Jassy's Shareholder Letter, The Next AI Capability, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Saagar Enjeti, Joe Weisenthal, Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, Brian Manning, Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, Changpeng Zhao, Tal Hoffman

(01:25) - Jassy's Shareholder Letter (23:24) - AI in CyberSecurity (27:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (40:41) - Saagar Enjeti, an American journalist and political commentator, co-hosts the independent news program "Breaking Points" alongside Krystal Ball. In the conversation, he discusses the significant capital expenditures by companies like Amazon on data centers, highlighting the resulting community pushback due to concerns over energy consumption, environmental impact, and displacement of residents. Enjeti emphasizes the need for a democratic process in approving such projects, advocating for transparency and local input to address the growing animosity toward data center developments. (01:01:09) - Joe Weisenthal, born September 2, 1980, in Detroit, Michigan, is an American journalist and television presenter, currently serving as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands and co-host of the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, he discusses the New York Times' investigation into the identity of Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, focusing on the claim that Adam Back is Nakamoto. Weisenthal expresses skepticism about the evidence presented, noting that many early cypherpunks shared similar ideas on privacy and internet architecture, which could explain the overlap in writing and ideology. (01:24:06) - Andrew Dai is the co-founder of Elorian, an AI company building multimodal reasoning models that can understand and interpret the physical world across text, images, and video. He focuses on advancing visual reasoning as a step toward more general intelligence. (01:31:56) - Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, co-founder and CEO of Luminai, discusses how his company helps large health systems automate operations and back-office tasks, such as processing patient referrals, by leveraging advanced AI models to handle traditionally manual processes like faxed documents. He highlights the importance of a deep, forward-deployed approach to understand the nuanced workflows of healthcare institutions, noting that while on-premises solutions are offered for data security, most clients prefer cloud-based deployments. Kesava also mentions the significant growth of unstructured data in healthcare and announces Luminai's recent $38 million Series B funding led by Sequoia India, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. (01:40:58) - Brian Manning, CEO and co-founder of Xona Space Systems, discusses the launch of their new satellite factory in San Francisco, following a recent $170 million Series C funding round. Xona is developing a network of small satellites positioned 20 times closer to Earth than existing GPS systems, aiming to provide highly accurate and reliable navigation services. Originally focused on supporting autonomous vehicles, the company has expanded its mission to enhance performance for the over 7 billion GPS devices worldwide. (01:53:14) - Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz is the CEO and co-founder of Chapter, an AI-powered Medicare navigation platform that assists seniors in selecting appropriate health coverage. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges seniors face with Medicare enrollment, including the complexity of choosing from over 24,000 plans and the prevalence of deceptive marketing practices. He emphasizes the need for better data transparency and the role of technology in simplifying the Medicare selection process. (01:59:25) - Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, is the founder and former CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. In the conversation, he discusses his motivations for writing a book to share his personal story and correct misconceptions about himself, Binance, and the crypto industry. He also addresses the evolving regulatory landscape in the U. S., emphasizing the need for clarity and balance between oversight and privacy in the crypto space. (02:21:15) - Tal Hoffman, co-founder and CEO of Enclave, an AI code security platform, discusses the company's use of large language models to identify critical vulnerabilities in codebases that traditional scanners often miss. He highlights the significance of recent advancements in AI and cybersecurity, emphasizing the importance of exploitability in assessing vulnerabilities. Hoffman also shares that Enclave has raised $6 million in seed funding led by 8VC, with participation from notable investors like Aaron Levie and Marc Benioff. 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. Today is Thursday, April 9th, 2026. We are live from the TVP in UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  I was getting a little worried Monday. There was not a lot of fundraises going on. I was looking at the schedule and I was thinking, is it over? And today, I'm happy to report that we're back. Andrew Dai is coming on from Alorian, raised a $55 million seed round. We got Kesava coming on with a $38 million Series B. We got $170 million Series C later, and then $100 million Series E. And then, a nice little mango seed from the Enclave team to cap it off. But, really fun show today. We got Saagar and Jetty from Breaking Points,

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  our friend over there coming on. We got Joe Weisenthal, Wise and Tall, and then CZ from Binance, who is releasing Freedom of Money, detailing Binance's rise to crypto evolution, and of course, his US legal battle.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Memoir. And I'm excited to talk to Joe about the, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? And I'm also excited to talk to CZ about who he thinks Satoshi Nakamoto is. You would imagine that he's in a position to potentially have a good, a good take on that. Anyway, there is a ton of AI news. Andy Jassy released the 2025 Shareholders Letter. Amazon is known for fantastic shareholders letters dating back to 1997. I thought he did a good job of sort of resetting the AI narrative. There's this AI Lab horse race going on. Of course, we've been covering it all week. Anthropic's Mythos preview and Project Glasswing launched on Tuesday, quickly followed by news today that OpenAI also plans to deliver a model

• 1:52John Coogan?

  with advanced cybersecurity capabilities to key internet infrastructure providers. And there's this debate going on over how and when these models will roll out. I think this is going to be an ongoing trend. I don't think cybersecurity is the last model capability that will be slowly delivered to key companies. First, cybersecurity is a perfect fit for powerful coding agents. And people have been digging into exactly how some of these zero day exploits, some of these bugs and vulnerabilities were discovered. And it makes a ton of sense that if you have a model that's fantastic at coding, it can basically try every single coding exploit, try new coding exploits across a huge number of open source packages,

• 2:35John Coogan?

  submit pull requests and generally harden the internet infrastructure that we all rely on. So in general, it seems like the rollout of Mythos, although people are disappointed because they want to play with the latest and greatest model, even if it's very expensive. It seems like it's having a positive effect and should be a bit of a white pill for containing powerful models, having them have proper impacts, having them have a positive impact on the American economy, on our security, on all these different things. I do think, I wouldn't be surprised if we see something similar happen in biosafety. Now, the biosafety AI research loop is a little bit longer because you might have to go to the lab.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  It's not entirely existing in a computer, in a virtual machine that you can spin up and just, you know, brute force reinforcement learn against. But you could imagine if a model develops capabilities, maybe in the next run, maybe in the middle of this year. If a model becomes powerful enough to design a harmful virus or something like that, you would want the lab that creates that model to deliver that to the scientific community and companies that can protect the population against the development of new harmful biological viruses, just like we're protecting the internet against cybersecurity viruses. And so I'm not exactly sure where this all goes, what the other 10 steps are.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  But in general, it seems like there's going to be a pattern of a powerful model becomes capable of doing something. That it makes sense to share with the particular community that can defend against that new capability and then make sure.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  The entire community needs to make sure that that capability is carefully under control before releasing a version of that model that can still, you know, in the biosafety example, like you still want a model that can help you learn about biology, learn about how viruses are made, how they mutate. This is important for education and augmentation of the of scientists from, you know, high schoolers all the way to professionals. But the most advanced technology, it makes sense to put it in the hands of people that can actually take a real, have a real impact on that immediately before rolling it out broadly. But Andy Jassy sort of zoomed out and was stepping back from the horse race because

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Amazon's a partner with basically everyone in the ecosystem and has their own models. And so he shared this shareholder letter zooming out on the state of AI, the state of Amazon's plans, and he shares a bunch of very interesting anecdotes about his personal life. So we should read through some of this. He says, "When I graduated from college, I wanted to be a sportscaster. After sending my resume reel to many small markets around the United States and only getting two nibbles, I settled on doing sports production at a major network. To make extra money, I coached my former high school soccer team and worked at a retail golf store. Six months later, a college classmate convinced me to interview at the consumer products company where he worked and I spent three years as a product manager there.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  I left that job to try some of my own businesses. After deciding these businesses weren't my calling, I tried short stints at sales and investment banking before going back to grad school and ending up at Amazon three days after my last final exam in May 1997." Not exactly a straight line. He says, "AWS followed lots of squiggly lines, too." And of course, Andy Jassy is the, by and large, the creator of AWS. That was his major project during his tenure. And he deserves so much credit in building that business. The original vision included storage, compute, payments, and human intelligence. They had a product called Mechanical Turk, where you could go and dispatch a specific task. You would have

• 6:32John Coogan?

  to build sort of a web UI, but- It was the original sort of data capture tool, but it could also be used for little things like manual translation tasks. People weren't really using it for customer support tickets, but Data labeling. Data labeling before you really needed mass data labeling, but it was that type of business. And there was always a question when Scale AI started, like, is this just mechanical Turk? Is this business process outsourcing? Obviously, that went on to a fantastic outcome with Meta, but it became a different thing and quickly moved towards what we see in the in the expert networks and data collection that's much more nuanced

• 7:14John Coogan?

  than a single task on demand. But AWS, this was in the vision. And they and they wound up pulling away from that and sort of refocusing. So Andy Jesse says, some of those, e.g. storage and compute, became linchpins in AWS. Others didn't. Others didn't succeed. We initially, we didn't initially plan a database service. And when we built one, our first attempt failed to get traction. We went back to the drawing board and built new relational and non-relational databases, which have resonated well and become core to millions of AWS applications. When we launched EC2, our compute service, it was a single instance in one availability zone, Linux only, with no auto scaling, load balancing, block storage, or private networking. Over the time, we added those capabilities and

• 7:57John Coogan?

  hundreds more services. And you see that when you go into the AWS dashboard. It is chock full of different products. AWS was initially attractive to startups, companies like DoorDash, Dropbox, Pinterest, Slack, and Stripe were among many that built their businesses on AWS. Pundits said that enterprises and governments would never use AWS. Wait, what is going on here? Out of order. I'm out of order here. Let me find the actual link on here and I'll stop reading from the paper because I printed the wrong page. Right here. So, uh, he says, uh, pundits said enterprises and governments would never use AWS for anything substantive, but in 2008, Netflix, which was delivering DVDs in the mail for

• 8:42John Coogan?

  almost a decade at that point, decided to move all of their applications to AWS. Then came big commitments from GE, Intuit, and others, and eventually the CIA chose AWS as their partner to build their classified cloud. Growth came fast and furious, and as it accelerated, so too did our capital expenditures, CapEx, with dilutive, with a dilutive impact on free cash flow. And so he's, he's starting to make the case that there's this trade-off between free cash flow and CapEx, and this will come back when he talks about his plans for taking advantage of the AI boom. So he says, "At our first, at our 2014, more than 12 years ago, AWS operating plan review,

• 9:24John Coogan?

  the discussion started with a senior leader at the company musing, 'Tell me why we're doing this business.'" Like, "Why are we doing this?" It was confusing, and it was very different from being an online bookstore, and then eventually the everything store. But it felt, it felt different, but then eventually it started working. So, he says, "AWS has worked well for Amazon, but a straight line, not really." Uh, there's a bit, there's a band I like from New Zealand called The Beths. Have you ever heard of The Beths?

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  We gotta listen to The Beths. Uh, "They've written several excellent records with thought-provoking lyrics. I eagerly await new releases, and when their latest album dropped last summer, titled 'Straight Line Was a Lie,' it made me think how prescient that expression is. Most long-term endeavors do not follow a linear straight..."

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  The Beths' top songs are generally considered to be "Future Me," "Hates Me," and "Expert in a Dying Field."

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  And "Little Death."

• 10:18John Coogan?

  What, uh, yeah, I'm gonna listen to The Beths on the drive home today.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Any Beths, uh, Beths heads in the, in the chat?

• 10:30John Coogan?

  So he's reflecting on his career and the twists and turns in building AWS. He says, "Most long-term endeavors do not follow a linear straight line up and to the right. Progress jumps around. It'll zig up, then sometimes stall or zag down or force you back to the starting line. Sometimes it feels like you're running in circles, but the path is rarely straight. That's because the world is complex and new technology, business model invention, competitors, global issues, or people and cultural shifts can come into play. When we're in the middle of some of the biggest inflections of our lifetime, e.g. AI, robotics, space, industrialization, geopolitical and military conflict, and just as proficient

• 11:12John Coogan?

  golfers need to be skilled across driving, approach shots, chipping, and putting, durable companies must be adept at managing different elements of inflections. I'll share some of our lessons below and why we're bullish on what's ahead for Amazon." So, he talks about how broad Amazon is these days. Retail, logistics, AWS, ads, Kindle, Alexa, pharmacy, there are too many new efforts in flight to mention them all. He talks about the long push to bring robotic automation, acquiring Kiva in 2012. He also talks about all of the benefits that Amazon has brought to rural customers who are often deprioritized

• 11:56John Coogan?

  by logistics. This is a classic thing when you launch an e-commerce site. Do you apply your flat rate shipping to Alaska? Because every time someone ships something to Alaska, it's going to charge you an arm and a leg. Amazon's been able to solve it through a network that delivers over a billion packages each year, customers living in over 13,000 ZIP codes spanning 1,200,000 square miles. And he's also focusing on closing the digital divide in rural communities. So, things like high-speed internet access, internet, LEO, he's been talking about, Amazon LEO, the Low Earth Orbit Satellite Network.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  He makes this point that Amazon must be willing to pursue parallel paths when it's unclear what'll best drive the desired trajectory. He says two is greater than zero. When I was a kid, I used to go to New York Ranger games, New York Rangers games with my dad. I loved hockey and it was a high-quality time together. I looked up to my dad, still do, and hung on his every word. One game, my dad noticed that one of the Rangers defenseman, Dallas Smith, had gone missing from the bench and stood up and exclaimed, "Where's Dallas?" To which a nearby fan said, "In Texas, moron." So, yes, it's... It's very weird that his name is Dallas, I guess. Is that the... that's the confusion? So, yes, it's fairly obvious that two is greater than zero, but too often companies

• 13:24John Coogan?

  focus on what looks most tidy instead of ensuring they have enough efforts in play to achieve an important outcome. Let's go back to fast delivery in our retail business. We know how much customers crave it, and we see higher order completion rates when delivery promises are faster. So, he talks about, you know, all the things that we know about Whole Foods and rolling out more stores, rolling out more, um, more, um, uh, just investments in the core Amazon business. But then he goes on to talk about artificial intelligence. And he says, "If there's an obvious path to changing your trajectory, take it and run. But most new jumps aren't forward like that. There's invention and experimentation required, and pursuing multiple paths gives you the best chance to find it.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  When you identify disproportionate inflections, bet big. Choosing which inflections are truly seminal versus just interesting requires judgment. Reasonable people can disagree, but if you believe you've found one of these disproportionate shifts, you want to invest as aggressively as you possibly can. This will create investment spikes that will invite scrutiny, but the game changers don't typically accommodate smoother investment horizons." One of these seminal shifts, of course, he says, is AI. And so, he says, "We've never seen a technology more quickly adopted than AI. When ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, it reached 100 million users in two months, four times faster than TikTok and 15 times faster than Instagram. ChatGPT already has over 900 million..."

