Benchmark's Future, SpaceX IPO, RIP Sora | Mike Knoop, Nathan Benaich, Rohin Dhar, Eric Jorgenson, Jenny Just, and Matt Hulsizer

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:53) - The Benchmark Ship of Theseus (14:16) - OpenAI to Kill Sora (23:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (43:07) - SpaceX Could File for an IPO This Week (51:57) - Manus Founder Stuck in China (59:34) - Mike Knoop is the co-founder of Zapier, the automation platform that connects apps and workflows without code. He is also a co-founder of the ARC Prize, an initiative advancing progress toward artificial general intelligence through benchmark-driven research, and now focuses on early-stage investing and technical projects across AI and software infrastructure. (01:22:33) - Nathan Benaich is the founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, a venture firm focused on AI-first companies. He is also the creator of the State of AI Report, one of the most widely read annual analyses of the AI industry, and co-founded the AI research hub RAAIS (Research and Applied AI Summit). (01:35:26) - Rohin Dhar is a San Francisco–based real estate agent specializing in residential properties. He works with buyers and sellers across the Bay Area, focusing on navigating competitive markets and helping clients make informed investment and housing decisions. (01:46:42) - Eric Jorgenson is an author and investor best known for The Almanack of Naval Ravikant and The Book of Elon, where he distills the ideas, strategies, and operating principles behind Elon Musk’s approach to building companies. He writes about leverage, decision-making, and product-building while working with early-stage startups. (02:00:28) - Jenny Just & Matt Hulsizer are the co-founders and managing partners of PEAK6, a financial services and technology firm spanning trading, investing, and venture. They focuses on building and backing companies across fintech, consumer, and education, and is known for their emphasis on performance culture and long-term value creation. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today is Wednesday, March 25th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital, capital ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, we have a great show for you today, folks. We got Mike from ARC Prize coming on.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  The new Panader.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  He did it. He did it. Uh, we'll talk about this later. We have Nathan, my buddy from Air Street Capital, Rohan Dar, uh, telling, giving us an update on what's happening in San Francisco in the housing market. Eric Jorgenson, the, the author of the book of Elons coming on. And then Jenny just from peak six investments coming on later. Thank you so much to tuning in for tuning in today. Um, linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise works based on linear using agents. So, um, there's been a debate. Uh, truth bomb dropped by Emile Michael. He says forgiving benchmark and others would be like letting the Wuhan Institute of Virology slide back into a good reputation because the new senior

• 1:08John Coogan?

  manager of pandemic causation has made more friends than his predecessor. And so this got me thinking and I'm probably going to have to put on the steel helmet for this one because this is wading into dangerous territory defending benchmark. But my question is, how close are we to actually being able to, to forgive benchmark? When is the right time? It's been a decade. Uh, obviously the, the drama between benchmark and Travis Kalanick was, was awful. I think everyone's against what happened. Uh, but the question is like, is like, what is a, what is a venture firm? It is its partnership. If the partnership turns over at some point, like, is

• 1:50John Coogan?

  it a new, is it a new team? Is it, do you get a second shot? Can you, can you actually change, uh, change the reputation? And so, um, believe me, like I, I get the benchmark criticism. Like Travis is truly a generational entrepreneur and was on such an amazing run, right? So he was

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Jason, Jason from Saster was reacting to our interview with Travis and, uh, his take, which I totally agree with is. It's hard to, if Travis had stayed in the role, it's hard to imagine Uber being worth less than something like a trillion dollars today.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yes. So, our friend of the show, Owen McCabe, over at bin.ai and Intercom, said, Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way. This was a year ago, in March 25th, actually to the day, a year ago, he said this. Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way that matters to consumers. Smoother, safer, more reliable, no chatty, weird, rude drivers. Private, quiet. Self-driving car services are going to dominate their human driver incumbents. And Owen says, TBT when, I think that's throwback to, right? Throwback to when Benchmark pushed Travis out of Uber and can the self-driving division that he started literally 10 years ago. And so, this is, this is what's so, so tricky about this is

• 3:07John Coogan?

  that, you know, Uber survived. It's 150 billion market cap. It's bigger than when Travis was ousted, but getting a two X over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. And Lyft has fallen to just 5 billion. Like, he won the capital war and Dara's done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up. It wasn't a complete reinvention. If anything, they just honed down the core business.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the thing that is holding the business back right now, at least from a valuation standpoint, is this big question, right? Around self-driving, how, you know, and Dara has, has answered this question, you know, thousands of times right now. The strategy is to invest in self-driving companies, partner with self-driving companies, but not the same as like having, you know, having developed their own internal IP and product starting a decade ago and seeing where that would have been by now is, is. Just hard to think about.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so Uber is valued at 150 today, something like that. Waymo was valued in February of this year at 126 billion. And so, yes, Waymo's been working on self-driving longer, but you have to imagine that there's another 50 billion of market capital.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  What would Waymo be valued if Travis was the CEO? You would get some type of Travis premium on it? Just the market would be, would say.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  You have this sort of one of one entrepreneur.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%. And just to sort of recap where things stand, I mean, Shervin Pishvar been on the show as well. We've had like everyone from this saga in the TBP in orbit. Both Travis and Bill Gurley have been on the show. Shervin's been on the show. Emile Michael's been on the show. We've, we've, we've talked to a number of people that have been around this, this story, and it's a fascinating one. It's one of the most interesting. It was certainly formative in my career because I got to Silicon Valley and this was the first big story that played out, really. So Shervin said, "In my opinion, Gurley, single-handedly destroyed hundreds of billions in value. Travis and Emile staying in charge of Uber would have led to a Tesla-sized win, 500 billion plus for everyone, including Benchmark's LPs.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  He nuked decades of Benchmark's reputation with founders. The market has spoken and no future Travis-quality founder would ever touch him or his former firm again, especially since three of the partners that approved the ousting of Travis are still at the firm." And so, my question is, like, how many partners need to be at the firm until we can call this a ship of Theseus? So, for those who are not up to speed on their Greek mythology, in Greek mythology, Theseus is the mythical king of the city of Athens. He rescues the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur, which is his mythical beast. And then he escapes onto a ship going to Delos.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this success by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. Over time, because they're sailing the ship every year, various of its timbers rotted and were replaced. A question was raised by ancient philosophers. If no pieces of the original ship remained in the current ship, is it still the ship of Theseus? If it was no longer the same, when had it ceased? Existing as the original ship. So some people might say 50/50. Some people might say, yes, it is, it is the same ship because replacing one board at a time, the ship is the concept and you can swap everything out 25 times, it's still the same ship. There

• 6:58John Coogan?

  isn't like, it's a paradox. There is no like right answer. It's a philosophical question. But it applies, I think, to Benchmark. Because back when Kalanick resigned as Uber CEO on June 20th of 2017, after investor pressure, after investor pressure that included Benchmark, on that exact date, Benchmark's equal GP roster was Bill Gurley, Eric Visser, Matt Kohler, Mitch Lasky, Peter Fenton, Sarah Tavell. Today, the partnership has changed dramatically. The only two that remain are Peter and Eric. And you have Chetan, Ev Randall, and Jack Altman, who are new to the partnership post the Uber scandal. And so it's not a full

• 7:41John Coogan?

  ship of Theseus, but only one-third of the original 2017 partnership remains. And my question, for those who remain reluctant to forgive Benchmark, is like, what happens if Peter and Eric retire or leave at some point, and the full ship of Theseus is complete? Like, maybe you'll shift-

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right now, right now, 40% of the, 40% of the partnership was there.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  33%. Oh, I mean, I guess, 2 out of the 5, yeah. So 2 out of the 5, because they've added 3, but only one-third of the original partnership remains.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  The question is, did Chetan, Everett, and Jack come in and as part of the interview process say like, "You're absolutely right."

• 8:18John Coogan?

  You're right. I mean, to defend Ev-

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Knowing, knowing 2 out of the 3-

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Ev had just graduated from college. Like, he was truly like not involved in the Uber scandal, and yet, you know, people will visit it upon him.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Knowing Everett and Jack, I'm sure, I'm sure during the interview process, they were like, "I've, I've," you know, the storied firm-

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to join, but we can never do, we can never do anything like that again. And so, and so one, one question that's worth asking is like, is the firm that did this and ultimately, you know, stained this, this storied brand and has certainly suffered the consequences, right? They've put up in, you know, incredible returns since then, but I'm sure they've missed a lot of deals. I would have made their returns even better because of that kind of narrative around the firm. And so they have, they, I would say, uh, you know, Emile, Michael and others are upset that they're doing great deals at all, but I think it is, uh, that a question I have is like, are they,

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  if they're in a situation again, right? In the same situation, kind of situation, are they more, what, what decision are they more or less likely to make, right? I would, I would argue like they are probably less likely to

• 9:40John Coogan?

  I would think so.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  go against the founder, given, given how this entire situation has played out.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The only, the only steel man, and this is, this needs the full steel helmet because it's so hard to steel man, the benchmark thing, but the full steel man of the benchmark thing is really bad. It's really bad to bench, I'm sorry for everyone. I'm sorry. But it's basically that, uh, every partner at Benchmark, it's an equal partnership. So every partner was going to make a clean $1 billion. They were all going to be billionaires from this one deal. And it was such a power law that, that like, there was no path to becoming a billionaire for, you know, from the other, from the other investments, most likely. And so you see the endless 24 seven hit piece pile stack up.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  And you got Mike Isaac, you know, blood hounded on at the New York Times, writing books, they're turning into movies. Like it's getting rough. It's getting rough.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac's at your door.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. My guy is exactly at the door. The barbarians are at the gate. And you're like, I'm either a billionaire or I'm going back to a paltry 10 million. And I can't, I can't do that. I can't do that. And so they freak out and they're like, we gotta salvage this. Thing. We gotta just push it out in the public markets. We gotta get out of this name. And so they basically just, it's just too nerve wracking. And yeah, it's not a strong steel, man. But I think, I think that's a little bit more of what happened than, than like taking a stand on like, oh, like this particular thing that happened was so egregious. It was more just like, okay, like, wow, all my money, like 99% of my net worth is in this asset. And it's looking like it could be a zero because Lyft is coming from behind. There's a whole bunch of VCs.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  They're piling into that. The narrative is totally flipping. There's a boycott Uber campaign like, and everyone's like, ah, what's going on? I gotta get out of this. I, I, I gotta salvage this. And I think that was maybe more of the underpinning than like, like I, I, I'm taking some sort of like moral stand on a particular hit piece or something like that. Uh, anyway, it's rough. But fortunately, you know, ship Thesius process, maybe it happens. I don't know. Would Deline accept that argument? Probably not. Would Emil? Probably not. But they're not making it any easier with the Manus investment either. Because the, like, there was a world where it was like, okay, yeah, the Uber thing happened a decade ago. The partnership is basically entirely new and they're focused on.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's, but.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  It's not there yet. Yes.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  It's just not there yet.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  It's not there yet.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  I, I think, I think you can rewrite this in five years.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. You, you made this point that this is, it's too early to call this, but.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  But that's directionally, given that the firm is still, is still putting up great returns. They've gotten to a bunch of great companies over the last five years. Uh, I think we are on, on a path to the, to the, to the benchmark.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Well, yeah.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark being the venture ship of Thesius.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  And VC brag said Airbnb has no homes, Uber has no cars and Benchmark has no partners. Of course, that was an exaggeration, uh, but they did get down to just three partners, which is very, very small. For, uh, for a venture capital firm, uh, some, some have dozens of partners. But different strategy and we will see where it goes. Anyway, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising is easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputer for training and things that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Uh, so. Sora, rest in peace, Sora. The app is leaving.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  Ev is in the chat.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  There he is.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  Class of seventeen, represent.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Ev was chugging beers while Uber is getting ousted. Do not visit the sins of the father on the son. That's what I would say. Ev not guilty.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Ev was a boulder.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was hanging out.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  What happened? Senior year? What happened?

• 13:42John Coogan?

  I think, I think, I think Ev deserves a fair shake and should not, and should not have to bear the, bear the cross from.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  The question, the real question, do, do Ev and Jack pull a benchmark and force out? Original partners? They don't have the legal control to do so, but neither did they during the Kalanix.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  At this point, Ev is probably already getting, getting calls from Sequoia to come be the senior steward, you know? He's, he's, he's on a meteoric ride.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Really all over the place today. Anyway, Sora is now, is it still in the App Store? I think it's like, the announcement was that it will be leaving the App Store.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Millions of people have made content on the app. They have to leave it running for some amount of time.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  There's a phase out, but the announcement happened and now it is, it is going out. And there's, I have a bunch of takes on this. Obviously, this is not the end of video creation for OpenAI. This will be rolled into ChatGPT, I imagine. Tyler Hodge put it well, bullish, killing products quickly is hard, almost no one can do it. It's a good sign for OpenAI. They're consolidating. In many ways, it's like, last week, you heard about like, the red, the code red was like a month or two ago. And then it was like, we're refocusing. And then it's like, here's step one of refocusing. A single app that we're going to push everything together. And also, I just, I've, I've enjoyed making some videos in Sora.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  I've never enjoyed having to go to a separate app. I want all of that to live in one place. So that makes a lot of sense. Let's see what Dak said. It's lame to see all the people saying, ha, I called it. I knew Sora wouldn't work. Yeah, duh, because everyone thought that, including me, who were working on it. They probably learned a lot trying to make it work anyway for every successful thing that exists. A hundred efforts like this had to fail. And those learnings are fed into making something that ultimately does work and provides you with a steady paycheck. Yes, it's interesting because

• 15:47John Coogan?

  this quote of like people saying, ha, I called it, I knew Sora would work. That is not how I interpreted the vibes around the Sora launch. Like, I went back and revisited the essay that I wrote on October 1st. We had the slop versus farming debate. I was really on a tear back then. So slop is bad. We, the timeline, don't want to be pigs at the trough. We don't like it when tech leaders treat us like farm animals, but we love farming. Farming is lindy. We, the timeline, want to return to a world where we are filling up troughs with slop on a daily basis, I guess. So between Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, and OpenAI, we now have three different variations on AI video products, each met with slightly different responses. So, the interesting thing here is that like, Google has been like charging ahead, launching it.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  It's in shorts, and that's just been like not a story at all. What was interesting was that the vibes around both Meta vibes and Sora were like, this is going to one-shot humanity. They're like, this is going to be too successful. That was, it was like

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  It was like an entertainment doom loop.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  You could imagine

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  It just getting so good at generating the next thing that you would want to see, better than even a billion humans on Instagram

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  could do, and that's not what we've seen so far.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  And so like, my big question was, was like, will this actually be sticky? Will people like this? And at what rate? I mean, I read LLM-generated text daily.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  But I also read a ton of not LLM-generated text and my my ratio has grown exponentially, but it hasn't gone to 100%, nowhere near it. Like, probably 5% of the text that I read is LLM-generated.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we should actually revisit how we were processing it during launch when it was, you know, rocketing.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  We should just throw on that three-hour stream and just watch that and react to how our text from that day.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  But even at the time, I remember saying, very obvious that they built like a very cool, creative tool.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  And they have the potential to seed a network with this. There's all this, you know, novel content. They had allowing creators and, you know, people like Sam to allow people to use their their IP.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  It was very, very well-executed launch, but even from the beginning, it was like, okay, obviously, cool, creative tool.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  It's a totally different ball. You know, this like, come for the tool, stay for the network has been like enduring.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  It's Chris Dixon.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Strategy, right? Chris Dixon probably wrote that in like 2014, maybe, or like a long time ago, over 10 years ago.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  But just because you build a tool that is attached to a network, like that jump is just really, really, really, really tough.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Especially when there are three or four, five serious networks that are at scale that can on day one support the format of the file that is produced from the model. So in a world where generative AI video came out not in a MP4 file or an MOV file, it came out in some sort of format that could never be uploaded to Instagram reels, then you have a chance to build a network and run away with it. And this was the story of Instagram. Like Instagram just had better support for images than Facebook did. And then Vine had support for video literally before Instagram. So Instagram, it was like,

• 19:20John Coogan?

