. Podcasts, getting subscribers and traffic to your podcast is a thing that you can monetize and run ads and have sponsors like you guys do. And so we have been focused on that by, we did this pretty simple thing

• 1:51:51Connor Hayes?

  where we worked with Spotify to do rich previews of podcasts. You can also pin your podcast link on your profile. I would love to do stuff like then you can subscribe on Spotify from the feed and things like that.

• 1:52:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the reason that philosophy, I think, is smart is that's what we're seeing across the entire internet.

• 1:52:12Connor Hayes?

  Because you're gonna have different ways to make money, different creators will.

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  You can't just get paid for views because not every view is equal. Otherwise, the kid running, there's kids running meme accounts that are posting funny, maybe controversial, edgy content on Instagram, getting a billion views a year, but it actually has zero value.

• 1:52:33Connor Hayes?

  It's like the videos of the kids that take the fake turds and put them in Burger King bathrooms. Have you noticed? Oh, my God. I'm like, what are we doing here, guys? Now, all the viewers will have to look that up. It's the most horrible content. You're right. The incentive there is like, how do I do something funny? Actually, I'm very, that whole prank video space to me is just this like... Insane, like I guess you could have imagined it coming 10 years ago, but whenever I see one, I'm like, how did we get here?

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  I feel like it blew up on YouTube like years ago. I feel like there was.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, prank videos were the.

• 1:53:05Connor Hayes?

  That was.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  Like the original.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  I used to have a few prank videos, you know, my holster, if I go to a friend's house and say, let's pull up YouTube. Let's go.

• 1:53:14Connor Hayes?

  There is.

• 1:53:14Jordi Hays?

  But going back to it, it's like, yeah, if you can be a place that helps people have an audience and build a business, that is what every successful content creator has done. They're not just relying on views. Even for us on X with Creator Payouts, you know, generating hundreds of millions of views in the last year, like the X Creator Payout is like such a rounding error that I wouldn't be mad if it went away, right?

• 1:53:41Connor Hayes?

  I think it's, you end up, it's funny, because when you talk to people, it's like, there's people like you guys who, hundreds of millions of views, rounding error, you want to be mad if it goes away. The people that tend to care the most about it are the ones who get paid out like $80 a year. And I do, I actually sympathize with that because it's like, if this is a side hustle for you, to your point before, you want to buy a new camera, you want better gear, like finding ways to get people enough money to sustain the thing that they're doing and give themselves more attempts to make it big or build a bigger audience, I think is great. We just want to do that by pushing people to the places where you're monetizing more efficiently.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  Are you seeing SpawnCon happen natively on the platform, like on Instagram where, I mean, I see a ton of influencers who are like, get ready with me and this outfit's brought to you by the app or something. And that's been a backbone for a whole variety. I have a friend who's been working with figs for a long time and she'll talk about figs clothing and it works really well on Instagram. Have you seen that flywheel startup in Threads?

• 1:54:41Connor Hayes?

  It's interesting that you ask that. I mean, we have had some of these.

• 1:54:46Connor Hayes?

  I would say it's more like memes that everyone in the app participates in for a few days, but not like categories like that. I mean, like Get Ready With Me, it's like Alex Earl was on Dancing With The Stars because she did Get Ready With Me videos five years ago. That's like, I don't think we've seen equivalents on Threads, but we had this, um, do you guys know the like, sorry, I'm just bringing up memes on the show, but like, hey. That's what we do.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  You started with a meme.

• 1:55:08Connor Hayes?

  Do you guys know the, uh, I hate gay Halloween?

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:55:11Connor Hayes?

  Thing? Okay, that was like big on Threads.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Okay. We, we, I, I actually do think I saw one thing.

• 1:55:17Connor Hayes?

  It was just people being like, you know, there was actually one that I laughed at the other day. It's like, hey, gay Halloween, what do you mean? I'm like, you're going as the grass from the Bad Bunny halftime show or whatever. You know, like, there was like two days.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  All these like very obscure, like niche references.

• 1:55:29Connor Hayes?

  I think that's what Threads is good at, is like the niche humor.

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  That is a great Halloween outfit. We were, during the Super Bowl, we were, I was just sitting there zooming in on, on the grass because you could see there was like coordinators that would be like right up in the face of the grass, just like yelling them like, get to the right, right?

• 1:55:46Connor Hayes?

  I thought they were gonna do something, but then I found out it was because they had limitations on the number of carts. You can roll out onto the field.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  So they had to add people.

• 1:55:53Connor Hayes?

  The way that they were able to do the set was to have humans walk on and off because there's like a restriction on the number of carts that can be put on the field.

• 1:56:01John Coogan?

  I like it. Nature finds a way.

• 1:56:02Connor Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how big, how big is the team? How do you think about scaling the team? What does it look like to go to, to go to Zoc and say, I need, I need 500 more?

• 1:56:13Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, I've never made that ask. Uh, we're, we're relatively small compared to the other apps inside Meta, like by orders of magnitude. But, uh, we are growing this year. Um, we're investing in like two things. One is like just relevance, making the content ecosystem better and stronger and the personalization of the feed. Um, the Dear algo thing is like a part of that.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  I have a question for that.

• 1:56:33Connor Hayes?

  And then, um, the other one is just like making sure that we can grow sustainably. Like, these promotions that we have in Facebook and Instagram are awesome. I think that we will have them for a very long time. Um, but we also want to make sure that people are turning to Threads without having to see a promotion. Um, there's a bunch of just like basic work to do well there that I think other companies have done really well over the years. Even just like SEO and getting yourself, like if someone searches "Super Bowl halftime show," I want Threads content to come up on a search engine there. And so those are the two categories where we're growing, but it's still a pretty small team.

• 1:57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can, I want to know more about Dear Algo and I want to share my experience. You can tell me if this is just me being weird or if this is actually a trend. Like, there was a time when a social network would be all things to all people. So if I liked sports and tech and cars, I would get all three of those sort of mashed together. I could maybe go into certain communities. Now I feel like I have different apps and different platforms. Like for real time tech news, I go to X, but then if I'm watching a video essay or a car review, that's on YouTube. My, my Instagram is much more timely, much more funny, more reels. And then all my podcast players for like

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  the conversations that aren't very visual. And so I have all these different platforms and I'm wondering about, like, is there, is there a future where someone's using threads for one interest of theirs? And then Instagram for a different interest of theirs. And there's kind of two separate communities and they're sort of intentionally steering it that way.

• 1:58:05Connor Hayes?

  I think it's possible.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:06Connor Hayes?

  Like, there is a, kind of to my point before about what content works well in the app and not like, I would say in a, in a category as broad as sports.

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Connor Hayes?

  You probably always will have two types of content. It's like, show me the supercut of like Kenneth Walker in the Super Bowl, and then show me, you know, Mina Kimes talking about his free agency or something like that. Like Threads is going to be really good at the, the latter. I think Instagram will be really good at the former. One of the ways that a lot of these apps think about how to get to the point that you just talked about, which was like, which is like, is like, how can we get the user to tell us what they want to see without asking them? So that's like, what do you search for? What do you dwell on? What do you share with other people? What do you like? All these signals. And like, our job is to figure out which signals are signal and which ones are noise.

• 1:58:55Connor Hayes?

  I actually think it's possible for an app like Threads to be multiple things for people, but probably not everything. Like, I don't, I don't want Threads to be a video app. That wouldn't make sense. We have like a lot of investment in short form video at Instagram and on Facebook.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  And even like the political infighting. And you've been like, that's something we've not really.

• 1:59:12Connor Hayes?

  I don't need to do that. Like, but I, I think that there's a space for the text format that's really big. And, and my biggest takeaway from the last few years of Threads, which when we first started it, I think we very much saw growing the app as, we need to pull people from other services to grow. I've been really pleasantly surprised at how we've grown the category. There's a lot of people that use threads that never used X or similar platform in the past. And so that's the thing that I've been really focused on is like, why is that happening? What are those people doing? And a lot of it is like these niche interests. Dating threads is really big, actually. It's like people like singles go on threads and make a post and put it into the dating threads community and they're like, hey, I'm looking for love. But then we also get book threads. There's like a like crocheting community.