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Weekly active users, both OpenAI and Anthropic have run revenue run rates reportedly approaching thirty billion dollars. These are breathtaking numbers for companies this soon after their commercial launches. And he has this great throwback to Thomas Edison and the dawn of electricity. A lot of people are looking for comparisons for what AI uh pattern matches to, and he goes back to the first commercial power station which launched in eighteen eighty-two. So at the time, most people understood the first commercial power station as a way, a better way to light a room. That was going to be the main benefit of electricity. Uh it was going to replace lamps and you were going to have electric lights.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Uh but what they couldn't see was that electricity would eventually reorganize every factory, home and industry on earth. And he says that AI may have a comparable impact. The difference is that electricity took forty years to get where it was going. And AI appears to be moving ten times faster. And he says that Amazon's smack dab in the, in the middle of this land rush. And companies are choosing AWS for AI. Three years after AWS launched commercially, it had a fifty-eight million dollar run rate. Three years in, and Amazon was already a big business at that time. So, you know, he's talking about the twists and turns of launching AWS. It's a, you know, a lot of products. Seems so quaint. It's very quaint to be three years in, have the backing of, you know, a ma- a massive company.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  And, and still three years in only hit fifty-eight million in run rate. He compares it to three years into the AI wave, which of course started in twenty twenty-three, basically, and now we're in twenty twenty-six. AWS's AI revenue run rate is over fifteen billion dollars in Q1 of twenty twenty-six, which is nearly two hundred and sixty times bigger than AWS was at the same point, and it's ascending rapidly. And so he, he highlights a bunch of reasons why uh customers are choosing AWS for AI. Uh obviously, they have a product in sort of every single category now, model, model building, uh high-performance inference, lower-cost inference that runs on trainium, their custom silicon, agent building, securing. Environments, etc.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  But he says that AWS could actually be growing faster and they are in fact limited on capacity. So AWS added 3.9 gigawatts of new power capacity in 2025 and expects to double total power capacity by the end of 2027. And AWS is monetizing that capacity as fast as it's installed. In Q4 2025, AWS reported 24% year-over-year growth and a $142 billion revenue run rate. That's a lot of absolute growth and yet we still have capacity strengths that yield unserved demand. As an aside, two large AWS customers have already asked if they could buy all of the Graviton instance capacity in 2026, which is their widely adopted custom CPU chip.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  And he says, "We can't agree to these requests given other customers' needs. You can't just say, 'Okay, we're giving everything to one company.'" But it gives you an idea of the demand. And so he goes on to talk about the other projects. The chips business is on fire. He talks about in the CPU space, virtually all of the workloads ran on Intel chips until they invented Graviton in 2028, has a 40% better price performance. And then, of course, they're working on Tranium and Nitro as well. And so he goes on to explore a little bit of how the AWS cash cycle works in a way that's faster than AWS and it requires more short-term capex.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  So AWS has to lay out the cash for land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear in advance of when we can monetize. And so there's been a lot of reporting about our data centers delayed. We're going to talk to Sagar and Jetty about some of the news and the political pushback to the data center build-out. But he says that it typically takes between six and 24 months before we can start billing customers depending on the component. However, these capex investments fund assets with many year-useful lives, 30-plus years for data centers, five to six years for chips, servers, and networking gear. And the free cash flow and return on invested capital for these investments are cumulatively

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Quite attractive a couple of years after being in service. However, in terms in times of very high growth like now, where the capex growth meaningfully outpaces the revenue growth, the early years free cash flow is challenged until these initial tranches of capacity are being monetized and revenue growth outpaces capex growth. We've been through this cycle with the first big AWS wave where they invested a ton of money in capex, building the servers before they were able to ramp revenue. And he says, we like the results, even though we've been through that cycle of high capex drawing down on free cash flow. And he says, we expect to feel similarly about this next wave with a much larger potential downstream revenue and free cash flow. And so he goes on to talk about

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Super strong.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  But I thought it was a very good letter.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Touches on a bunch of different stuff. I think this is what people wanted out of Jassy like about a year ago, right?

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  He was getting, you know, people were constantly kind of chirping at at Amazon leadership and wanting some kind of like basically lay of the land like this to show that Amazon had a broad understanding and actually had, you know, real leadership and was committed, committed to, you know, being being a real player.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, in other Amazon news, Amazon Pharmacy to offer Eli Lilly and company's new GLP-1 pill, Foundayo via same day delivery. Shiel Monat says this thing is going to fly. Amazon is up 3%. I don't know if it's on this news.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to say. Amazon's actually almost up 5% today.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  And I would, I would expect that to be because of the letter, but people tend to buy a lot of GLP-1 drugs too.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  But it does seem like a good, I mean, we were, we were talking about this with the, some of the, the, the fast ramp of that one company in direct to consumer GLP-1 and peptides. And there's so much skepticism about fly by night peptide operations, where are they being compounded? Are they safe? Do they contain even what you think they contain? And giving consumers an option that's something as, you know, established as Amazon with all of the All of the guardrails that they have in place feels like a very positive move for consumers.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  Before we jump into the next story, Jassy did share a letter to shareholders from 1997.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  And there was, I'll read the first two paragraphs. "To our shareholders, Amazon.com passed many milestones in 1997. By year end, we have served more than one and a half million customers, yielding 838% revenue growth to 147.8 million, and extended our market leadership despite aggressive competitive entry. But this is day one for the internet, and if we execute well for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and time. Time and money, save both. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon uses the internet to create real value for its customers, and by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise even in established and large markets."

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, they certainly did that. And the letter goes on to talk about how it's all about the long term. So even back then, growing like absolute crazy, still wanting people to think about, think in decades, and so Jassy doing that now. And they have a good track record.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Amazon's had decades of drawing down on free cash flow to invest in the future, and they've had a long history of communicating that effectively to the community and to the shareholders.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Level to which people miss the ads. This is never, I don't think this has ever happened before.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  In the history of podcasting.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  We miss the ads, too.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, all we have now is...

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Well, we need it, we need some alerts, because there's a debate on the timeline about OpenAI's new cybersecurity product.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  The, uh, there was a post that was deleted and then Axios issued an update. Basically, the question was, uh, OpenAI is launching a new model rumored to be called Spud, trained on Blackwell, sort of similar, you know, big model, lots of capabilities. And, uh, OpenAI has been working on cybersecurity products. Will they gate the rollout similarly? Are they running the same playbook? Will they, uh, take a different path? At what point will they make their models available? And, uh, people are going back and forth. And Andrew Curran is sort of clarifying here that the new model and the cybersecurity product are separate and only the cybersecurity specialized model will have a limited release,

• 24:15John Coogan?

  not the new model itself. So it looks like a general public release for Spud. Dan Shipper shared some extra, uh, commentary around this. The Axios story floating around about OpenAI limiting the release of their newest model, Spud, isn't true. He just spoke to OpenAI and it appears the story conflated two things. They do have a cyber product. They are testing with a trusted tester group, but this is not the same thing as Spud. The Axios story has now been updated.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a very, there's a very strong argument to never release a model publicly that is specifically optimized for cyber.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Because like you're just inviting a bunch of like, think about like the teenagers out there. I now get to be, uh, a super powerful hacker, even though you're just kind of like, probably should just be vibe coding like a fun little app or something like that, right?

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  You would think having some cybersecurity capabilities in the model would just be better if you're vibe coding a product. It becomes secure out of the box.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, I'm just saying like, having this super powerful like cyber focused product.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't be the kind of thing that anyone, like you should probably have to KYC.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Well, yeah, what do you think about that?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, also I think, you know, when you zoom out on AI progress, it is like, it is like very smooth.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Where like, you know, people were talking about this with Mythos yesterday where like, well, actually if you run even like an open source model, uh, and you actually run enough times, you actually can find similar, you know, exploits. Uh, and it's just like kind of the efficiency of the new model.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Versus the, the smaller open source ones.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  So like. Like, I'm pretty sure right now I could take, you know, 5.4 and I could just run it a bunch of times and I could find a lot of exploits.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Like, people have the capabilities right now. Maybe it's like a little bit harder.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  You might get flagged.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. But, and also, like, yeah, I think, I mean, at some point, like, a lot of the coding agents, I think, you'll just see, like, in the, you know, in the system prompt or whatever of the coding agents, it'll be like, yeah, make sure you're checking to see if any, if there's, like, big security vulnerabilities.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Even right now, you can just ask, you know, Codex, whatever, you're building something, like, are there errors? Are there, you know, security problems? And it'll solve them.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  And this is the nature of every, every advanced model, is that in order to understand how to fight something, you'd have to know how to build it. And this is, uh, this is true. I mean, I'm sure that, uh, the folks at CrowdStrike or Palo Alto Networks, like, could definitely, if they went black hat, it would be bad for everyone, even in the pre-AI era, and that remains true. And so, um, having at least as much economic incentive as possible to put the resources and the tokens and the inference budgets towards, like, white hat hacking is good. There's also, somebody in the chat is making the comment that there's a, uh, there's a, uh, there's a lot of precedent for this with, um, with, uh, bug bounties and, like, time disclosures.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  So oftentimes, white hat hackers will go to companies and say, uh, that we found a really bad vulnerability. We're giving you 90 days until we publish it, but it is in the public interest to know that this, that this, uh, vulnerability exists broadly. So we have to release it, but also we want to give you the time to react to this. And so, uh, it feels like you're sort of holding that company hostage a little bit. It can be a little bit tense. But I think if it's done, uh, it's, if it's done carefully, it can be sort of a win-win.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I think regardless, like,

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  I think more KYC is probably the future, right? Even if you're just talking about, uh, like, risk of, uh, distillation and stuff like this, like, I think I've talked about this before, where, like, yeah, at some point, you need, you need more KYC to ensure, like, people aren't just, like, you know, training off the model or doing, like, nefarious things.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Meek Mill pulled out a slide from Bill Ackman. The slide says, "A small percentage of songs are listened to. The overwhelming majority of music tracks receive zero or minimal engagement. AI is poised to exacerbate this reality." And so it shows that 0.2% of songs are culturally and commercially relevant. Commercially relevant is 10% of songs streamed 1,000 to 100,000 times. And then Meek is dropping that into what looks like Claude saying, "You're not in that 88%. You already skipped the whole bottom of the pyramid. You're already in that top 0.2%. People know your name. They search for you specifically. They stream on purpose. That changes everything. You already have the hardest thing, attention.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  You don't need the algorithm to find you. Your fans already look for you." So while AI is flooding the market with millions of trash songs, this is AI throwing AI under the bus. This is crazy. Your catalog just sits there collecting streams because people want Meek, not just a rap song. And Dimes Square Holding says, "First in my bloodline to see a rapper with AI psychosis commenting on a deck from..."

• 29:10John Coogan?

  I think it's a reasonable...

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  It's a reasonable analysis.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Reasonable analysis.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's a little bit unfair for the AI to be dunking on the other AI. It's kind of like a crabs, crabs in the bucket.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  There's a whole story about this in the Journal the other day about a local group that's lobbying against data center development using AI tools, ChatGPT, like very heavily to understand the legal code, how they can organize, who they should be calling. It sort of feels like a good use of AI in the sense that they're exercising their democratic rights properly through the correct channels. Like, it could be so much worse. I don't know. What do you think?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, hopefully like by using the model like models enough to be like, oh, wait, this is actually good.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, or like, or like, there are some parts that I like narrowly, but do we need this data center in my neighborhood, maybe not.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, specifically on this, I think it's interesting, like, among celebrities, it seems like rappers specifically are like really leaning in a lot more than other like types of celebrities.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  You see like Little Baby.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Little Baby, not Little Baby.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  There was a post yesterday about someone who who got paid to like set up OpenClaw Forum.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  You've seen this a bunch, yeah. It's just funny, like, you don't see actors talking about their.

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  Baby Keem, Little Baby was second after Baby Keem.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right, that's right. I mean, Matthew McConaughey had some words about AI, saying it's coming.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, when he was gonna log in, he needs to log in.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Well, no, that was separate. Like, wasn't it like months, it was like months, months, months and months later, he was like, this is coming, like, you need to be prepared for this, you need to work alongside of it.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he's not talking about his specific.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess Ben Affleck had that company, right?

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, yeah.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ben, Ben Affleck already got the nine-figure exit. He's good.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you would, you would imagine that, that AI actually might be a useful tool for understanding the impact of building a data center in a particular community because everyone is debating the, the economic impact, how many jobs will be created, what's the environmental impact, and being able to crunch through all those, all those trade-offs so that the community gets to a net, like a net positive impact that the population can basically vote on and be happy about and say, yeah, like, we made this trade-off properly, and we feel like we're getting the benefit, because maybe it's generating a lot of tax revenue, maybe the tax revenue is very durable, maybe the tax revenue is going to the right place, is it going to a tax refund, because, or is it going towards a project that people don't actually support?

• 31:48John Coogan?

  And so, there's a whole other question of, for the local community, is that tax revenue meaningful, like, what dollar value do they put on new tax revenues for the city, depends on what the city's building or doing with that, with that revenue. Anyway, what is this post by Eigengender?

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Actually, that's not impressive, the concept of a Dyson Sphere was already in the training data. This is like, you know, we build the Dyson, you know, built the Dyson Sphere, and then someone's, someone's coping and just saying like, yeah, I mean, it's not that impressive.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  You're just watching the Dyson Sphere be built around the sun, thinking like. I'm not that important. Here's another like self referential thing like, you know, AI, should AI be used to fight data center construction? Today, Meta began removing ads from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to be harmed by social media while under the age of 18. And so there's been, these class action lawsuits have been a big, you see them on social media all the time. Usually it's some sort of data breach or some sort of, you know, random product that they're targeting you for. And I feel

• 32:59John Coogan?

  like many people just sort of scroll past them because the default class action is like you wait a long time and then maybe you get a check for $5 in the mail. But Meta has begun removing advertisements from attorneys. What is their justification for this? Lawyers across the country are now seeking new plaintiffs in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts. It's unclear if any of them have been backed by private equity, as the California lawsuit appears to have been. Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan and Morgan. Almost all of them ran on Facebook and Instagram. Some appeared on Threads and Messenger, plus Meta's audience network. One such ad read,

• 33:43John Coogan?

  anxiety, depression, withdrawal, self harm. These aren't just teenage phases. They're symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Meta has something in their Terms of Service that says, "We also can remove or restrict access to content, features, services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Meta."

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is basically like, we're not going to let you use our product to take legal action against us.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder where the class action recruiting will go next, you know?

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  It'll go everywhere.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Maybe out of home?

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  Out of home.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Could go on podcasts.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  I mean, it's such a broad case that, yeah, well, YouTube is another.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  It's easy to, it's relatively easy to reach like Facebook and Instagram users.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, especially young people.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Everyone.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  It's everyone, yeah. So they just need to cast a wide net. But it'll be interesting to see how that develops.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Has anyone built an out of home advertising network for classrooms?

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Classrooms? What do you mean?

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Like teachers?

• 34:52John Coogan?