  I have a video on my phone. It's cool. I want to share it.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Sharing it to Instagram was not possible.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Now, on day one, you generate an AI video. You want to share it, you can share it on TikTok.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just the incentive. If you create, if you created an amazing video on Sora, what is the most logical thing to do? If you're a creator and you want reach, post it to Instagram. There's just naturally, there's billions of people there. There were millions of people on Sora and a lot of energy momentum.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's not lost on me that the same day that Sora was killed, you have a viral breakout reality TV style series, show putting up incredible numbers on TikTok for Fruit Love Island, I believe it's called. It's an AI-generated twist on Love Island. There's romantic intrigue and plotlines and stories and consistent characters and a lot of things that have come from a variety of AI models. And we should talk to the person that's the entrepreneur behind that project because I would be interested to know what the stack is because I imagine it's not just, you know, going to a single gen AI app. I imagine that they have a whole

• 20:28John Coogan?

  pipeline of of like workflow in place to actually generate that. And so we're at this weird moment where, you know, Sora, the app is going away, but we're also seeing more and more AI-generated content slowly see success, whether that's the podcast that's at the top of the charts that's fully AI-generated. There's this Love Island show. There's a number of niches where they've found the right product market fit for AI-generated content, but it's not overnight. We're living in infinite justice. We just can't look away. It's like for specific things, it makes a lot of sense. And so it's working there.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to think about Google's strategy with with video. Even even Google was like, we cannot operate this for free at scale.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Two hundred and fifty bucks a month.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  No, that was the that was the discounted rate.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Oh, I think I had five hundred a month.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like an entry to start. It was like $250 a month.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  And it was brutally weight limited, like.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even even with we were laughing at this because.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  I'll get three a day.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  I remember we'd be like at the gym in the morning, you would fire off a couple prompts.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  And and then you were like.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  I hope I got it right.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it wouldn't get it right. Then you were rate limited. And you're like, wait, I'm rate limited on a on a $250 plan that's going to jump to 500. You're probably paying, got to check the ramp.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Check our ramp. It's probably paying 500 a month still.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  No, seriously. And and that and that.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  And that's Google with. All this

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Literally hyperseller.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Insane data advantage with YouTube.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  And, and that, let me tell you, rate limits kill retention. Like, nothing, nothing is worse. If you're in Instagram, the endless scroll exists. TikTok, you can, you can scroll endlessly. You can use the, imagine if TikTok was like, after five minutes, you have to close the app and come back in 20 minutes. Like, how successful do we think that would be? It would be a disaster. And that was the experience for both Sora and VO3, where you would fire off a prompt and it would be like, okay, come back in a couple of minutes, it's gonna take me a while to cook. And then, and then you fire off five and it's like, okay, no more for today. Like, and then, and then you, the next day happens and you forget about it. And you, and you go on something else. So clearly the compute constraints are immense. And there's just so much more value, value that can come from enterprise

• 22:49John Coogan?

  and can come from deep research and so many of the other models that are immediately economically valued like code gen, like enterprise workflows. And it's maybe more boring and less viral and less controversial. But it's, it's where the compute needs to go. And so I think you're going to see the chips be moved around inside of all the labs to like, compute will find the most optimal output. Like the tokens of the most value will always be the ones that it flow, that the compute flows to. And as a lot of people predicted, like just endless random generations that aren't quite dialed yet, even the best video models, like they're just not there, they require a lot of work,

• 23:32John Coogan?

  is not the same as, as where we are in terms of knowledge retrieval, where we are in terms of code gen. It's just way more valuable. So, anyway, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Thank you, guys. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Market clearing order inbound.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  You said September, people overestimate how much brain rot happens in a year and underestimate how much brain rot happens in a decade. So yes, we're still.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  So, I mean, I'm using brain rot pejoratively there, but, uh, but I do think that like this, this move does not really bend the curve of, of just AI generated content, but I still think it's like a slow rollout. Like it's, it's fast in the sense that like we went from no slop on the timeline to lots and we went from like, like actually zero, it was like one, one cool AI video, Harry Potter, Balenciaga was like entertaining to general people. And now we get like five and then we get like, next year we'll get like 20 and then eventually it'll be like hundreds and it'll be like, oh yeah, I'm actually into that. Like people are into cartoons and people are into CGI movies and superhero movies. Some people will be into it. Some people will never like it. Some people will

• 24:52John Coogan?

  always say, I want a black and white film from the 40s. That's what I want to watch. Uh, and, and, and these rollouts, the diffusion of this stuff will happen. Should we revisit?

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Tweet Davidson says.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Y'all are worried about the wrong open claw.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  This is a good post.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  This is the open claw that, uh, that Ev Randall was worried about in 2017. He was not, he was not thinking about.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Was, was White Claw invented in 2017? When did White Claw get founded? That's a great, that's a great, I feel like it really took off. It had a fast takeoff.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. 2016.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  2016. Okay.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  It's very good chance he was an early adopter.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  He might've been an early adopter of open claw. It truly was, uh, open, uh, I'm calling it open claw now. White Claw did have a fast takeoff for sure. It went from zero to 60 and it was just everywhere all of a sudden. Uh, anyway, uh, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken, helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. I got a story for you, Jordy. Today, as I was driving in to Hollywood from my hometown of Pasadena, I was driving.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  Through Hollywood and I look over and there is a new Hollywood sign. I'm not kidding about this. I actually saw this. I took a picture. I can maybe send it into the chat, but I can just show you because I'm driving and I just see this.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Like. Billy Bowman.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Billy Bowman. I don't know. I'll send it into the chat so they can pull it up. Uh, let me see. Production. Here we go. But anyway, uh, it is a, uh, it is a remarkable story because Fiverr is running a, one of the coolest out of home campaigns, like just from an out of home inventory. I didn't know you could do this. Let's, uh, we can pull up either my picture or we can pull up.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from KTLA five.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  KTLA five had a video breaking down what's going on. Let's watch this and then we'll react to this. And while the team pulls that up, I'm going to tell everyone about Labelbox, RL Environments, Voice Robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So let's pull up the, uh, KTLA five report, uh, about, uh, AI coming for Hollywood. The mysterious sign along the 101.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Underneath a logo for Fiverr and a search box says, find the best AI directors. It's a brash, bold statement. AI coming for Hollywood.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Coming for Hollywood.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Fiverr has made a name for itself connecting projects with freelancers. Now they're launching an AI video hub, which they say can make content at a fraction compared to traditional production. This Billy Bowman guy is one of the directors that you can hire. He's based in Sweden. He's made AI videos for Google, Universal Music Group and others. As you know, AI really hasn't taken over Hollywood yet, but it has certainly crept into commercials. Brands like Google and Jeep rolling out AI on national campaigns. Many are slowly, or slowing rather, to see the 30 foot sign, uh, which went up over the weekend. I first noticed it stuck in traffic yesterday morning after someone was so entranced, they rear ended somebody else.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  It's causing accidents.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  So interesting. AI director. So it's basically someone who. puts the prompt into the machine and chooses is Fiverr gonna pay the $500 that the vendor bender that's a great question yeah

• 28:15John Coogan?

  yeah can they be held liable for such a distracting sign I didn't

• 28:21Speaker 03

  well you know uh these AI companies are flush with money whether or not it is a bubble like you can debate

• 28:27John Coogan?

  that's interesting because Fiverr is not one of those companies

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  KTLA KTLA five is not prepared for it not to be a bubble

• 28:36John Coogan?

  uh so Fiverr's market cap now is 560 million dollars and that's down about 95% over the last five years

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  where are you seeing that I'm seeing 350

• 28:47John Coogan?

  sorry I yeah 359 what did I say

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  uh 500

• 28:52John Coogan?

  so sorry so it's a 360 million dollar company today down 95% from uh from five years ago uh it started selling off in 2021 uh sort of pre chat GPT so I think the AI narrative might be a little bit overblown there it did IPO um around this price it was a 700 million dollar IPO I think uh maybe a billion dollars uh went through a massive boom during covid and then uh and then sold off uh but of course the AI wave has not been kind to Fiverr because a lot of the tasks like you know generating

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  AI is very very very good at $5 creative work

• 29:32John Coogan?

  exactly

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  25 dollar obviously that the prices go well beyond $5 since uh since since the early days but in terms of the kind of projects that I always use Fiverr for AI just one shots all of that

• 29:45John Coogan?

  and the nature of Fiverr is like you have to define your task in a prompt it's not it's not oh have like a long conversation get drinks with somebody

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  yeah that was often that was often the the bottleneck that was the bottleneck it was like okay I need to do this task

• 29:59John Coogan?

  yeah

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  I I need like yeah 10 minutes to like properly define it all these things and it's honestly way more time than you spend prompting normally because with prompting you're just like I'll just try it a few times Kind of iterate.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Hit my rate limits and then fire back up. Yeah, I mean, it was always a bottleneck. I remember as an entrepreneur, I found out about Fiverr and I was like, this is amazing. I can get random stuff done for five bucks, but the time commitment, actually finding the right person, making sure the reviews are good. It wound up being like hours of work. And if you have a consistent flow, you're better off just hiring a person. So the, so they got kind of squeezed in the

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  middle. Yeah, the market is, is not excited about Fiverr right now. They're being valued basically at four times EBITDA.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  But this is an interesting pivot for them. They're basically saying that you can come to us to hire someone who has all the tooling set up to actually sit there and, and sort of, you know, nanny all the AI models because it is a hassle. Like you, as you described with me and VO3, I was sitting there like, okay, I fire off four prompts, then I go back. Like it's way better if you, if you're on the API and you have Higgs field wired up and you have, you know, runway ML and you have access to the Chinese model C dance, like, you know, the right tool for the job. And then you do a fine tune on someone's face. There's a whole bunch of things that you can do to get better results, but it takes time and it's a hassle and it's more of a professional job. It's not actually out of

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's the main problem with the campaign.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Is that Billy Bowman.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Is a real person.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  With his own website.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  With his own Instagram. You can just go and reach out to him, which is interesting because like the primary issue with, with these labor marketplaces like Fiverr.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Disintermediation. If you, if, if a business hires somebody on Fiverr and has an amazing experience, eventually they're just going to go direct because they build up a lot of trust and it's very different than, than a platform like Uber where you don't necessarily want the same driver every time because they're not around you and all these things. And so the reason that, that. The the the fivers and the up works of the world and and there's been a bunch of other like engineering focused marketplaces just have never reached like insane scale like Uber is because of the disintermediation and this campaign is effectively an ad for Billy Bowman who you could just go hire today.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, disintermediation has always been a problem on these platforms. Anyway, let's move on. Let me but first, let me 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 let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Speaking of stocks, did you see that Bombardier, the manufacturer of private business jets is down 10% over the past month. A lot of people were wondering why this was happening. I think we now know why, and it's probably because the shot across the bow from United Airlines. So what competes with a private jet? Potentially,

• 33:10John Coogan?

  United Airlines' new product, which is an entire row of economy seats. We got to pull this up. United Airlines says the entire row is all yours. Welcome to the United Relax Row. Three adjacent United economy seats with adjustable leg rests that can be raised or lowered to create a cozy lie-flat space for stretching out. You'll also get a mattress pad, blanket, and two pillows. If you're traveling with kids, a plushy too. United Relax Row will be available starting next year on more than 200 of the 787s and 777s, each with up to 12 of these brand-new rows. So what do you think, Jordy? Is this the way? I was telling Tyler Cosgrove, who is out of the studio today, he's in Washington DC, he's

• 33:54John Coogan?

  got to demo this. He's got to get on one of these. I don't know. Every time the airline announces something, it's always like five years until it actually is available. I've been waiting for Starlink for a long time. Took a long time for that to get rolled out from the PR release.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  United has pretty good pace. Haven't they been quick to?

• 34:08John Coogan?

  So you think Tyler could get on this tomorrow? Or today? He's going to the airport today?

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  I think I think if Tyler's resourceful enough, he could just, if he ended up in a row, two empty seats next to him, he could just figure out a way to detach the armrest blocking this and just kind of kind of build your own. He might, they might have to land the plane and arrest him.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Potentially worth the risk.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  He could also, he could also potentially negotiate with whoever's sitting next to him. Say, hey, you go and spend the entire flight in the lavatory. And in exchange, I will vibe code you a sloppy app of which I don't understand what programming language is used.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  I'll trade you an app for your seat.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  I'll trade you an app for your seat. And somebody might be like, that's amazing. I don't have anyone that can vibe code for me. This is, this is too good. No, I'm sorry.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson says, now we just need to put stairs on the food drink cart so you can climb over the top of them to get to the bathroom instead of holding.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this just, this just feels like, this just feels very, very chaotic.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  But it's good.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  This is wild.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  It's good.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. Starlink, a relaxed row, a dream. I, I think that this could be a good option. Uh, United built the product that everyone who has been, who has ever been on a plane wanted, says John Collison.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  John, you need to work on fixing Bombardier's stock price.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  I don't think it's related. Oh, apparently Air New Zealand launched this in 2010.

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  No, it is related because he, he should, he should help them build out their pipeline.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Well, he's, he's just pumping his bags because he owns a, a property in Ireland. How do you get there? You gotta fly on United. So, you know, one hand washes the other on this. He's, he's, he's talking his own book. No, just kidding. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  And Carter says, if you say no to pretzels, the flight attendant should give you something called a coin of restraint. While worth nothing now, these coins will play a major role in the afterlife.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  The coin of restraint is very, very good. I like that. Uh, well, Elon Musk is teasing something cooler than a minivan that might come because Elon said the Cybertruck rear bench has three seats of Isofix attachments and is wide enough to fit three child seats or three adults. So there's been a big debate on the Isofix attachments. These are the little metal hooks that are installed in every car in the backseat for for child seats. And so child seat requirements mean that you have to have a car that has these. And it's been, uh, it's been called like the death of the five kid family or something like that, or like the death of the big family. Because at a certain point, in order to have

• 37:08John Coogan?

  another kid, you have to upgrade your car and that has an expense associated with it. You need a three row SUV, or you need a minivan, or you need something bigger that's not as, that's not as affordable as, you know, just a normal sedan. They used to be able to just throw four kids across and maybe that was less safe.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Regulation killed the birth rate.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  People, people actually say this. People say that, uh, that child seats have saved like, like a million lives, but then they've stopped 10 million from being born. They, they, they, they talk about the relative exchange ratios. I haven't really dug into it too much, but, um, there's clearly demand for more spacious vehicles with more seating. The Model S used to come with a third row, which I still don't understand how that was possible. Um, the Model X came with a third row and there was, uh, and in China, they actually sell a Model Y L, which is a long wheelbase version of the Model Y. I hope they bring that to the States.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  People are saying make a minivan Elon. Elon says something way cooler than a minivan is coming.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  What do you think it is?