• 1:59:57Connor Hayes?

  I tend to spend my time on sports and pop culture and stuff like that. But there are these very niche communities that we actually built like a community's product so that you can find those people and kind of make your app about that.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  So how does Dear algo work? Is it plain text or buttons?

• 2:00:11Connor Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:11John Coogan?

  UI? How can someone actually customize?

• 2:00:13Connor Hayes?

  We just say, we just sort of built it off of what we. So there was this viral moment like a year ago where people were writing Dear algo, show me more tech content or whatever. Dear algo, introduce me to people who are into these things. And that, I mean, to say that it didn't work would maybe be incorrect, but it's like the system wasn't architected for that to be like a strong signal.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:00:31Connor Hayes?

  Yeah. Of course, if you write about a thing and you like a bunch of content about it, maybe the algorithm will pick up, you want to see more of that. But it wasn't working with like high intent. So now if you just go type Dear algo into a post on threads, it like tags itself blue. You can say, you know, the other day, actually, because I'm a Patriots fan, I was like, stop showing me NFL content. And for three days I got nothing about the NFL in my feed. It was amazing. Like, I don't even know if the Seahawks parade happened. Like it didn't cross my timeline. But then you could, you can also say, show me more of something. So actually, I think I made one the other day that was like, show me more real grass people from the halftime show, not AI generated ones. And that worked. Like, the reason why we're able to do it is because content understanding and like

• 2:01:15Connor Hayes?

  topic trees have just gotten so much better with LLMs. Like five years ago, we might've had you as dog sports cars. Now it's like this specific model of this car, which is associated with this brand, which is made in this country.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  It's like a million parameters that no human can understand. But it's way better.

• 2:01:30Connor Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  Just like ad targeting. Love it.

• 2:01:32Connor Hayes?

  You will get like a rejection if you, if you say like, show me more murder. We will probably be like, we can't do that. If you say, show me more of something that's like so niche that we don't have enough content, we'll tell you like, hey, there's not enough content for this. And then we actually tell you in the feed. When you see something that's because of the request that you made, it'll be like marked as such so that you know what you're getting for.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's very cool.

• 2:01:51Connor Hayes?

  It's fun. You guys should try it.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I've been waiting for the plain text interface to the.

• 2:01:57Connor Hayes?

  Jordy could make his first threads post today, maybe by trying it.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  I will do that. I haven't done, I haven't done one?

• 2:02:02Connor Hayes?

  No.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, alright, I'm gonna get there.

• 2:02:05Connor Hayes?

  I don't mean to shame you on the, on the live stream.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Today, I'll be on there. At Jordy Hayes on threads. Find me there.

• 2:02:12Connor Hayes?

  Actually, I made my first X post in three years today. Because you guys tagged me on there and I wanted to route people to.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Always, always be selling.

• 2:02:22Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Always be selling. Uh, well, the app, the app, the app looks absolutely beautiful.

• 2:02:27Connor Hayes?

  Thank you.

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  I love the.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  Number three in the App Store, too.

• 2:02:29Jordi Hays?

  I love the polish.

• 2:02:30Connor Hayes?

  For anywhere from two to three, I want to get that number one.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you, do you like wake up and check the App Store charts?

• 2:02:36Connor Hayes?

  That is not a thing I do. I wake up and I look at like six dashboards.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, just to be clear, in.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, it might help if you put a big monitor in the office that just has your App Store position.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Usually when you put things up like that, it tends to like.

• 2:02:50Connor Hayes?

  That's a great tip. I'm sure my team will really enjoy that.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Dude, it's great to hang.

• 2:02:56Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, thank you guys for having me. Thank you.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 2:02:59Connor Hayes?

  Thank you guys.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Uh, you heard Martin talk about it, but now you're gonna hear me talk about it. Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. And I'm also gonna tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai and.

• 2:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Next, Alex Bouzari. He's the co-founder and CEO of DDN. He's in the restroom waiting room and now he's in the TV.

• 2:03:29Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  How are you doing, Alex? Good to meet you.

• 2:03:31Speaker 05

  Hey, how are you guys doing?

• 2:03:32Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great. I expected, we expected you to suit, Magus.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  We certainly have.

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  That outfit is fantastic.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Certainly have.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  What's the background on the, on the suit? Have you always been into fashion? Is it particularly?

• 2:03:44Speaker 05

  I've always been into fashion. I'm sure you guys appreciate it because you're definitely not like everybody else.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, we'll, we'll hit you up after the show for some tailor recommendations, uh, but uh, very, very excited to meet.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, first time on the show, please give us an introduction.

• 2:04:02Speaker 05

  So CEO, co-founder of DDN. DDN solves all the data problems associated with AI implementation. Or enterprises, sovereigns, so nations, countries, large-scale deployments. Nvidia uses internally for everything they do. Elon, Larch, Grok, on 200,000 GPUs is powered by DDN. Hundreds and hundreds of deployments like that. So that's what we do. Solve the problems of AI and we help organizations monetize AI. Because it's great to invest, but if you don't monetize, what's the point?

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  What's your background? How did you get into this business? How long?

• 2:04:41Speaker 05

  Been in technology forever. Born in France, came to the US in my early twenties, went to school here. Loved it. And then just did a bunch of technology companies. This one, my partner and I started about 20 some years ago.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:04:59Speaker 05

  At the time, we were solving the problems of high- Midnight success. So high-performance computing is basically government labs, academia, trying to solve complex technology problems. I mean, those guys were our customers. We ended up powering 60 out of the 100 fastest supercomputers in the world. In every country, basically. Free letter agencies, Department of Defense, Department of Energy. And then this little thing called AI started to happen. And so Nvidia came to us and tapped us on the shoulder and they said, well, we're trying to stand up a reference architecture. Eight years ago. And they said, we have all the pieces, we don't have the data.

• 2:05:43Speaker 05

  And so we became part of that architecture and Nvidia became our customer. And you know, here we are, eight years later. AI is booming, as you know, as you see. I mean, it's expanding, exploding in every aspect, every industry. And that's been the journey. And the journey is super exciting.

• 2:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through, obviously, you're quite bullish on AI and implementing it across every possible industry, but how did you personally kind of process the different evolutions and paradigms from the transformer architecture to all the different steps that we've had since then?

• 2:06:24Speaker 05

  Sure, sure, sure. That's a great question. I mean, look, when Nvidia came to us eight years ago, I mean, honestly, I don't think anybody realized how quickly it was going to grow and evolve. And so we walked away from that first meeting saying, well, we need to develop a radically different architecture. And that architecture for AI to be successful needs to connect edge, so edge devices, think of that as autonomous cars, think of it as sensor data, robots in factories that move things around. So it has to connect the edge to the data center where the data is getting processed, analyzed. That's where a lot of the Nvidia infrastructure is being deployed, and then multi-cloud. And so the evolution

• 2:07:07Speaker 05

  really was, as Nvidia and other companies have been deploying faster and faster GPUs, the resulting factor is that there's a scarcity in the number of GPUs available in the world, scarcity in power, there's not enough power in the world, and there's not enough data center footprint in the world. So our technology has basically evolved to adapt to these limitations. People are spending, organizations are spending millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. We have customers who are spending tens of billions in building out infrastructure. Well, if that infrastructure is not productive and is not delivering value, then it's wasted,

• 2:07:48Speaker 05

  and the ROI just doesn't work out. So we've evolved our software stack, call it the data plane, to ensure that these infrastructures are running in the most effective way possible, irrespective of what power shortages might be, or data center footprint shortages might be, or the number of GPUs that are available. So that's really been our evolution. It's been lock and step. A lot of it guided by Nvidia. I mean, our engineers and their engineers interact on a daily basis across all aspects of Nvidia's engineering. And the primary problem is, how do you make it easier for enterprises to implement AI in their environment in a non-disruptive way?