  I don't think people want to advertise to Google.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Kidding, kidding, kidding.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, the spreadsheet will become irrelevant, says Buco Capital Bloke. No, the spreadsheet is eternal. The spreadsheet paradigm is capitalism. The two are irrevocably intertwined. We were using spreadsheets 3,000 years ago to trade oxen. We will still be using them in 3,000 years. Long live the spreadsheet. And he shares a stone tablet that appears to be a spreadsheet. This is in reaction to Signals post that Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have maybe four to five years of relevance left, simply because the document spreadsheet paradigm itself will become mostly irrelevant. It already makes zero sense to draft, review, or analyze anything without a native AI environment around it. That gap only widens over time.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Most communication, including email, chat, status updates, is heading towards agent-mediated flows where humans set intent and AI handles execution. I don't know. I mean, it is like both can be true here because you could be in a world where if you need a spreadsheet, like the code is written on the fly and instantiated. Like, we saw Ramp launch Ramp Sheets very, very quickly, and it was a very full-featured product that was clearly only possible to build that so fast. Like cloning Google Sheets is, used to be insane. We had some cloning Slack recently.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, our intern built like a very, very convincing clone.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  It's so crazy.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  In about like an hour.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Like I actually.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  I think it was on the, was it on the $200 plan? Wow. Like, that's incredible.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  So, yeah, like, I think there's still the question of like, you know, actually getting that to feature complete, maintaining it, really, you know, serving it, hosting it. All of that seems like a hassle compared to just signing up on a consumption basis or a seat-based basis for a lot of SaaS. I'm still sort of, you know, not a firm believer in like those near-term SaaS apocalypse broadly, but it, it does, it does, I think the more likely scenarios that you will see.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  You will see software instantiated on like in real time. So if you're building something and it requires a spreadsheet to visualize, and you're already seeing that with a lot of the chat apps when if you ask for a deep research report or something that that requires sort of building a timeline or a chart, it can write Python, it can write HTML that will

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other the other thing is just giving giving customers a lot more flexibility around the product and thinking that like, okay, if you're buying buying a piece of software, it'd be like buying like a home, you get the home and then you can make changes to it to fit your own needs over time.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  And so we'll see, we'll see what ultimately changes. But you can imagine a world where, you know, it stops being, I forget who was on the show, but they were talking about how, oh, it was, it was console, console.com, talking about how instead of having like a request a feature button, you just let people build it themselves.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, there's been some back and forth on the timeline between Nate Silver and Nikita Beer over whether or not links are truly de-boosted on X. Philippe Lemoine said, after the exchange between Nate Silver and Nikita Beer, I did a little test to check whether that was true. And to my surprise, what I found suggests that link de-boosting was indeed reversed. What I did was randomly sample 15 tweets by the New York Times between 2019 and today. That feels like a small sample. It feels like you should look at maybe a larger swath there. But he computed the weekly average number of likes and retweets they got and plotted the the results along with a trend line.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  The idea is that likes and retweets are probably a decent proxy for reach and the New York Times only posts tweets with external links. So by looking at this, we should be able to see how many changes in the out, any changes in the algorithm with respect to how links are treated. As you can see, it's pretty clear that starting around the spring, summer of 2023, posts with links started to be penalized and eventually they were completely nuked until the spring, summer of 2025, when a reversal to that policy seems to have started. To be honest, this isn't what I was expecting to find. So even if it's just a quick and dirty test, it's hardly definitive proof. It's good news and I thought I'd show the results. There is a question of like even so links, links. Yeah, there was clearly like a de-boosting

• 39:33John Coogan?

  moment, although some really good stuff could break through. Like there were a few examples of people just posting links to links to the like Google Docs, basically, and those would still rip somehow. And I don't know if that was like a specific link, but.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  I think one thing has remained true the entire time.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  Just that, that if you are linking to content that is genuinely very interesting.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  It can still do numbers.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and there is a little bit of maybe some, some feature of the New York Times where if you spent a year or two on X, knowing that, okay, like there's sort of this adversary relationship with links, you're going to open it in the browser, you might actually just develop a different habit of, okay, I go and read the apps. Like I definitely developed the, the muscle memory to open the Wall Street Journal app regularly and scroll that news feed separately. And I don't really look for as much cross pollination as, as I thought. Anyway, we have Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points in the waiting room. So we'll bring him to the TV panel. Sagar, how are you doing?

• 40:45Saagar Enjeti?

  I'm great, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on. Where should, let's start with the data center thing.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  I didn't get the time.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The tie is.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm getting brutally time off.

• 40:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Dude, Jordy gets an exit and immediately starts dressing like a tech asshole. What's, what's going on here, man?

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  To be, to be clear, I've been, I've been going, I've been having, I have the limited edition.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Technology in motion.

• 41:13Saagar Enjeti?

  Okay. Well, why has nobody sent me one? How come I haven't been sent?

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  These are dropping, these are dropping soon.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  They're in the works. We'll send you one.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be, you're gonna get to wear TVP all day long.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we were talking about Andy Jassy's 2025, 2026 shareholder letter, $200 billion of CapEx, tons of new data centers coming online. Every, this applies to every company.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  You were hoping for a bigger number.

• 41:39Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, of course, as an American, I just want all of my farmland. I want all the trailer parks pushed out and I just want to make sure that there's beautiful data centers that are just sitting on previously like taken care of and people with generations just get kicked out. So I wanted 400 billion, 600 billion, something like that.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe we can start with the, the, the shape of the pushback against data centers because it's fallen in a few buckets, but let's just start with like the big one, which is energy. What are the headline numbers and fears that people are pointing to the case studies that people are nervous about the energy impact specifically?

• 42:21Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, I think especially guys, you know, this is a pre Iran war conversation. There's a poster on more conversation. I think that's really important to say because, you know, who knows where the price of oil will eventually stabilize. But when you have high inflation at the gas pump and likely at least some moderate increase in electricity bills, we have, we don't know exactly where things are going to stabilize. You're going to have a lot more cost consciousness whenever it comes to energy. Now, especially in the midst of a data center conversation, I know that the data center, pro data center people are always telling us, don't worry, it doesn't actually impact your electricity bill all that much. Nonetheless, there is a feeling there. And John, I just sent you that study or that story this morning, which is very interesting. My colleague, Emily Jashinsky, actually talked to me about this, but the Wisconsin

• 43:06Saagar Enjeti?

  city has now been the first in the nation to actually pass an anti-data center referendum. And so the ballot measure is basically the last thing that the voters in that town felt that they had at their disposal to effectively ban the entire city from approving any of these new projects. You guys remember the guy who went viral in New Jersey who blocked the data center? I interviewed him on my show. He was a long time viewer, actually, of the program. He was just like a normal activist type, but hadn't. Really engage with it and he went through the zoning and he was like, look, these developers are making all kinds of promises and he was concerned about water. And I know, you know, again, the pro people are, are always telling me that that's not the case, maybe, you know, I, I gotta see a little bit more evidence for myself.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Real, real quick.

• 43:51Saagar Enjeti?

  And city council.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  Is your, is your mic, I, I don't know that we're, you're on the correct mic. We might be on the.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Gain might be a little high. I will, I will give everyone some news about this. Wisconsin city passes nation's first anti data center referendum. The vote suggests ballot measures could become a powerful new tool for grassroots activists.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  The chat thinks it's a foreign adversary doesn't want you to be on the mic right now.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Let, let, let's hear if it sounds any better now.

• 44:18Saagar Enjeti?

  Is it a little better?

• 44:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I think that's great. Thank you.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Okay. So, uh, is, so is this, uh, is this, is this local Wisconsin city referendum? Like the new playbook that will spread all over America? Are there other jurisdictions that are already looking to copy and paste this? How, how do you think this, where do you think this goes?

• 44:42Saagar Enjeti?

  I definitely do think it will serve as a model, especially as other, remember this is really a bottom up phenomenon. So it's really at the community level and here in the state of Virginia, where I live, 40% of our power is actually consumed by data centers. And so you've seen organic pushback. It became a major issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidates were against data centers.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Saagar Enjeti?

  And both, a lot of the candidates are seeing all of the energy I'm sure around this, I'm saying at the community level. I'm sure you guys also have seen all of these viral videos. I referenced the one more recently of this trailer park, which is being basically told they have to go out because they're going to build a new one. There's the famous one recently, I think it was in Kentucky of a woman being, I think she was offered like $20 million for her land. She's like, I'm born on this land. I'm going to die on this land. So I, I really think that this is one of those bubbling political issues, which no major politician, maybe Bernie Sanders, the only one that I've seen, which has been willing to like jump on top of it.

• 45:44Saagar Enjeti?

  But I think it's going to be a major issue in 28, 28. I think in 28, both candidates are going to have a data center, uh, a platform. Maybe the Republican one, depending on who it is, is going to try and square the circle around GDP. But I don't think that voters want to hear anything about it. That's just my personal opinion.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Is the sense in Virginia that Virginia would be better off if the state had never had a data center?

• 46:12Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, it's complicated. Remember, you know, we're full of a military industrial complex, but don't forget this. We had Amazon. Remember when they were going to leave New York and they were going to come here? They're actually going to come near where I live. It really didn't work. And there's a lot of local op-eds. They're like, hey, we didn't get all the jobs that we were promised. Virginia threw all these tax credits. And so people do feel really taken advantage of, I think especially by Amazon here in Northern Virginia. But look, the backbone of our economy is always going to be the military industrial complex and all of these like ridiculous server farms that serve the CIA and the Pentagon. But I mean, Oregon, I think it was 30% of power in the state of Oregon is being used by data centers. There's like 20% in a few different states. Virginia is definitely, we were the highest in the nation. But I can tell you at the organic level, Fredericksburg,

• 46:57Saagar Enjeti?

  more of the rural communities where there are the new projects that were being looked at. All of those city councils, people were lining up for hours to campaign against this. Same thing in New Jersey. People lined up for, you know, in the middle of the night. And I've talked about this before. Guys, do you know what it takes for a voter to actually care? You could barely get people to come out for election day for the president. Now, to come up for a local meeting against zoning, usually that's just really old people. This time, people are bringing their children. They're sleeping in the room. They're waiting all night just to be able to speak.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  What is your advice for the data center developers out there? Because certainly, I like, you feel, you don't think that we should just not build any data centers?

• 47:43Saagar Enjeti?

  It depends. You know, I don't know. I mean, I'm becoming more radical as times go on. And so maybe we do just need a Butlerian Jihad. I'm testing the limits of your editorial independence, by the way. Shout out to you, Sam. But I mean, look, I'm not giving any advice to the enemy. I think really what I would say to the tech community more generally, and John, you and I have talked about this, is just prove to me that this is going to make my life better. And stop talking about all these scary things because I'm starting to believe you. In fact, Do you believe you? What is this new Claude news that their new model is so scary? Hack everything. They have to pre-release it to the cybersecurity companies so that they can develop, so no, no. So that the new model can develop defenses against itself.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  We're very much with you that the fear-based marketing like needs to stop because it's not, it's not helping anyone. Like part of the whole backlash is like.

• 48:37Saagar Enjeti?

  But I don't know, guys. I mean, Jordy, you have always made the case, and maybe you're right, is that that's a great way to fundraise. Every time the company that bought you wants more money, they have to go and be like, look, we're changing the world. We're going to destroy all these shops. Like, I don't know. I mean, for, for, let's say like with Anthropic. I feel like he believes it.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  So my point, my point was that it was very effective when there was no revenue in the industry, right?

• 48:59Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and it was kind of this kind of far out idea. Nobody had had like a magical experience with AI. They hadn't had like a question, didn't have anyone to ask it to, and then asked AI the question and they got a good answer. Like when, when, when the average American had not had a very cool experience with AI, they hadn't generated an image that was, you know, photo real or gotten help with their homework or help with, you know, writing, any of these things that like now everybody's had the experience of. It clearly like was necessary to kind of marshal enough capital for a bunch of upstarts to be able to compete with the biggest companies in the world on this, like the Googles of the world. And I just think at this point, I made the case like, you know, at the end of last year where it was like,

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  we need to stop, we need, I think we need to stop this as, as an industry because why would, why would average American be excited about this? If you're just trying to give them, you know, Terminator nightmares. Uh, but clearly the entire, you know, some people in the industry still feel like they need to, uh.

• 49:58Saagar Enjeti?

  I think they really believe it.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:00Saagar Enjeti?

  No, I think they believe it. That's, yeah, I'm with John. Like, I feel like Dario believes it. And he just goes on every podcast in the world and says it like over and over again. And at a certain point, especially like with the new Claude news, I'm like, dude, maybe I should just believe you. And, you know, people, what is it? People are taking leaves of absences because they're afraid. And I mean, you know, you can only call yourself the new digital god so many times before. Look, again, I'm a Luddite. I don't know a ton about the technology. I listen to smart people like you guys and many others to try and figure out what's going on. But if anything, I just want to be able to convey to the people who watch this show. You're not very popular right now, and especially in the midst of a global energy crunch. I would just be real careful about strolling around town and talking about how it's going to bring jobs in.

• 50:44Saagar Enjeti?

  Because A, nobody believes you. They all think that their bills are going to go higher. There needs to be, I think what this really needs, guys, is I don't think it can be solved at the federal level. Or sorry, at the company level. I think the government is going to have to step in and genuinely like codify, let's say, the executive order that Trump wanted to put in place where every data center project is going to have to supply the initial amount of energy that it's going to use. It'd have to prove it to the local city council, to the state, to the feds. Like, there needs to be genuine democratic buy-in if we're all going to decide like, this is cool for us. And I'm not sure that, I'm not sure really that the tech companies are ready for that. Although, maybe Sam is. You guys saw his new social contract.

• 51:25Saagar Enjeti?

  I was about, I was gonna do a segment about it on my show, but I didn't have, I didn't have a chance because of this entire Iran war thing. But I mean, look, I mean, clearly, he's, he can foresee what the problem is. I don't really agree with some of the stuff he laid out, but yeah, anyways.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was notable. So Demis had an interview with Harry Stebbings this week, just 30 minutes. You would probably appreciate it because Demis is, you know, one of the godfathers. And he even was kind of talking about potentially, you know, one solution to this is like sovereign wealth funds, like investing in the labs, getting a piece of it so that every sort of citizen benefits. I thought that was notable because it was, you know, Google and, you know, the Gemini team is the most heavily funded lab in, in the entire world. And so we'll, we'll see how this stuff works out. How in Virginia, Tyler, Tyler on our team just dropped a truth nuke.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  He said in some localities in Virginia, 31% of total local tax revenue is from data centers. Is there, is there, like, do you think that?

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, I guess, like, part of what I'm trying to wrap my head around is, like, it seems like there are plenty of places in the United States where that, uh, putting a data center somewhere that would generate a huge amount of, of, of local tax revenue would be a net positive, right?

• 52:54Saagar Enjeti?

  Maybe.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I believe that you're right, that, that individual areas should be able to decide, is this an industry that we want to support? Is this an industry that we want as a part of, like, personally, do I want, um, you know, uh, uh, people, you know, drilling oil, like, you know, 10 feet from my property line? Like, probably not, right? Uh, but there are places in the United States where people have decided, we're gonna drill for oil here, and, and we're gonna, you know, be okay with those trade-offs. And so I think, uh, I, I, I generally, you know, I, I've said this before, I think there's a lot of reasons for somebody to, like, citizens need to understand, okay, what is the benefit of putting this data center in our county, in our town?

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  And it, and it needs to be, it needs to be, um, there needs to be some positive benefit other, that, for, for the local community, and so I think we agree there.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  It's not gonna be using the models, because the data center could be halfway around the world or in space.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  And you still get, you still get access to all the AI tools that you want. It doesn't need to be in your backyard. And so, and, but I, but I believe that-

• 54:00Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, yeah, no disrespect to Tyler, uh, who's in the chat, uh, but, I mean, I, I do think, though, that that tax argument, the problem is that largely, again, I'm speaking from a voter level, is they do not feel either that impact, or that they often, like with the Amazon, you know, example that I gave you, is that we give these tax credits away, and then the promises, a lot of these things, don't end up happening. Come on, guys, this is a tale as old as time. Every state in the country, remember when Amazon did that ridiculous pony show for every state to throw whatever it could to them, and then they ended up-

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Oh, for HQ2.