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  And people are speculating, Garcia here.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  I think it might be a data center.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, test.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  I think you might be like, there's another data center coming.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  Chip fab.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, chip fab. It's like you.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be able, I'm gonna, and, and.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  You're not gonna need.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  Texas is gonna change the child labor law.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  So that instead of worrying about bringing your kids around.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, they'll just go work in the.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  No, they're in the fab.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  They're in the fab.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Clean room.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  They're in the clean room.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  They're fully suited up.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  Suit it up, yeah.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  They're making chips. But no, people are speculating. This is very cool. Uh, Gen AI has been amazing for car enthusiasts to create basically their own concept cars. Now, these look very, very cool.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  We were talking about.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's funny because it's like, make a Tesla that look, make a Tesla version of the Rivian.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  Cause it looks exactly like it. But let's, let's get into some of the speculation. So.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Okay. What, what are people saying?

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Cyan Banister says an RV. That could be fun. Arthur McWater says, "I can't wait for the next Roadster unveil." Elon was teasing, it was on Joe Rogan, right? This concept of maybe it'll fly. And I think what Elon could be, could be getting at is, picture, picture a Roadster, not a great family car, hard to put kids in a, in a sports car. Some of them you technically can, but it's so uncomfortable and kind of chaotic. Very few people would. And I think what we could see is the Roadster comes with five, kind of like, you know, that Fury collaborative combat aircraft from Andral?

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  What if it comes with like up to five little mini Roadsters? Roadsters that can, that are just trained to autopilot behind the primary Roadster? So you can be in your sports car. And then however many kids you have are in the mini drones following.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  That'd be fun. What about a Chinook heavy lift helicopter with two massive rotors that can lift your Roadster off the, off the ground? Technically a flying car then. Anyway, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. I have a question for you, Jordy. Are you, are you running the new AI model? It's on cowork. It's literally on copilot. You can probably find it on codex. Dude, it's on co-author. It's a co-sign exclusive. It's on cocaine. You can run it on cocaine. You can literally go to cocaine and run it. What a great copy pasta. This is one of the funniest, funniest formats.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  But yes, the war for copilot and cowork is heating up. We gotta find a new term, I think. People have been really, really fighting neck and neck with this.

• 40:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, I was telling Microsoft they should name it Coco. Microsoft Copilot Cowork. It's just Coco.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Coco would be good. There's a few different, there's a few different options. I do, I think I prefer the non-anthropomorphized AI names, although they are a little bit colliding in the namespace. I have been a fan of, of, you know, the, the, the codexes and coworkers and copilots. Those feel more collaborative to me and they feel more like tools than the Bards and the, and the Series and the Alexas and the Rufus and the Sparkies like that. That's just a different vibe. And I think that i- if we're living in a world where people... Are going to form, you know, strong relationships with these tools. Introducing them truly as tools is probably.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's see what's going on with QVC. Let's pull up this video.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  And we also have one of our guests joining early at 11.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  No, he's, he's, he's going to be joining. He'll be ready to join in an, in an hour.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Are you sure?

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's check with the production team.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  I've already, I've already texted.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  We'll continue for the next 15 minutes.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, take us through the next story. What do you?

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  River says QVC basically reinvented live streaming decades, invented live streaming decades ago. Goes 24/7. They invented live TV. Goes 24/7. A good 80% of the show is just the host going on long, personal digressions. People watch it as background, heavy parasocial element. Hosts know the callers. 95% of repeat buyers. It's 100% Twitch for grandmas. Let's pull up QVC.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  And with the submarine. I wanted to tell you that I got that peasant blouse with the tassels. Yes. And I used to wear the tassels on my pasties. Do you know what pasties are?

• 42:34John Coogan?

  This is ridiculous.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  What pasties are? Okay, well, I have.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  We're moving on.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. We are going to deep dive Arc AGI today. And Gemini 3.1 Pro has done very, very well. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts. Synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX aims to file IPO as soon as this week. I know everyone is excited for the S1. Particularly, I think people will be focused on XAI.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  What they have going on. I think that.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Are they going to have to break it out in the, in the S1?

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  I would assume so.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  This might be the first time we actually see the economics of inference, the economics of a foundation lab, even though, yes, they are at a smaller scale.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  Hard to read too much into it because they've been investing so far ahead.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I just think that like, there is a world where we get broken out financials that you can dig through and you can understand based on Grok pricing, which we see, and top line revenue and cost, we can actually see, are they serving that model profitably? And there will be, you know, a lot to dig into there. Obviously, the other labs have different strategies, different vertical integration points, different economics, different pricing regimes. I mean, the true frontier, the models that are dominating Arc AGI, which we will talk about in 15 minutes, those command a premium, a price premium. And there's a wild

• 44:26John Coogan?

  difference between charging 15 bucks per million tokens versus $2 per million tokens. So it will be.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if, remember, I think it was in Q4 of last year, if you looked on Open Router, Grok was what had, I think it was like Grok Fast.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  Had a ton of usage. People are like, okay, why is this happening? And part of it, at least I believe, was because they were subsidizing it.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Well.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  But okay, so here's what I think. So people were posting this as though it was fact, but I think, I think it's a very real possibility. So I think Elon will, will, will try to aim for the company to actually go out on, on April 20th, 4/20.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  Really?

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  And I think it is possible if he goes.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  So fast.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  The ticker, we'll see what the ticker ends up being, but I think some people would, like, knowing Elon's very millennial sense of humor, I think the ticker, S E X is.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Oh, you think so?

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  Plus the April 20th IPO. I would assume that.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  You think it's a real prediction? You're not trolling?

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying, I'm not saying I would bet on it, but I think there's like a, I think there's, I think there's. I would put the April 20th at maybe like, you know, 30% and then the ticker maybe down at at 15%.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  Call she has when will SpaceX officially announce an IPO before June 1st, which April 20th would be before June 1st.

• 46:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not talking about it. I'm talking about like list, actual like listing day, like the day of the IPO.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is just announcing the IPO.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  Which I don't even know if they.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  They haven't even confirmed this. This is now, this is currently in the scoop, in the scoop thing. So they haven't even.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  Scoop, you said?

• 46:16John Coogan?

  They, so the.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  Wait, John, did you say scoop?

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Yes, this is a scoop from.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is this thing over here? Can we go to the wide angle?

• 46:25John Coogan?

  We got Katie Roof scoop master.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  We have a new, we have a new.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Award her the first TVP and golden scoop.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  The golden scoop.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Do you want to show her the?

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to, I don't want to pick it up yet.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we can.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  We, we need to give the golden scoop award for the best scoop of the day to Katie Roof, who moved markets with her scoop. She of course is the deputy bureau chief of venture capital at the information and she's an absolute scoop athlete. She's scoop doggy dog and, and she moved markets. So Sats is up 7.8%, BKSY is up 4.8%, LUNR is up 4.1%. Every stock in the space.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  And we're working on, on a new award, award show, the Scoopies.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  The Scoopies.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  The TVP and Scoopies.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  I think Katie Roof is a lock.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, she's in, she's, she's a front runner for sure.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  She's been putting on a generational run.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Front runner for sure. Yeah, it's so, it's so funny. The, the, I mean, incredible moment for the retail space investor community.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  Because they're just, for some reason, people, people, anytime you get SpaceX repricing, they're like, well, this, this other random company that happens to be technically on the same market map definitely deserves to be worth 7% more.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I was as skeptical about the, the rest of the lunar economy for a long time. It felt like winner take all. It felt like SpaceX was running away with it. But there have been interesting dynamics where, where companies that are buyers of SpaceX capacity, whether on the satellite internet side or on the launch capacity side, they don't want a monopoly to exist. And so they're willing to throw money at competitors. Jeff Bezos has stuck around with Blue Origin, Rocket Labs done very well. There's been a bunch. Uh, people are saying we need to redesign the scoop. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know what you, what you could be talking about.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  It's an ice cream scoop. It's an ice cream scoop that people, get your mind out of the gutter.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Out of the gutter, please.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  And head over to 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.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Casey Hamer is worried.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  What is he saying?

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  He's worried.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Why is he worried?

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  He's stressed.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  Why is he stressed?

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  What I worry about is a generation of talented, experienced engineers being too rich to work.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  So if you're worried about being demotivated by your incredible SpaceX liquidity, you have to do what I recommend, which is the Brewster's Millions approach, where you have to spend all the money in 30 days without telling anyone why you're doing it. This is from the 1980s, 1990s comedy, uh, called Brewster's Millions, which I highly recommend you watch. Uh, in it, uh, a man is, is gifted an inheritance from a wealthy, uh, uncle or father figure, grandfather. And, uh, and it is conditioned on the, on the fact that he needs to spend something like $30 million in 30 days without telling anyone why, and he can't accrue assets. So he can't go and just buy cars. He needs to throw parties and give money away and, and, and spend money wildly.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  And it's, uh, it's to teach him that money does not bring happiness, of course. And I think that's the solution to this. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, here's why I'm not worried.

• 49:52John Coogan?

  Why are you not worried?

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  Because I think that these ultra talented, hardworking engineers.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Having some liquidity, let's say someone's been there for some number of years.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  They have five million liquid. They buy a nice house somewhere. And then realize, hey, I've got a nice nest egg.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  I can keep working on crazy moonshot. I don't have to go join, you know, the, the, the, uh, you know, historical example would be like work on the hard thing or work on enterprise SaaS. And I think this just will give people more confidence to work on the hard thing, the thing that might have a 5% chance of success, but if it's successful, you know, has a tremendous impact on, on, on, on our country and things like that. So.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  It might happen for some people, but in general, I, I do think that there is this liquidity wave coming. Dalian talked about on the show yesterday. At the same time, like SpaceX has been doing tenders for over a decade and it's not like the early employees have never had a crumb of liquidity or secondary throughout their journey. A lot of them have had opportunities to sell at least a portion of their stake and had been able to buy houses. And there's always been a way to access some of that capital, whether through a loan from a bank and you're obviously more credit worthy if you own a bunch of SpaceX stock and it's going up. And.

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Bigger, a bigger issue for the kind of space economy overall is just the Blue Origin people who like, wasn't, didn't they have like way more that like they didn't, they didn't really know what their equity was worth. They didn't, it's not like there was regular tenders.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  And so why work at the number two, at least by many definitions, space company? And then that's potentially ultimately bad for competition and it's bad for lot, you know, launch pricing for all these other companies that are reliant on the SpaceX's and ultimately the Blue Origin. So anyways, crazy news out of China. Apparently the co-founders of Manus are still in China and were called up to talk with the government and are now blocked.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Have you seen The Dark Knight?

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Has everyone seen The Dark Knight? You, you thinking what I'm thinking? You thinking what I'm thinking? We go there, wrap our arms around him. The plane comes, grabs the balloon, sucks him out of the back of the, of the skyscraper. It's one of the greatest scenes and I think that's what we gotta do because we need personal super intelligence.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  So this was surprising to me because I feel like we've been messaged to for a long time that they were in Singapore.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true. It was definitely like it's not a Chinese company.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  It's not a Chinese company. They're in Singapore. The whole team's in Singapore and, and you would.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  It takes some audacity to sell your leading Chinese, one of the leading Chinese AI companies during an AI, a global AI race.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  This battle between great powers and to sell to a big American hyperscaler.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  Maybe get out of the country before you do that because it's not at all, I mean, this doesn't, when, when the Manus acquisition happened.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  Seemed very clear that you would be, if you were China.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  And you were competing in the AI race.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  Even though Manus is not like a lab.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  You're still like, okay, they're building a powerful harness.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  We probably don't want them going to serve.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  And the harnesses are incredibly, they're probably underrated.

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  More important now.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's super important right now. Everyone, everyone, you know, obsesses over the models and the models are important, but the, the harnesses have shown incredible promise for actual diffusion and making these models.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  So Josh Wolfe says, I thought this wasn't a Chinese company. And, uh, Delian goes for the jugular and says so much for all the arguments about Manus not being influenced by the CCP, Phil.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm mostly shocked just about how this is playing out. You, you would think that if you're the CEO of Manus and you get a call from Mark Zuckerberg and it even smells like a potential acquisition, you're like, yeah, I'd love to come see the headquarters. Why don't I come in with my team? We'll just come and hang out in Menlo Park or Miami for a couple of months while we hash out the deal. And if the deal doesn't go through, we'll head back. But if it does, we'll just stay and we won't go back because if it goes through, then there's going to be pressure and we're going to wind up in this situation. This feels almost predictable. I don't, I don't know. It feels like there's something else going on here. I'm excited for this, uh, this, uh, story to develop.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  So the authorities are reviewing.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  The sale.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  And they're being asked not to leave. Seems hard to reverse at this point, but again, not sure why. I mean, we look back at. Acquisitions that were blocked historically. Who knows?

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Who knows how feasible it is to fully block the acquisition, but they can certainly block these individuals from, you know, materially benefiting from it in some way or contributing to Meta's efforts.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Well, here's some advice for the CEO of Manish. When you get here to America, when you get that liquidity, that payday from Mark Zuckerberg, open an account on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Just do it. And then, you know, tell your story. Start restreaming. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. You should be, you should be multi-streaming. So go to restream.com, tell your story live on the internet.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Gabriel says Meek Mill has been going off.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  About AI. AI is helping him organize his whole music career and other businesses in days, and it's moving his business forward at a high rate. Some tech, Young Bull, I met on LinkedIn, gave me

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  an incredible template. It was probably G-Stack.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, who else can help me with? Claude. Uh, Gabe says, Drake, I don't do K2 Kimmy Deep Seek. That's more for your kind. My gal more like Demis Theme Park Ting London Deep Mine. Meek Mill. I Claude coded perks out of 18th and Burks. I got 500 agent lawyers trying to free Lil Dirk.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  That's a good line. Bars.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Drake, sing it. You got me loco trying to be your Schultz.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  You didn't sing it.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  Sophie chimes in.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  You didn't actually sing it.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Two chains. Open claw on my laptop. Trapping off these Mac minis. Shout out to YC. Real G's want to stack with me. That's good.

• 56:41Jordi Hays?

  That is good. I mean, yeah, it's not a, it's not a bubble until, until G stack makes it into, makes it into a, uh, uh, uh, actual hit.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  The funny thing here is there's some debate and, and there's this general vibe, like some people were latching on to this trunk fan post about like, you know, are people making fun of Meek Mill? Do, are people like undercounting his ability to actually build something for real? And the interesting thing is that I would definitely bet on Meek Mill to build a real, valuable piece of software for his audience or his life or his business over, over any of these tech people writing rap lyrics, even with all the powerful L L Ms. Like the tools to actually build software are way better than the tools to write rap lyrics. And, and, and it's interesting because you are seeing this dynamic where, where the like, like it, I think a lot of people are latching on to the older paradigm of like, oh, like,

• 57:37John Coogan?

  you know, Jeremy Renner built an Instagram clone at one point and it was just the Jeremy Renner app and it was just his feed of his photos. And people were like, why does this exist? You can just follow Jeremy Renner on Instagram. It doesn't make sense that he would have like his own private Instagram. And he probably spent a lot of money developing that piece of software. But, and, and I don't think it wound up working and it didn't scale and he wound up winding that project down. But if you think about like, well, what if this, what if this cost of doing that is a hundred bucks or 200 bucks or a thousand bucks? Like all of a sudden the, the hurdle rate to clear something like that actually does open up the creative aspects where I, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a like, maybe not

• 58:19John Coogan?

  like a breakout, hyper scale, incredible, like generational company, but just like in terms of like you, like you can be a great musical artist and also produce great clothing. Like you will now be able to produce software at the equivalent level. Like it is available. And so if you are constrained by your ideas and if you're a creative artist, you, and you have a great idea, you're no longer going to be in this world where you're like, well, I need to put a couple million bucks down for a software engineering team and they're going to not really take me seriously. And all of a sudden, you get into this weird thing where like the app that they launch is like sort of iffy and not that good. So I don't know. I'm actually, I'm actually

• 59:00John Coogan?

  coming away bullish on what Meek Mill winds up producing over the next few years.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  And we are working on getting Meek on the show.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  I really hope we can talk to him.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  I'll cover.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  You're good, you're good.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  I'll cover Meta. If you want to jump for a second.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  First, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I'm totally good, so I can take the next intro.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  I have a personal thing I'm going to run to, but I will see you guys tomorrow.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  Love you. Cheers.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Thanks, Jordy. Up next, we have Mike from Arc Prize in the Restream Radio Room. Let's bring him into the TDP and UltraDome. I'm very excited to talk to Mike. How are you doing?