• 2:08:31Speaker 05

  I mean, in essence, you're dealing with CIOs who are like, well, I don't want to have any glitches, because if I have glitches, I'm going to get fired. And line of business people who are saying, hey, I want to benefit from AI in developing better, more compelling, more competitive products and services. So you have this tension, which means you have to make it easy for them to deploy in their environment. You have to make it risk-free. And so with Nvidia and others, we've developed these integrated solutions that are industry-specific, that can be deployed and make it easy for enterprises to bring in AI into their environment and benefit from it. So it's really that. I think we're moving from

• 2:09:12Speaker 05

  an early adopter phase, which is a handful of organizations are benefiting from AI. You know, the hyperscalers, the, you know, chat GPTs of the world, the Groks of the world, into one where the industrialization of AI is underway. And I think that's one of the most compelling things that is happening out there. But for that to take place, it's easy, easy.

• 2:09:35Jordi Hays?

  The latest earnings cycle, I think everyone was shocked by some of the the capex numbers that were coming out from the hyperscalers. Was that surprising to you or?

• 2:09:45Speaker 05

  Not, not, not really, because again, we're, we're very, very close to the center of the universe, which is Jensen. And, and if you look at it, I mean, the capex might seem-

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jensen, Jensen was saying, like in Q4 of last year, he was throwing out numbers that implied that the hyperscalers would be raising their, their capex projections massively. So it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. But when Jensen was first saying it, he's obviously a salesman. And like, you know, it, it, it felt, yeah, of course, it feels a lot more real once, once they're throwing out, you know.

• 2:10:21Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, look, I mean, if, if you, if you think about it, the hyperscalers have a software suite, which they're monetizing across a very broad population, hundreds of millions of users, billions of users. And so you look at that capex and you align it with- How much they're charging and how sticky the offering is, you've just got to do it. Because if you don't, one hyperscaler will emerge, I think, as a leader. I mean, just like the Google search engine, there will be one leader. And then there will be a number of others who will have market share, but they won't be the leading market provider. And I think everybody has come to the conclusion that you have to invest very, very heavily. Because without massive infrastructure deployments,

• 2:11:06Speaker 05

  you cannot train the model at the level of complexity that is required, at the real-time elements that are required in order to deliver outcomes to organizations and consumers. So I think it's really that. Everybody is racing to be the market share leader in this newly created space. I mean, Google is doing it.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:25Speaker 05

  OCI is doing it, Microsoft is doing it, Meta is doing it.

• 2:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:29Speaker 05

  There will be one leader.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  What, um, getting a little bit more specific. Software engineers have done an excellent job adopting, creating and adopting a bunch of AI tools. What are maybe some under-discussed areas that you're seeing AI adopted and real usage growth that, that the kind of broader tech community is less focused on? Because these are, you know, maybe companies or industries that aren't, you know, typically at the center of the conversation.

• 2:11:59Speaker 05

  Sure. I mean, look, the places where we see significant traction, financial services, because the ROI pencil sells out beautifully. I mean, it's a no-brainer. The better your models are, the more complex you can run those models. The faster you can get outcomes, the more differentiation you create. And so the better return to your shareholders. So.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  And so that's like companies that are doing trading or?

• 2:12:23Speaker 05

  Oh, think hedge funds, high-frequency traders. We have some very large customers in that space. Those are very technical organizations. Typically, the people in these organizations have come from the world of high-performance computing. So they understand the benefits of it. And so, yeah, that's, that's one bucket, which I think will continue to expand. Second area is life sciences. Anything having to do with drug discovery, bringing a new drug to market, genomics. The costs associated with bringing a new drug to market are staggering. It's billions of dollars. It's years and years of development. And so in the end, if you find yourself with a drug which is being rejected by the FDA, well, you have a problem.

• 2:13:05Speaker 05

  So AI gives them the ability to better triangulate what should an optimized drug be to cure a specific disease? And how do you increase the likelihood of that drug getting accepted?

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  So the costs will still be extreme because of, you know, animal studies, human trials, all the different steps. But you, we could enter a world where you have a higher success rate for drugs that are entering.

• 2:13:32Speaker 05

  Exactly. I mean, it's, it's higher success rate, it's better predictability. And it's also as the omniverse, the digital twin starts to happen. I mean, the ability to basically run what-if scenarios that you don't have to do in the real world. So if you're bringing a new drug to market and you're saying, well, there's like eight different ways I could do this, but I'm not sure which one is going to be the best outcome. You run simulation in the omniverse with synthetic data. And then the responses come back saying, well, if you combine parts of the first one and the third one and the fifth one, combine them together, likelihood of success will be higher, the drug will be better. So I think increasingly we're seeing that the omniverse and synthetic data is coming into the mix.

• 2:14:17Speaker 05

  Autonomous driving clearly, because, well, if you have driverless cars on the road, you have to collect data in real time. This is cameras, audio, this, that, the other. You have to continuously reprocess, reprocess the model at very low scale. So many car manufacturers are our customers in that space. Manufacturing is starting to happen. Again, factory floor automation, retail, just how do you optimize inventory in various types of retail organizations? And then the other really big ones is sovereign, sovereign AI. I think with what the Trump administration has done.

• 2:14:59Speaker 05

  They've created lots of concerns worldwide in terms of, you know, autonomy and risk. And if the US is no longer there to just bankroll you, so you have to protect yourselves in some ways. So we're involved in lots of-

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Have you spent much time in France over the last few years? There was obviously a little tiff between the Western, the US tech community and Macron. Last week around, he came out with an announcement that was kind of intentionally misinterpreted a little bit. And then he was-

• 2:15:31Speaker 02

  By who, Jordi?

• 2:15:32Jordi Hays?

  Maybe by me. But he was kind of, you know, putting out charts of, you know, showing foreign investment. And we've, you know, heard from, that at a number of labs have been excited about the energy availability in France and look to capitalize on that, but kind of just kept, you know, running into different blockers, kind of from a regulatory standpoint or a general speed standpoint. But what's your kind of take on France's progress around sovereign AI? And just kind of catalyzing the industry locally?

• 2:16:07Speaker 05

  So look, I mean, one of the organizations in France that's very, very active in the space is a company called Mistral. Mistral is our customer, so we're deployed in their infrastructure. I think, look, at the end of the day, lots of super, super smart people in Europe in general, you know, France, Germany, UK, all of it. But the scale of investments is just not at the same level as the US and China. I mean, so today it continues to be a two-horse race. I think it's US and China. And the Middle East is starting to deploy massive resources into it. I mean, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I mean, we're involved in those infrastructure buildouts, so sovereign AI.

• 2:16:50Speaker 05

  The good thing there is that the cost of energy is very low. Land availability is very, very significant.

• 2:16:58Speaker 05

  And there's a desire to really step up what KSA is doing, likewise in UAE. And well, there are geopolitical tensions between the two, but I think both have aspirations to set themselves up on the world stage as being the third player. Europe, I think, will be there, no question, but Europe, I mean, all these countries have centuries of history, and so getting things done quickly, easily is not quite there. Whereas in the Middle East, well, you have one decision maker. And if that decision maker says go, it goes with infinite resources. I mean, right, trillions of dollars under management in both places.

• 2:17:43Speaker 05

  So making a multi-hundred-billion-dollar investment is nothing.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Straightforward.

• 2:17:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when you look at where DDN is spending money on software today, how do you think that'll change over the next five years? We've been covering the SaaS apocalypse. Uh, and it seems like a number of great companies today could be comparable to the sort of office equipment and imaging companies of like the nineties where they're, they had, the revenues were really high, but then the internet and email and the PDF came along and suddenly people just needed less fax machines and, and all that kind of thing.

• 2:18:24Speaker 05

  Sure, I mean, look, I, I think the market is overreacting in some ways, as it sometimes does. So, you know, somebody makes an announcement and then everybody freaks out. Oh, my God, oh, my God, this whole industry is going to get commoditized. Everybody's going to go out of business. Service now is going to go out of business. My God, my God. I think you have the forward-thinking organizations in SaaS who are adopting and integrating AI into their offering, and I think those will do well, provided that they do it at very high velocity. And then you have the ones who will be more traditional in their thinking and, and in the way they operate, and I think those will go by the wayside. I mean, just look at IBM. IBM is a perfect example. Look at Intel. I mean, these are companies that had everything to succeed.