• 54:33Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, for HQ2, that's the project I'm talking about, is that Virginia, where I live, also did that. And then, of course, you know, local politicians feel very burned, and a lot of the voters do as well. But ultimately, Jordy, I don't think we're disagreeing, man. Like, local control is really what it's all about. And I also think the feds, though, I do think that, you know, considering the way that Trump and the AI industry are so like, they really do need each other just because of the way, especially now after Iran. My God, can you imagine? You know, like, look at how much he's reacted to market swings. One of the fears that I had really was that a lot of this, you know, you're talking about sovereign wealth funds. John, you and I know the amount of Gulf money sloshing around Silicon Valley. I'm like, guys, like, we're about to see force majeure just get declared.

• 55:16Saagar Enjeti?

  I mean, if you see even 10% go down from QIA, SIA, or any of these other investment funds, you're like, that's like an extinction level event for a lot of these. Or they might reallocate, they might start funding all these defense tech companies and not investing in data centers. And don't forget that an Amazon data center was struck by Iran in the UAE, I believe. A couple of different tech infrastructure places were explicitly declared war on by the Iranians. So I do think that there's an element here where what we're, what we are watching play out, I think politically and even geopolitically is that foreign, you know, adversaries can see clearly that this is a potential pain spot for the US economy.

• 55:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Here in the US, the administration is really aware of this, but there's also just this rising kind of populist tide against the data center movement. And against, I think, really like abundance style assurances from politicians and from companies that after 40 years now, I mean, before data centers, it was Walmart. And before that, it was something else. There's always going to be like a small guy versus big guy feeling, especially in rural parts of the country. And, you know, I'm from Texas, Jordy, with the oil industry, so I get exactly what you're talking about, right? Like, there's a symbiosis of we actually get rich off this stuff, so we're okay with drilling for oil. But, you know, there has been enough stories also, even there, where people go bust as a result of them.

• 56:43Saagar Enjeti?

  There's a lot of animosity towards the oil industry, especially pre shale revolution after things petered out. And, you know, I don't know, I've just seen this go politically in a lot of interesting directions enough to see that. Thing is happening. B is that the tide is not only just turned, but I think coming very explicitly. And if what I would really advocate for is a genuine democratic process because that's what it's all about. Like people just feel like this is out of their control about AI.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Saagar Enjeti?

  Especially they're like, I want impact. I want a say, and I don't think they're wrong to say.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the flow for for getting some sort of resolution on the federal level? Is that like a new bill or something or like, obviously this is gonna happen after the midterms, but then, uh, yeah, and it's gonna try and tie a bunch of these different questions in a bow around safety and cybersecurity and data center build outs. Like, is there, is there a world where the, like, a good data center exists in the sense that it supplies its own power with clean energy? It's not an eyesore. It's either buried or covered in trees or beautifully designed. And it doesn't have any environmental impacts. Like, i- is there, is there a world where someone could get behind a data center at that level?

• 57:56Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, and that's kind of the thing. Why are we just talking about data centers? I talked about this before. I read it once, a report of a guy who just came from China. And he said, nobody in China cares about power with data centers because they have a ton of power. He's like, we have energy, dude. He's like, bro, we don't care. He's like, yeah, you can build, you could build a data center. We're good. Like, we have cheap and abundant power. So if we have cheap abundant power all over the nation, no one will care either just about data centers. Especially if we have, you know, cheap electricity, if there's just, if there's no concern on the power generation level. And this is why, you know, I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power plants or whatever renewables. I don't even care at this point. Shale gas, let's put it all in together. But I actually think our grid and the delay of our grid and, and really just the knowledge right now.

• 58:40Saagar Enjeti?

  We're not investing a lot more into it. It doesn't seem like things are propelling. That's what makes it a zero sum game. It doesn't need to be this way. Like, really what we need is just a ton of power. If we have a ton of power, then we don't care about anything being built.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So is, is codifying the, uh, the rate payer protection pledge into law a good move?

• 58:59Saagar Enjeti?

  It would be a good move, but I don't think it's enough at this point. There's so much distrust, guys, like at the local level and on the political level. I recommend you follow Ryan Gerdeski. He's done some more recent work on the data center question. He's been talking about this. He's like, guys, this is just laying out there for any politician to pick up. And I'm talking about it from an anti-data center position. He's much more of an expert on polling than I am. Go and check out his feed and some of the work that he's done, especially not just on feelings against AI, but data centers. Because I think he crunched the numbers. I know it was within the last couple of weeks that he looked at the question and he just said, there's an overwhelming animus and that people are angry. So it's not just, again, let's be very clear, it's about a feeling of lack of control over,

• 59:42Saagar Enjeti?

  you know, you're coming to take my job, you're increasing my electricity, you're changing my nation, and I have to have a say as a citizen. So that's not just no longer about electricity. That's about the whole picture of like, technology and oligarchy and the economy. So you're fighting against a very, very big force right now in the country.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Thank you for coming on and breaking it down. I'm sure we will be talking about this.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Have you tried, just out of curiosity, to just not use any AI? I mean, it's impossible to not use AI now because every company, for the most part, is using it. But have you tried to do your own personal, like, pause, just for like a few weeks?

• 1:00:22Saagar Enjeti?

  I should try. That's a good idea.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  I want the, like, you should, let's get you back on the schedule for a few weeks from now. And in the meantime, just promise us, you will not use any, any AI at all until you're not.

• 1:00:36Saagar Enjeti?

  Guys, it'd be so hard, because even the chessboard behind me has built-in AI. It's everywhere. Yeah. It's got the built-in.

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  No, it's fine. You can just, no, just don't play chess, bro. It's fun.

• 1:00:46Saagar Enjeti?

  No, I can't do it. I can't.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Just get a, just get an old-school board. You're fine.

• 1:00:51Saagar Enjeti?

  I've been one-shotted by the game. This is, I've been completely one-shotted by the game. Anyway, yeah, that's a problem.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon, sir.

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:00:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Always helpful. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg and Odd Lots, here to break down the New York Times analysis of the strongest Satoshi Nakamoto candidate. Joe, how are you doing?

• 1:01:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Look at that. I'm good.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Look at that sweater.

• 1:01:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, what do you think?

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. I love the green.

• 1:01:20Joe Weisenthal?

  You think the green works?

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Green is great.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  And the collar coming out the top.

• 1:01:25Joe Weisenthal?

  That's actually what I meant. I, when I said, what do you think? I was like, oh, actually, I'm wearing TVPN green for you guys. So, yes. Glad you guys noticed the gesture.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, welcome back.

• 1:01:35Joe Weisenthal?

  It's nice to see you guys.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Is, is the, is the New York Times the most underrated company in the world?

• 1:01:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, of course. It's the, it's the most, the, yeah, of course. It's the most underrated tech company and the most underrated news company. The number of haters that the, and the underrated, the thing though is, to be fair, that's the hater comment. Like, that's just a gaming company. But look, like, it's extraordinary juggernaut of both tech and news. And so many people have some sort of criticism of it or whatever, and find a reason to hate it. And everyone can find good reasons to complain about the media. But it keeps on winning in ways that I've certainly been very surprised about. So, um, I was really excited. I know, topic at hand. I, this is one of my favorite, Satoshiology is like one of my favorite topics. I was super excited to see that they took a stab at finding out who it is.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Did you have a candidate in mind before this piece dropped? Had you watched the HBO documentary that actually pointed to a different suspect?

• 1:02:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. I've read a lot. I actually didn't watch the HBO documentary, in part, I guess, because it was just so heavily criticized, et cetera. They're like, ah, maybe I don't need to watch it. I had often, often found the, um, the Nick Zabo, uh, he's one of the candidates. I had always found that one to be fairly compelling.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:02:53Joe Weisenthal?

  And, you know, on my first read of the New York Times piece yesterday, I thought it was about Adam Back, like, I knew he had been in the mix. It struck me that most, you know, the piece didn't have a smoking gun, right? And that's sort of what we're all waiting for. We want that smoking gun, whether it's some sort of digital signature or an email. It didn't have that. It was sort of, a lot of it was sort of linguistics, like, oh, he makes it's and it's wrong, or hyphens wrong. I make those same mistakes, too. I don't know. Everyone, everyone makes those mistakes. So I wasn't totally convinced. But then I read it a couple of more times over the last, you know, 24 hours. I read it again right before I came on this, because I wanted to be prepared to chat with you guys. And I

• 1:03:35Joe Weisenthal?

  am like, I've been like, upgrading my odds that, um, that John Kerry has correctly, has correctly identified him.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, have you worked with any journalists like John Kerryru before? It feels like such a lost art and it's so delightful when someone has a chance to, it seems like this was reported for a year or more, like really he had the space in the breathing room.

• 1:03:58Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I, I love it. And like I said, whether this was right or wrong, this is one of my favorite topics. And it is one of these things where like over the years, you know, a handful of journalists have like, I can be the one to crack this, which actually like brings to my mind, one of the more fascinating aspects of Bitcoin period, which is it's amazing to think that like, okay, here is this thing. It's kind of like a digital gold and so forth. It's a new kind of money. And whoever Satoshi is, here, her group of people, whatever, maybe it is Adam Back, maybe it's not. But the opsec, I mean, can you even fathom being online for several years in a way that could not be traced back to you definitively? Like I wouldn't even know where to begin.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Joe Weisenthal?

  I wouldn't even know where to begin, how to like interact online in a way that like I could ensure my anonymity. And I think one of the fascinating things about Bitcoin is that it does have like this founder creator myth. This sort of, um, this sort of, uh, the divine, the divine birth by this entity that left no earth, almost no earthly trace is as much as a fascinating part of the story, almost as Bitcoin itself as a technical accomplishment.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also just the fact that then Satoshi even like, it wasn't an effort to remain anonymous in perpetuity. It was like, then Satoshi went dark and, and nothing's moved on the wallet. And it's just been this like, uh, you know, that, that's obviously fueled the theory that, uh, that potentially Satoshi passed away or something.

• 1:05:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. So the question, so here's a question that I have. So one of the stronger arguments, or one of the pieces of evidence that the article in the New York Times are, points out is that Adam Back, it's well known, he has a long history with the cypherpunks. He'd been interested in privacy and digital money for a long time, going back to at least like the mid 90s, et cetera. He had invented Hash Cash, which was, you know, basically laid the foundation for proof of work, which of course is elemental to mining. So he was like, right there. Now, one of the arguments that the piece makes is Adam Back, like disappeared, didn't have much of a digital trace of those first couple of years when Bitcoin was taking off. So

• 1:06:13Joe Weisenthal?

  maybe that was when he had slipped into Satoshi mode. On the other hand, there was no way that anyone in 2008, or 2009, or 2007 could have known really what a gigantic phenomenon Bitcoin was going to be. Why, you know, like, Adam Back clearly was very comfortable talking about many of his projects under his own name. He talked about Hash Cash. All of these people had been talking about their work in applied cryptography for years under their own name. So, not having been able to know how big of a deal Bitcoin was going to be, why would this particular project suddenly, he would like, have the foresight

• 1:06:55Joe Weisenthal?

  to like, "Oh, I have to be pseudonymous for this particular project?" I don't totally understand why someone who had like, talked about digital money, digital money for years under his real name, would have had reason to think, "Okay, with this project, I'm gonna have to talk pseudonymously or anonymously." That is not entirely obvious to me.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Like, again, in retrospect, like, sure, like, in 2026, we can look back, yes, it makes a lot of sense that this person would have like, the pseudonym aspect. But when it's just a bunch of people, part of a community, trying to solve the problem of P2P payments, who have been using their names, why suddenly, like, when these pieces come together this way, would the creator feel impelled to be private, in a way that they didn't feel impelled to be private, with all the other B Cash, Hash Cash, Digital Gold, etc.? That's not totally obvious to me.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, the way that, I mean, honestly, the way you're talking about it, I'm becoming more suspect that it was in fact you.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:07:56Joe Weisenthal?

  So this is a, yeah, wait, John, it sounds like you don't find this component.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  No, I, yeah, I, I just, I, I feel like after watching a number of projects sort of sputter, where they did have a specific founder that could be, just, not even attacked, but just like, the motivations of that individual could be questioned and, and there's so much like, risk tied to like a single person. It doesn't strike me as that crazy. I mean, clearly someone went anonymous, right?

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one exercise is like, is there a person that if, if, if it came out and we could determine that it was entirely factual that this one person, who, who is the kind of person that, that would make the Bitcoin sort of trade up in value, right? Because there's like, I can't really think of anyone. I can think of a lot of different groups that it would trade down dramatically. It comes out, oh, it's some government entity, you know, you know, that, that, that goes down dramatically.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  And so there's not, there's not a lot of like ROI for anyone on a personal level.

• 1:09:03Joe Weisenthal?

  One of the funny things, so one of the funny things about Adam specifically, so you go to like his Twitter profile, it says, you know, lists his accomplishments and it says he is the inventor of hash cash, hash cash in parentheses, Bitcoin mining. And what's funny is many people over the years have actually accused Adam of overstating what his claim there. It's like, yes, there's clearly a lot of overlap between hash cash and the notion of proof of work that was elemental to how Bitcoin mining worked. But hash cash itself is not Bitcoin mining. It is a sort of a thing that precedes, it was one of the antecedents or the precede whatever, to Bitcoin mining, a similar technique, the

• 1:09:47Joe Weisenthal?

  whole proof of work concept. So there's been this claim that actually one of his issues is that he overstated his invention role in the creation of Bitcoin, which is very funny, like if it turns out it's him, that for a long time, the accusation is that he overplayed his role. And then the other thing that's strange is that like, since, you know, he's had, like, so, and this, this is mentioned in the New York Times piece, he was one of the guys who, last year, whatever. Launched one of these Bitcoin treasury companies, right? Like a micro strategy like entity that was just gonna hold a lot of Bitcoin. And does that sound like something Satoshi Nakamoto would do? In my opinion, not really. But then the flip side is, well, that's like the best opsec in the world.

• 1:10:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Doing a bunch of stuff that feels a little bit scammy, feels a little bit cheesy, feels a little bit like opportunistic.

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  This guy is definitely broke. There's no way, there's no way, there's no way he's got, you know, the tens of billions of dollars.

• 1:10:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So it's like on the first pass, I was like, no, like Satoshi is not gonna like launch a little like mini me micro strategy company. This does not seem very likely. But then the flip side is, man, if you were someone who like maybe some suspect of being Satoshi, what would be the thing that would be the least Satoshi like thing to do? And throw people like, oh, maybe it would be like create a Bitcoin treasury company.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Or if you were Satoshi, but you lost the keys in some sort of silly mishap, then you would wanna get back in the game because you're still a believer, but you don't have access.

• 1:11:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, last question.

• 1:11:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, last question on the Bitcoin thing. Did you ever go down the Paul LaRue route? And did you ever, were you ever a Paul LaRue believer?

• 1:11:28Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I was never a Paul LaRue guy. Which one was that?

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  So he, he was a former criminal cartel boss, informant to the USD, uh, drug enforcement agency. He created TrueCrypt and was really early in, uh, basically spamming, like the classic email spam of like, uh, you know, mail enhancement. He would spam that out, scam everyone. He became so deeply entrenched that at one point he didn't just own a, uh, like domain name and he would switch the URL. He owned a TLD or like a registrar so that no one could kick him off. And he could create unlimited new websites.