• 59:46Mike Knoop?

  Here we go. Hey, hey, good to see you again.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Good to see you. I'm so excited. This is always the highlight of the show. I love talking to you about everything. But what are we talking about today? Reintroduce Arc as an organization and then take us through the actual, do you even call them benchmarks, challenges? What's the right term?

• 1:00:08Mike Knoop?

  Benchmark is a fair word.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:09Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. A couple, almost three years ago now, we co-founded the Arc Prize Foundation, me and Francois Chollet. The Arc Prize Foundation has a mission to be the North Star to AGI. So sort of our sort of job, we have two of them. One is to help be a useful sense, public sense finding tool for the public to understand how close, how far are we towards AGI or not.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Mike Knoop?

  And the second is to inspire progress towards AGI. Arc is a series of benchmarks that help highlight what are some of the large remaining gaps between what Frontier AI is capable of and what humans are capable of. And we sort of target that gap. That is sort of our definition of ultimately AGI is, you know, we produce an ongoing series of benchmarks, continually studying frontier progress. And, you know, at some point, we are not going to be able to do that job anymore. We will run out of ideas, you know, we'll test Frontier AI and say we can't find anything else, any more gaps. And I think that'll sort of be the moment when I think it becomes commonly accepted to say, okay, yeah, we've got AGI now. And today, we are announcing and launching the newest, best version of Arc AGI 3.

• 1:01:13Mike Knoop?

  It's the latest in the series. This is a really large format change from the first two. Arc 3 is designed to test agentic intelligence. And it is, as far as I am aware, and I've been sort of interviewing folks all over the AI scene the last few weeks, the only unsaturated general AI agent benchmark in the world. The headline score is human score 100% and AI less than 1%.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Unpack that, like, launch, because I, my conception of Arc AGI V3 is it's almost like a 2D game. It's no longer the puzzles where I'm picking colors to match a pattern. It's actual moving arrows on the keyboard. I'm stepping on triggers. I'm opening doors, switches, that type of thing. And I played it with you on the stream of months ago.

• 1:02:06Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, you helped us launch our preview several months back.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Okay, so that was the preview.

• 1:02:10Mike Knoop?

  Today, we've got the full dataset launching today.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so does that mean more, I'm gonna call them games, more, more actual levels launching? Or is this that what you're launching is like you did the actual benchmark and got the four leading labs to devote the compute and actually open up their models to be able to interface with the system to get the scores?

• 1:02:32Mike Knoop?

  Both things, actually. So today, on the benchmark side, the public version of the benchmark is, or I guess the overall benchmark, so over 100 games, nearly 1,000 different levels across these game-like environments. I think it's fair to call them games. We've designed them to be fun, and games are fun. I think you could look at them, you know, from a research standpoint, more as environments, though. These environments are intended to test whether AI can effectively explore, discover its own goals, acquire strategy, develop plans, execute its plans. One of the really unique things about Arc 3 compared to the 1 and 2 format is that it is interactive now, whereas you mentioned, you know, 1 and 2 look like these kind of static IQ puzzles that were on a page.

• 1:03:14Mike Knoop?

  3 challenges both humans and AI to essentially figure out the, uh, figure out the goals themselves. Uh, when you're dropped into one of these environments, your only goal explicitly is to win. And so in order to figure out how to do that, you have to actually, you know, dedicate some, uh, some exploration to figure out the rules, the mechanics, the strategy. And, um, one important thing is you're sort of playing these environments, the strategy and mechanic, they grow and they evolve and they change over time. And this is one of the reasons I think Arc 3 will be a really useful tool for understanding agentic intelligence this year. I think it'll be our first real test, um, where, you know, seeing early progress on these AI systems that are able to do on the fly world modeling, some degree of on the, like on the fly continual learning. These are both like critical capabilities, uh, that we view as missing today that Arc

• 1:03:59Mike Knoop?

  3 tests for.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, take me a little bit deeper on, you, you said there's a thousand games or a thousand levels?

• 1:04:08Mike Knoop?

  Uh, I think the, it's a few over a hundred games.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:12Mike Knoop?

  Uh, across those a hundred environments, nearly a thousand levels across all of them. Um, yeah, it's a much larger, uh, version of, uh, of the, of the benchmark than, than we've ever, uh, had previously. And then like I said, mentioned before, the other, uh, major thing we're announcing today is Frontier Scores.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:26Mike Knoop?

  So the benchmark is, is launching. We're also publishing as of today, um, the, the latest four models, uh, across all the, uh, four major labs. And yeah, I think SOTA is currently sitting at like point three percent, uh, point four so.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think I saw Gemini 3.1 Pro, uh, maybe there's an extra hyphenate on there, but, uh, basically the Gemini, uh, Anthropic and OpenAI were all in the point two, point three, something. And then, uh, Grok was, I think it's zero percent. Uh, walk me through, uh, the actual build out of these hundred games. Is this

• 1:05:03Mike Knoop?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  entirely human done? Is there some sort of, uh, computer aided tooling to insert variation programmatically? Or is it important that they're all created by hand? How do you think about the creation?

• 1:05:15Mike Knoop?

  I wish we could use AI to help design games. We'd be able to make the benchmark even better.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Mike Knoop?

  The reality is like humans are still the bottleneck on creativity. And so every game has still been handcrafted and hand designed by humans.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:28Mike Knoop?

  You could sort of imagine if you were embedding all these different levels on like a big manifold, you know, in an embedding, you want them all as far apart as possible in that sort of space. And today, still, humans are kind of the limiting factor in terms of ensuring that, you know, every game is different and is novel from each other as possible.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Mike Knoop?

  There's a few interesting design changes, actually, from a benchmark standpoint compared to one and two. Maybe the largest is, you know, ARC studies the frontier progress. We have to design our future versions of benchmark to adapt to changing frontier progress. One of the design goals with one and two was we have what's called a private and a public test split. Where we have a public version of the benchmark and a private holdout version, which is what we actually use to verify the performance of frontier models.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  So the frontier models get no freebies? They don't get anything from the public set?

• 1:06:19Mike Knoop?

  But they can train on- You can't memorize the public set, right?

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Or they can experiment on the public set from like a prompting perspective, maybe?

• 1:06:28Mike Knoop?

  Yep. The idea is the public set is intended to demonstrate the format.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:31Mike Knoop?

  And this was similar with ARC one and two. However, we held a design goal that the public sets and the private sets were what's called IDD with each other. Basically, that they are supposed to be as close as possible to each other. And it's just split along visibility. Some are private and some are public.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:46Mike Knoop?

  With one of the big advancements with AI reasoning is this actually like not a very useful way to run benchmarks. AI reasoning systems are so powerful now that they can actually generalize across IDD test splits. And this is what we saw with ARC one and two. So with three, one of the big design decisions is we're actually releasing fewer games into the public demonstration sets. So there's only, I think, about 25 games that are in the public set. We're actually explicitly not even calling it a training set anymore. We're calling it a demonstration set just to show the format to humans. You know, be able to test your systems to make sure you can sort of create them, get a feel for them.

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Mike Knoop?

  There's obviously fun marketing value in being able to play the games as humans too, which we really love. And on the private set, this is the set that's over 100 games. They're specifically different. They're different. We designed it with different characteristics, different goals, different- Intelligence capabilities required to beat them, the difficulty, the acceptance criteria is more extreme between human and AI performance, all to hopefully produce the most useful like high signal benchmark towards whether we actually are getting real progress towards AGI with the foundation models.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  So, let me pitch you a strategy. If I have access and I, you know, I'm at Google or OpenAI or Anthropic and I want to do well here, can I take the public set and create a log of all the steps and all the reasoning chains and all the keystrokes that are required to pass those levels and then sort of like dump that into the context window before I go off into the unknown?

• 1:08:21Mike Knoop?

  And train your model that way, basically?

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Maybe train my model, but also I'm just wondering if that's helpful for setting up the context or like doing some sort of like pre-compaction of the strategies that are learned.

• 1:08:37Mike Knoop?

  I see.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Maybe not even training a custom model because I feel like that would maybe be like bench hacking. I'm more thinking about just like, okay, we went and we played all the public games to completion and we monitored them, screen recorded them, tried to extract as many learnings as possible into, you know, an MD file, basically. And then we include that in the prompt that kicks us off that to sort of bootstrap the learning.

• 1:09:03Mike Knoop?

  Right.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Once we get into the unknown environment.

• 1:09:06Mike Knoop?

  If we've done a good job on the benchmark, you should not be able to train a system on the public set and perform on the private set.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:11Mike Knoop?

  If we've done a good job. Obviously, every benchmark release, it's an experiment.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Mike Knoop?

  Right? We make contact with reality, we ship these systems, benchmarks publicly, we try to analyze the performance, understand what they're good at and bad at and evolve, you know, future versions of the benchmark. But intentionally, you know, and this actually is a very closely related to another design decision that we're making with our scoring function going forward this year. And this is again in response to like AI progress that we've seen. You know, our scoring methodology is basically AGI filled at this point. We, going forward with V3 are using as, I kind of have this idea of like,

• 1:09:48Mike Knoop?

  Basically, a philosophy of having essentially no harness. We want to create a testing experience that's as similar as possible between the human and the AI test takers. And when we have our human baseline, when we have rented a literally a testing center in San Francisco to have hundreds of humans play these games. All they're given is you have sensory input through your eyes and action motor output through your hands back into our testing interface. And all of the intelligence happens between those two steps. And so we try to emulate that as close as possible for our verification function where we have this sort of a philosophy of having a very stateless client. So that our scoring function basically tries not to introduce any kind of bias, any kind of help, any kind of maybe potential cheating strategy. If you go read our prompt, it's extremely simple.

• 1:10:33Mike Knoop?

  It's like, you know, you're playing a game, here's your actions, your conversation will be carried forward to the next turn and that's it. In order to again, kind of produce this really clear signal towards when the real progress towards H I and the base intelligence layer, we're able to detect that.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so take me back through history a little bit because I'm surprised by why AI is struggling with this in particular. Because I remember it feels like almost a decade ago that OpenAI had a product, I think it was called Gym, where they were able to beat Mario and then they beat the Dota team, Dota 5. And they were able to do things that I can't do. I certainly can't beat Lisa Doll in Go. I certainly can't, you know, win Jeopardy or any of these things. And yet, AI systems were able to dominate those games. You've created new games.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  What's different about the games or the strategies by the AI labs where we're not matching up like we did in the past?

• 1:11:36Mike Knoop?

  I think the biggest thing is the expectation of what constitutes real progress for its H I. Right? When labs were using games in maybe the 2016 to 2018, 2019 era, when they're very popular. Human researchers are studying the games, trying to understand the failure modes of machine learning, deep learning, trying to build custom search-like harnesses and sort of feedback mechanisms from the environments. It's very, very handcrafted. It's loaded with what I'll call like human G, right, in the research process. We are now at a point where we want to control for that, actually. We want to understand, like, we want to control for as little human G in these like systems as possible, right? We want to understand is, can basically AI do what the human researchers were doing back in the era in order to beat

• 1:12:20Mike Knoop?

  those games that they had never been trained on or exposed to before?

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:12:23Mike Knoop?

  So I do think it's kind of elegant that, you know, we are coming to find a full circle where games are these very minimal representations of like actually important capabilities that humans possess around exploring and developing strategy and world modeling and being able to learn on the fly. They're really elegant as far as an environment goes. But I think what's changed is our expectation of how much human crafting is needed in order to learn the games when they haven't been specifically trained on them is the big difference today, especially with Arc 3.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Okay. Remind me of some more history, but more related to Arc. I remember with one of the Arc AGI benchmark tests, there was a version of a model from OpenAI that was running on some sort of like extra high mode, and I seem to remember like $2,000 per task being cited, something.

• 1:13:10Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, 03, a very big launch.

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:13Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, that was like a preview of 03 in December of 2024. It's really the first, you know, there's a great chart on the Arc Prize homepage now where you can actually see those data points so clearly. I think one of the really, like I mentioned before, one of our missions of the foundation is to try and be useful public sense finding tool.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:13:30Mike Knoop?

  And I think, you know, when we first launched Arc 1 and 2, you know, it was a very common critique. It's understandable, you know, hey, these things look like toys. Are they really economically useful? Are they going to lead to any, you know, real progress? And now in hindsight, I actually think that's a pretty outdated view because we have pretty strong evidence that Arc held quite strong predictive power of noticing really important moments. We only started seeing saturation on the V1 benchmark, and remember, V1 was like five years old. We only started seeing any amount of progress from LMs on V1 once we got AI reasoning, which was a really critical innovation, I'd argue, is as important as the original Transformer innovation. And then a year later, this was, you know, four months ago now, with the November, December

• 1:14:09Mike Knoop?

  2025 class of models with GPT-52 and OPUS 4.5, we again started to see saturation on Arc V2 and it precisely correlated with this like agentic coding capability that emerged. And so I'm optimistic that Arc 3 will again be a very useful sort of predictive tool to understand when, you know, basically AI agents are capable of operating more open-ended environments. Right now, you know, you need a lot of human handcrafting to get these intelligence systems to work in domains such as coding, right, with Cloude Codex and Code, or sorry, Codex and Claude Code. I basically expect that like when you are doing very good on V3, which will mean, by the way, 100% score on V3 means like AI can sort of beat all the games as efficiently

• 1:14:51Mike Knoop?

  as humans can on an action basis, that will lead to economically useful systems where agents are able to operate in more open-ended environments that they haven't specifically trained on.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  I still remember from Arc AGI 1, you know, you see these like three by three grids and the first time I ever tried it, I tried it on my phone and I think my phone was in some weird like landscape mode or something, so it wasn't rendering correctly and I was like-

• 1:15:16Mike Knoop?

  You didn't even get all the data points.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, so normally it's like you see the blocks and then you see the blocks to the left and the right and I was like, wow, I'm like, I'm cooked, like the fact that other people can do this, but of course, once you load it on desktop, it's very usable. I want to continue down that path of the 03 extra high, like what are you seeing from the labs that put forth models that did test on Arc AGI V3 in terms of just steering the models? Because we talk about GPT-5.4, but that means a lot of different things these days. Was this in the max reasoning? Should I compare this to what I'm seeing in ChatGPT?

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  I'm getting more and more dropdowns where I can go, oh, I can go pro and then I can go extended thinking mode. Is it, is it an off-the-shelf model or are they able to sort of come to you and say, hey, we want to, we want to actually marshal 10 times the amount of compute for this particular challenge?

• 1:16:16Mike Knoop?

  On our verification leaderboard, we have a new testing policy. It's actually something we did have with one and two, introduced after three, where we limit to $10,000 per verification run.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:26Mike Knoop?

  This is somewhat of a practical, like, consideration.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Mike Knoop?

  If we actually used, like, the most expensive, highest, you know, million context window, the most expensive model, I think testing in the full 53 private data set would be like $100,000.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:16:40Mike Knoop?

  Which is just kind of like silly, right?

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Mike Knoop?