• 2:19:09Speaker 05

  I mean, why is it that Nvidia is where they are and Intel is not? Well, because of velocity of execution and the ability to adopt. Something that is happening that is completely different from what it was before was not quite there in the culture of the organization. So I think the way to look at it is which organizations have leaders who are embracing the change, not fighting it, and who are going to integrate it into their portfolio and forge the right alliances. I mean, you could say the same thing about GSIs, Accenture, Deloitte, all of these organizations. I mean, Accenture has what, 750,000 employees? How many of those are going to be relevant in this AI-enabled world? Well, Accenture has to completely transform the way they operate and the value that they

• 2:19:54Speaker 05

  deliver. Otherwise, it will just go like that. So you need really forward-looking visionary leadership that will force the change. Because if you stay in your comfort zone and you say, oh, I have a great business, like you said, the top line is steady, the bottom line is fine, you will get whacked. That's just the way it is. I mean, look, at which AI is operating, it's Jensen Speed. He's pulling the whole industry at a velocity which very few can follow. The speed at which he is turning the GPUs, the integration of the software stack and ecosystem into the GPU enablement.

• 2:20:39Speaker 05

  The open-source approach he's taking, I don't know if you saw his CES keynote, is basically developing turnkey-integrated software stacks and is open-sourcing them in order to accelerate adoption, industry by industry. I mean, what he did with Mercedes, it's okay. Here's an open-source software stack. It's kind of the opposite of what Elon was doing at Tesla, which is a closed architecture. It's like I'm opening it up, because if I open it up, I will accelerate the adoption of AI by the automotive industry, and they will buy more of my GPUs. So I will put 5,000 engineers on this for many, many years, and then I will put it out there. I mean, it's a meta, really.

• 2:21:24Speaker 05

  Accelerating adoption.

• 2:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you think about kind of forecasting and planning for your business, are you more scared of a like chip bottleneck or energy bottleneck when we talk to different?

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  I would also like to put in a research idea bottleneck and energy bottleneck. There's sort of four categories that people are worried about progress halting on. Chip.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  And to date, it's been obviously oscillating between chips, data, energy.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  Energy.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:55Speaker 05

  So, so look, the ability to process, I mean, think of AI as you have models, you need to train the models, then you need to layer analytics on top of it. And then the most important part, which creates value is inference. From that data, you need to get value. So I always say we are to data what Nvidia is to compute. And in order to do AI successfully, you need to combine the two together. So what that means is an infrastructure can only deliver benefits if it is cost effective. And in order to accelerate the adoption of AI, you need to make it cost effective. These shortages will continue, I think, for the next several years.

• 2:22:39Speaker 05

  And so you have to say, given the limitations that I have, how do I make these AI workloads more effective and have the ROI pencil out across industries? I mean, I was at Nvidia yesterday, actually, and we were talking about that. How do we accelerate the adoption of AI by enterprise? Well, by packaging turnkey solution that optimize outcomes. How do you make sure that these agentic AI organizations that are providing services? And unfortunately, these services are very consumptive of tokens, which means many of these companies are now upside down. They're losing money because what they're charging to their customers does not tie into what is costing them because they're relying on AI.

• 2:23:23Speaker 05

  So I think the cost reduction and the compression in terms of tokens required to perform a certain task is really what it is. So I think it's a software play. The underlying infrastructure, eventually it will happen. I mean, SSD shortages and NAND shortages. I mean, we deploy our data plane on top of storage SSDs, hard drives and so on. Well. Over the last few months, the cost of SSDs has tripled. So it's significant and it's not available on top of it. Now, we happen to have an architecture where we can tie into SSDs or hard drives and so on. So our customers are able to do the same, if not better, with less money. But I mean, these are issues, but these are transient issues.

• 2:24:07Speaker 05

  I think eventually the problem that needs to be solved is how do you ensure that a task that is performed for a consumer or an enterprise is cost effective for the organizations that are delivering that service? And it's really that. I mean, that's what we're very focused on. That's what our partners are very focused on. That's why many of our interactions with Nvidia revolve around this. How do we make sure that we make it easier to deploy, easier to integrate and lower the cost? Lower the cost of power, lower the cost of building data centers, compress the velocity. I mean, look, what Elon did with his data center and we were involved every step of the way.

• 2:24:50Speaker 05

  I mean, he built out the data center in four, four and a half months, which was unheard of.

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you, when you heard, when you and the team heard the initial timelines that they were planning around.

• 2:25:00Speaker 05

  I said it's completely, I said it's completely mad because we had done probably more than a hundred large data center deployment and I had never seen it done in less than three years. And when the X team first came to us and said, oh, we're going to do it in four, four and a half months. I said, that is just ludicrous. Why is that even possible? But see, the way he did it, instead of hiring people who are experts in building data centers, and all of them would have said, it's impossible, mental block, right? If you've never seen it done in less than three years and somebody tells you four and a half months, you go, it's impossible. This is stupid. So what he did is he hired very, very smart people who were very good at connecting the dock outside of the box.

• 2:25:43Speaker 05

  And he said, okay, I want this done in four and a half months. Figure out how to do it. And, and they did it. I mean, we were there with them Christmas, New Year's, weekends, 24/7. I mean, they were. mattresses in the hallways. I mean, everybody was sleeping there. It was just working to get it done. And he got it done. Uh, now it was extremely painful, but he got it done. And so you go, okay, so the new benchmark now is not three years. It can be done in four, four and a half months.

• 2:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Have any other, have you seen any other, uh, either Neo Labs or, or Labs or Hyperscalers be able to replicate that kind of timeline? Like, once he set the bar?

• 2:26:21Speaker 05

  China.

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:23Speaker 05

  They are very, very good. I mean, we are so behind. We are so behind.

• 2:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:26:30Speaker 05

  Uh, I mean, they've developed models. I mean, I was looking at what they're doing in data centers. Uh, I mean, the first one is the cost metric. I mean, in the U S, the cost metric is ten to fifteen grand per kilowatt to build a data center. Uh, in China, they're able to do it for between a third and a fifth of that. Why can't we do it? Because they're looking at it in a very optimized manner. What, what Elon did, he did the first one in four months. Lots of issues. Then he did another three. And lessons learned from the first one, he applied to the next three. By the fourth one, he's like, okay, I got this. And then he did the next thirty two.

• 2:27:13Speaker 05

  And, and the Chinese are doing it the same way. They're not looking at each one of these as a one off. They're saying, we really have to focus on optimizing, optimizing, optimizing, and then we replicate. And, and that's something we need to do better in the U S, for sure. For sure, for sure. How do we lower the cost to build a data center? And how do we compress the time to build a data center? Uh, and, and China is way ahead of us right now. They're just way ahead. It's reality.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, hopefully more Colossus data centers coming online soon.

• 2:27:46Speaker 05

  I know, I know, but, but I mean, it needs to be done. I think the good thing is people are realizing that China is very good at certain things.

• 2:27:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:54Speaker 05

  And, and instead of saying, well, no, we're just gonna ignore them, they say, okay, how, how do we learn? I mean, I had a meeting with one of our large customers from the Middle East, and we're actually going through the design architectures from China, looking at how they do it. And we're like, okay, how do we apply that to doing it in the Middle East in a very modular manner? Uh, and it's really remarkable. I mean, again, we're not talking about twenty, thirty percent cost improvement or, or timeline compression. It's, it's When you say three to five times, the economics associated with that are huge.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, dramatic.

• 2:28:28Speaker 05

  That's it. That's it.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That's, yeah, wow. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really enjoyed it.

• 2:28:36Speaker 05

  Appreciate it.

• 2:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon. Great to meet you, Alex.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:28:40Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your weekend. 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. Let me also tell you about vibe.co. We're D to C brands, B to B startups, and AI companies. Advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Up next, we have Brett Adcock. He's the founder and CEO of Figure and about 12 other companies. Serial entrepreneur with a massive release today. Brett, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:29:14Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Been great.

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  But I think most people will be familiar, but break us, break it down. Where is Figure now? And give us the news today.

• 2:29:24Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, so we, well, several months ago, we unveiled Figure 3, our third generation humanoid robot. This morning, we actually gave you a sneak peek at a future roadmap item we've been working on for about over three years, which is our newest generation hand.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:43Brett Adcock?