• 1:12:10Joe Weisenthal?

  That's pretty funny.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  So he would just create a new website every day. And so the Gmail filters would get confused because, well, we've never seen this one before.

• 1:12:17Joe Weisenthal?

  I love that. You know, the thing is, I've always thought like that. I don't know if any of you have ever read it, but there's an amazing book by an NYU professor, Finn Brunton called, I think it's called Digital Money.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And it's about the prehistory of Bitcoin. So it's about this community of the cypherpunks in the 90s and 80s. And actually even going back to the 1970s.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Where people were talking about this fact. That as the world was going to go online, it would be very difficult for me to send you a payment without the need for like a third-party database. The idea of like, we need something that's cash-like, a bearer instrument on the internet.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Joe Weisenthal?

  And I think this is like a really important thing to know is that there have been, there was a small group of people that basically for three decades or more before Bitcoin had been trying to solve this problem. And so like in the New York Times piece, it points out that Back had been talking about all of these things that Satoshi had been talking about. And my first response is, yes.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  There were a lot of people.

• 1:13:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Of course they did, because this was this core group of people.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Who for years understood that in the online context, if payments were ever going to be a thing, we would need a third-party. And if there was a third-party, they can block a transaction, they can reverse a transaction, they can penalize you for making a bad transaction, etc. And so this was understood by some people from day one of the, you know, pre-internet, that this would become an issue. And so I'm not surprised that they were all using roughly the same analogies and so forth.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. The book is Digital Cash: The Unknown History of Anarchist Utopians and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. And I will recommend a book to you about Paul LaRue. I think it's called The Mastermind. And I believe it was optioned into a movie. I'm not sure. I think Michael Mann was going to do it, and that sounded really good. But the book is fantastic.

• 1:14:09Joe Weisenthal?

  That's awesome.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:14:10Joe Weisenthal?

  That's really fun.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  Has this been like a nice reprieve for you from covering the war? How have you been processing the constant gyrations in the oil market and the broader financial market? It feels like such a hard thing to cover, but obviously you've been doing a great job with Odd Lots and beyond.

• 1:14:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you. The stakes are, I mean, it is a hard thing to cover. It's an awful thing to cover, right? It's a war, and wars are awful, and the stakes are so, you know, there are so many ways that wars. Can get more, as catastrophic as they are, get even more and more catastrophic. So it's like, you know, it's a, but it, but it's also like an extraordinary story for the things that we like to cover, which is like, understanding the real flows of the economy. And, you know, prior to this war, I had not fully appreciated, essentially just like, how, I mean, I knew about, for oil, I was aware that the Strait of Hormuz was a very big deal.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Joe Weisenthal?

  But like, the degree to, the fallout, whether we're talking about like fertilizer, whether we're talking about, um,

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Real estate in Dubai, you guys had a great.

• 1:15:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Real estate in Dubai, of course. Which, real estate in Dubai, which, you know, we probably, you guys probably know more people than myself, camping out to Dubai for the low taxes and stability, and then suddenly, you know, you're like, oh, this could be.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, credit, credit to Americans, like Dubai has just not been that popular.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  I think it's different.

• 1:15:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  I think it's more affected by the British.

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Very much, yeah, European thing. When I was out there, I mean, it very much is like a melting pot. I've been there a couple of times and very limited number of Americans and the Americans, the Americans that are there for the most part, aside from on like, you know, scheduled, you know,

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Jordi Hays?

  fundraising trips are not really in the same type of like,

• 1:15:57Joe Weisenthal?

  They're not.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  business community that, that you and I are in.

• 1:16:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it does seem like a more of like a British thing, specifically in terms like, oh, going there for the low taxes or the stability, et cetera. But yeah, like, all of these things getting upended, or the specific, not just oil and gas that, yes, that goes out of the Strait of Hormuz, obviously, but then like, the specific acuity, the pain points that are being felt in Asia specifically, and how they're already having to go into sort of like a 1970s rationing mode, where you see these headlines about, if you have, you know, if your license plate ends with an odd number, then you can drive on this date. I mean, the economic. Reverberation, it was clearly the biggest sort of global econ story since covid.

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was reading this article in the Economist this weekend in Buttonwood about how it feels like the market is not actually able to process what a 20% decrease in in oil rates is. And it feels like, I don't know if that's just like, hope that there will be a taco, that there will be a quick resolution, but the key stat that they were latching on to was that even if the, everything was world peace tomorrow, just bringing resources and infrastructure back online, just starting the flow and moving the ships again, takes, you know, three months, six months. And so you will see reverberations through the economy

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  for, for months, if not years, even if, you know, we get a good outcome immediately, which is what we're all hoping for.

• 1:17:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, some sort of benign outcome. But like, but this is the weird thing, and you're spot on. And this is the weird thing, which is that if you talk to the commodity guys, they're like, this is unbelievable. This is like a scenario that we couldn't even really have contemplated. And then you look at the stock market, and you know, oil is up a lot. It's not like oil markets are not registering. It's up a lot. But, but then you look at the stock market and it's flat on the year, like as of the time I walk, or it's like down 0.3%. I mean, it's stunning, because you have to remember that even like, the last thing we were all talking about prior to the war was like, oh, every legacy business model in the world is going to zero because AI is getting so good. So that was the first

• 1:18:09Joe Weisenthal?

  two months of the year. And then the third month of the year is this war that massively shoots up the price of oil, kind of like takes the prospect of rate cuts off the table. And we're looking at a market that's flat on the year. Like, it's really, like, you know, I try to, I'm sort of an EMH guy. And so I always think if I'm missing something, I just trust the market. It's very strange. It's very strange.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  It is very strange. Have you, have you found any particular corners of the economy that are serving as white pills these days? Because it feels like a year ago, things were sort of, there was, there was political chaos. We were talking about the tariffs and whatnot. But it felt like broadly, most industries were sort of seeing reasonable advances. Things were much less controversial. And we're in a much more tumultuous time.

• 1:18:59Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, I it's hard to it's hard to disagree with that. I mean, I think that there's basically, I think most people say there's basically two parts of the economy that are growing and one is anything related to AI and data centers, etc., obviously. And the other is like home healthcare jobs. And I don't think much has like changed on that front. And unfortunately, like, okay, like, again, let's just go back to the world of February 26 before the strikes had begun. You know, we the issue was, we were already still at that point well above target for the Fed's inflation. Now, there were reasons to think maybe it's trending down, maybe there's some softening, etc. But even with just essentially two cylinders out of, I don't know if the cylinders analogy is great, because I don't know how many cylinders.

• 1:19:43Joe Weisenthal?

  But two cylinders really firing, like, okay, constant, ongoing need to like provide people healthcare and then AI. Even with that, the economy was like under a certain level of like strain with price, stress, yeah. And so then you add in, okay, now, like, all forms of commodities are going to be more expensive. There's spending, of course. Wars are very costly from an expenditure perspective. And so where does that leave the rest of the economy that's not AI or healthcare? I have yet to see, I don't know, I'm certainly not feeling white-pilled. To the extent, maybe the the closest is like, look, I would say, there, there, I, there, there's still evidence a little bit out there that, for

• 1:20:24Joe Weisenthal?

  example, that we're not seeing the evisceration of tech and software jobs, the way some people might have anticipated. And it continues to be like evidence, like, oh, actually, like, that's sort of like, the economist optimism that maybe AI will create demand for software engineers, because there are more things that can be softwareized. I actually think maybe that's looking okay, that thesis. And so it's white pilling in the sense, maybe we don't have like the totally Evisceration of the sort of the labor market, like that part. Um, we actually got a good jobs report last week on um, the good Friar report. So like, I suppose there are.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  And we, and we trust all the jobs reports now. We could definitely lean on.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  The revisions have been a little tumultuous for me.

• 1:21:07Joe Weisenthal?

  There have been a lot of revisions. It's very tough to measure the economy, but I um, I, I salute our brave statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Services.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  And we did, and we did talk to some other folks who were looking at like private market data, payroll data. And, and, and there were green shoots there as well. So I, I'd be, I'm optimistic that that holds. Yeah, I've heard, I've heard the most optimistic take about uh, just uh, more companies building more new things. We've built a bunch of internal tools here. The actual um, like NPS score for most AI apps is actually very high, even though AI as a concept pulls very poorly. So there's this, there's this difference there.

• 1:21:47Joe Weisenthal?

  What does NPS stand for?

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Net promoter score or like approval, approval rating. So like people might give chat GPT directly like an 80% approval rating. And it has like a lot of, it has a lot of good reviews in the app store, for example. And if you just ask them about that or, or what they're building with Claude Code, they'll say, oh, it'll tell you an amazing story of some custom software that they built for their business. That they would have had to spend a million dollars on a consulting group to do it. And it maybe would have been really tricky to get it to math out. But then they'll just tell you like, oh yeah, we needed this dashboard and we just made it in a day or, or a couple of weeks with a couple of people.

• 1:22:21Joe Weisenthal?

  People love their specific things they built and, but then it's like, but also AI is terrible.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, they hate the abstract.

• 1:22:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. No, I mean, look, I mean, I think this is actually seems to be a recurring phenomenon. People have even over the last several years, to some extent, said this about the economy generally. Like I'm doing okay. I, my financial situation is actually fine, but the economy is like really terrible. So it would be kind of interesting, like if maybe there was a pattern that we're seeing across domains where, you know, everything else. I, I like AI, I like how it's doing, I like this thing I built, et cetera. It's all terrible. Maybe this is sort of like a general disposition that people have towards a lot of things.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the Kyla Scanlon vibe session concept.

• 1:23:02Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, like people, maybe they're happy in their, maybe they're happy or they're happy in their relationships, but they're like, oh, but dating ever for everyone else is a total wasteland.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:23:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Maybe that's actually kind of a thing these days.

• 1:23:15Jordi Hays?

  Last question, any prediction, market predictions from your side? What do you think today?

• 1:23:20Joe Weisenthal?

  We had an episode, we have an episode out today with Tomas Petry, the founder of IBKR, which is also one of the most impressive, impressive trading entrepreneur. They're getting prediction, they're really getting into prediction markets. So I think my prediction is that it's not just going to be like a two entity race for that much longer. I think like, I think as it gets bigger, there's probably too much money to be left on the table for it to just be these two companies that most people have never heard of up until like a year ago.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

• 1:23:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Nice to see both of you.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Jeff.

• 1:23:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Take care.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Andrew Dye from Alorian. He's a co-founder and CEO with a big raise coming in to the TVP in Altria Dome. Let's bring in Andrew from the waiting room. Andrew, how are you doing?

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Hi, good thanks.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  I would love to hear a little bit about your background. Maybe we should start even before Google Brain and DeepMind. What was your academic track like going into tech?

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I grew up in the UK. I lived in Manchester and Sunderland and London all across following my dad's work. And then ended up in London, did my high school. Then I went to the University of Cambridge for computer science. And then I went to the University of Edinburgh for my PhD in AI.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  And what did you work on when you were at Google?

• 1:24:54Speaker 05

  At Google, I worked on a whole bunch of things. I worked on Google Now. I worked on Smart Reply and Smart Compose. But really, I had a paper about 12 years ago where we proposed language model pre-training as supervised fine-tuning. And that's the paper that all the GPT papers cite.

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Turned out to be a big deal.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Did, did the...

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:25:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know if you're going to dig in deeper there, but at the time when you were writing that, how, how much conviction did you have around the paradigm? Did you expect?

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  And scaling laws in particular?

• 1:25:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I knew it was going to be something big. And I could tell because when I was giving my poster at NeurIPS that year, one of the inventors of like LSTMs, which were the biggest model at that time, they said it just works, like the method just works. And then I could tell, oh, yeah, there's something, something happening here. But I never imagined it would get to this scale. And I never imagined I'd be doing it for more than a decade.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Did you go to NeurIPS this last year?

• 1:26:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  How has it changed?

• 1:26:08Speaker 05

  It's all NLMs now.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Hello, I'm.

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  A lot of language.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  And VCs, a lot of VCs sneaking around too?

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  A lot of VCs, that's right.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  Well, then, yeah, take us through the, this company that decide to launch, the decision to launch this company, what you're thinking needs to be different about the current strategies employed by AI Labs.

• 1:26:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, so our company is built around visual reasoning as a first class citizen, multimodal reasoning. So looking at all the labs, you see there's a lot of focus on text, on language. That's been very effective, right? We have new paradigms in cybersecurity right now. But the visual capabilities are kind of getting left behind. And there you have problems where the models are on visual problems at the level of like a preschooler, of like a three year old.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Can you give me an example of that? Yeah, what, what, what does that look like in practice?

• 1:27:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so in practice, you can tell these models to generate a pool table and they will make a perfectly good looking pool table, right? But if you ask them to count the number of balls on the table or count the number of bottles in a bar, then they will just hallucinate. They'll be off sometimes by a large amount.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I, I've seen sometimes the reasoning models will ingest an image and then wind up writing a bunch of like Python code to basically like count pixels and do things like very much not the way I would imagine the way a normal human would process counting something. At one point I was asking to estimate the height of a desk and it was, you know, writing all this math to, to. To sort of manually, you know, try and understand the size of things, which, which we meant, it was a reasonable approach. It wound up just being a normal sized table, which was sort of underwhelming. But how are you thinking about the, the actual development, what you want to

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  do differently? Are you, are you focused more on a new architecture, new data sources, more scale? What's the shape of your, of your strategy here?

• 1:28:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we are basically a full stack team. We have experience with pre-training and data multimodality. So we are essentially building specialized models that includes new architectures for visual reasoning, very specialized sets of data with specialized data processing and new algorithms. So we expect to be running the full gamut of changes. And this is really needed to really make a breakthrough in visual reasoning.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  What does good training data look like today? Is it, is it synthetic? Is it images, videos, 3D, you know, virtual worlds? Like what, what's the shape of what's valuable?

• 1:28:57Speaker 05

  As you can expect, it's a bit of everything.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  All of it.

• 1:29:00Speaker 05

  But yeah, definitely, definitely natural data. So data that's not generated from a model is more valuable and more useful. Data from a model that's synthetic data has the risk of putting the model into like a weird place where it just outputs like M dashes or just like tries to repeat the same thing all the time.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:19Speaker 05

  But yeah, data around the natural world, around the 3D world, that's invaluable.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  What do you think the cybersecurity analogy is for visual reasoning? Like cybersecurity is so equipped for text-based models, coding agents, the entire cybersecurity threat can sort of be understood as a big string of text, more or less. Where do you think visual reasoning goes in terms of applications?

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, so for applications, one of the most promising ones that we're seeing is engineering. So right now, all these engineers, mechanical engineers, hardware engineers, and also architects, they're drawing all these diagrams in CAD software, which has been developed around, you know, the last few decades, but there hasn't really been AI breakthroughs there. People are still doing basically the same thing they've been doing for the past few decades. And so what we will do is we will produce models that really understand these drawings. Like, say, you have a real estate floor plan and you want to say, make this bedroom bigger or add an extension to my house, right? Right now, that would take weeks and lots of manual time, and then you have to follow

• 1:30:32Speaker 05

  building codes, make sure like everything is correct. And that's because there's not really any reasoning, original reasoning in our current models, and so we think there's a huge potential.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  One of the hardest, one of the hardest times we've ever laughed on this show was reacting to a floor plan that was generated by AI, and it looked so high fidelity. Every line was perfect. It didn't have any of the fuzziness that you've expected from earlier models, but when you dug in, it made no sense.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Three toilets in one room.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Twelve toilets and two baths, and it had one big, it didn't really understand the problem. So, very exciting. Well, you raised some money. Tell us about it. How much did you raise? We want to hit the gong for you.