  So we set a reasonable limit, like, humans are nowhere near as much as, sort of, like, dollars to, sort of, produce the same performance.

• 1:16:48John Coogan?

  I like that, too, because, like, that is the, like, getting AGI, and it's like, yes, it can do anything, but it costs $50 million per prompt to do one hour of human labor. Like, that's not really economically valuable, and so bounding it makes sense.

• 1:17:04Mike Knoop?

  I think you want to know progress, right?

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Mike Knoop?

  And I think $10,000 is a reasonable amount of money, where you actually see some degree of progress, and that would be a useful signal to start paying attention to it more.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Mike Knoop?

  And it's like, just, you know, for practical reasons, we just can't, we're a strapped nonprofit, so.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:16Mike Knoop?

  You know, we have to be, sort of, thoughtful on our, on our, sort of, money, on how we deploy things.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Well, good luck.

• 1:17:20Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, that's, that's, so I think the high reasoning model is the most we used on, for the official verification stuff that we've used today.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  So, I mean, do you spend a lot of time thinking about your own AGI timelines? Has your work at ARC shifted your timelines at all, or do you feel like, "Oh, I've always been a 2035 guy, I'm still a 2035 guy," something like that? Like, do you, do you have an internal model of this, or is that even useful these days?

• 1:17:45Mike Knoop?

  I, instead of listening to my predictions, you should probably follow our actions as our, like, best sign of, a sort of, view of progress.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:58Mike Knoop?

  I think the reality is, we have made tremendous progress with our reasoning over the last 12 months.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Mike Knoop?

  ARC is operating to bring the next version of the benchmark. We've already started work on V4. We actually have plans written down already for V5 as well. Our intention is to bring these to market annually over the next two years. And so that's our expectation of having the next version ready right now.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Mike Knoop?

  Now, like, will we actually launch them? I think we'll have to just see where Frontier Progress does. We want the future benchmarks to be as useful as possible. And so if there's like still a lot of utility and scientific value in the current version of the benchmarks, you know, we want to keep focus on those. But to the extent that like the scientific value is starting to wane, we want to have the next version ready that has sort of like identified, hey, are there other interesting remaining large gaps between what humans can do and AI can do in order to drive that gap to zero, you know?

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Mike Knoop?

  Again, we're a very AGI-pilled organization. We want to see progress. We actually love seeing progress.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:18:51Mike Knoop?

  And part of our goal is to inspire as much progress as quickly as we can to get to these AGI systems.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Mike Knoop?

  So I'd say like, yeah, that's sort of the operating view. Well, you know, a common question would be like, was V5, you know, is V3 AGI, is V4 AGI, V5 AGI? The honest answer, and this is something I've actually learned, I had a different view of this maybe three years ago, the honest answer is no single version of any benchmark is ever going to be AGI. I think it is a, the frontier of progress is a moving target, and our job is to like, understand that the gap, the remaining gap, and by definition, that gap is going to change as time goes forward, in order to keep chunking up what are the largest pieces of that gap that we can find that are interesting, you know, that identify some missing important capability that humans are able to do, and produce benchmarks that showcase that gap.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Last question, I'll let you go. What's going on with the Pokemon Bench? That feels somewhat related, similar tasks. What are you learning from that? How are models becoming so good at that? It feels like they aren't specifically RL'd on Pokemon, and yet they're learning. But also, there's a massive amount of, you know, written text about what to do at every level in Pokemon. Are they just learning that from the pre-training corpus? What's your thesis on Pokemon?

• 1:20:06Mike Knoop?

  It certainly seems helpful. If I use our experience in developing ARC as a tool to try to sense finder on this, we have seen more understanding from the latest generation of AI reasoning systems over the last three months than we saw in the first six months when we were developing ARC V3. I think you can kind of fork, you can almost split the research problem of agents into two things. You can split it into a problem that says, can an AI agent effectively perceive some kind of environment state, apply a strategy that's written down to produce actions and successfully execute a plan? That's half the question.

• 1:20:49Mike Knoop?

  The other half of the question is, can you have agents that are effectively able to develop what that plan is? And to do that, you need to be able to on the fly, build like a world model of your task, acquire goals, create your strategy, create your plan. We've seen a lot more progress on the perception through strategy to action problem than we've seen on the exploration problem, the strategy generation problem. And I actually think this is one of the areas that I would point interested ARC3 researchers at, because I think it's a lot more greenfield and will unlock a lot more progress, even on things like Pokemon Bench, where it's kind of coming down to like, okay, we know they can sort of, or I should say execution. The exploration and planning step is still where there's a large degree of bottlenecking

• 1:21:34Mike Knoop?

  still happening today.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress. Where can people find it? How can people participate? How can people help out?

• 1:21:42Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, go to arcprize.org. You can play the games as humans. Like I said, we've got almost 25 of them, I think, on the site. They're all designed to be very fun. We were closely controlled for this, actually, when we were doing human baseline testing. So that should be fun, you can have fun. And you can also get details there, enter ARC Prize 2026, our new $2 million prize pool this year that's on ARC2 and ARC3.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Yeah, our teammate Tyler Cosgrove was climbing the human leaderboard for a while. I imagine he's been knocked off, but we'll have to get him back on top. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with me. This was fantastic.

• 1:22:17Mike Knoop?

  Likewise, man.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And without further ado, we have our next guest, Nathan from Air Street Capital, coming in to the TVV Ultra Room. Nathan, how are you doing?

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  Great. How are you doing, John?

• 1:22:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for staying up late. What time is it there?

• 1:22:45Speaker 05

  7:25.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Okay, not too bad, but past the workday. Reintroduce yourself. It is your second time on the show, but reintroduce yourself and give us the news.

• 1:22:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm Nathan. I started a venture capital firm called Air Street Capital in 2019 to invest in AI-first companies.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  What year were you investing in AI?

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  Well, so I started the firm in 2019, but started investing in AI in 2013, which was probably around the time that like deep learning was still definitely cooking only in the lab. And most people didn't really care too much outside of it.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. What were the median deal like? What was the median deal like in 2013? Was that like recommender systems? Like we're going to bring Netflix recommendations to everyone? Like that type of thing?

• 1:23:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, it was e-commerce, recommendation systems, ad tech.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

  Big data was the buzzword back then.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:40Speaker 05

  A little bit in finance, like insurance underwriting, like loan prediction, credit.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, your risk. Yeah.

• 1:23:47Speaker 05

  Fraud detection.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, fraud detection, just like a big, I guess it was like a, were they doing deep learning yet? Or was it mostly just?

• 1:23:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were. Yeah. I mean, it was, 2013 was the year that computers started to be able to recognize images better than than humans.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:03Speaker 05

  That was, I remember like Andre Karpathy was the infamous human benchmark on ImageNet in 2013. PhD.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:24:10Speaker 05

  So that was the year when, when basically like Alex at University of Toronto, like built AlexNet, which was the first deep learning system running on Nvidia card.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What a remarkable time. So what has it, has it been easy? I mean, you just raised a new fund. Has it been easier to pitch this to LPs? What have been the challenges and opportunities over the last few years?

• 1:24:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's been a sea change. Like in 2018, you know, I started for Air Street. It was like, I'm, you know, by myself, so solo G P, super contrarian, starting in Europe, where risk aversion is extremely high, trying to focus on A I, which most people didn't really care too much about. And then first time fund, those are sort of like all the worst, like buying selection criteria.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  They're the worst.

• 1:24:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then, yeah, like, I think, you know, this, this is a very much like a long term journey. Like, you know, I set out with, I'm gonna do these early stage investments, be high conviction, invest in biotech, defense, vertical software, dev infra. You know, I stuck with what I said. So, you know, investing in like Synthesia, Eleven, Black Forest and others. I'd like six exits to like recursion and, you know, a company that went public and Amazon, et cetera.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  And then, and then, yeah, like first one was like $27 million. Fund two was 121. About three years later, again, pre-tragic P T. And then, and then this one's 232 million, which at this point makes us the largest solo G P in Europe.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  That's amazing. So us, you said solo G P, but you said us. Who else is on the team?

• 1:25:48Speaker 05

  I'm, you know what, like, I'm kind of guilty with the royal we thing. But, but I have two colleagues who run talent and operations and then a pretty sizable back office for like admin.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:00Speaker 05

  But everything that comes along with like, you know, building brand, finding founders, investing, fundraising, that's all me. And the decisions are just me.

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  And then also, the, is it annual report state of A I? I mean, it's, it's sort of a huge project. Do you bring in collaborators on that?

• 1:26:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I started in 2018 to basically create like a kind of canonical open access document covering research industry, politics and talent.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Speaker 05

  There are a number of contributors every year who are sort of like at the coal face during their P H D or like transitioning between roles in A I labs who help us kind of stay smart on things. And also folks who've been working on policy because it's become increasingly important as we've seen the news almost every day. And then the cool thing is like I get contributions from companies and labs and researchers every year and like I think this last year when we last talked, there was like 50 people in the Google Doc. Kind of like leaving comments being like, hey, I I tried this implementation, this paper, like I had this problem. And then some other person's like, that was my paper. This is what I tried. And it's like cool, like community document, basically where we can kind of get to the center of truth.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Uh, not to call you like lucky on timing. Uh, it's very fortunate that you have the size of fund that you do for where we are in the market cycle. But, uh, how hard would it be to do what you're doing today? With a $27 million fund, because it feels like a 20, $27 million is like a seed round for like a, you know, startup with just an idea. Sometimes that's like 1, 1, 1% of the of the seed round. Uh, but like, is it, can you even make plays with that size fund if that's what you were constrained to today?

• 1:27:40Speaker 05

  I, I think you have to decide like what I did, which is either you want to be like a main player and lead rounds and express conviction and be early, et cetera. Or you play the like large portfolio model and then you have checks and a lot of opportunities. And for me, that job is like much more of like a network SDR style job and less of like I can make my own opinions, like do the research, be there early. And then when I like something, like really make the bet.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06Speaker 05

  I don't think you can do the former, like be a lead investor in 27 million, no chance. I think you can do the larger portfolio, um, you know, chipping into a variety of rounds and still have like good performance. But it's just a different job that I don't particularly enjoy and doesn't maximize like my strengths and my interests as much.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  Um, you know, so I, I think at the end of the day, like you gotta pick what, what flavor is good for you. And then try as best as you can to bring the best product to the market and given your circumstances. And I was fortunate with Fund Three to be able to really come with like a blank slate with, you know, long-term partners and say, this is what I think is going to be the most convincing model, you know, right up to $15 million in first checks and do a couple of growth stage rounds up to 25 million. But still, you know, high conviction, 20 companies. And of course, like I'm, you know, mostly based in Europe, but still. Invest in the US and spend decent time there as well.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I know you're you're you're in Europe, but you're not, you know, exclusive European investor by any means. But I am interested in the thought exercise of like, where is the AI opportunity internationally? If I were to just back of the envelope it, I'm, you know, I've seen some of the sovereign AI efforts. It it sort of makes sense that like a certain government might want to buy from a particular local lab. But at the same time, like, you know, Google has been very successful internationally. And, you know, China got the the Google of China, but many other European countries didn't get the local Google competitor

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  or the local Amazon competitor or the local Microsoft or Apple competitor, just because like they were consumer products and consumers kind of flow wherever they want. But at the same time, I can imagine if Google or OpenAI or Anthropic is going to build a data center, they might want to go to a local NeoCloud, or there might be opportunities for, you know, the Harvey of some other country that has different laws and different rules. And so how are you seeing the shape of like opportunity outside of America in AI?

• 1:30:07Speaker 05

  I I think you covered it really well, and I would generally agree with you on this. You know, Europe doesn't need its own Google per se. And in fact, historically, like, the government has tried. There was Quero and one or two other initiatives that, you know, had hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into them so that they could like capture European culture better than Google could. And I think that's a bit bizarre when you're talking about a learning machine. But but so there's certainly some sectors where I think like the sovereignty like really matters. And it's not just marketing speak. So, you know, defense and security is clearly one where, you know, Europe woke up to this like two years ago. And and now even more so with the Middle Eastern war that's ongoing. You know, as an example, like I invested in a business called Delia and Alliance Industries doing defense, autonomous defense systems right in Greece.

• 1:30:53Speaker 05

  And one of the number one things we got from people outside of Greece, particularly in the US, is like, why are you investing or building a company in a vacation resort that I go sailing in, you know?

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Speaker 05

  And then that narrative changes significantly. Well, once you start seeing Shahed like drones hit, you know, UK bases in Cyprus and you realize like, okay, the border to Southern Europe actually comes over the Mediterranean, Greece. Um, I think the, the other part, uh, which is, which is interesting is like ambitions change and, um, and I think in Europe where traditionally there's been fewer role models that one can look to and say, I'm going to be like that person and I know the path.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Speaker 05

  Um, some companies grow and you know, for example, I think Ligora originally started as Leia, like started in Sweden, right? And it was the idea of, hey, we should do this locally in Sweden. And, um, and now like clearly that company's ambitions are like, no, we can go head to head with Harvey.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Um, yeah, yeah. It does feel like in Europe, like the, the entrepreneurs that break out, they're not saying, I'm building X for Europe. It's like, I'm building 11 labs. I'm going to go everywhere. I'm building Spotify and I'm going to go everywhere. And yes, I happen to be from some other country and I'm going to have a headquarters there, but get ready in New York because we're going to have a headquarters there. We're going to have an engineering hub in SF and like, we're just going to be an international company and have our roots there. Uh, and that's the right path.

• 1:32:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. So this is why I think if you're going to invest in Europe, it's really important to have this foothold and knowledge of the US market so that you can apply the same quality distribution that you see in the US over in Europe. And either there are people who start from day one being that ambitious or there's others that are, that grow and, and kind of, um, yeah, just like fuel their batteries with ambition as they see and like experience it, you know, like when you get success, you want more of it. And so that's like the kind of recursive cycle of the continent is going through.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, with all the progress from the big labs and they're at such incredible scale now, like, how are you processing the SaaS apocalypse and just advice for founders of like, what gets steamrolled versus what doesn't? I mean, there were some, there, there was some founder, we've had a couple of founders on the show that have been like, we're doing AI generated video social network. And then it was like, you're getting steamrolled. And then it was like, actually like, uh, you know, Sora is not going to be in the app store anymore. So like, maybe that was a good bet. I don't know. I'm not on that particular app, but, uh, it feels harder and harder. It used to be just like, don't do an app that's just a prompt around the foundation model, like that's done. But now we're talking about, oh, is there pressure on CRMs? Is there pressure on databases?

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Is there pressure like the, what will the labs do? It's, it's unpredictable, but how are you working through it?

• 1:33:25Speaker 05

  I think, you know, one thing you could say is like, what are the problem sets and areas that like the smartest AI people want to work on and like, don't do that.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  So like, don't do coding.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 05

  Like after, it seems like AI researchers really like AI for science. So like, don't do that.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a friend from the show that does like, uh, yeah, it's an AI company, but it's for like small businesses, like HVAC owners and helping them. It's like, yeah, I don't think that's on the roadmap.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  That's really good.

• 1:34:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. Jokes aside, I think, I think, uh, it comes down to like this task of knowledge and like where you can capture how people do a task and taste. Like I see it's a bit with our job, like, you know, I'm using like I'm Claude Maxing as well and like Codex Maxing. It's amazing how it can, you can imbue it with your taste. And you're like, at some point you realize, okay, we built like a learning machine that basically is like a sieve. You can pour as much as you want into it and it'll still like learn stuff. But before it was only one task at a time and like forget accumulating multiple tasks. So at this point, if you're really AGI pill, like you have a call, you pipe the feedback in, you ask like, hey, how did I do? And you get suggestions, you do that on the next one, you pipe it back in and then you're like, make a skill file and then next time, like here's a new opportunity.