  I think we've been working on this project basically since the beginning. Our Generation 1 was like this tendon-based hand that we designed in 2022.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:53Brett Adcock?

  Had tons of problems with it, and we've basically been working on trying to reach human, like, how do we approach human parity in terms of hand dexterity and sensors?

• 2:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, does it, does, does anything else about the robot really even matter if the hands aren't like human level capable?

• 2:30:09Brett Adcock?

  I think like one thing we're realizing is like more and more, if we want to like learn from humans, we need to like look and do human-like things. So even like from a, from a visual perspective, like having the right kinematics of the hands so that we can do human-like stuff. Meaning like if a human folds like, you know, socks or towels a certain way, like we need to really understand how to be able to do that on the robot. And so if we truly want to do like full general purpose work in a home across the whole world at billion unit levels, we have to start approaching like human-like level dexterity.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  There's somebody going for a stroll in the background.

• 2:30:49Brett Adcock?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  What is that? Is that just a walk cycle? Is that scripted? Is that, did it decide, did the robot independently decide to walk behind you right now? What's going on?

• 2:30:59Brett Adcock?

  Yep. We literally have hundreds of robots here on our campus in California. They're, they're everywhere. They're all over the place.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Okay. Why, why jump straight to full dexterity humanoid form factor? Why not wheels? Why not pincher grabber more incremental? You know, we've seen Amazon acquire that, that robotics company just to sort of move packages around. There is a logical chain of events that you could do more incrementally, but you're going for the moonshot straight away, it feels like. What informed that decision?

• 2:31:33Brett Adcock?

  Listen, we have like a very deep respect to trying to do what like human level work in the world without changing the world too much. And if like we as humans built the whole world around our, the way we look and feel like, uh, the way we like move around the world. So we like, you know, we use tools, uh, doors, like stairs, like, um, like, so like, you know, we've like built the world so that human body can interact with. The ultimate form factor for this is a, is a human. Uh, you know, like if, if you start like removing, uh, like the ability to like have legs or fingers or the different stuff, you're just going to do less of what humans do in the world. Uh, so our view is that we want to go out and basically do everything a human can. Uh,

• 2:32:14Brett Adcock?

  that, that approach is basically a human form, uh, in the limit. So we went after the hardest problem here, which is like, how do you design, uh, humanoid hardware? How do we design neural networks now to work on that hardware? It's a really difficult problem, but it's like super tractable. This is a problem that will be solved in our lifetime. In the coming years and decade, we will see like millions of humanoids, uh, out in the world doing all kinds of things.

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, uh, what is the, what's your bar for, to get to the point where you're selling, you're selling a robot that somebody can buy and put in their home and start doing tasks? Because it is, there's, there's a lot of, you know, I'm sure you're testing this stuff constantly and you're able to do think tasks like laundry or moving dishes from a sink, uh, cleaning dishes, et cetera. Uh, and yet the bar is an individual just saying, well, I can just, you know, do this myself. It's quick. So that's one you have to overcome that. It has to be so good, so consistent.

• 2:33:09Jordi Hays?

  But like, what do you think is the bar? There's obviously companies like 1X that are pushing hard to get robots into homes.

• 2:33:15Brett Adcock?

  Even if it requires tele-operation.

• 2:33:17Jordi Hays?

  Pushing hard to. Elon is obviously adapting his Fremont facility, right? To be able to make these at scale. But I think everybody's sitting around being like, okay, once I can hit buy on one of these things. The amount of pressure that the first company that kind of comes out, if you don't count Unitree, but the first American company to come out with a robot, the pressure to actually deliver real value when people are like, hey, I just spent 30 grand on this, 40 grand, 50 grand. The pressure is going to be immense. What is the bar for you?

• 2:33:50Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, I would say like, the thing that really matters here in the world is getting to a spot where you have a humanoid robot that can go off and do like many minutes and then hours and days of work, fully autonomously with neural networks. Like, that's the bar. And if I think, if you look at like, who's doing that today? There's not a single group out there that can recreate the video we did two years ago, which is basically, we had a figure one just moving Keurig around with a couple of hands for like a minute or two. That was done with neural nets. We were just standing in place. It was uncut, it was a few minutes long. And I haven't seen a single company in the world able to do that today.

• 2:34:35Brett Adcock?

  So we can like pretend that we're like teleoperating robots and be super silly and act like that's going to work. It's not going to work. We have to deploy neural nets at scale to robots that can be fully general purpose over a long period of time without any human intervention. So for Figure, I think we're just like by far and away the best example of being able to do this today. And we're still like, we still have so much more to go in order to be able to put it into a home like for days and days and be like extremely useful in that respect. So right now, we're able to do like pockets of this work really well. Like, we're able to do like, clean up the home, do like, we can fold laundry, we can do dishes, like this stuff is being done with neural nets fully end to end. And a lot of times like doing it pretty high performance.

• 2:35:20Brett Adcock?

  Uh, so my view is like, we will only launch a product here at Figure into the home when we're really ready. I think it's the, I think the world will only accept the product in the home when it's really ready too. Uh, nobody's gonna deal with like silly tele operating the room in the home, things like this.

• 2:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing is like we've, we've seen with, uh, we've seen with a number of, of hardware, like the humane pin. You had the rabbit R1, like people, people might be willing to try like a digital product like a couple of times. Even if a lot of people will try it, if they have a bad experience, they won't come back. Some people might try it again.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  Chat G P T got better.

• 2:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Whereas with hardware, it really feels like if you launch a hardware product and it doesn't deliver real utility.

• 2:35:56Brett Adcock?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:57Jordi Hays?

  You lose everyone, like it basically kills the company.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:59Jordi Hays?

  So the bar is just so high.

• 2:36:01John Coogan?

  So.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  So, so yeah, time timelines, uh, you guys have, uh, the benefit of being private, even though you have a, a valuation, uh, you know, somewhere around the range of, of Ford, uh, you have time to, to, um, figure this stuff out. How like, what are the timelines that you're setting internally? What are you, you know, what are you rallying the team around?

• 2:36:25Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, we're, we're, we're working like kind of to, to pass, how do we ship robots in the industrial workforce as fast as possible? I track this pedal to the metal like every single day. Uh, we have many different customers there fully signed up, ready to go. And we're excited, uh, you know, we had robots at BMW last year. We have like more robots going into commercial customers this year. The second is we want to solve a general purpose robot, like solve general robotics in a home. And, um, the best, I, I, one of our top goals is like be able to drop a robot of ours into an unseen home this year and do like full general purpose end to end work. And, um, it's extremely tough. I think we can go do it, um, but we're working like day and night to go get there. Um, and, um, yeah, it's a, it's, it's like, it's, it's basically how do we design?

• 2:37:11Brett Adcock?

  It's the closest thing like AGI for like for physical world, right? Like, how do we get something that can like have common sense in a home? That you can talk with, it can understand things. Maybe you can teach us something on the fly and can watch you. And then ultimately be able to carry out those tasks at high performance all throughout the day. So my hope is we can make material progress on this this year. Our goal is like working day and night to try to solve this. To the extent we can hit this goal of like being able to do full end to end work. There's other like barriers of like privacy and safety and other things that are really hard that we're also paralyzing. But my hope is by the end of this year, we're making considerable progress towards this.

• 2:37:51Brett Adcock?

  Being able to like show like some crazy insane things with these robots in, you know, in these type of environments. But this is like, this is a separate track to like the commercial side. Like we're already out, like, and we've already been out being able to do this. We're going to go out even larger this year in 2026. They'll deploy robots at scale. This is important for us to get like a real operational readiness. Like, how do we make sure, like, how do we make sure we can run robots at scale really well here, figure?

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's all, I mean, it's, it's, it's a like much more straightforward to have a robot in a setting where you have trained professionals probably wearing hard hats that can be kind of monitoring the robots from far away. You're not dealing with the safety risk of like a robot falling on a dog or on a kid or any of the other challenges in the home. What's your timeline to a robot humanoid being able to bench two plates? Is that, is that an interesting, is that an interesting problem to solve?

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  The only problem that's interesting to me.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Because for us, for us, that we're very fascinated on when, when that'll happen.

• 2:38:54Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, is it bench or squat? What do we want to do here?