• 1:31:12Speaker 05

  Yes, we raised fifty-five million dollars.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:31:19Speaker 05

  From who? And that's from Stryker Ventures, Mello Ventures, Automata, and Nvidia and Forty-Nine Palms participating, and we have some great angels there, including Jeff Dean.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Jeff Dean. He's been on, he's been on angel investing terror. It's really exciting to see. I mean, obviously, he's a legend, but he's clearly very optimistic about all these different approaches going forward, so very excited. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Andrew.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Luminai and Kesava Dina Karan in the waiting room. We'll bring him in to the TVP N Ultra Dome.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  They've raised a $38 million Series B to scale AI automation for health systems. How are you doing?

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:32:02Speaker 06

  Doing, doing great. Great to see you both.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Great to see you. I believe it's your first time on the show, even though we've met in the past. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:32:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm Kesava, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Luminae. Help large health systems drive automation in their operations and back office.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  What is, so is this a diffusion story? Or is this like a foundational AI research problem? Like, what, what, what is the secret to actually driving improved healthcare outcomes in these larger organizations?

• 1:32:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, you know, the, the models have kind of got to a place, probably in the last maybe six to 12 months, where, where some of the opportunities to actually drive automation end to end in a very reliable manner is, is very possible. So it's 100% a diffusion story at the moment because the reality is like, you know, American healthcare still runs on faxes in many ways. And so you're kind of at this opportunity now to dramatically change how, how it's done in the first place.

• 1:33:06Jordi Hays?

  So would love an example of like a specific back office task. Is this like passing information to insurance providers, processing claims? Like, what, what are some specifics?

• 1:33:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'll give you a very concrete example. So imagine like, you know, one of the customers you work with is the Cleveland Clinic. And they're obviously one of the most advanced sort of academic research organizations as well as hospitals in the, in the world. And so there are patients who come from all over the world to Cleveland Clinic. And the way they actually get care is initially through something called a referral, right? And, and that referral basically gets sent from, you know, small clinician practices to massive hospitals that are based in, you know, even all the way from the Middle East. And they're all, unfortunately.

• 1:33:59Speaker 06

  Or key sent to Luminai, sent via a fax machine. And these are sort of documents with handwritten notes where people are sent saying, hey, this is Kesava. He has some unique sort of left knee pain that requires, you know, specialized attention. Here are the details and there is a huge sort of operations team on the clinical clinic side where their job basically is to look at every single document, read every single sort of handwritten note. And by the way, these fax.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  So, so sorry, sorry to interrupt, but you guys, so, so just so I have it correct. You guys are making humanoid robots that can write handwritten notes to fax back through a physical fax machine to the original sender.

• 1:34:43Speaker 06

  You know, I think five years ago, that would easier solution to solve in healthcare than than try to get it implemented. But, but it's all, all N F I software.

• 1:34:55Speaker 06

  So it's just literally a virtual inbox agent that, you know, triages each referral that comes in, puts in the high risk patients first and then processes the referral in an automated way. But that's sort of an example of many other problems that obviously exist within the operations of a health system.

• 1:35:10Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. And so are you guys doing the kind of forward deployed model where you basically say, hey, we, we have a good understanding of current A I capabilities. If you let our team into your space, we'll figure out individual workflows to automate or what's been the, the approach so far?

• 1:35:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, healthcare is extremely nuanced. You have to understand the specifics pretty, pretty deeply. And so without actually being on the ground, living in the offices of your, of your customers, it's difficult to sort of scale solutions. And so, you know, about 20% of our team comes from Palantir. And so we've taken a very deep forward deployed approach to every, every customer we work with. And, you know, we work with some of the largest institutions in the country. And so it sort of lets us afford to actually be able to do that.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  How much about deployment and diffusion is gated by regulatory or approvals versus it's a less maybe, you know, obviously, there's a lot of tech native people in these healthcare systems, but they might be a little bit less online, a little bit less aware of the progress. And so there's just an education element versus, you know, understanding the cost trade offs and actually implementing the processes.

• 1:36:23Speaker 06

  I mean, and there's definitely a massive amount of like barriers to entry and being able to actually drive or actually implement AI systems in these spaces. And for good reason, right? Like this is like extremely, extremely sort of sensitive healthcare data that's flowing through these systems. And so there's the right amount of sort of guardrails put in place. But once you're in, there's a dramatic amount of work that's, that can be done by software and that can be done by, you know, AI in the first place. And it's, it's sort of, you know, there's definitely areas we shouldn't touch, like deep, deep clinical decision making and, and threads around that, that, you know, this is why we have doctors.

• 1:37:07Speaker 06

  But there's a huge amount, over a trillion dollars, just like wasted administrative operations work that, that, yeah, today can be done by software systems.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about on prem these days? With the AI context, I mean, these models are so big, the latest ones seem to run on NBL 72s, that feels like a big lift in CapEx if you're going to stuff that in a closet somewhere or in the local IT cabinet. Where do you see, like, are we going to be seeing like local inference happening for, for regulatory reasons? Or is it more about just interfacing with on prem systems because they exist? And then this will be actually an accelerant to cloud adoption?

• 1:37:54Speaker 06

  You know, we've offered on-prem to every single health system we work with.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:37:58Speaker 06

  But only, only, you know, ten to fifteen percent of them have actually taken us up on it. And, and so that's an interesting sort of one data point. But the primary reason to offer on-prem in the first place is because, because of the amount of data that you're sort of handling and you don't want those, that, that data to basically leave your, leave your premises in the first place. And so we've chosen to go, go on-prem with, with, you know, even certain workflows with, with large health systems. But, but funnily enough, we thought it was going to be a massive need, when in reality, it's, it's definitely a checkbox that they do to make sure that you can actually do it versus, versus actually deploy some of this in, in, in full production.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Interesting. Last question for me. How, how dramatically is, is this, the, the, the quantity of data produced in healthcare environments growing right now? We looked at this one company that was just an audio recorder that would transcribe everything that someone would say. We've seen a bunch of these targeted in, in tech audiences, but this one was specifically for doctors to take notes and then have a, a running transcript of everything that they said, as opposed to needing to scribble a bunch of notes. It feels like we could be at some sort of like data production inflection point, but what are you actually seeing in terms of the quantity of data that's being produced in the healthcare system?

• 1:39:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, there, there are, there's sort of obviously a variety of folks who've done research on this, but I think the healthcare, healthcare has like eight times more data than the next largest enterprise industry on the, on the, in the country. And over, over ninety percent of that data is unstructured. So these are all like sort of, you know, contracts and PDFs and handwritten notes and text that's like floating around the, the IT systems that exist. So it's, it's obviously a massive opportunity and, and problem at hand.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, congratulations on the progress. Give us the details about the round.

• 1:40:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, we raised a $38 million series.

• 1:40:09Speaker 06

  Led by the P15 team, which is the Sequoia India group along with General Catalyst, as well as YC and a bunch of others. So grateful for all the support and interested in continuing to deploy pretty deeply.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  When did you go through YC?

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  We actually started in summer 20. So yeah, so yeah, I've been, I've been sort of in the game grinding for the last five and a half plus years.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, what you caught the perfect inflection point. I'm sure you've done a ton of work to set up for the success and take advantage of the progress in AI broadly. So congratulations. What a fantastic story. Great stuff. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have Brian Manning from Xona Space coming in with a new Series C announcement, building a GPS alternative network. Brian? What a setup. Beautiful setup. I assume you're in your factory. Take us through an introduction on yourself, the company, and where you are.

• 1:41:15Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. It's been an exciting day. We're fresh off this morning, the announcements and the launch of our new satellite factory here in San Francisco, which coming on the heels of our $170 million Series C raise that we announced a couple of weeks ago. Thank you. There have been a lot of exciting things happening. So what we're doing, what we're building here is we're basically building a new GPS.

• 1:41:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:41Speaker 07

  And so we're building a network of these small satellites that are 20 times closer to Earth than existing GPS to provide extremely high accuracy, extremely high reliability, navigation capabilities. You know, I came from SpaceX, our CTO came from Ford. Originally, the company was designed around providing autonomous vehicles, the level of certainty and accuracy they really need to scale. But we started finding pretty quickly after that that there are 7 billion plus GPS devices around the world. Every single one of them is looking for better performance, and that's exactly what we're, we're building a network here to provide.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so 258 satellites going into low Earth orbit. You're building them in that factory, I assume. But you probably have a deep supply chain and partnership. I imagine that they launch on other rockets.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  What is key about what you're building? Where are you partnering? Where are you doing R and D before the actual satellites get built and sent to space?

• 1:42:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, for sure. That's a good question. So with satellite navigation, most people always focus on the satellites because satellites are cool and that's always the fun thing to focus on. But a sat nav system is really three pieces. That you have the ground segment, which is the mission operations, kind of the control segment. You've got the satellites and then you've got the user equipment. And then the user equipment is arguably the most important, but it's also the most overlooked. So we are building the satellites. We're building the ground segment. And then we've partnered to integrate our capabilities into all the different user equipment that's out there. And so that's the chips that would go into everything from a dog collar to a phone to a tractor to a car to military devices and everything in between.

• 1:43:26Speaker 07

  We've designed our capability to be just a software update so that we can integrate in with these billions of devices that are going out there. And we've been able to demonstrate that on over a dozen different receivers with the satellite that we launched last year that's up in the air now.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Got it. So yeah, can you give me an example of, so a dog collar has a GPS chip in it. It's currently interfacing with satellites that are higher in orbit. And with a software update, you won't actually need to swap out the chip. You'll be able to get more accurate GPS data. What is the benefit of this particular new constellation?

• 1:44:06Speaker 07

  For sure. So there's three big areas that we've seen customers really need better capability. And it's we try and make it simple to remember by precision, power, and protection. So there are some customers that are, you know, GPS in the automotive world, for example, can tell you a human driver kind of reliably what road they're on, where our system is designed to extremely reliably tell them not only what lane they're in, but if they're in the center of that lane or not. But we deliver that through a signal that's 100 times stronger than GPS, which means it's strong enough to punch through jamming, it's punched through trees, even punched through a couple of walls. So back to the dog collar, right now, everybody just accepts that like when you walk inside or when you go indoors or you go into your house,

• 1:44:48Speaker 07

  GPS just kind of disappears and location doesn't really show up anymore. With ours, our signal is strong enough so that you can see if Fido is in the kitchen or in the backyard, or at least knowing where they are at all, where you just can't do today with existing GPS.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  I heard this story years ago, that I have no idea if it's true, that the current GPS constellation is higher resolution for military applications than for civilian applications? And the technology is not actually the problem, it's more that there are specific rules about the level of resolution that GPS data is like turned over to private companies. Is that true at all?

• 1:45:30Speaker 07

  Sort of. So there's bits of that that are true and some I think that are just misunderstandings that are pretty common in the world. So the military does have a different GPS service than civilians do. The big difference between the civilian GPS and the military GPS, though, isn't the accuracy, it's actually more on the security aspects. And so there's more protections that exist on the military service to prevent, you know, bad actors from being able to fake the signal or being able to use the signal. And that's one of the big gaps in the civilian market today is that they don't have access to a service that gives the level of protection that's needed. And so you can kind of think of it a GPS signal.

• 1:46:13Speaker 07

  Imagine taking your social security number and your date of birth, your mother's maiden name and everything and putting it on a postcard and mailing it through the mail. That's kind of what GPS is today, that everything is just wide open. What we're providing is a capability that's more similar to the military one, where everything is secure, encrypted, protected, but making that available to civilians so that you can trust taking your hands off the wheel in the autonomous car and know that that signal's coming from us, that it has the protection, it's not coming from a bad actor.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Okay, so the software update handles, like, it sort of enables the encryption as well, I assume?

• 1:46:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, so effectively, you can almost think of our service in a similar way to, you know, if GPS is like FM radio, it's the free service, we're more similar to like XM radio or satellite radio, where we broadcast down and everyone can listen to it, but until you type in the subscription key, the data doesn't work.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:47:11Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was gonna ask, like, business model, but...

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how big or small are current GPS devices if you want to basically have an air tag that you can throw in your shoe so you can be, so you can know where you are, or the dog collar? This feels like there's a, we've been on a miniaturization path for a long time. Where are we now? Where are we going?

• 1:47:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the size of the device, I mean, we've got chipsets that we're working with that are, I think, like, three millimeters by three millimeters, so it's something that's, you probably put ten of them on the end of your hand. It's, GPS is really, one of the superpowers of GPS, and what we're building also is that it is a one directional broadcast, so it's a receive only signal, that it doesn't do it. Your GPS device, like, GPS doesn't know where you are, it only can tell you where you are. So there's no personal privacy concerns or anything like that. It just gives you the data to figure out where you are, and that enables it to also be used in these ultra-low power devices, because they just have to listen, they don't have to actually talk back.

• 1:48:18Speaker 07

  So it enables you to provide this into, you know, as you pointed out, things like the dog collar, the cow tracker, you know, we've even seen people with, like, peel and stick packaging labels that we're starting to work with, that you can put on the side of a FedEx package to track it. So it is getting into smaller, smaller devices and... In the world of AI, everything wants to know where it's at.

• 1:48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:38Speaker 07

  And the more accuracy you can provide with more availability and just enabling these things to know where they're at more of the time unlocks so many new insights and logistics visibility and whatnot that really just doesn't exist today when GPS can't get into the place where the thing is at.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  Tell us more about the factory.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, you know, hard, a lot of the, the sort of space companies that come on the show are obviously are based down in Southern California, what have been the, what have been the pros and cons of building in the Bay Area?

• 1:49:11Speaker 07

  For sure, that's a very good question. That's something we've had people ask before. If you open up our satellite and look inside of it, and we laid it out on a table, most people look at it and say, this looks like the guts of a desktop computer. There's a bunch of circuit boards. I mean, there's certainly solar panels and propulsion systems and other things around it, but the core, like the heart of it and a lot of pieces that we've designed and built internally here have a lot more in common with a desktop computer than they do with, you know, a 747. And LA has, you know, a lot of great talents, a lot of big aerospace talent. Silicon Valley is in many ways, you know, the heart of compute, all these, you know, the chipsets and a lot of the talent, the people that we're looking for, you know, it's a lot of electrical engineering, a lot of software engineering, a lot of mechanical

• 1:49:55Speaker 07

  engineering to put the pieces together, which is, you know, and the whole founding team came from Stanford. So we all kind of naturally landed here, which had the right resources around us. The factory that we're stood up here is modeled more after, you know, a supercar assembly line than it is after a typical satellite assembly line. And so it's something that, you know, this satellite factory is built to start providing, you know, multiple satellites per week, where to put that in context, the US currently produces maybe two navigation satellites in a year, where with what we're building here, we can produce that many satellites in a week, which really just brings an entirely new capability to the world at a pace that's never been possible before.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  What's the regulatory side of the, the picture? Do you have to get FCC clearance for your designs? Is there a wait and see period? Is that being accelerated at all by new tools and the ability to proofread documents with AI, anything like that?