• 1:34:44Speaker 05

  I'm like, dude, if you're not doing that, it's like game over.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Speaker 05

  And so I really do think, especially for our job, like there is a point at which you're like, you know, solo GP with like 200 or 300 million dollars with a bunch of AIs.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Speaker 05

  So like, yeah, I'll call you in 10 years and see if it works.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  I'm excited. I'm excited. Uh, well, I want to hit the gong for the new fundraiser. Congratulations.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the show. Have a fantastic rest of your day and I will talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:35:14Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about vibe.co. We're DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, major sales, just like on Meta. And let me also 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. And without further ado, our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have Rohan Dar. He is a real estate expert. Thank you so much for joining the show. How are you doing Rohan? Good to meet you.

• 1:35:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, happy to be here.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  Uh, since this is your first time on the show, would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself? And I'd love to know, uh, some of your background, how you got to where you are today.

• 1:35:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I am. I'm a San Francisco real estate agent and I'm, you know, among the highest producers by volume in the city. And I came from a little bit of a traditional background. I did a Y C startup. I went to Stanford Business School. I did a bunch of startups and then got into real estate when I'm kind of learning about Airbnb early on and built a small portfolio of that and, uh, and then learned the real estate craft from that.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Did you have to get a license at some point? Did you join a big firm or did you just sort of strike out on your own?

• 1:36:22Speaker 06

  I was, my Twitter account started growing because I was like posting interesting houses that I was like just kind of curious about. And then people were messaging me like, oh, I actually like bought that house you posted about. And so I was like, dang, like someone's making a lot of money off of this and it's not me. So then I like decided to get licensed. And originally I was going to focus on like Airbnb markets and short-term rentals and vacation areas. But I live in San Francisco and I could see the prices were like after the pandemic, just like crashing here while they were shooting up everywhere else in the country. And I was like, oh, they're converging. And that's, that's like odd to me. And so I was like, okay, well, Y C moved here.

• 1:37:04Speaker 06

  OpenAI is just sort of like getting traction and the city's getting better. I think everyone was sort of agreeing to that. And then I was like, well, this is the opportunity and I'm getting licensed and like this is what I'm going to focus on. And then, uh, and then I had a lot of traction with it. So I just sort of got sucked in to be sort of a, you know, full service, like, you know, Rohan in your corner, real estate agent when you're trying to buy or sell a place.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, when did the actual rebound start? Where, where was the trough after COVID?

• 1:37:33Speaker 06

  Um, so the interesting thing about like COVID was 2020, 2021, everyone was leaving San Francisco, but the prices kept going up because interest rates were like practically zero and there were always liquidity events. So prices were rising, even though things were looking like a little bit desperate in the city. And then when interest rates rose, that sort of like tampered the liquidity in the market. And then sort of very end of 2022, things like abruptly dropped. So 2022, end of 2022, 2023, 2024, prices were way down. Um,

• 1:38:09Speaker 06

  And then 2024, by the end of it, there was like a little trickle. And 2025, you sort of had had come out of the bottom, but it was like a slow, you know, like, you know, pretty stable market, but on the upward trajectory. And then end of 2025, then it just sort of started booming like crazy in terms of pricing. And then even from like, you know, March 2026 is like way up compared to like two months ago. So.

• 1:38:36John Coogan?

  So yeah, what does it actually take to raise a family if you're working at a tech company in San Francisco? Because I think a lot of people will move to suburbs, but walk me through, you know, if you're coaching someone that has a couple of kids, they want schools, they want access to their employer. Like, how should they be thinking about what it takes to find a great place in San Francisco these days?

• 1:39:00Speaker 06

  Um, you know, I don't even know if people think of it that way. I think it's like, San Francisco is just like such a scarce place and in all ways. Uh, it's like, there, there's not enough housing, there's not enough like restaurants, there's not enough this or that. And it's sort of like, if you want a place like in San Francisco, you're like so convicted on the idea of it, of the city, of like the tech industry. You're like, you know what? I'm just gonna like do this and then I'll figure the rest of it out. Um, and so like, I don't think people are like, oh, now I have to figure out like what school my kids are gonna go to, or like what my commute will be, or this or that. It's like, if you're sort of like dilly-dally around the edges, you sort of end up never really

• 1:39:41Speaker 06

  sort of being so committed and that kind of ends up being like what makes it hard to buy a place. But like the people that like actually win these, uh, homes, whether they're like, you know, any price point, it's, it's like, there's something mentally inside them that's like, this is the place for me.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. And what does the, the, the, like the down the fairway place in San Francisco look like these days? Is everything over two million, three million? Like where are we in terms of like single family?

• 1:40:09Speaker 06

  Kind of trying to find a place that is, uh, That would fit four people and might have parking and a second bathroom and two or three bedrooms. Um, say like a year ago, it was like around two million. And then if you were slightly above that price, there'd be like a big drop off in competition. Uh, and now it's like that level is sort of definitely moved up to like three-ish million. Um, but there, the bigger change too, is that like, there's like huge level of competitions at any price point now.

• 1:40:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:39Speaker 06

  Um, if it's like one that sort of checks the box for buyers.

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  So give me some advice if I'm trying to win one of those competitions. What do I have to do? I have to show up with all cash? Just put the cash in the bag? What do I have to do?

• 1:40:50Speaker 06

  I mean, all cash, I mean, in any given offer process, like there'll be a decent number of all cash buyers. So it's not like it's gonna, you can walk in and be like, oh, I'm gonna

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 06

  win this because I'm all cash. Like assume like a third or, you know, half might be over a certain price point. Um, and like, I think what you sort of have to realize is there's going to be a range of competition on any given house. So like some houses, uh, you know, this could be like a five or six million dollar house. So pretty expensive house and there might be like 15 offers.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:41:21Speaker 06

  And like the seller's not like gonna just sell it to you because you're a cool guy. Like they're, they, the market will sort of dictate the price. And unfortunately, for buyers, you just have to say, you know, the highest price and the best terms to win.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:34Speaker 06

  Um, and so like what you're sort of trying to navigate is the level of competition any one house is gonna have. So like, say it doesn't have as many bathrooms as you want, but you could figure out how to add one. Or say it's like off market and only a few people know about it. So there's less competition. So like your lever of getting a good deal on a house isn't like, just like participating in a massive auction. It's like trying to participate in a, at an auction only you know about, or a smaller sort of a, you know, a, a different kind of property. So.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  And you're probably expecting it to go a lot higher, I imagine with IPOs. The labs are getting bigger. There's more liquidity. There's new investment rounds happening. What's your forecast?

• 1:42:16Speaker 06

  Um, well, obviously it's like, uh, you know, hard to chow, you know, predict the future, but I wasn't like, oh, I want, I'm a San Francisco real estate agent. You know, like I'm going to say like, you know, whatever, like I decided to get into the market because I thought like this was going to happen. I was like, oh, like these scarce homes are going to become more valuable and people will wish they bought them and like I should focus on this. And so like personally, I'm convicted like the city is on the right trajectory now. Uh, so it's not like contrarian to buy a place here at the moment.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49Speaker 06

  Um, and then there are like liquidity rounds and like that has made a big impact on the market. And if the liquidity rounds get bigger, like there's, it's a fixed number of homes that the, you know, that money goes into. So.

• 1:43:02John Coogan?

  What do you think, uh, expansion looks like over the next few years? Are we gonna, I, I know Mill Valley is booming. There's other suburbs. Is Oakland going to happen? There's this California forever development that's happening. That's further out. Like, uh, are you starting to broaden your horizons? Or do you want to stay focused? And what do you think the real estate buyer will want to do in the near future?

• 1:43:22Speaker 06

  So I, I solely focus on San Francisco, like buyers and sellers. Um, cause like I found that like, in order to like every time, especially on the buyer's side to win, it's sort of like pulling off this like mission impossible like heist. Uh, where it's so elaborate and you have to know like every detail about the market. Um, and so for me personally, like I feel very strongly that I can really help people in San Francisco.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:43:47Speaker 06

  But then if you put me in Mill Valley, it's like, oh, I mean, I don't, I mean, maybe it's good for me to help serve Mill Valley customers, but it's not good for them. So I think like, you know, if you're going to use a real estate agent, you should use one that like really knows a particular market really well. So for me, I want that to be San Francisco.

• 1:44:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of the San Francisco boom is attributable to the labs being based in San Francisco? Like specifically as opposed to the previous generation of, of tech, uh, boom times happening in Menlo Park, Cupertino, sort of on the peninsula?

• 1:44:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. I'd say it's about like 50 50, like explaining what's going on. Like on one hand, like what's really driving it is like the perception that the city is on the right track with like the mayor and like walking around and it just feels better and it feels fun and people are moving there and sort of like, it sort of regained the zeitgeist of like a place you move to, to invent the future. So I think that's like half of it. And then the other half of it is that like, yeah, like. We've had very successful companies in San Francisco, tech companies, but we never had the big one like Meta or Google or Apple. And now like we have two, you know, that like just started that are within that range. And like, it's somewhat unprecedented, I think, even though we've had like hundred billion dollar companies before and like massively

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  successful ones. We've never had this magnitude.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  But this is at a different level and order of magnitude. And so that's just going to drive up attention and excitement and all sorts of things. What are the most underrated neighborhoods? What's on the come up right now?

• 1:45:19Speaker 06

  Um, you know, everyone sort of really wants like Noe Valley, Pack Heights. Like, I think if like, if you're sort of like looking in the Noe area, like Bernal, like the, the kind of the hills right next to it, Glen Park, like, you know, Sunnyside is like dramatically less expensive. Um, like Pack Heights is now like getting to be like back to its sort of premier level pricing, but Russian Hill is like right next to it and like a little bit less like walkable and this, you know, but like, you know, just as great. But now the prices are up there and then like Nob Hill is next to that and the prices are still a little bit down there. So maybe I'd say Nob Hill and, you know, Bernal Heights.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  Well, where can people get in touch with you? How do people reach out if they're looking to buy a place in San Francisco?

• 1:46:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, they can, you know, Google me, Rohandar, and then find my email or just reach out to me on Twitter. And I'm pretty active there. And generally I just share what's going on in the market over there.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat. Thanks so much.

• 1:46:25Speaker 06

  Awesome. Yeah.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:46:27Speaker 06

  Thank you. You too.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  Goodbye. 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. And let me also tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we have Eric Jorgensen, good friend of mine. He is the author, the publisher of the book of Elon. Thank you so much for sending these. It looks fantastic. And I was particularly, I want to get into the, the book, but I, I think partnering up with Jack Butcher on this deeply underrated. He is an incredibly special illustrator, designer. I don't even know what you call Jack Butcher, but obviously he was helpful in this. But thank you so much for taking the time to

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  join the show. How are you doing?

• 1:47:14Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here and extremely excited to put this thing out into the world.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, listen to that voice. You got a voice for live streaming. Let's go.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  The microphone's helping. You got a good setup.

• 1:47:28Speaker 07

  Am I about to get discovered right now?

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  I think so. No, of course, you've been online a million times. Everyone knows you. But maybe, maybe take me back to a little bit of like how you got into publishing, your business overall, the, the Naval book, and then we can go into the Elon book.

• 1:47:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's an amazing setup because then I get to shout out Jack Butcher again. Basically, like I was tweeting and blogging happily in like 2017 and I'd been following Naval. I learned so much from him over the years and I felt like he was putting out this timeless wisdom that was just dissolving into the, the stream every day. And it just broke my heart that it was gonna get lost, get buried so quickly.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. This is the thing with Twitter. It's, it's ephemeral, which is amazing, but there's no rediscoverability. We actually put out this account once, Banger Archive, where we would just share screenshots of old tweets and they would go viral again. But Twitter doesn't, it acts and set up to resurface stuff like that, like YouTube is, like Netflix is. And so the back catalog really goes stale, but you were able to obviously repurpose it.

• 1:48:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think so many of the great books have this like long fat tale of timeless wisdom that we keep needing to revisit. And Naval was, was, you know, obviously has done an incredible job distilling that wisdom and articulating it for sort of our era. And I wanted to preserve that in a permanent format. And that side project that I did in nights and weekends and published, you know, hoping to sell a few thousand copies has gone on to sell, I think we're coming up on 2 million. I've given away 5 million more digital versions and 40 languages.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  So crazy. That's such a huge number. I feel like it's hard to sell 1,000 books and you sold 2 million.

• 1:49:16Speaker 07

  That is a, that is an unbelievable number for those that don't have like inside context in the book industry. Like, I think the median outcome is like a few hundred and like 10,000 is top fraction of a percent.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely incredible. What was the strategy? I mean, Naval has a big audience, but I don't see him pumping this book constantly on his Twitter feed or his X feed. Like, how did this book actually get into hands of customers? Is it like top of Amazon? Is it on the New York Times Bestseller list? Like, how do you even sell that many books?

• 1:49:47Speaker 07

  I cannot explain it other than to say it has become like a word of mouth phenomenon. I think it is just, so many people tell me they buy it as gifts, or they recommend it, or they give it to, you know, I know teachers, they give it to every class that comes through. And it's just sort of, it's, who doesn't, the subtitle of the book is, A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Like, Big Tam, right? Like, Universal Human Desires. And new people graduate into like trying to figure that out for themselves every day. And I think it is, you know, this really rich, dense collection of Naval, who's a really, really gifted sort of a distiller and articulator of some of the most important principles that make life, make lives successful.

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  What, what principles from that book either stick out to you, are timeless, or maybe even underrated, that you keep coming back to?

• 1:50:39Speaker 07

  I think, I mean, the, on the wealth side, like leverage is, is still an underrated one. I mean, you guys are living examples of this. Authenticity is another one. Like, that word is thrown around so much that it becomes sort of a cliche. But the people that we tend to admire the most, or that are doing the best, are a really interesting combination of like excellent, authentic, and leveraged, right? Like, Jack Butcher is an incredible example. You don't even really know how to describe him. He's like, he's an artist, but he's a contemporary artist in the digital era, and he's a really gifted designer. He's kind of like inventing this category of networked art. But whatever he is, is him, and it's awesome, and it's massively leveraged. And, you know, he's doing things

• 1:51:23Speaker 07

  that nobody else is doing in the art game.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  Do you think that?

• 1:51:30John Coogan?

  Being controversial is correlated with authenticity. Because if you're not authentic, you can be this very polished, one side, you know, many-faced thing. You interact with one person in a certain way, another person another way. You make everyone happy. You're less controversial. As soon as you start wearing your heart on your sleeve, being authentic, you're going to attract some people that don't like what you're showing them because you're showing them the true self. Is there anything there?

• 1:51:58Speaker 07

  It's a great question. I bet there's two opposing archetypes. I bet there is a type of person that is extremely inauthentic in how they court controversy for the benefit of, you know, the algorithm or just being elevated by being attacked. And I bet there's another set of people that are authentic despite any headwinds or controversy that might come up. And I think the only way to probably tell the difference is just zoom out and see who's been doing what for how long and in under what contexts.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  So, how obvious was it that Elon was going to be the next subject? I imagine that the playbook that you ran, the process that you ran with the Naval book could apply to a lot of entrepreneurs. It's a very interesting style where it's, it's, it's, it's high leverage. I can only think, I can only describe it as high leverage because you're, you're standing on the shoulders of giants, which is like all of the work that they've produced, all of the podcasts that they've done, everything that they have written. There's a lot of primary research there that doesn't necessarily require the same, you know, access and permission.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  And you can do a lot of pre-work, independent, before you actually go in. Whereas some other books, it's like, okay, this author didn't even get the interview with the person that they're writing about. Like, they sort of, you know, no one wanted this book to happen. And that's a lot harder, right? So, so, so I imagine that the list was pretty long. How did you narrow it down? How did you land on Elon? Why this person? Why this time?

• 1:53:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is an interesting, it's an interesting type of book because as you point out, like, I'm not writing about someone, I'm trying to get out of the way. It's not about my opinion of them.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:46Speaker 07

  My north star with these books is to just be as, for the book to be as useful as possible to the reader. I want the reader on every single page to be like, oh my God, this is a great use of time. I got a highlight on every page. I'm getting so much out of this. I feel like I'm getting personally mentored by Elon Musk through a few hours of reading about his most valuable and timeless ideas, right?

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Speaker 07

  And I think for those of us in tech, Elon's been interesting for a very long time.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:10Speaker 07

  And over the last, you know, five, six years, uh, he's become more controversial, but inside tech, he was, before he was a household name, he was the most ambitious person in tech and nobody knew how that story was gonna end, right? He was running on a very thin, tight rope for a really long time with both Tesla and SpaceX.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:31Speaker 07

  And more recently, people have started, I mean, Marc Andreessen and Brian Armstrong, maybe most famously, have started asking the question like, how does Elon do it? Like, what is this? Why is he an outlier among outliers? And I wanted to answer that question, and I think this book does that in more ways than I anticipated at the outset, right?

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:52Speaker 07

  Like, I think there was some interesting stuff that everybody kind of knew would come in, and there's like the greatest hits, and then there's the back catalog, and then how it all comes together is actually like, what's really interesting.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember in college, someone called me and was like, oh, I heard about this, this entrepreneur named Elon Musk, and he runs two companies, SpaceX and Tesla. And I was like, of course I know about that. I'd learned about it like three months earlier. But, but it really was a very, a very controversial thing to do, the, you know, the timeless wisdom is like, focus, focus, focus. How have you perceived Elon's ability to be like, the exception that proves the rule versus a pattern that might actually be more replicable than people think if they just adopt a particular stance in how they leverage what they're

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  capable of to build multiple companies simultaneously?

• 1:55:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's just a couple, there was a period where Jack Dorsey was running two companies, this period where Steve Jobs was running two companies, uh, and there's plenty of companies that are collections of... Meaningfully different companies kind of in one, under one name. I think it's kind of hard to extricate like, what does run the company mean?

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Speaker 07

  Really, on a day to day basis? And who is around and who's running different functions? Like Elon running a company probably looks a lot different than Steve Jobs running a company, or than, you know, Bill Gates running a company, or Marc Benioff, right? The motions that he dives deeply into are very different, kind of on a per leader basis. And there's an element of this that like, Naval points this out, I think it's super interesting. He's like, you are probably working harder on your company than Naval is, or than Elon is working on any one of his companies, just because he has this divided attention. So let's just say he's working 80 hours a week, but he's only working 30 hours a week on SpaceX.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50Speaker 07

  Like, how is he able to have orders of magnitude more impact in those 30 hours than you're having with your 70?

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  Well, it is sort of, it is sort of interesting, like, maybe ironic that his main competitor over the last two decades has been Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin, who's also running two companies and so like-

• 1:57:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, and retired and-

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, now, now maybe more focused, you know, he's retired, but there was a long time, like a full decade where Jeff Bezos was running Amazon full time and then, you know, Blue Origin was the halftime or side project and Elon sort of didn't have a direct, like, full time, you know, by the book entrepreneur, just building a direct competitor in that one space, fully focused. So, I don't know, maybe, maybe that's luck, maybe, maybe things play out differently if, if there was someone in that space, but it's clearly, it's clearly worked out.

• 1:57:40Speaker 07

  We kind of end up conflating like Elon the person-

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 07

  Like Elon the core team around him and Elon the, the symbol, frankly. And especially at this point in his career, he's one of the most leveraged people alive, right? So we are ascribing to like, quote unquote Elon, what is actually the effort of tens of thousands of engineers and, you know, plenty of other employees and fans and supporters. And there's, there's beauty to that, right? Like, we are humans, we rally around people, kind of- Better than we do with symbols. But that becomes this rallying, like this, uh, this rallying point for people to like organize around the values exemplified by this person.

• 1:58:26Speaker 07

  And I think that's, uh, that's beautiful and magical and part of the formula. But it does tend to like, if you conflate the conversation about the guy with the conversation about the symbol, you end up in this really weird.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:39Speaker 07

  Kind of arguments with people, or you're not even really talking about the same thing.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about the, the thinking in decades concept? You know, it's something that everyone in Silicon Valley says, oh, you gotta think in decades. And then Elon comes out with something that's like 20, 30, 40 years away. And everyone's like, no, we didn't actually want thinking in decades. I want to know something that's gonna happen for sure in like five years tops. Uh, I'm thinking about this mass driver, uh, question. And I'm wondering like, uh, now that you've, you've written this book, you've, you've studied Elon, like, is this a departure? Is he thinking even farther in the future? Or has he always been thinking around this time horizon? Like, how similar is this crazy mass driver on the moon pitch compared to previous eras?

• 1:59:26Speaker 07

  I think it's difficult to predict, as are many things. But if his theory and his acting principle is that the future is arriving ever faster. Right? And so things that at our previous growth rate or technology trajectory seemed like they were 30 years away are actually now maybe 10. It is really difficult to adjust for that, like recursion factor.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:59:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  Well, where can people find the book?

• 1:59:55Speaker 07

  Uh, anywhere you buy books, Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, Target. Uh, it just came out like yesterday.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  Are you gonna do an audiobook?

• 2:00:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, the audiobook's out. I didn't read it.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you got to read it. You got this. Put them to work. Well, Eric Jorgenson, thank you for joining. The book is The Book of Elon. You can go find it everywhere books are sold. And we will talk to you soon, Eric. Thank you so much.

• 2:00:21Speaker 08

  Appreciate you.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  To join the show. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context in beta starting today. And our next guests are live here with us in the TVP in Ultra. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. How are you doing? Please, since this is your first time on the show, introduce yourself for everyone.

• 2:00:44Speaker 09

  I am Jenny Just, co-founder of Peak Six.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:47Speaker 08

  And I'm Matt Hulsizer, Jenny's husband and also co-founder.

• 2:00:50John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Take us back in time. I want to hear the founding story.

• 2:00:56Speaker 09

  Founding story. We both grew up on the option trading floors, Chicago and New York. And we were at an infamous options trading firm called O'Connor Associates.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  You were both at the same firm?

• 2:01:11Speaker 09

  We were both at the same firm, different cities. Yeah. So, super lucky to be trained there. When they did their merger acquisition, UBS.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Who was in Chicago?

• 2:01:20Speaker 09

  I was.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Did you ever go to Series?

• 2:01:22Speaker 09

  Of course.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  The best place. Series is amazing.

• 2:01:24Speaker 09

  Yeah. It's getting kind of modern these days.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I worked at Citadel in college and that was the place where we'd go and hang out and they'd give you, you'd order like a, like a rum and coke and it would just be a full glass of rum. It was crazy.

• 2:01:38Speaker 09

  That's right. And a really good greasy sandwich to go with it. Really good. Good fries.

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  Okay. So you're in Chicago.

• 2:01:43Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we're in Chicago. We decided, we started working together.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where were you trading at the time?

• 2:01:50Speaker 09

  Equity options, both of us were.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Equity options.

• 2:01:52Speaker 09

  Yeah. And then when they did the original Swiss bank joint venture, we were part of the team that went to start the OTC.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:59Speaker 09

  Derivative desk. So there was just three of us. There's a gentleman from Goldman who came in. And so we're like, oh, this is cool. We're in our mid twenties, starting a business, you know, an entrepreneur. And when things started going really well, and then UBS came in and they were moving to the East Coast. We're like, well, we're not moving. He had actually just come from New York.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:18Speaker 09

  And my family's in the Midwest. So we're like, we're just, we'll just do that thing again.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Speaker 09

  So that thing was to partner with a bank. That was our plan A. And

• 2:02:30Speaker 09

  Do over the counter derivatives.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:33Speaker 09

  We it's 28 and a half years later, we've still never done it.

• 2:02:36John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:02:36Speaker 09

  But we did invest really early in tech and education.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:40Speaker 09

  And so we created proprietary options trading firm.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:44Speaker 09

  Which is 28 and a half years old that has never had a losing year.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:02:47Speaker 09

  And it allowed us to self-fund.

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 09

  All the things we've done since then.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  And what's the secret to such an incredible run with no losing years? Is that risk management? Is that the particular strategy? Like, how does that come together? Because I can't think of another investor who's ever done that.

• 2:03:06Speaker 09

  It's unusual, for sure.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:07Speaker 09

  Go ahead.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  It's a secret.

• 2:03:08Speaker 08

  Well, I think it tends to be about like our approach.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:11Speaker 08

  Our approach was not to be smarter with our algorithms.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:15Speaker 08

  It was smarter with our business model. So there are plenty of businesses that haven't had losing years in the last 29 years.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Speaker 08

  They tend to be technology firms.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:23Speaker 08

  That are basically providing a service into the market, which is the approach that we, I mean, we talked about ourselves as Wendy's or Walmart, Walgreens. Like, we're merchandisers.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:37Speaker 08

  We carry inventory and then deliver it to customers. We're not trying to take the, we're not disagreeing with customers. We're providing a service.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  And then on the investment side, what is out further on the risk curve for you?

• 2:03:51Speaker 08

  I mean, I think we've lost money in more ways than anyone you've ever had on this show.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Well, uh.

• 2:03:57Speaker 09

  Collectively.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  What is the nature of an investment that doesn't pan out? Is it just, it's high risk and you know that going in? Or, yeah?

• 2:04:06Speaker 09

  Well, there's a wide range. Obviously, in our trading business, it's really systematic.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:11Speaker 09

  We have an amazing team. We educate kids right out of school into our model.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 09

  It's really rare that they would leave and be able to do the same thing because it is about the collective.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:22Speaker 09

  But.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  That's interesting.

• 2:04:23Speaker 09

  But we started a whole bunch of other businesses, of course, so. Peak six today, based on what Eric was saying in your previous interview. It's a company of companies.

• 2:04:33Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 2:04:33Speaker 09

  So we have started or bought and turned around 15 ish companies at this point. And primarily in the backend technology space in fintech.

• 2:04:44Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:04:44Speaker 09

  Definitely in insuretech, which is relatively new to us.

• 2:04:47Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 09

  And edu tech. So those are the biggest risks we're taking. And then fast forward, as we built those businesses over the years, we started an investing side of the business, which is quite large because it's all AI stuff now.

• 2:05:00Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:05:00Speaker 09

  And we started early enough, so it grew really fast.

• 2:05:03Speaker 08

  We have some doozies. I mean. I don't want to dwell on it. Yeah, no, no, we'll refer. We're this is a, this is a callback to your previous person. In 2008, we had, it was a good year for us, not because we were smart and short the market. Yeah. Jenny was like, she's like, things are confusing. We should be in cash and we were. So it's lucky. Well, she was right. The market goes crazy and then we have a lot of cash. Everybody starts knocking on your door in the fall and she's like, well, why don't we do something good for humanity? We'll do electric vehicles. Sure. So we are early. Yeah. So we interviewed two different people at the time.

• 2:05:37Speaker 09

  And we're not investors at this point. We are traders.

• 2:05:40Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Speaker 09

  So it's two different things. We are operators, traders.

• 2:05:43Speaker 08

  I still don't know if we're investors.

• 2:05:44Speaker 09

  Investors, yeah.

• 2:05:45Speaker 08

  We're just knuckleheads.

• 2:05:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:47Speaker 08

  We get two people. We're going to interview the two companies at the time. Yeah. One is this PayPal guy who's trying to do it. And the other is the guy who was the chief architect at BMW. The PayPal guy gets on the call, on a call with us.

• 2:06:03Speaker 09

  With you.

• 2:06:03Speaker 08

  With me.

• 2:06:04Speaker 09

  Just to be clear.

• 2:06:04Speaker 08

  Okay. She. You gotta distance yourself from this.

• 2:06:07Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:06:08Speaker 08

  You gotta see where this is going.

• 2:06:09Speaker 09

  Yes, you know where it's going.

• 2:06:10Speaker 08

  I mean, if he's list, if he listens to this, I don't know if he'll remember because I think he was stoned out of his mind. Okay. It was the worst presentation I've ever heard. Like this guy's never going to build a car.

• 2:06:20Speaker 09

  It wasn't about cars. It was about, it's about the, the train.

• 2:06:23Speaker 08

  He was talking about trains. Trains.

• 2:06:25Speaker 09

  Between LA and Tampa.

• 2:06:26Speaker 08

  Electromagnetic trains. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also be useful. I was like, what the hell are we talking about here? This is supposed to be a business investment. I want to hear the business pitch. And the other person comes in buttoned up, right? German engineer. Yep. Amazing. Built these my entire career. Hundred percent. So we go with that person. Okay. And then nine months later, we find out that the one we invested in. Yeah. When it rains, the cars catch on fire and explode.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  That's the craziest outside.

• 2:06:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's not a good, that's not a good business.

• 2:06:58Speaker 09

  That's a bad dumb side, yeah.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of investors have had to really come around to the, the, the other pattern of thinking. I know.

• 2:07:06Speaker 09

  That's right.

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  Some investors that, uh, I mean, e- even on the other side, I know, I know an investor that passed on Tesla, but not, uh, but not because Elon was thinking too futuristic. Uh, he was thinking, well, all the cars are going to be self-driving and no one's going to need a car anymore. So if this guy's just building cars, why should I invest in this?

• 2:07:23Speaker 09

  At all.

• 2:07:23John Coogan?

  And, uh, and of course the, it was Tesla was going to be the one to do that, but that was too hard to predict. And it just gets very, very hard when you think that far out. So walk me through a deal that is in the wheelhouse. Um, what's the structure? Are you looking for a particular vintage, an age, a size of like, you know, meat on the bones of the company? Um, and then what are you looking to do? Because there's, when, when you come into a new company, you can be transforming the business with AI, you can be, uh, focused on cost reduction, back office rationalization. Like there's so many different techniques that you can use to drive value.

• 2:07:59Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'll, I'll start, maybe I'll start with Peak Six Trials.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:08:03Speaker 09

  So at its core, we're entrepreneurs, right? That's what we do.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:06Speaker 09

  So we're comfortable with that risk. Ironically, it doesn't make us super comfortable doing venture because.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Speaker 09

  We're not doing it.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:11Speaker 09

  So we have to find really special people. We've been lucky in the universe of Peak Six to have some of those special people along the way.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:18Speaker 09

  We just started something called Peak Six Trials, which is, and think about entrepreneurship and residence. We have, it's, you know, like previous accelerators.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:29Speaker 09

  Except for that we have the capital, it's already there.

• 2:08:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:32Speaker 09

  We have the resources, the tech resources, for example, legal compliance, whatever it is, already there. And then we also have the customers.

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:39Speaker 09

  Because of Apex Fintech Solutions. So that's our backend tech. Powers.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:08:44Speaker 09

  Forty million customers today. So, and consumers were B2B.

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:48Speaker 09

  So there's a unique opportunity for fintech, insuretech type of young entrepreneurs who want to do something. That's how we want to make those bets. Um, that will go into our operating company.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:01Speaker 09

  Scenario. And then, I don't know, you want to talk about the investment side where we take, what kind of, what kind of investments we're looking for?

• 2:09:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Or even just the story of Apex. I'd love to know like how that came into the portfolio, what the process was like. That's, I can tell it's already gonna be a good story.

• 2:09:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, so there was a public company called Pensinn.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Speaker 08

  We owned and operated a brokerage called Options House at the time.

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:27Speaker 08

  This predates Wealthfront Betterment and Robinhood, et cetera. And that business custody, kept the assets, right, at Pensinn, along with a million other customers, retail customers.

• 2:09:41Speaker 09

  So we're in 2012 at this point.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:43Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:09:43Speaker 08

  And we get a call from the CEO of the bank. This is the bank that holds our money, calls on a Friday. He's like, hey, you guys have some money and could you lend us some money for a little bit? It would help us a lot.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:00Speaker 08

  I'm like, let me think about it, I gotta talk to Jenny.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 08

  She's like, we gotta, that's not a good sign. For your, for your listeners or watch, your viewers, if your bank calls you and asks to borrow more money, like, that's trouble.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:14Speaker 08

  So, Monday morning, we get a call from the SEC. There's fraud, announced fraud at the, at the clearing firm.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:10:25Speaker 08

  And we want you to put $70 million into the business by Friday.

• 2:10:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:10:30Speaker 08

  Or we're gonna liquidate everybody.

• 2:10:32Speaker 09

  And that's everybody in the market. So think pre-generation Robinhood, for context.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:36Speaker 09

  All those names out there.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:38Speaker 09

  Those middle-tier names besides the big names.

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:40Speaker 09

  Options House, our firm was one of them.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:42Speaker 09

  They're all gonna go.

• 2:10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:43Speaker 09

  So, 13 days later, we bought it.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:10:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:10:47Speaker 08

  Announced fraud and all.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  That's wild. Yeah, yeah, I've heard a number of these stories of like, turning around a company when there is fraud. I mean, Strauss Zelnick sort of did this with Take-Two, is fantastic, turned around to that business. It feels like an incredible cultural challenge to actually... Not just clean up the legal documents and make this SEC happy with whatever happened. It's actually a cultural problem sometimes that led the company down that path.

• 2:11:12Speaker 09

  That's right.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about cultural development generally? I feel like when I, when I dig into different funds, there's fascinatingly different approaches. You know, the, the Ray Dalio's recording everything. There's like so many different, but you mentioned that like when you train a new grad, they come out with skills that are uniquely just synergistic with the rest of the firm. And so how do you think about the cultural values that you want to instill in the next generation?

• 2:11:46Speaker 09

  They are, they are critical, really difficult in times of COVID and changing work from home and all those things. And as we continue to build new companies, right? So, you know, at our firm that's over 28 years old, they are ingrained. It is a sense of urgency. It's a work ethic, like it's, it's just high. And even when the market is telling you, you know, we ought to be different or nicer or something, like people are so engaged. It's, it's really fun to be in the markets, so it makes that easy. It's fun to be part of an entrepreneurial culture.

• 2:12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:23Speaker 09

  So that makes that easy. So how do I? And if you don't fit, it actually, they weed out pretty quickly. We've had that benefit over the years. But every time we take on a new company, it is, it is a challenge for us to try and integrate or have them stand in their own culture, which is also fine with us, right? So if we, we sit at the top and we have CEOs of each of these businesses, they are dependent quite a bit on the peak six core because it's, it's facilitating the financial stuff. It's facilitating the HR stuff. And if they want to sort of ignore that and not join the club, it's a hard road because we've figured out such a rhythm.

• 2:13:07Speaker 09

  When you get in the rhythm, it makes each, the acceleration goes so much faster. The leverage we get with our people, with the culture is just really exponential.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, some people refer to it as like you stress, the good type of stress. It's a stressful scenario, but it gives you energy. It doesn't actually drain you. I feel like if people get, you know, the runner's high. So running is very stressful for some people, but for some people it's invigorating. And I feel like if, you know, being in the market at a tumultuous time gives you more energy during that day, that's something where you'll probably thrive.

• 2:13:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, I was going to say, taking risk, right? Starting as traders and becoming operators and then investors, like at its core, that trading, that heart and soul of trading and taking risk every day, all day, getting used to it, that isn't in everybody's DNA. It is part of the reason why we like poker so much. We're trying to teach a million girls and women to play poker.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:14:05Speaker 09

  Solely to get these male dominated areas for the women to feel more welcome. But you have to be able to take that risk every day. And the organization thrives on it, right? It's a little scary.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  I know like 10 amazing female venture investors and they're all incredible poker players. I would never sit down with them. They would absolutely smoke me.

• 2:14:22Speaker 09

  Well, the funny thing is I didn't play all these years. When I started playing in 2019, it was a conversation we had. It was about our daughter, et cetera. But I realized, I was like, wait, I've been playing poker my whole career. I just didn't know it. It's the closest thing I'd ever seen to options trading. So I was like, wait, is this what's missing? Because if we get, who cares how people come into the puzzle? The more differentiated their backgrounds are for us, right? If you look at 1997 and he and I were partners, that's what, by the way, we weren't married at the time. We were together 10 years before we did. So making that decision, that was a highly unusual decision to be made. She chased me.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  I love it, I love it. What are you looking for in a CEO? If I want to come work for you and work for one of your portfolio companies, what does it take to make it as a CEO?

• 2:15:15Speaker 08

  I don't think there's any, like, there's no one thing, there's no prescriptive formula. The number one thing we've learned, because we've, look, we've dealt with thousands of employees, CEOs, et cetera, invested, I don't know, hundreds, not thousands, of businesses.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:32Speaker 08

  Self-awareness is probably the most important thing, because what's gonna, it can get you in trouble. If you think you're really smart, like, you, you better be really smart. Poker teaches you a lot of that, that's a good callback there for you.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Speaker 08

  The self-awareness, like, you control effort, you control attitude, those two things you really do control. Like, so hard work, great, you're gonna be positive, optimist, but awareness, like, like, hey, we're the best.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:02Speaker 08

  You know, by the way, these other people aren't that good, like, you should think about it. Like, constantly questioning where you're at and being humble.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is, is, is self-awareness around intelligence the main flaw for CEOs? Or, or are there CEOs that are overconfident in their deal-making ability, in their emotional intelligence, in their managerial ability, in their ability to public speak and do, there's so many different things. The CEO is a bundle of traits. I, I, I feel like intelligence is obviously super important, making good strategic decisions, executing, but there's so much else that goes into actually running a company.

• 2:16:40Speaker 08

  I wouldn't say, I would not say lack of confidence is not necessarily an issue.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:45Speaker 08

  Overconfidence is disaster.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 2:16:49Speaker 08

  You get yourself in a lot of trouble because you know for sure that this is gonna happen. And when it doesn't, you, you're in a, you're in a world of hurt.

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Speaker 08

  That happens.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  So, so what are the signs that you're looking for to suss out if someone is self-actualized in that way? Aware of their, their flaws, aware of their strengths, their weaknesses? How are you interrogating that in an interview?

• 2:17:15Speaker 09

  We hate interviews.

• 2:17:16John Coogan?

  Okay, how do you recruit that?

• 2:17:17Speaker 09

  It's hard, it's hard. We've actually tried to build tech over the years. We've done all different things to try and figure it out. We try and have, without being inefficient, as long of a process as we can to see somebody. So if we can get a student in December for two weeks during their break and see them, or we have a women's trading experience that's eight weeks in the summer. Anytime we get an extension of time, if we can, I mean, the CEOs is the hardest. They often come from within for us.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:50Speaker 09

  Now, some of our CEOs did not. But it is, our hit ratio, I think, on just cold interview, making it right, I think is really hard. So then, of course, it's connections and recommendations and all those things. Because you don't know all of the different pieces of the puzzle. I think people get to know it all the time.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have a bright line between deal team, operating team? Like, those who evaluate a great company to join the portfolio versus those who will be going and operating the businesses?

• 2:18:24Speaker 08

  We have a very, very small evaluating team.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:27Speaker 08

  Like, this is the team.

• 2:18:30Speaker 09

  No, we have some really smart, there's some lawyers and some analysts in there.

• 2:18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Speaker 09

  But at the end of the day, so we don't have outside money.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:37Speaker 09

  So it's ours and then our employees who have become partners over the years. So that's who we're investing on behalf. And so, but we are looking for any guidance. We are just, we know we're not the smartest. But that's what trading does for you. It humbles you really quickly. So how do we connect? How do we partner with great people on the outside? And then with the best people internally to make a decision. But we're also willing, we're willing to take probably more risk on average, I would say, with some of these investments. I mean, we're not, you know, on the energy side or on the power side or on that infrastructure side for us is new. But we started early and we try and get smart and try and be surrounded by smart people.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  I want to get to energy. That sounds fascinating. I want to first ask about sourcing. Are you close with a lot of investment banks? Or are you cold calling people and saying, "I want to buy the company"? Like, if you're to the deal team, where are the ideas coming from?

• 2:19:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a, the good ones come from interpersonal relations.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:36Speaker 08

  Which is why, like in the age of AI, everything's going to be automated, everything, like, this really matters. Showing up in a studio, you'll hopefully send us, you know, you'll say, hey, I have an idea for you guys.

• 2:19:48Speaker 09

  And vice versa, huh?

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 2:19:50Speaker 08

  I would say that's 99% of our sourcing.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  That's 99% of it.

• 2:19:53Speaker 08

  And it, but it's worked pretty well.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  That's so interesting. I mean, yeah, we, we, we talked to investors across the category. There's some that are doing tons of outbound. They have a price for every company in their CRM. They have an army of deal associates that are getting out there, pounding the pavement. There's other folks who, yeah, just wildly different strategies. It's fascinating.

• 2:20:13Speaker 09

  Well, for being a very quiet firm for a very long time, it didn't allow us to have what we now realize we probably should have been doing for a while. It's building those relationships. But it's been quick coming out, like coming out and building those relationships and figuring out how to make it work. We're more mature doing it. We know what we're looking for. We made a shit ton of mistakes, so like, you know, it's, it's easy to start, you know, they're not, they're not perfect, but they rhyme with the past, right? So we're, we're good at, we're good at saying no, I would say.

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's talk about the energy side. What's interesting there? It's a very broad category. We talked to a founder yesterday who's refining uranium to go into nuclear power plants that won't come online for five years on the good side. Then at the same time, we talked to, you know, Chase Lochmiller from Crusoe. He's building data center, putting up power plants today. There's so many other pieces of infrastructure, so many, the supply chain is so complicated. Where is the opportunity?

• 2:21:22Speaker 08

  We like Crusoe or investors in Crusoe. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. No way. Oh, yeah. That's amazing. We've got a lot of investments. Okay. And I think what is interesting in energy is it tends to be there's some individuals or individual companies that are doing some stuff that's that we see as transformational. Yeah. So everybody's very worried about energy. Yeah. Whatever happens with the war, we don't have any thoughts on that. Yeah. But assuming that things are peaceful, like, hey, is it going to be nuclear? Is it going to be? Solar. Solar, et cetera. Geothermal is really interesting. So we're big investors in a company called Furvo. Okay. It's in Utah. Yeah. It's, your viewers should look it up. Yeah. It's transformational and it's today. Today.

• 2:22:05Speaker 08

  So it's built, they're going to deliver, I don't know, 500 megs in. Wow. Yeah, that's a 2027. Wow. Like delivery. Okay, yeah, that's enough. That's the average Metacampus right now. Okay, and remember, it's fracking. It's traditional. Yeah, yeah. Drilling, but not in traditional areas. Okay. Okay, so I think more remote areas. Sure. Are there side effects? It's unclear. I don't think there are necessarily, but maybe there could be some seismic. Yeah, sure. But like, that's super interesting and the people who are doing that, like, by the way, there's plenty of heat down there. Yeah. It doesn't heat the planet. There's a bunch of physics around that. Sure, sure. We're not physicists, but it won't make the planet hotter. Yeah, because net zero. So that's a good one. I think there's another company in Utah that we like a lot. We were talking to him earlier.

• 2:22:50Speaker 08

  It's Taurus Energy. And that is what effectively what you saw in cloud compute is cloud energy. Okay. And so Taurus is a, it's basically, it's a flywheel business. Okay. Like actually a flywheel. Okay. Like a physical, like this table. Like a literal flywheel, except it weighs about 3,500 pounds. Power. Okay. But it spins. Remember, the issue with power is that it's, everybody draws at the same time. If you're Snow Basin in Utah and you draw on power to run your tram. Yeah. At the same time and everybody's, hey, by the way, OpenAI is going to run one of their. Sure, sure, sure. You know, one of their loops, then you're going to end up drawing tons of power and that's expensive for the grid. So what?

• 2:23:31Speaker 08

  Nate has done and his team at Taurus is they're a balancer.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  The load balance.

• 2:23:37Speaker 08

  It's the load balance. And you realize there's actually quite a bit of power. How you actually balance the power is the hard part and he's solved it. So they are operating today. We talked to him earlier. He's in a bunch of different states and he's coming to a state near you.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. Well, tell me more about Peak Six Trials. Where can people get started? How do people apply or join?

• 2:24:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, so peaksixtrials.com. And we're looking for entrepreneurs who have ideas. And everything else is sort of there. You don't have to go and raise money. You don't have to spend time doing that. Think about the things that where your specialty is, is your idea. This is a place with AI. Like we can do a bunch of stuff around you. And interestingly, like with Apex, right? We have these 40 million customers. They might want your product. And if they don't want your product, that's also really good news. So we short circuit all these things that take to say like, is this a good idea? Or not? You don't have to worry about the capital. You don't have to worry about paying your rent. We actually pay your salary. Yeah, so it's really nicely packaged for someone. I wish we had it at the time.

• 2:24:48Speaker 09

  It would have made me feel better. Maybe we were better off because we took so much risk. You never know. But the balance here is we want the people who bring the ideas and we help support and build it ultimately to own the majority of the thing, not for us to own the majority of things. So the way we've structured the deals are really creative, I think, and different than the marketplace has seen so far. So finding those people, right? Those young entrepreneurs, or they may not be so young entrepreneurs. They can be anywhere. But it's really, I mean, I think it's super broad with the fintech sort of space is. Like everything's money. Every large CPG company who has a bunch of customers, there's some money product that

• 2:25:32Speaker 09

  exists or could exist in that ecosystem. So there's a lot of ideas I think that are out there. We're going to pick 12 to 15 for the first year and we're going to see what we can do and see what we can pump through.

• 2:25:43John Coogan?

  That's great. Last question. What's the best way? I'm terrible at poker. What's the best way for me to learn and get better?

• 2:25:51Speaker 09

  Well, we have amazing teachers around the country, which is kinda crazy. We're like at 28 teachers. We have taught at like 360 companies. So you can actually bring us to

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  your company. Oh, really?

• 2:26:01Speaker 09

  The banks, the technology firms, the law firms, yes.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  I think they might like it.

• 2:26:05Speaker 09

  It's been wild how people have picked it up, right?

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:07Speaker 09

  First of all, we're not playing for money. We're actually teaching because these are people who know nothing.

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Speaker 09

  But, um, you know, 94% of poker players on the planet are men. So, yes, yeah, it's really extreme. So, I mean, after a couple hundred years of this game coming around, it's probably time for women to be doing this.

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:26Speaker 09

  Um, we're in 70 countries. We're in rural villages in Kenya, for example. So, we are super quick, turnkey events, best events that are on the... PokerPower.com. Yes.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  PokerPower.com. I love it. Well, thank you both for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:26:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  Uh, we will close the show here on this camera. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Uh, we'll be live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific, sharp. Uh, sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Thank you.