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, squat is probably the overall compound lift squat, I feel like is pretty.

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  Thousand pound club ideally, but we'll take just bench press if that's what you got.

• 2:39:06Brett Adcock?

  We, I mean, we should, if we can, if we can bench press that, we should be worth at least twice a Ford, right?

• 2:39:10John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Just for that. The tickets to the bodybuilding competition.

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  No, but I feel like, I feel like, uh, even as silly as that sounds, you know.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  It is an interesting benchmark, yeah.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  I think the.

• 2:39:24John Coogan?

  I mean, over in China, they're doing robot Olympics, they're, they're doing marathons, they're doing all sorts of stuff. You know, it is a tactile.

• 2:39:30Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, okay, can we be real for a minute on all this stuff?

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:32Brett Adcock?

  Like, let's just like, let's, okay, let's be real serious. The, what really matters, I think, for us as humans, is we look at the distribution of what humans do, it's like useful. And we try to do as much of that as possible.

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:43Brett Adcock?

  These things where we run like marathons, or we do backflips, or we do karate moves, or we like try to deadlift 300 pounds, they're not in the main part or the fat part of the distribution.

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:53Brett Adcock?

  They don't matter. And if you really want to size for those and do those, you're going to build a really expensive and heavy and unsafe robot that's hard to manufacture.

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:00Brett Adcock?

  You're going to build like a super duty truck. And like, nobody, like, no, people want the 10, $20,000 humanoid that can do general purpose work, right? That's what we want. So if you're trying to size a robot to do those kinds of things, like silly things, I think of like, there's like gymnastics and other stuff.

• 2:40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:17Brett Adcock?

  You're going to build a very specialized robot that is like, that can do like a very small percentage of what normal humans do every single day.

• 2:40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:23Brett Adcock?

  So our goal is to build a general purpose robot to do majority of what humans can do out there. We want to do like laundry and dishes and be a companion. I want to ship robots at scale and a billion level into the workforce to do logistics and healthcare and build buildings and, you know, build, build data centers, like that's the stuff we want to do. I don't need to do backflips to do any of that work. I want other robots building other robots. So I think like, um, I don't know, I mean, I, I think of like, you look at the silly stuff out there, it's not only not important for the roadmap, it makes the hardware extremely, uh, like heavy and hard and expensive, uh, and all that causes more problems. So like, none of that matters in our mind, I figure.

• 2:41:04Brett Adcock?

  We, uh, you know, every once in a while, we'll put a robot on a DJ stage with Deadmau5 and stuff for fun, but like, we're, we're definitely not trying to design a robot to be great at that.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Brett Adcock?

  Uh, we want to be great at like the, the, the things I do every day and you guys probably do every day. I mean, you guys are probably deadlifting, uh, 300 pounds, but like, uh, at least for me, every day, I'm trying to like, you know, just do normal, like normal practical stuff that billions of people today are, are doing that we can help offset.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think, you know, let's say we get the iPhone moment for humanoids, hopefully in the next few years and that it's a, a, a piece of hardware that has real utility that a lot of people are buying. How do you think their kind of form factor evolves? Do, do robots over time look, you know, do they, do they follow the iPhone path and that they get like thinner, lighter, you know, that kind of thing? Is there, like, what, what have you been learning so far that maybe people kind of misunderstand about the form factor long-term?

• 2:42:02Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, the long-term form factor is more and more approaching the average human in terms of like the range of motion, payloads and speeds and like what you can do. If you're too short or too tall, you're just like, you're not in the right habitat for like interacting with the, a human world that well. So in an extreme case, if it's three foot tall, it's like really hard to get most things out of cupboard or get into the, get into the, you know, the sink or reach over a table. They actually become really practically hard to go do. So it's going to be like an average human size overall. I think we're in like the pre, I'll make an argument here that we're in the pre iPhone stage, in the flip phone stage for, for humanoids. And I think we know as better than anybody, we've been building them like crazy. We have our third generation out in three years. We've walked three generations in three years.

• 2:42:45Brett Adcock?

  I think what you'll see here is that we're trying to find this ideal product, like product fit, like long-term where that's headed and we're like learning every year where that's going. It certainly means being more human-like in our minds so we can unlock more percentage of this distribution we just talked about earlier. I think, I'll make it, I'll make a statement that's pretty, pretty bold, is that when you look at like figure one to figure two to figure three, we've had to like step up in performance and they're just better and better every year. When we head to figure four here, it'll be the largest step that we've ever made by like, but by a long shot. It'll be the first time that we feel that we probably hit like iPhone one level humanoid. We're just like, this is the right place to be in.

• 2:43:28Brett Adcock?

  And then this will like, this will, you know, this will go extremely far to a point where it saturates at some point in the future, you know, maybe 10 more years. But we feel like relatively early, it's an extremely difficult piece of technology. It's obviously early in this, so it's got to be like earlier than phones, right? We're not like, we're not there yet. So, but I think the iPhone one moment will happen with figure four and it'll just be... It's just an unbelievable machine and I uh, I never would have uh, suspected we'd be able to make that big of a move. I, you know, in figure three shit, I'm like, this is it. This is like the best it'll ever get. And then, you know, the more we uh, learned and ran it and the more we developed neural nets here with Helix, the more we really understood better about like what the hardware should like, should look like and be like.

• 2:44:12Brett Adcock?

  And the more we got folks in the room together with us and said, how do we radically redesign the head, the, the hands, the, the kinematic systems, like all of it from scratch? And I think um, you're, you're gonna see something, I mean, this stuff is just gonna get crazier and crazier in capabilities.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what are your goals around uh, consistency? So for, for example, a robot that uh, can unload my dishwasher, if one out of a hundred times it, it like breaks a plate into, you know, 200 pieces, maybe that's not that big of a deal if it can like, you know, pick them all up easily and I'm not home and I don't see that, you know, you're exploding the, the plate. But uh, what, what level of like consistency do uh, do you guys need to get to before you're, you're, you'd be at a point where, you know, you can sell one of these things?

• 2:45:03Brett Adcock?

  I would say like, we probably need something pretty high. I think it would suck pretty bad if you're at my house and dropped like the number one mom coffee cup. You're getting your, you're getting your, you're getting your ass booted, right? Like uh, I don't like um, I think you gotta be, especially around safety and stuff, like this needs to be super high performance. So we like, we watch folks that are trying to like teleoperate and ship early when the product doesn't even work and it's just, it's just silly, they're all gonna die. The, you gotta ship something really high quality and that, that is just like a super hard thing to do. So we, we, I figure we'll ship into the home when we're ready. We're not ready right now. We're trying to get like, you know, I'm here till midnight every night, seven days a week, trying to get more ready with my team. I hope we get like we hit some place where we're getting really, really close this year is what I really hope.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  How are you?

• 2:45:47Brett Adcock?

  And you're right.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you pressing the Waymo story of teleop? Because I was completely on board with the Elon pitch for straight shot to FSD, collect a bunch of data from the cars that are on the road, train the big neural network. And FSD, I mean, we talked to Alex Roy, who drove without touching the steering wheel all the way from LA to New York. Like it clearly works. At the same time, a lot of people in San Francisco hopping away now and they're like, that works too. And so it was a bit of a narrative violation where a lot of people were saying like the Waymo teleop model will never scale. And it feels like it's scaling. So how is it? Is there a world where both approaches work? Or are they fundamentally like different industries?

• 2:46:30Brett Adcock?

  I think what I'm seeing in the space here, and it's been like a pretty big shock is like everybody in the humanoid space is just teleoperating.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:36Brett Adcock?

  The robot with a human in the back and they're putting out video out, not being very explicit. It's very different than this. It'd be like the most analogy for your Waymo Tesla of like your Waymo is being driven by some dude in Kentucky, not with neural nets. Waymo has neural networks. The way they went about with the sensor suite to go do it is maybe harder to scale than cameras. The situation happened in humanoids is like, there's a large percentage of the companies out there that are like, have a dude in the back. Like that are like teleoperating with the robot in real time. And then like, you know, we're trying, we've done everything we've ever put out publicly has always been with neural nets. Um, on like, you know, stuff we do, we've never teleoperated that's, you know, in that, in that case, like those, any of those videos. Um, so it's just like the, the self-driving stuff, not the greatest analogy.

• 2:47:21Brett Adcock?

  Um, you're definitely not going to be able to human teleoperate in people's homes and the latencies will be terrible. The data coming back will be terrible. Train your own nets. It's just not enough data. So there's just a bunch of problems with that story and um, it's, it's not going to work. If it would work fast and we can get product market fit and get out earlier, we would do it. Just like it's just dead end. Uh, completely. You really want to solve like for real neural nets, real autonomy from, from the get-go.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  How big of a bottleneck is data? What are you guys doing to solve it? Like is there hardware breakthroughs that you guys are looking to achieve? Or, or do you feel like the, obviously you have the new hand, which sounds like it's, it's a, it's a step up. But uh, what, what are kind of the key bottlenecks?

• 2:48:03Brett Adcock?

  We just unveiled Helix 2 about three weeks ago. It's a robot that can basically do like fully end to end, whole body work. We did it in like unloading the dishwasher and rerunning it. That was basically the whole, the whole stack there was basically neural nets, basically all the way down the stack. The, the only reason why it could do that now, or like, say from, go from there to do laundry is just a data problem. Like, we need just more data to cover the distribution of those new tasks. And then the robot can do it at this point. So we, we feel like the, like the longest pole in the tent, prior to like extremely high rate manufacturing, is how do we acquire data at like a really high clip? And so we're spending a lot of time on that.

• 2:48:47Brett Adcock?

  That gets you to a point where like, you know, acquiring data through teleoperation is just not going to even be close. You have to embrace like learning from humans at scale. That's kind of figures, you know, core models that comes to Helix for neural nets. And I, I would say if we could snap our fingers and have enough of the right data today, you would have a general purpose sci-fi future of robots in our office right now. That we'd be able to put anywhere, like we have it. It's just, we are just extremely data constrained. It's not as simple as just like going out and getting random data. It's like, it's got to be the right type of data to match the observations and action spaces of the models well. But we now know what that data is. We are acquiring that data like crazy. Here at Figure, we'll spend nine figures of capital on acquiring data like this in 2026.

• 2:49:33Brett Adcock?

  So it's a huge focus for us. We think it's by far and away the biggest bottleneck to get to general robotics.

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about China in the context of the race for humanoid robots? Obviously, there's competition from humanoid robot makers there, but there's also a bunch of great part suppliers at all levels of the supply chain that might be useful to build American humanoid robotics companies. How does that puzzle play out?

• 2:50:03Brett Adcock?

  I mean, listen, I think like as it relates to competition, I think what's extremely important is seeing robots that can do like human-like work with neural networks that's useful. We haven't seen any of that out of China today. They really don't have any hands.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Good on hardware, but they're still behind on software.

• 2:50:17Brett Adcock?

  Well, I would say like, uh, you probably don't have good enough hardware if you're not able to do the software really well. They don't have enough compute in a lot of cases to run like, like things like Helix onboard. Unitree, for example, has a very tiny computer where you can run like very small reinforcement learning controllers to do like open loop replay of stuff. They wouldn't be able to run Helix on a board of hardware like that. They don't have any real human-like hands of five fingers. So you're really missing a couple of big parts of the story. Beyond that, I think they've been, um, you know, great in existing kind of industrial robotics and existing consumer electronics last like several decades. I think those are playing a big part of the ecosystem supply chain for humanoids that are important in some cases.

• 2:50:59Brett Adcock?

  But you know, but listen, we, we basically design almost everything internally here at Figure. We don't, we don't go buy, and we don't go buy designs from, from China or elsewhere. We do it all here internally. We even manufacture the robots next door in our campus here. We have a, we have a Figure 3 robot now coming off the line every three hours and I think we'll, we'll be at every half an hour here, uh, in the coming, you know, few months. So we're like, you know, like things are coming out at a pretty high clip. But I think today, like if you look at like who's doing the best human-like work with neural nets over long time horizons, it's, it's not China. And, uh, I think we can, um, I think we're, we feel at least a few years ahead of anything we're seeing out of there.

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  What's compute like, uh, you, I mean, you mentioned you're working so intently on neural nets. You have to train those is, is it, are you at a point where a training run is run on a massive cluster? It costs nine figures or something like that? Or is it more data collection at this point? And then the actual training run is pretty tight?

• 2:51:59Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, we spent like. Hundreds of millions of dollars on compute that is uh yeah.

• 2:52:07John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:52:08Brett Adcock?

  There we go. We spent, yeah, a bunch that went live already. Some, our next giant like step up is going into April, like first of April. Uh, that's for training Helix models that we're doing here internally, which are quite large. Um, and long runs. And then separately, we do all of our inference onboard on two GPUs in the torso of the robot. So we can run in like cases where we don't have a network. Uh, we can run at much faster speeds. And we can put all those models fully onboard the system. So all of our robots now are kind of, they're, they're running off brains that are all on robot. Um, so they don't need any outside network to be able to do work.

• 2:52:40John Coogan?

  So talk about like input and output. Is it, is, is the, is the network sort of taking in voice input and trying to translate that into plain text actions that then get transformed into motor actions? Uh, what is like the reward function for humanoid robot?

• 2:53:00Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, we're taking in, um, we're basically taking in the like, the, like the, the instructions through text or speech, like what should I be doing? We're taking in vision from the cameras. And the current state of the robot, like where's, where's it like, you know, what, what is, what is the body doing? What does the sensors look like? And then we're basically processing that onboard with Helix two. Helix two is an outputting, uh, like basically trajectories of where the mo, like what the motor should be doing. Um, basically figuring out like, what, what do I put torque at in every single joint to produce, uh, to move my body in a certain way? And I think, um, you know, honestly, one of the hardest problems we've had last two years is two years ago, we were basically doing it's like, you know, coffee work and other type of stuff on tabletops.

• 2:53:42Brett Adcock?

  And it was really, it was unbelievable. It was like the first time we're like, man, neural nets on humanoids work. We spent the last two years trying to leave the tabletop. How do we walk around with neural nets fully end to end? And it's extremely, um, it sounds kind of, um, it sounds like, you know, not maybe not the hardest problem in the world. It was a bit like some of the hardest problem in the world for us. Uh, how do we get the whole body, like 30 plus joints? All running at like, say 200 times a second and doing the right things with camera frames and a prompt coming in. And that's what we did with Helix 2 unveiled three weeks ago is we had all that done. So it's the first time in three and a half years where we feel like we have the right technical stack to actually scale, which we didn't have last like several years. We were running at BMW last year and we're like, man,

• 2:54:24Brett Adcock?

  this is going great. We're learning a lot, but it's not the tech stack I want to scale. And we have that now with Helix 2. So we're really excited to hit the gas on, uh, we're going to hit the gas on this in 2026.

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:54:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great to get the update.

• 2:54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is awesome.

• 2:54:38Jordi Hays?

  I know you said the, the bench press is silly and things like that, but it's to us.

• 2:54:44John Coogan?

  No, it makes perfect sense.

• 2:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Even, even, even the bar, even just repping out the bar, I'd be pretty excited about. I also think

• 2:54:51John Coogan?

  It's a serious company.

• 2:54:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a serious company, but even serious companies can have fun. I'm also looking, I'm looking forward to the moment that, uh, that you get a, a figure robot surfing at Jaws too.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  That'd be great. Are they waterproof? Can they swim?

• 2:55:04Brett Adcock?

  Guys, we got, we, we got it. We got a gym here.

• 2:55:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:07Brett Adcock?

  You guys, you guys, you guys swing by.

• 2:55:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:09Brett Adcock?

  And let's get, let's get the figure three and you guys in the gym. Let's, let's see, let's see like, let's see how you guys are all, let's see.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Matching up. Yeah, well, yeah, it's match up. Thank you.

• 2:55:17Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:55:18John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day.

• 2:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:55:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Brad.

• 2:55:21Brett Adcock?

  Nice to meet you guys.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:55:30John Coogan?

  I will also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 2:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a company that launched yesterday.

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Yes, what company?

• 2:55:44Jordi Hays?

  OpenClaw for Slack. I don't know what it's called, but they said they launched three hours ago and they just hit one million ARR just now. So they made $350 in three hours, which is, this is one million of ARR.

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  We've done it. We've done it.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  They did it.

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  Final four.

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  They did it.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  I saw a fake post that was like, uh, Meta acquires OpenClaw for a billion dollars or something. And I really had to fact check it because I was like, this seems so possible in this day and age.

• 2:56:12Jordi Hays?

  I think they, they have that team with Manus.

• 2:56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I think the Manus team is, is in a good spot to sort of bring some of those functionality to bear.

• 2:56:21Jordi Hays?

  Ring apparently has terminated its partnership with Flock. Their Super Bowl ad did not go as planned.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 2:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the doorbell company ran an ad during the Super Bowl that touted a search party feature that uses AI to help locate lost pets. People

• 2:56:39John Coogan?

  Sounds amazing.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Quickly realize that maybe it could be

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  A dog's home.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Tracking things other than pets, but anyways, they probably are the the Super Bowl loser. I was I was in the end, the worst blowback of any company that I that I've seen.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  This this Circe post is so good. VCs love to be like, yeah, hedge fund guys may be smarter, but at least I make less money.

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Oh, good stuff. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. We're going to see potentially some very, very large IPOs. Unprecedented in size this year. He's he's agreeing that it's about to rain. It's about to rain. Oh, one of the IPOs that could be going out is Coher. Aiden Gomez, we gotta get him on the show. I'm such a big Aiden Gomez fan. 240 million dollar a year set stage for IPO. This is this is in TechCrunch. Of course, Aiden Gomez, a Death Grips fan. So you know he's a good time. You know, he likes the Death Grips.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Sizgong moment. Airbnb, according to Sarr and according to Chesky, has generated 19 billion in cash flow since going public.

• 2:57:56Jordi Hays?

  And

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  Not gonna vibe code that. Not gonna vibe code a house. You're not gonna vibe code a basement that you can sleep on the couch on. I met my co-founders for my first company on Airbnb.

• 2:58:09Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, moved to Silicon Valley, get into YC, need to find somewhere to stay. Was staying with like a friend who was sort of, you know, not doing a startup, so way different lifestyle. And and searched on a service that was actually the most vibe coded software, but in 2012. It was a mashup between Craigslist and Google Maps, because Craigslist didn't have a Google Maps feature. So if you were looking for housing, you had to just guess where the places were. Insane. So it was called Padmapper. Someone took, they scraped Craigslist and then put it on a Google Map and so you could click and be like, oh, that's near me. That sounds like a good place.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  But Padmapper, Craigslist had given Padmapper a cease and desist. We don't want you scraping us because.

• 2:58:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they were, I mean, every single marketplace created in Silicon Valley was immediately scraping Craigslist.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:59:05Jordi Hays?

  They've fought back aggressively.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  They fought back and they said, hey, we're gonna get around to doing Google Maps on Craigslist and so Padmapper, get out of here. So when I, when my co-founder and I opened up Padmapper, the only data that was still flowing to Padmapper was Airbnb. Because Airbnb, of course, is a marketplace. It doesn't matter if someone else is driving traffic. They love that. They were all over SEO. They wanted other people to flow in. So we didn't know this, but our future friends and co-founders had a large place in Sunnyvale that they had an extra room and they had thrown that on Airbnb. That showed up on Padmapper. We go over, take a tour. We're like, this place is sick. It was a disaster. All the toilets were broken. They were like, it's like the social network.

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  It's got a pool. It's got a jacuzzi. We're gonna be hanging out. It's gonna be the best summer ever. The pool and jacuzzi filled with algae. Like truly filled with algae. We spent the entire summer being like, we're smart guys. We can beat the algae. Let's go get one gallon of bleach. Pour it in. They're like.

• 3:00:10Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  We're gonna need.

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  A hundred gallons.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  Thousands of gallons.

• 3:00:13Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna just, we're gonna be swimming in bleach.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it was like, there's nothing you could do. And then we were like, there's like a filtration system, but that was super clogged. So we were like, empty out the filtration system, try and take it all apart. But like, everyone who was like an expert was like, yeah, you just have to drain this and like declare like pool bankruptcy, basically.

• 3:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Well, New York Post says, have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Now there's a bar for you. There's a Hell's Kitchen establishment that has been redesigned for those who have AI partners so they can bring along their phone for romantic evening. Uh, very, very dystopian her moment, but not entirely unsurprising that that this bar is pivoting to AI.

• 3:00:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a good day to launch, right? Because 4O is uh.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  4O's deprecated today. Is it still, is it still available? Or is, or did they stop it at uh, at when the clock struck midnight?

• 3:01:06Speaker 02

  I still see it. It's still uh, on my, my chat GPT.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  Well, it'll be interesting to see what the community does because I, I did see some posts about people being like, I'm recreating 4O. I'm fine tuning some, you know, Chinese model Kimmy could be potentially fine tuned on 4O outputs and paid for and distributed. Like, there are other ways for those folks to get what they want, essentially.

• 3:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, uh, it is Valentine's Day weekend, but before we go, Tyler, we did have a recommendation for you.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Weekend. We, uh, you mentioned that you've been seeing a lovely lady and we thought.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  This was supposed to be abstract.

• 3:01:43Jordi Hays?

  We thought.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  This was supposed to be a, a recommendation for the audience.

• 3:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, you.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  Now it's directed for Tyler.

• 3:01:48Jordi Hays?

  There's a girl that, that uh, maybe, maybe.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Doing this.

• 3:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Tyler likes and we were just saying, go, uh, surprise, tell her, hey, tomorrow, just have a bag ready.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  This is so out of pocket. Continue.

• 3:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Have a bag ready. Uh, we're gonna go do an overnight trip.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Find a nice hotel.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  Hotel.

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Check in.

• 3:02:08John Coogan?

  Staycation, basically. You're not getting on a flight. You're just going somewhere local, but somewhere nice.

• 3:02:12Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, somewhere nice.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the beach.

• 3:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Easy, easy to set up. Uh, check into the hotel.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe get her kind of a spa day.

• 3:02:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  She goes to the spa, you sit down and she doesn't know this, but you actually booked her an eight hour spa, like a full day thing. You sit down.

• 3:02:30John Coogan?

  Time to lock in.

• 3:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Time to lock in on some cheeky pint.

• 3:02:32Speaker 02

  I have cheeky pint. I have dwarf cash, Dario.

• 3:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:02:35John Coogan?

  You got a lot of stuff to watch.

• 3:02:36Jordi Hays?

  So lock in and then just start getting Guinness on room service.

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:39Jordi Hays?

  21 now.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Pint for pint.

• 3:02:41Jordi Hays?

  And go, go every time, every time.

• 3:02:43John Coogan?

  Every time AI is mentioned, you take, you take a whole.

• 3:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or every time John takes a sip, take a sip.

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Take a, drink a whole beer.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you basically are gonna have.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-four hours.

• 3:02:52John Coogan?

  So she comes back eight hours later from her eight hour spa treatment and is like, what were you doing?

• 3:02:56Jordi Hays?

  And you can just catch her up to speed on, on everything you watch. And I think, I think they really appreciate that.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  What did you say? You haven't, you haven't listened to dwarf cashier, yeah? That one hits like a ton of bricks on Valentine's Day.

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  Ask, ask your, uh, ask your spouses, ask your girlfriends, your boyfriends. Have they listened to Ilya and Dorash? Are their timelines up to date? If not, that's the best Valentine's Day gift you can get them.

• 3:03:21Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 3:03:21John Coogan?

  Up to date, understanding of what's coming.

• 3:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but we hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We love you.

• 3:03:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for hanging out with us this week.

• 3:03:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:30Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 3:03:32John Coogan?

  We will be back Tuesday. Monday is a holiday.

• 3:03:35Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  We're off. Yeah.

• 3:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, market's closed.

• 3:03:39Jordi Hays?

  I did not know that.

• 3:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm learning this for the first time.

• 3:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Learning this for the first time.

• 3:03:44John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, we, we experimented with, with streaming on holidays and it was, it was, there was not a lot of news. So we'll be back Tuesday, uh, 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you then.

• 3:03:57Speaker 02

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.