• 1:50:54Speaker 07

  It's, yeah, so a very astute question from the space world that anything spectrum-related. We started working the spectrum engineering years before we started working any of the satellite engineering, because we knew that that would be the biggest challenge. And one of the things that we've done that's very unique is with all the spectrum engineering we've done, we basically figured out how to provide a service that is in the GPS bands right next to the GPS signals without actually causing any sort of interference to those signals, which is incredibly difficult to do because GPS broadcasts at about the power of a light bulb from an earth and a half away from earth in distance. And so it was just such an incredibly weak signal that there's a lot of people that told us when we started the company, like, there's no way you'll ever figure out how to put a high-power

• 1:51:38Speaker 07

  signal next to these GPS signals without causing interference. And a lot of people still didn't want to believe it until we launched the satellite last year and were able to show, look, there's our signal, there's GPS, it's 100% fine. And it's not only, you would say fine, it's really necessary in the world today with so much electronic warfare and jamming and other things. You really need these high-power signals to be able to fend off interference, whether that's interference from a wall or a roof or interference from somebody trying to jam the signal and prevent the capability from getting through.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the new factory. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

• 1:52:18Speaker 07

  Thank you guys so much for having us.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure we'll be back on soon.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a great rest here, guys. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  Awesome. You too, guys. Thanks.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Cody Blumenfeld-Gantz from Chapter, raising a Series Z to expand Medicare navigation and launch financial products.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  Not with us just yet.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  We're waiting.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Casey Nice got his M64, and he showed the packaging. It says, "Brought to you by the crack team at Mod Retro."

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  At Mod Retro.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Crack team.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  We have one over there. I saw some people playing Cruisin' USA, Cruisin' World, maybe? Something like that. This is gonna be fun.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  What do you think they mean by crack team, though?

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Crack team?

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  If you look at the packaging, it doesn't say, "Brought to you by the cracked team at Mod Retro." It just says, "Crack team."

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe this is some new slang.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  They cracked it open. Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Cody Blumenfeld-Gantz from Chapter into the TVP and Ultra Down. Cody, how are you doing?

• 1:53:20Speaker 08

  Doing well. Thanks for having me.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me on. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:53:26Speaker 08

  My name is Kobe. I run a company called Chapter. We are a Medicare navigation and retirement platform. I started the company a few years ago after seeing my parents struggle with the Medicare process. Pretty much every person in this country who's over 65 or retiring has to deal with Medicare. And I was just really appalled at how bad their experience was. I'm on to make it much better.

• 1:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, early on, when you kind of discovered the problem, did you assume that that there was companies already solving it well? And when you talk about the scale of the market, it's like everyone over, we're an aging country. And everyone in retirement, for the most part, is dealing with this. What did you find? And then what gave you the confidence to start the company?

• 1:54:14Speaker 08

  I found really poor experiences all around. Most Medicare brokerages in this country are heavily incentivized to push plans that pay people, that pay brokers more rather than focusing on what's best for the consumer. And there's really no good technology in the space at all. So you really have a combination of sort of mom and pop brokers. You can think of these as local real estate agents. And then you have these legacy call centers that are basically just like marketing orgs that are very bad at what they do. And really nothing in between that really prioritizes the consumer's interest. So when my parents were going through it, they had to deal with faxes and phone calls and they got really bad guidance. My mom actually now has lifetime late enrollment penalties because she was told to sign up too late.

• 1:54:58Speaker 08

  Yes, the government imposes lifetime penalties on people if they sign up late for Medicare.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk to me about then how it seems like reaching the potential customer or user as early as possible is critical. What's the customer journey to actually get on Chapter or work with an advisor? How do the users actually find the product?

• 1:55:23Speaker 08

  We take a really heavy AI-driven approach, but we augment humans with the AI.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:27Speaker 08

  So we have one of the smallest teams, probably of any tech company and especially any Medicare company for our scale.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:33Speaker 08

  And we're really proud of that because we're pretty sophisticated users of AI.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:37Speaker 08

  And so a consumer will find us through one of our partners. We do almost no direct-to-consumer work. It's all through enterprise partners.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:44Speaker 08

  They'll find out about us through their financial advisor or their health system or hospital. They will give us a call, fill out some information, and they'll be connected to one of our full-time employees who's a licensed Medicare advisor. That Medicare advisor has a lot of tooling at their fingertips that we've built to make sure they can deliver really high-quality guidance all the time for every single person.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  And what does that tooling look like? Is it visualizing and analyzing numbers and sort of instantiating spreadsheets and dashboards and charts? Or is it actually going and filling out forms and dealing with like legacy government systems that can be abstracted into something that's just more usable?

• 1:56:20Speaker 08

  All of the above and a lot more. I'll give you a couple of examples. One is every single insurance carrier has a different portal that one has to use to look up information and fill out forms. So we have to automate all of that. And they don't, and most of them don't have APIs, as you can imagine.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:34Speaker 08

  So that's kind of the automation of filling out forms and paperwork. For any given Medicare plan recommendation, we have to know every doctor that that person is in network with. We have to know every prescription that that person takes. In order to answer what sounds like a very simple question of what prescription, what will a prescription cost on a given Medicare plan at a given pharmacy? That requires tens of billions of records to know, just that one question.

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  Tens of billions.

• 1:57:02Speaker 08

  And that's one of many elements. So we do a lot of work to, obviously, our Medicare advisors are not crunching those numbers every time they talk to someone. So a lot of that to surface the right answer to the Medicare advisor.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  You guys just surpassed 100 million run rate. What seems pretty fast for a company in healthcare, which typically, you know, this isn't like selling like some image gen model or something like that. What is best in class? Who are you guys going up against from a kind of 0 to $100 million run rate? I'm assuming you guys are one of the faster in history, but I'm curious.

• 1:57:46Speaker 08

  I don't think of ourselves as a healthcare company, really. I think of ourselves as a really good tech company. So we compare ourselves to the fastest growing companies where we grow as fast or faster than companies like Ramp, companies like Lean. We went one to 100 mil in run rate revenue in I think about two and a half years. So I really think about us as just like, what do great tech companies do? And we try to orient the team around that because the bar is just too low in healthcare.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  So then what is the funnel to actually grow the business? What is the flow? You said you don't do consumer marketing. Is this, like you said, enterprises? Do you have SDRs? Are you going outbound to companies and financial advisory groups? What does that go to market motion actually look like?

• 1:58:28Speaker 08

  We do have an enterprise partnerships, enterprise growth team. The team, the whole team is about six or seven people. So as I said, we're very small and we take a lot of pride in having a really high bar for talent.

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  The entire company is?

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:58:44Speaker 08

  But all of our corporate headcount, product engineering, growth, legal, et cetera, we're about 30 people.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  That's still.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Well, congratulations. You just raised around. Tell us about it.

• 1:58:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, we raised about $100 million, led by Al Gore's Generation Fund.

• 1:59:09Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the progress. And thank you for everything that you do.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you'll be back on probably multiple times this year at this rate.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:59:20Speaker 08

  Goodbye.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Up next, we have CZ from Binance. He is the founder and former CEO. He released his book, Freedom of Money, detailing Binance's rise, crypto's evolution, and his legal battle with US regulators. CZ, how are you?

• 1:59:36Speaker 09

  I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. Tell us about the book. What was the goal? Is this an attempt to set the record straight or just tell your story? What motivated you to write a book at this moment in time?

• 1:59:50Speaker 09

  I think it's really just to tell my story. And then I was bored for, I had nothing to do for a couple of years. So I started writing a book when I was in prison. And then I just finished when I got out. So I thought, you know, it might be an interesting story to share and let people know what my view is.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  What do you think people get wrong about your story?

• 2:00:14Speaker 09

  Well, I think a lot of traditional media have many misconceptions about crypto, Binance, myself, etc. So I think there's a lot of media that's not accurate about crypto. So I think this is a very good chance for me to share my perspective and have people understand crypto better.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  What specifically do people get wrong about crypto, or you, or Binance?

• 2:00:37Speaker 09

  Sure. I mean, like, from 2013, right? People think that Bitcoins are only used by drug lords or for illicit activities. The truth is actually, if you look at perceived-wise, illicit activities in crypto is actually much, much less than in traditional finance. And then, by extension, a lot of the crypto players, a lot of crypto platforms get hit. And recently, you know, there's more attacks about, you know, just random attacks on me about how I do business, who I have connections with. So I'm a simple tech guy, so I just wrote the book, you know, the way I wanted to tell it. It's a pretty simple language, pretty straightforward book.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Just a simple guy. Just a simple guy.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  What...

• 2:01:19Speaker 09

  I think I'm a relatively simple guy.

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. How have you been processing the new regulation that's been proposed in the United States? What do you think needs to change in the crypto industry? Because I take your point about, you know, the amount of illicit activity might be lower than in cash or the traditional financial system, but, you know, the goal, I think for everyone that would agree, is to get that to zero. And so what do you like about the new regulation? What do you think is reasonable to ask for?

• 2:01:51Speaker 09

  Well, I think right now, US is making really good progress on crypto regulation. The Genius Act was passed in last July. But I think right now, there's still quite a lot of debates, based on my layman understanding. I'm not an expert, I'm not a lawyer, not a regulatory guy. But it seems like, no, there's a lot of debates about stablecoin interest rates. So I think it's a big, important issue, but from my perspective, any clarity is better than none. So... We will not, I think the current iteration of regulations will not get everything right on the first try. Right. So there's always some collaboration over time. So I think it's more important to make progress and move forward.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the broad trade off between decentralization, anonymity, and then oversight and regulation? Like, it feels like we've been moving towards more oversight, more regulation, more KYC. We've heard from some crypto leaders that that can lead to data breaches and other problems. But where do you sit on the level of regulation in the crypto industry broadly?

• 2:02:55Speaker 09

  So I think right now, the crypto industry is, to be honest, is too transparent. It's actually extremely easy to track crypto funds. Like, the blockchain is a public ledger. And then if you couple that with a few centralized exchanges KYC information, you can track most of the transactions pretty accurately. So I think right now, there's a lack of preserving of privacy. But right now, the problem is many of the regulators and law enforcement people don't know how to use it yet. Some people do. I think some of the US law enforcement actually knows it quite well. In other countries, they know it much less. So hopefully, we'll get to a balance where, I don't know where the optimum balance is, but there should be an optimal balance where we satisfy all the regulatory requirements,

• 2:03:38Speaker 09

  but we also need to protect individual privacy. Right? For example, I'll give you a couple of examples.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:03:45Speaker 09

  For example, if your company pays everybody in crypto, and if you get one payment today on the blockchain, you can just trace to the address that paid you and see how many addresses that address paid in the last week. You can figure out everybody's salary.

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02Speaker 09

  Right? So that's a privacy issue.

• 2:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:04Speaker 09

  And if you stay at a hotel, you pay for the hotel, then people know where, if people know your address and the hotel address, people will know that you're gonna stay at that hotel, which, for some people, may create security issues. Right? So there's little problems like those that are not solved yet. So we need to strike a balance. It's hard to say exactly where the balance is, but I think over time, we'll get there.

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about the interaction between AI and crypto generally? There's been a lot of excitement even from people in AI about crypto and the intersection. But I'm curious if what your overall view is and then if it's positive, some maybe specific examples of where you expect to see it manifest first.

• 2:04:52Speaker 09

  Sure, absolutely. I think both AI and blockchain are big recent new big industries. I think there's really three big technologies in my adult lifetime, right? There's AI, there's blockchain, there's internet. It's on those levels. I think AI is gonna use crypto for payments, for transactions. They're not gonna use, they cannot KYC through a bank, they cannot do, they cannot do a selfie, they don't have a passport, etc. And also, payments in every country is a little bit different. Whereas crypto, blockchain is the same across different countries. So when you integrate with a blockchain once, it works globally. And it also handles microtransactions, large transactions, etc.

• 2:05:35Speaker 09

  And also crypto is gonna increase the amount of transactions significantly. So the traditional payment rails may not be able to handle that. I think blockchain also have a lot of benefit from AI. I think right now, a lot of the applications are in blockchain, quite difficult to build. I think with AI, we can probably build like safer, safer tools for people to do self custody and safer tools for people to transact. So I think so today, the two industries, to be honest, have not really leveraged each other that significantly, but I think in the future they will.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the risk of quantum computing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem broadly?

• 2:06:15Speaker 09

  I think there's some risk, but I think overall though. Any technology improvement is always going to be good. More computing power is good for crypto. So quantum may break the existing encryption mechanisms. But with quantum computing, there's probably new, or there will be new encryption algorithms. There are already quantum-proof encryption algorithms that quantum computers do not have an advantage to crack. So we just need to upgrade the protocol to use those encryption mechanisms. Also, more computing power with quantum, there's probably newer encryption mechanisms we have not even thought about. That we can use quantum to encrypt, and decryption is always going to be much harder.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Sure. What about non-quantum hacking? Throughout the crypto boom, there's been so many upstart projects. Many of them have been able to get to escape velocity, and they're still around today. A lot of them have had to go through hacks and adapt. And it feels like with the moment that we're in in terms of AI's effect on cybersecurity, we could potentially be looking at maybe a bifurcation between the projects that have the resources to actually harden themselves against new cybersecurity threats and those who are maybe smaller upstarts and don't. How do you think that effect plays out?

• 2:07:34Speaker 09

  I actually think AI is going to improve security for most projects. Like Anthropic Cloud, right? So now, I think if you play like that, you could potentially discover many flaws, at least they claim, in many projects. But I think projects can also use their tool to fix their security problems. I think a big company like that, they already make a lot of money. They don't need to exploit smaller projects to hack, to do illegal stuff. So I think right now with AI tools that's available, the developers can use those tools to find their own problems. But of course, if you don't do that, then the hackers may do that for you, which is a typical problem we have today anyway.

• 2:08:16Speaker 09

  So I think with AI, security is actually going to become better. I don't think it's going to become worse. So I'm pretty confident about that.

• 2:08:25John Coogan?

  Do you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is?

• 2:08:28Speaker 09

  No, unfortunately, I don't. Even if I did, I would have said no, but I honestly don't.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Do you have, how have you processed that question of who is Satoshi? Have you wrestled with it? Have you done a bunch of research to try and figure it out? Have you had various suspects at various points in time? Favorite pet theories, wildcard theories? Or has it sort of been a quick ride to sort of process that? And then let go of that desire because it's the unsolved mystery?

• 2:08:58Speaker 09

  This is an interesting point. I should have put this in my book. Maybe the next edition. But I've come to peace with it. I think, I'm curious, obviously. And if there was one person I really wanted to meet in the world, that would probably be him. But I think there are negative consequences if we find out who he is. Right? For example, if I couldn't lie on the oath, if people say, look, have you met Satoshi? If I say yes, then you know, that's gonna, oh, hell's gonna break loose.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:23Speaker 09

  I think it's better if we don't know who he is.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:26Speaker 09

  It's better if we did, and without knowing him, that we don't have a founder centralization.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33Speaker 09

  Right? For example, if you look at Ethereum, Metallica's there, right? So there's a founder centralization.

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:38Speaker 09

  What makes Bitcoin unique is that we don't know, well, the founder's no longer participating. He may not be around, he may not be participating. So that makes it more decentralized. I think that's a good thing, which should come to terms. I came to terms with it quite a while ago. So even though I'm curious, I'm not actively looking.

• 2:09:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you ever thought about doing a anonymous project? Or do you have a reflection on why we haven't seen more projects effectively run? At least to my knowledge, the Satoshi playbook of maybe it requires some crazy opsec to go anonymous for a couple of years. But if it worked for Bitcoin, I would imagine that somebody would have thought, I'm gonna do the same thing for this new project with slightly different opinions about how the technology is built. I haven't seen it happen, but what's your, what's your take on the idea of a new attempt at a Satoshi-like founder in the crypto industry?

• 2:10:38Speaker 09

  I actually really want to see that too. I think that's a really, really cool idea, to be honest. But I think it's also very hard to do. Most projects fail, even with the founders heavily promoting. We know who they are, etc. For a new project, without knowing the founder, there's less trust in the community. Bitcoin was the first one. Somehow it got, you know, it started very slowly. It took many, many years for it to get to where it is today. And for a new project to do that is very, very difficult. And there have been anonymous projects that, you know, that are basically rug pulls. Right, so there are also the other side of it. People lose trust with anonymous project. So to do what Bitcoin did is very, very difficult.

• 2:11:19Speaker 09

  I would, I would actually love to see more anonymous, fully decentralized, you know, projects. But what you mentioned is the offset is also extremely hard. It's so hard today to not leave any trace, both digitally or physically, right? So the fact that nobody has really announced who Tatoshi is means that his offset is crazy. I don't, I think 99.91, nobody else can do it really at this point. Yeah.

• 2:11:46Jordi Hays?

  What do you Americans miss about crypto adoption globally? Here, I mean, so many, at least, at least younger generations, almost everyone has some exposure to digital assets or some experience buying, selling, maybe not, maybe not using it functionally for payments. But obviously, it's very different in other parts of the world with, with, you know, less centralized financial institutions.

• 2:12:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think America, for the last few years, before the Trump administration, was, you know, fairly anti-crypto. So many of the founders left, many of the projects left, and many of the liquidity left, right? The biggest crypto exchanges are not in America. Today, the biggest blockchains, the biggest stablecoin, they're not America-based. So I think America misses that liquidity quite a bit. America right now has very forward-looking regulations, and now people flocking back. I think the talent pool is coming back, but some of the larger players are not backing America yet. So we'd love to see that changing. I think right now, crypto, if you buy crypto, Americans are probably paying the highest

• 2:12:58Speaker 09

  fees in the world, whereas if you buy anything else, America is usually paying the lowest price. So the cost to American consumers today for accessing crypto is quite high. So that's a disadvantage that America has today. But America is a large economy, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of VCs, and good liquidity in traditional markets. I think, and I think America definitely has the ability to catch up very quickly.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  You were born in China. How are you thinking about geopolitical relations between the US and China? Tensions seem to have been rising for years. There's trade tensions, there's all sorts of geopolitical tensions. Is there any hope for de-escalation between the two countries?

• 2:13:42Speaker 09

  I'm not an expert on the geopolitics between different countries. And also, my layman understanding is both countries have leaders with pretty big personalities, so they're very hard to predict. I think the President Xi in China is easier to predict than President Trump. President Trump is like a wild card, right? Which is in his advantage. You can't predict what he's gonna do. But I do think both countries are large countries now with leaders who are smart and who are business-driven. They want the economy to grow. So if that's the goal, then I'm optimistic that there's a certain outcome to be reached. Between two countries, there's usually a fairly large zone of overlap that you can

• 2:14:27Speaker 09

  reach deals. Right now, it's just the personalities, and also both countries are quite proud, so they are all hard negotiators. The negotiations at that level takes time. But I'm fairly optimistic that both, the two countries of the world have something that's beneficial for both.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  You've written the book, What's Next for You? What do you think the next decade looks like?

• 2:14:51Speaker 09

  I'm actually not too sure exactly. So I'm doing a few different things right now. I'm running investment fund. I'm not really running it, but like I support it. I do some mentoring in the space for new entrepreneurs. I run a free education platform, a Giga Academy, that provides free education to 240,000 kids now. And we've only been at it for like a year and a half. And then I also, yeah, so and I also advise different governments on crypto policies. So between those four things that keep me pretty busy. The book was actually a huge distraction for me. It took a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to write a book. But I'm glad, no, it's out there. And there's an audio version coming out soon.

• 2:15:35Speaker 09

  And then after that, I'll put that, I'll put that on pause, just let it be for a while. And then figure out what to do, yeah.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  What was the strategy for the audiobook version? Did you narrate it yourself, hire a human narrator, use AI?

• 2:15:50Speaker 09

  So one of my friend, Michael Santos, is gonna narrate it. So he, we had this sort of agreement verbally from a long time ago. And also, Amazon doesn't allow AI-generated voices.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Interesting. I didn't know that.

• 2:16:06Speaker 09

  So you will human read or audible. And then I've been playing with AI quite a bit myself. The AI cloning of voice is, I can't tell the difference from my own voice. It's, and it's just better. It reads more smoothly. It's better than my own reading. So in certain, we, on certain other platforms, or in certain other countries, we may use the AI-generated voice that clones my voice to try to read it. I haven't finished that yet. There's still little quirks here and there. Sometimes AI make very obvious mistakes. You know, it pronounces Chinese names wrong, which I would not make that mistake. It pronounces, sometimes you will say like, when I write $400, you say $400.

• 2:16:50Speaker 09

  So I would not make that mistake. But 99% of the time, he actually reads better than me. So we'll see. So I might do two different audio versions. Still playing along with it.

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  I wonder after Jassy's letter today if he's still gonna be anti-AI voices.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08Jordi Hays?

  I did have a one last question. I'm curious, how did you process the prediction market boom over the last two years? There had been, you know, long, people had long had predictions that prediction markets would intersect with crypto and be really big. And yet, there was attempts in the 2010s that didn't really reach critical mass. So I'm curious, you know, how you process that entire period?

• 2:17:36Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I think today, I do think prediction markets has a huge potential and it's already pretty big. Like, the top players are pretty big already. And there's like hundreds of thousands of upcoming platforms as well. And also, if you look at the regulatory landscape, the CFTC chairman, Michael Selig, he talks about prediction markets multiple times. Every time I watch him talk, he seems to be in prediction markets. So it seems like the regulators and the traditional markets are also moving in. So, as you said, there have been many attempts previously, but then timing is important. Some ideas, you know, even though the ideas are very obvious, if you implement them too early, they don't get traction.

• 2:18:18Speaker 09

  You have to implement the right idea at the right time. I don't know what all the ingredients are for prediction markets, but somehow now seems to be the right time. The previous attempts struggled, and now it seems to be taking off. So I'm a big proponent for anything that's new and interesting. And I think prediction markets are very interesting. They're the price discovery and truth discovery. They're kind of using price to discovery truth, right? So, which is actually a very, which is usually the reverse for what we do. We, like, information drives trading volumes. So that's a very interesting dynamic. I think, and also, the Easy Labs, the fund I'm involved with, we invest in multiple prediction markets. So we'll see which ones work. But I do think that it's a huge potential, and it's hot.

• 2:19:03Speaker 09

  Yeah. And it works.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  Are you, how are you thinking about any of the previous crypto booms or narratives or themes coming back? Things like NFTs or crypto gaming? Are you optimistic on any projects, DAOs, that had their moment in the sun and didn't quite release, reach escape velocity? Do you think anything will have a second wind in the near future?

• 2:19:29Speaker 09

  I do think so. I think many things will have a second wind, but the second wind will most likely be a little bit different, right? There'll be something that's, you know, even prediction markets today, they're different from the sort of prediction markets four or five years ago. So every iteration, there will be some tweak, and it's usually that little tweak that makes it a little bit different, and it may be the micro environment. So I do think that some of the things that, you know, that were there, like, I think DAOs will not disappear. I think DAOs haven't really took off, to be honest. The concept being there for years. It's like, you know, in the 19, even in the 2010s, video streaming doesn't really work, right? Like, you know, this type of, even today, this type of call, sometimes the internet doesn't work, sometimes the microphone doesn't work, right? So, you know, we get into those situations a lot.

• 2:20:13Speaker 09

  So, a lot of things take a lot of time to mature. So I think the DAOs, the NFTs, again, I don't, the next iteration may be slightly different, but you may still be called NFTs or NFT2, you may be a different name. But I think tokenizing art is probably gonna come back at some point, multiple times. I don't know when it will really hit big and stay. NFTs, I think honestly, we saw, we saw like, we saw a rise and then a downward trend. So it's hard to say, but I think all of those things eventually will, should be much bigger than they were today.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations. Yeah, congrats on the launch. I recommend everyone go check it out and hear CZ's side of the story. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

• 2:20:57Speaker 09

  Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. There's some lore on the timeline. Bluetooth is such a strange name for technology. Apparently it's named after a Scandinavian king who united Norway and Denmark, and the logo is a combination of two Norse runes. I like Bluetooth. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Tal Hoffman from Enclave. He's the founder and CEO. Here to tell us about his seed round. How are you doing? What's going on? Hey, thanks for having me. How are you? We're good. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:21:32Speaker 10

  Yes, please. So I'm Tal, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Enclave. Essentially, we're an AI code security platform using LLMs to find critical vulnerabilities in code bases the way traditional scanners want.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So huge week. Take us through how you've been processing it. From your perspective, what is AI actually capable of doing? What is not there yet? How have you been processing all the news around AI and cybersecurity this week?

• 2:22:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think what Tropic has done is tremendous for the industry. I think it's a tremendous leap forward for our security. I think the real novel thing that they did, they did besides finding the unknown, the known, the vulnerabilities that have been there for decades.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:19Speaker 10

  Were able to exploit autonomously vulnerabilities. Essentially, exploitability is the name of the game, as I see it, right? Because a vulnerability that's not exploitable is not worth as much until right now, unless something changes. So I think it's a huge leap forward. And I think they have done very correct move in deploying it safely.

• 2:22:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think it's very exciting for anyone that's in code security, including ourselves.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  And yeah, how do you see yourself fitting in? Tell me about the shape of the business, the strategy, how you want to roll out your products.

• 2:22:58Speaker 10

  Yes, so I think especially with Middles and the recent changes, I think that it's gonna be asymmetrically deployed. And so I think that this creates an opportunity for other organizations that do not have access to the technology to be proactive about it and procure, whether it's for us or competitors. I think it's a net positive for the industry, especially with new attack surfaces being exposed and created and with new teams from regular developers to go to market and everything in between deploying more code. So I think it's a tremendous opportunity. Yeah.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about interfacing with Project Glasswing? Do you want to fold into that and then be able to do things on top of the private models that are maybe deployed in this asymmetric way? Or do you want to use other models and sort of figure out a different way to differentiate and add value?

• 2:24:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, I think we want to go and partner with Anthropic that has done great work and OpenAI and all those big labs. I think the alpha is currently in using them. So definitely want to partner with them. We are talking with them. Again, I think they are doing a tremendous job, but I think ultimately, most organizations do not currently have access to this technology and they need an independent system level reviewer that's able to constantly deploy the state of the art models.

• 2:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Tell us about the round. You raised some money?

• 2:24:38Speaker 10

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have raised $6 million led by 8000.

• 2:24:46Speaker 10

  And then we have another bunch of exciting investors on board like Aaron Levie.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Brother Aaron.

• 2:24:55Speaker 10

  Brother Aaron, Mark Benioff.

• 2:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:25:00Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:25:01Jordi Hays?

  You got the dolphin in.

• 2:25:04Jordi Hays?

  The dolphin. You don't see him ripping personal checks.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  Last question from my side. What have conversations been with customers like? Who do you need to get to? Who are the key stakeholders? How diffuse is the understanding of cybersecurity threats these days? And what are you educating customers about most frequently?

• 2:25:27Speaker 10

  Yes, I think so. We have just out of beta, just released the product. I think for us, we're trying to cater to both the security practitioners at the end of the chain. Like, we have seen very, we are seeing a lot of anger from them. We have the wrong cloud code, the wrong cursor, right? The wrong shiny object. So we want to empower them. But I think most importantly, we want to empower developers to be able to deploy safely and quickly because it's becoming very concerning. We can see because we have some new Zero Days that we'll be publishing soon, following responsible disclosure. And I think that Like, security is gonna be very big as a whole, the new job.

• 2:26:10Speaker 10

  You see how sexy security has become the last couple of weeks. So I would say like agio security personnel, but ultimately this whole thing is very good for them. You can assume that bad state actors already utilize those ZODs. So eventually, as more organizations get exposed to this powerful tech that is LLM-powered security research, the safer it becomes. And I think it's become very obvious, we don't have to do much education. It's like, the opportunity is very obvious, the problem is very obvious.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the business model? Do you want to sit between the code that's written and the pull request and the code review phase? Do you want to be actively monitoring systems in production, both?

• 2:26:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, definitely both, but we are trying to be like, to prevent those issues to begin with, whether it's through GitHub, through the pull request, through Claude Code, MCP, through Cursor, but also, yeah, definitely also prevent production. And I mentioned exploitability, so context is most important here, and looking at your, and I think this is something that Wiz has done a great job with, is looking at the cloud environment, at the cloud environment at the runtime, see what's exploitable, what's not, because you can have a 10.0 CVSS vulnerability that's completely irrelevant, because it's not exposed to the internet. So yeah, we wanna be both preventing, but also finding live vulnerabilities.

• 2:27:42Speaker 10

  But right now, we are focused on code, yeah.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us and have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:27:51Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  What else is in the timeline before we wrap up the show? Yahoo's G800 is at Augusta. If you got really good SEO between 1994 and 1999, then messed everything up after that, your executive team in 2026 will still have a G800 money, says Chris Backy. That is very funny. And Preston Holland is chiming in with some crying emojis.

• 2:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Secretary Kennedy.

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  New podcast.

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, coming soon. Derek Thompson says, "The urge to pod cannot be denied. Tech VCs and David Rubenstein are richer than God. What do they want to do in their enormously valuable spare time? Fire up a mic and pod. What does Jamie Dimon want to do after JPM? Start a media company, i.e. pod again." RFK Jr. is in charge of all government health policy. What does he want to do with that power? Pout about it. And this Will highlighted Jeremy's post, "Posting is the end state. It's the treasure that awaited Alexander at the end of his conquest. It's all that's left for man after gaining the world. It's all there is at the very end of it all. Celebrities, billionaires, industrialists, scholars, all wind up as the humble poster."

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  David Rubenstein's podcast is deeply underrated. If you're not already listening to it, The David Rubenstein Show, peer-to-peer conversations, airs on Bloomberg Television. He's also done history with David Rubenstein on PBS. He is the chairman of Carlyle Group. And yes, truly very successful, but still enjoys a recorded conversation. In other news, The Acquired Podcast just released a new website, acquired.fm.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  It is stunning. Many people are calling it the most beautiful podcast website in history.

• 2:29:32John Coogan?

  It's incredible. Really, really well done. Every time you mouse over something, you get a vinyl record that pops out. I'm very excited to see the physical instantiation of this. And it fits the brand perfectly. It's a great, so many iconic episodes, so many iconic interviews. So congratulations to the folks at Acquired. Every company has a story. Really, really well designed.

• 2:29:55Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have him back on.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 2:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Very soon. But thank you for being with us today.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege to podcast with you today.

• 2:30:05John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:30:08Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter.