Jensen on Dwarkesh, Cursor + xAI, Codex Update | Kevin Hart & James Morrissey, Ben Smith, Jonathan Criss, Paul Scherer, Matan Grinberg, Akhil Voorakkara, Charlie Cheever, Victor Cardenas Codriansky, Theodor Marcu

(01:57) - Jensen on Dwarkesh (27:23) - Cursor + xAI (30:49) - Claude Opus 4.7 Reactions (34:00) - Codex Update (35:14) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (40:03) - Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, discussed the Semafor World Economy conference, highlighting its scale with over 500 global CEOs and political figures in attendance. He emphasized the conference's focus on the intersection of politics, finance, and technology, noting that discussions frequently centered on artificial intelligence and its impact on large enterprises. Smith also shared insights into Semafor's use of AI tools to enhance journalism, including a system that analyzes interview transcripts to identify newsworthy content. (49:30) - Jonathan Criss, CEO and founder of Vital Lyfe, previously spent over 13 years at SpaceX, where he contributed to projects like Dragon and Starlink. In the conversation, he discusses Vital Lyfe's mission to address water scarcity by developing portable desalination units that convert seawater into potable water, leveraging high-rate manufacturing to reduce costs and increase accessibility. He also highlights the company's recent fundraising success and plans to scale production in their new California facility. (01:01:40) - Paul Scherer, originally from a small German village, is the founder of a new platform designed to connect people by bridging personalized digital bubbles. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from Germany to San Francisco, the early stages of his startup, and his vision to strengthen existing relationships through technology. He also reflects on the challenges of building meaningful connections in an era of hyper-personalized content and the importance of creating experiences that foster genuine human interaction. (01:17:06) - Kevin Hart & James Morrissey. Kevin Hart is an American comedian and actor. In the conversation, Hart discusses his tequila brand, Gran Coramino, emphasizing his commitment to authenticity and quality in its creation. He highlights the importance of hard work and genuine involvement in his business ventures, aiming to build a brand that reflects his personal values and dedication. James Morrissey is the CEO of Gran Coramino, the tequila brand co-founded with Kevin Hart. He leads the company’s growth, brand strategy, and distribution, building it into a premium spirits business focused on quality and storytelling. (01:40:29) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:44:06) - Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory, discusses the company's recent $150 million funding round led by prominent investors, the evolving landscape of AI adoption in software development, and the importance of enterprises being model-agnostic to ensure efficiency and resilience. (01:56:54) - Akhil Voorakkara, co-founder and CEO of Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering, discusses the company's recent $38 million Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism Fund, which will enable the production of more autonomous maritime robots like their Mako model. He highlights the versatility of these modular robots, capable of both autonomous and remote-controlled operations, equipped with various sensors for tasks such as infrastructure inspection and environmental monitoring. Voorakkara also emphasizes the company's commitment to vertical integration, manufacturing components in-house to reduce costs and accelerate development, thereby enhancing their ability to address critical challenges in maritime domains. (02:06:12) - Charlie Cheever, co-founder of Quora and current president of Expo, discusses Expo's recent $45 million Series B funding led by Georgian, bringing the company to 62 employees worldwide. He highlights Expo's evolution into a leading platform for AI-driven app development, enabling developers to create high-quality mobile applications using React Native and TypeScript, with the flexibility to incorporate native code when necessary. Cheever also emphasizes the importance of taste, high action per minute (APM), and agency in software engineers, especially in the era of AI-assisted development. (02:18:35) - Victor Cardenas, co-founder and CEO of Slash, a rapidly growing business banking platform, discusses the company's mission to modernize banking for entrepreneurs by offering industry-specific financial solutions that go beyond traditional services. He highlights Slash's focus on automating financial workflows tailored to various sectors, aiming to become a leading commercial card issuer in the U. S. Additionally, Cardenas emphasizes the integration of AI tools, such as their agent "Twin," to enhance user experience and operational efficiency. (02:25:10) - Theodor Marcu, Head of Product Growth at Cognition, discusses the recent launch of Windsurf 2.0, which integrates Devin, Cognition's AI software engineer, into the Windsurf platform, introducing an agent command center to streamline the management of multiple AI agents. He emphasizes the evolving role of engineers, highlighting how the command center enables them to oversee numerous agents efficiently, allowing for a shift from routine coding tasks to higher-level system architecture and design. Marcu also addresses the importance of model agnosticism, noting Cognition's commitment to evaluating and utilizing the best available AI models to optimize performance across various tasks. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching We Are Not a Car.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  We are not a car.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  We are not a car.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  It is Thursday, April 16th of 2026, and we are live from the TVP in UltraDome.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Cars.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  The Capital of Cars, absolutely wild podcast between Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Dwarkesh Patel. So many clips, so much debate. We're going to kick it off with the question of whether or not Nvidia is a car. First, let me tell you about our lineup because we have an insane group of guests joining us today. Kicking it off with Ben Smith from Semaphore, I think it's his third time on the show. He's live from the Semaphore World Economy Summit, has convened a massive group of policymakers, CEOs, investors. He's going to give us the update on what conversations are happening on the ground. Then Jonathan Chris is coming on to talk about Starlink for Water, former SpaceX employee,

• 0:59John Coogan?

  just raised $24 million to enable off-grid desalination. One of my favorite topics these days. We talked a little bit about it with Peter Diamandis. Then Paul Scherer from Eigen, raised 15 million from Benchmark, James Morrissey and Kevin Hart.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  New consumer social play.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, Kevin Hart's coming on.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  People in that one.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Talk about building a tequila business and.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  And we will be asking him about Jensen and Dwarkesh. We've got to ask. I gotta know. Then Matan from Factory.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Ulysses, we have a massive $46 million fundraiser today for underwater and surface drones. Charlie Cheever from Expo is coming on. And Victor from Slash is coming on as well. And then we'll close it out with Theodore from Cognition. So, big show, should be going at least two and a half, three hours as usual. We will be off tomorrow, but we'll be back on Monday. Let me start off with this.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's start off with this video.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Real from Semi Analysis because it is a treat.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, and pause for a second?

• 2:04John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  I, you know, I was asking you.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Like what app you use to edit videos.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  It was to make this exact video. And then I saw this and I was like, oh, I need to make it.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I don't, you're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. And that loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me. We are not, we're not a car. We are not a car.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Such a great edit. It's absolutely, it's such a good vibrio. And it's so funny because.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  I love to, this is Tokyo Drift. Very good. It's funny because it's this new type of vibrio where the semi-analysis team, obviously, they recontextualize the two clips and added the beat to get the video going. But that final edit with the cars sort of morphing together, like it goes from, there's a match cut. These are match cuts between one, one stick shift move and another, or one car drifting and then another car drifting. That takes a really long time. Somebody clearly made this video just because they're enthusiasts of Fast and Furious. And then the semi-analysis team was able to quickly recontextualize that to be about Jensen's answer on Nvidia's mote and the CUDA mote and what's happening with Nvidia.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  So let's go through this question because it's been, it's been humming for a while. And it's sort of bubbled up most recently because there was a whole bunch of news that Mythos might have been trained on Tranium, then maybe TPU, then maybe Blackwell. And it was sort of a mix and it just feels like more and more of the AI labs are capable of making other chipsets work. In the early days, it was all about Nvidia and now it feels like the incentives are really high to figure other options out. And that creates a different competitive dynamic. So we can run through my thoughts on this and then we can go into the geopolitical considerations as well. Cause that was another fascinating segment of the interview. So.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia, spent over 90 minutes, it was almost two hours when you include the ads too, in the ring with Dhankesh Patel. It was electric and the key question, at least for the start, was whether or not Nvidia is a car. And I'm only half joking about that. It sort of was the key question. Nvidia has been the market leader for years. During the gaming boom, Nvidia was the gold standard for rendering PC graphics. There was always decent competition from AMD, but once the AI boom kicked off, the CUDA ecosystem significantly sped up development of AI systems and training of AI models. And for those who aren't familiar, CUDA is a programming model that enables GPUs to accelerate demanding workloads by

• 4:49John Coogan?

  parallelizing computation. So instead of needing to work on the very low-level instruction sets, if you are a CUDA kernel engineer, CUDA engineer, you can access the, all the power of the GPUs very efficiently while staying up in the more mathematical AI research, more standard Python, C++ programming paradigms. You don't need to dip down too low, but it's getting easier to dip down lower, and that's what we're seeing. So that created the CUDA mode, because developers were way more productive and the biggest bottleneck to progress was allowing AI researchers to quickly test ideas and scale their experiments up to whole fleets

• 5:30John Coogan?

  of GPUs and eventually entire data centers. So at the time, researchers really liked CUDA and really liked Nvidia and they did not want to have to spend hours and hours figuring out other hardware systems. They just wanted to run their tests and see if the model was getting better and continue to scale. But recently, the biggest cost center for AI labs flipped from researcher time, more or less, to compute capacity, and this creates a much larger economic incentive to figure out a way to drive down the cost of chips used to train AI models. I wrote about this back in, on Tuesday, October 22 of last year, so almost six months ago.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  I said, not every link in the supply chain of AI can be completely commoditized. Nvidia has an insane amount of power, having ramped full year revenue over the last three years from 27 billion to 60 billion to 130 billion. Absolutely insane top line revenue ramp at that scale. And that's why Jensen is so confident about how dominant this business is. It's the world's biggest company for a reason. It has been growing spectacularly at immense scale. And not only did they grow the top line, but net profit margin grew insanely. So it grew from 16% to 56%.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you do that when you have pricing power and massive leverage because, you know, in this case, demand massively outstripping supply plus developer love and kind of just like.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  And I believe the forecast net margin was 70 something percent. We were hearing about 80% potentially. And so Nvidia, you know, the plan and the plan is still to make an incredible amount of profit off of these chips because they are incredibly valuable. But all the hyperscalers and the AI labs, they are sort of incentivized now to form a bit of an anti Nvidia alliance to commoditize the accelerator market and drive down those margins at least a little bit. And so today, the AI chip market is starting to look much less monopolistic. AI coding agents can make it easier to write software that works on non CUDA chip stacks. And the teams behind competing chips have plenty of resources and economic incentives

• 7:47John Coogan?

  to bring performance in line with Nvidia, even if it's going to be a big hassle, even if you're going to need to spin up a team to get AMD or TPU working. It's going to be worth it because you're talking about billions and billions of dollars spent on chips. For the past few years, Nvidia-

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, another example of like, you know, an instance where an AI lab had so much urgency that they were willing to spend whatever it took was Meta rebuilding like SL.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Like they were willing to outspend pretty much any other lab on talent because they didn't have time to find a homegrown talent or go through a normal recruiting process, especially considering a lot of those engineers were like happy doing what they were doing.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the incentives flip when you get to this scale or the incentives just get so big, you can build a whole team for a specific thing, solve any problem. And so- For the past few years, Nvidia has sort of looked like SpaceX's launch program. It's incredible technology with very few viable alternatives. And so that creates great margins, as we've seen with SpaceX's launch capacity. And they control something like 90% of the launch market. While the products have not degraded, quite the opposite actually. Blackwell and Veroubin are incredibly powerful chips. They're clearly on the leading edge there.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  And they have incredible amount of supply chain guarantees from TSMC and across memory and all the other different pieces of supply chain. Like Nvidia is ready to make more chips. But increased competition makes the category look a little bit more like the car market than the rocket launch market. And so that, I think, is where Jensen is pushing back and saying, no, there's a lot more that we bring to the table with our customers that don't think of us like a car. This is not, you know, the difference between a Ford and a Toyota. They all sort of get you to the same place and you can swap one out. You can be driving a BMW one day, go to the dealer, turn it in for a Mercedes and you're going to have a pretty

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or the other, the other example that I was using with the team earlier was this idea of like, if you're, if you're a delivery company like FedEx and you have a lot of like Ford, Ford vans. And then, and then Hyundai comes to you and says, hey, you've been spending like $50,000 per Ford van, but like, would you consider a Hyundai van?

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  We'll, we'll sell it to you for $35,000. It's just as good. And it could be like mildly inconvenient for the company because like they're kind of used to using, using Ford. They maybe have like an internal team that does some maintenance. But when you start looking at that cost differential, it can start to get pretty interesting to say like, hey, we should, why don't we try out some Hyundai's?

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's like move over some of our routes to Hyundai's and like see how that goes.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  They try it and they're like, hey, this actually, this works pretty well. Maybe, maybe there's like, you know, higher maintenance, but it actually like masks out.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  And like, we're going to actually start adding more Hyundai's to our overall fleet.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  And so Jensen's point on the podcast is that like, we're not, we're not selling cars, right?

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  This is not like something like you can just swap out.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  And Dwarkesh was obviously pushing, pushing back.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  And for a lot of companies, swapping out Nvidia for TPU would be very difficult. Some workloads that Jensen focuses on, he says, we're not a tensor processing unit. We're an accelerator. There's a whole bunch of scientific computing workloads that work particularly well with Nvidia. The, the problem that Dwarkesh was pointing out.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, it's perfectly fine to have like a specialized chip for specialized workflows because the biggest companies in the world, the biggest buyers here have like a single type of workload that they're trying to do.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  And that's why they're using your competitors.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, uh, because the AI build out does not seem to be slowing down as long as power can continue to be brought online and data centers can continue to find towns that will approve of them, uh, demand for chips will presumably grow, but every chip designer and AI lab, uh, has to be praying that the net, that those net margins come down. How quickly will it happen? Very too, very early to tell. Uh, the market did not react negatively to this back and forth, uh, in the short term, although, uh, the price of Nvidia has been basically flat since last August. And I think that's why Nvidia, uh, Jensen is trying to sort of like reset on the narrative because it's possible that, uh, you know, with the, there, there's a lot of movement up and down. They've been sort of flat.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  There's a desire to sort of like reset and, and recontext.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Inference demand is scaling.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  In a very significant way.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  And the Nvidia stock price is relatively flat.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's, and since August, there's been like so many different, uh, moments where, uh, fears of the AI bubble, fears of the products not finding product market fit, that revenue might stagnate. Like we've seen a ton of bullish signals for like AI demand broadly. Demand is there. And so if you're a supplier, you should also be, uh, going up, but there's been this overhang of what will happen to margins and market structure. And so, uh, that is what people are going back and forth on. Tyler, did you have anything else, uh, thoughts on this?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I mean, like personally, I think I probably am more on the Dwarkesh side where like, yeah, I mean, at some point, like these margins are so high, there's so much opportunity here. Like, we've seen that, like, actually, you know, if you're a big lab, you actually can just like, put a little, maybe, you know, it's a lot of resources, but you actually can just like, train a model on a different architecture, you can serve them on a different architecture. Like, you actually can figure these things out. As models get better, you can, you know, you can go lower and lower on the stack.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  You can, you know, you can write the kernels semi autonomously. These things get faster and faster. And it's like, I'm probably much more on the Dwarkesh side.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how Grok fits into this, the new CPU, integration between different pieces of the puzzle, like, and then also, I mean, Dwarkesh makes this point that the, the supply agreements that Nvidia has might be a bit of a moat for the next few years while TSMC line time is so constricted.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, but even then, like, you know, Jensen was saying, the, the kind of supply constraints, this is like a two to three year problem. After that, like, you can just solve these things.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  So it's like, almost, like, I don't know how to think about this because, you know, to me, it seems like, yeah, so much of the value of Nvidia is just, like, they have such an incredible relationship with TSMC.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  But if, and it's so valuable because of how constrained it is.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  But if that kind of constraint is maybe gonna, you know, go away to some extent.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, TSMC?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what he says, like, that they're gonna increase, you know, they can build a new fab and whatever, three, three years.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the big, the big, the big takeaway from the conversation is like, you have one person who seems incredibly AGI pilled, which is Dwarkesh.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  And then you have Jensen, who doesn't seem AGI pilled in that sense at all, right? He, uh, Dwarkesh asked about, you know, he was kind of getting at, early on, the idea of like, can, can, will, will you be able to just like, prompt your way to Nvidia chips? He's like, you basically sell software.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  And, uh,

• 15:06John Coogan?

  He didn't put it quite as aggressively, but yeah.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, of course, like, you know, more, more on the nose.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Jensen was basically like, no, I don't, I don't think that'll happen. And then, and then when you get to the whole geopolitical conversation too, again, it's like, Dwarkesh is like, you're selling nukes. And Jensen is, in my view, like, I'm selling computers.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  And that, that was like, the big rift. It was like, these two kind of totally conflicting.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Worldviews and it made for some very

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Pay-per-view.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  It was a pay-per-view. It should have been a pay-per-view.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  It should have been a pay-per-view. Yeah, Shri Ram Krishnan summed it up pretty well. He said, "Every person here's reaction to the Jensen plus Dwarkesh podcast can be extrapolated directly from whether they believe in the frontier labs achieving short timelines for AGI/ASI. If you believe in the labs achieving RSI and then AGI/ASI for some definition of all three, in the next few years, you're probably sympathetic to the frame Dwarkesh adopts. If not, you're probably more sympathetic to the arguments from Jensen." And so, we can go into the export controls next and talk about that. Metacritic Capital sort of summed up a little bit of the why just Jensen's rhetoric

• 16:27John Coogan?

  and how he wasn't conceding a lot of things. Dean Ball said, "Dwarkesh Jensen reveals how inconsistent and unbattle-tested AI acceleration talking points are, especially when they're filtered through the prisms of corporate comms and mass politics. Strategically coherent accelerationism is possible," he says, "I try, but not currently prevalent." And Metacritic Capital says, "The problem is that Jensen doesn't concede anything. Compute spending going to the moon, one trillion revenue in sight, models keep getting better, no unemployment, software codes are good, other Western accelerators are bad, Chinese competitors are good, Nvidia makes token costs decline 90% per year, but Chinese compute scientists are capable of making all the necessary algorithm improvements." He also can't be AGI-pilled enough because at the end of the day, he is an intellectual property company in the business of sending a file to TSMC. I think it's part of

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Taiwanese culture to want to be loyal to all clients and don't have favorite winners. He doesn't want to betray his software co-customers. He has antitrust concerns.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was making the bull case for software, which was that AI agents are going to use tools. And so, he's like, "There's going to be more users of software than ever."

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Which is something I'm somewhat sympathetic to, but yeah, it definitely...

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  It's still very easy to take the counter.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  The flip side of that, yeah. Well, let's play the distilled recap from Dwarkesh Patel of the back and forth with Jensen on export controls. It's about four minutes and we'll watch this and then discuss, so.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  If Chinese companies and Chinese labs and Chinese government had access to the AI chips to train a model like Claude Mythos with these cyber offensive capabilities and run millions of instances of it with more compute, the question is, oh, is that a threat to American companies, to American national security?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  First of all, Mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity and a fairly mundane amount of it by an extraordinary company. And so the amount of capacity and the type of compute that it was trained on is abundantly available in China. And so you just have to first realize that chips exist in China. They manufacture 60% of the world's mainstream chips, maybe more. It's a very large industry for them. They have some of the world's greatest computer scientists, as you know. Most of the AI researchers in all of these AI labs, most of them are Chinese. They have 50% of the world's AI researchers. And so the question is, if you're concerned about them, considering all the assets they already have, they have

• 18:48Speaker 02

  an abundance of energy, they have plenty of chips, they got most of the AI researchers. If you're worried about them, what is the best way to create a safe world? Well, victimizing them, turning them into an enemy, likely isn't the best answer. They are an adversary. We want the United States to win. But I think having a dialogue and having research dialogue is probably the safest thing to do. This is an area that is glaringly missing because of our current attitude about China as an adversary. It is essential that our AI researchers and their AI researchers are actually talking. It is essential that we try to both agree on what not to use the AI for. With respect to China, we want to have, of course, we

• 19:32Speaker 02

  want the United States to have as much computing as possible. We're limited by energy, but we got a lot of people working on that. And we had to not make energy a bottleneck for our country. But what we also want is we want to make sure that all the AI developers in the world are developing on the American tech stack and making the contributions, the advancements of AI. Especially when it's open source available to the American ecosystem. And it would be extremely foolish to create two ecosystems. The open source ecosystem, and it only runs on the Chinese tech, a foreign tech stack. And a closed ecosystem, and that runs on the American tech stack. I think that that would be, that would be a horrible outcome for the United States.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the concern, going back to that flop difference in the hacking is, yes, they have compute, but there's estimates that because they're at seven nanometer, they don't have UVs because of chip making expert controls. The amount of flops they're about to actually produce, they have like one tenth the amount of flops that the US has. And so with that, could they train eventually a model like Mythos? Yes. But the question is, because we have more flops, American labs are able to get to these level of capabilities first. And because Anthropic got to it first, they say, okay, we're going to hold on to it for a month while all these American companies, we give them access to it, they're going to patch up all their vulnerabilities. And now we release it. Furthermore, if they, even if they train a model like this, the ability to deploy it

• 21:00Speaker 04

  at scale, you know, if you had a cyber hacker, it's much more dangerous if they have a million of them versus a thousand of them. So that inference compute really matters a lot. In fact, the fact that they have so many researchers who are so good is the thing that makes it so scary, because what is it that makes those engineer researchers more productive? Is compute.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  We should always be first, and we should always have more. But in order for that outcome for you to, what you described to be true, you have to take it to the extremes. They have to have no compute. And if they have some compute, the question is how much is needed? The amount of compute they have in China is enormous. It's, I mean, you're talking about a country that is the second largest computing market in the world. If they want to deploy, aggregate their compute, they got plenty of compute to aggregate.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Very, very tense back and forth. Dean Ball says, "It's a shame Jensen mostly fails here because the monoculture on export controls is bad. If you're a young AI policy researcher trying to make a name for yourself, it's almost impossible to be taken seriously unless you are pro-export controls. Monocultures are usually bad." And I am sympathetic to Dwarkesh's points there for sure, especially on the inference side, even if models exist in both worlds, like having a whole bunch of, you know, good guy compute that can go and patch bugs while the amount of attackers is much smaller. It's just a matter of, you know, how many, you know, resources you have on each side.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  That's a great point. The only, the only thing that they are like talking around is just Taiwan as a particular, you know, particular turning point and, and how their various positions flow through to Taiwan policy and where the, how China's stance on Taiwan is something that I've always puzzled and I wish that both of them had articulated their sort of philosophy on actually war gaming out what export controls do to likelihood of Taiwan intervention or blockade or anything like that. I don't exactly know. I've been trying to like work through it, but I don't have a complete thesis. But we've been, we've

• 23:15John Coogan?

  been debating it back and forth all day. I don't know if you have a strong take on any of this, Jordi.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate Matt Zeitlin's point. He said, "I kind of appreciate that Jensen Huang seems relatively normal about non-business stuff compared to other tech founder/CEO types, but then when it comes to Nvidia's actual operations, he's a complete sicko."

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I saw a couple of takes around this that...

• 23:37John Coogan?

  That he had like some very, very, very, very strong points. If you're deeper in the supply chain, I haven't, I couldn't really assess how he did on that. But some people were, there were definitely people that were in Jensen's camp. It was, it was divided, which I think is why this went so viral. Elliot Arledge summed it up here. Jensen Wong and Dwarkesh today, most combative interview he's done in a while. The biggest regret not funding.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Has there been a more combative interview ever with Jensen? It seems unlikely.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  So, no. And I'm trying to think of just like in terms of combative, like people were sort of comping this to like the Elon Dwarkesh interview, which wasn't combative, but it was more just like digging into all the different projects and trying to, you know, elucidate the, the strategy and how they all fit together. There's actually some interesting updates on where XAI might be going with a partnership with Cursor that we can go into. There is, there is some funny details in here. Apparently the Larry and Elon begged Jensen for GPUs at dinner story. That never happened. We absolutely had dinner. At no time did they beg for GPUs, which is funny. I wonder what that would happen. Quietly folded Grok into the CUDA ecosystem.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Reason, premium ASP tokens where latency beats throughput, higher throughput used to always win. That trade off has bent, bent enough that Nvidia is expanding the parade of frontier towards fast, expensive, low throughput. And it will be interesting to see how all of that comes together. On ASIC cost savings, Nvidia margin is 70%. ASIC margin is 65%. What are you really saving? Someone still pays Broadcom. Open challenge to Google and AWS. Publish TPU and Tranium on ML perf and inference max. I would welcome Tranium to demonstrate their 40% claim. And so Jensen threw down the gauntlet and said to Amazon and Google, head over to semi analysis and put your chips on inference max so that they can be properly benchmarked.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was a good, that was a very, very good call out.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it was smart.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I just, I just don't know why they don't, they don't go over and.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  I've been excited to see

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Inference maxing.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  To see the inference max results.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Dwarkesh posted tomorrow and it's him and Jensen standing next to each other. And Alex Volkov said, hey, Dwarkesh, was this picture taken before or after the pod? Because it does feel like it was a tense situation, although, you know, to both their credit, like Jensen, it felt like he loved being in the arena, asked, getting asked hard questions, like working through this. There's this back and forth where where Jensen's pushing back and Dwarkesh says, oh, I can drop it. And he says, you don't need to drop it. I'm enjoying this. Like, like, let's, let's hash this out. And I thought that was, I thought that was a very, very diplomatic and just good overall. Well, Intel is up on the news, up 4% today, 10% over the past five days, almost at all

• 26:40John Coogan?

  time highs. I think we're very close to the 2,000 peak for Intel, which was also around where they were trading in 2021, $67 a share, $330 billion company, clearly with, with all of this backdrop and just the idea of more chips and maybe the CUDA ecosystem being something that you can work around. Can an American fab run by Intel produce a chip that's viable for an AI lab? It feels like increasingly, yes, that's certainly the argument that's being put forth by Dwarkesh. And it would be very exciting. I think it's something that everyone would support an Intel resurgence. And there's some, there's some news around

• 27:22John Coogan?

  TerraFab potentially getting involved. But first, let's start with the scoop from Grace Kay over at Business Insider. She says, scoop cursor plans to use XAI's infrastructure to train its composer 2.5 code.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Where's the golden scoop, Tyler?

• 27:38John Coogan?

  According to people familiar with the matter, cursor will use tens of thousands of XAI's GPUs, they said. And we got a scoop for Grace Kay.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  This one's going to Grace. Grace, congratulations.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  You win the golden scoop.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  The golden scoop.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Interesting to see, something we talked about, probably midway through last year, XAI has shown a tremendous ability to, on the kind of infrastructure data center side, spinning up a huge amount of compute very, very quickly, ahead of any timeline that any reasonable party would have probably expected. And demand hasn't exactly followed in the way that they would have liked. And so, opening that up to a company like Cursor, who has all the demand, and what they really need is their own, is their own model.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was also interesting because, I don't know if it was thrown out as a potential project for other companies, I feel like MSL mentioned it at some point, maybe OpenAI, but there was, there was some talk of like, okay, if you're marshaling all this compute and you wind up with too much, like what do you do then? And the idea of becoming a cloud provider, if you have a, if you have a data center and everything.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's been the big, the big question of like, you know, with, with everything that SpaceX is doing, and now TerraFab, they're going to be creating all of this capacity. But what is the, what is the, like, where's the demand for that capacity going to come from, right? And so you could imagine a world in the future where if SpaceX has a bunch of space data centers, they open up that capacity to a bunch of companies other than just Elon Inc. businesses.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  So, Grace says, "The setup effectively turns XAI into a kind of cloud provider by renting some of its GPUs to other country, companies. XAI could start generating revenue from its massive infrastructure while still developing its own AI models. The arrangement could help the company offset the costs of building and operating data centers while also deepening ties with a startup that has access to valuable coding data." And so there could be some sort of trade deal going on. Ed Ludlow at Bloomberg has a report from the TerraFab. Musk's team is actively requesting price quotes and delivery timelines for a wide range of chip-making equipment, photo masks, substrates, etchers, deposition, cleaning, testing tools, according to sources.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Elon Musk's lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers for his envisioned TerraFab project. Remember, he was pictured with Lip Buteon from Intel, I think, last week. Early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. That is a very, very tall order, but maybe there's never been a better time to break into the into the cutting-edge chip market, given that the you you don't need to, I mean, you sort of need to reinvent CUDA, but it's becoming it's becoming easier, potentially. That is the story. Well, there are two big releases

• 30:48John Coogan?

  from from Anthropic and OpenAI today. Claude announced Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable Opus model, yet it handles long-running tasks with more rigor, follows instructions more precisely, and verifies its own outputs before reporting back. You can hand off your hardest work with less supervision, they say. Very good score on Sui Bench Pro, 64.3%. Excited to test it. They say Opus 4.7 has substantially better vision. It can see images at three times the resolution and produce higher-quality interfaces, slides, and docs as a result. On the API, the new X-Hi effort level between high and max gives you finer control over reasoning and latency on hard problems. I'm excited to see how these do on Arc AGI V3.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the most notable thing here is you have a model, a model card that shows a model that's not publicly accessible.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they share the Mythos benchmark, and so.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Mythos, logging Opus 4.7, just sitting there. But of course, unless you're one of the select companies, you won't be getting access to it, at least yet.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Well, Addy gave Opus 4.7 the Tiny Man Bench, which is a very funny one, where you ask the model, "I am a tiny man. When my son was born, they handed me to him." And Opus 4.7, that's a nice little riddle. The answer is a bar of soap. No, wait, let me think about it. Tiny man handed to him when his son was born. This sounds like it's pointing to a cigar. The tradition of handing out cigars when a baby is born and a cigar can be thought as a little man shaped object. That is very, very odd. This, this is a, I mean, this is like the new how many Rs in strawberry, uh, where all of the models seem to have, uh, weird results for this.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Um, we of course have shrimp fried rice bench, which, uh, no one has really solved. Even, uh, just humor bench and tell us a novel joke has been, uh, increasingly difficult for these, uh, for these companies.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I think, I think gonna have to wait and see on Opus 47 how, what, what, what the reactions are. Um, I will be keeping an eye on Dan Shipper, uh, who is always does great, um, analysis, uh, immediately after launch.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I feel like generally benchmarks are like almost completely meaningless at this point.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Uh, like there, there, there's so many like um, towards models where they can like really, I don't know, I don't know if you know if they're like actually bench maxing.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  But like you just talk to a model for a while and you say, okay, this is a good model.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Okay. Or this is not a good model.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Like, uh, it's very hard, um, it's very hard to get like a, you know, uh, quantifiable signal at this point.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, in increasingly, I mean, the, it, it feels like all of these models will be, uh, sort of like tested through like enterprise, like rollouts and, um, you'll just do a demo project, swap in something, test this model, test that model, just see, okay, well, our goal was to deliver value and we had some KPI like reduce cost, increase sales, like were, were we successful when we implemented this model, rolled it out to our team, used it for a couple of weeks, did we see a tangible result or not? That's at the end of the day, all that matters for businesses. So I could imagine that that's where all of this goes. Well, um, OpenAI announced Codex for almost everything.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Uh, it can use apps on your Mac, connect to more of your tools, create images, learn from previous actions, remember how you like to work and take on ongoing and repeatable tasks. Uh, with computer use on macOS, Codex can now use any app by seeing, clicking and typing with its own cursor, runs in the background without taking over your computer, uh, working on tasks like front end iteration, app testing, or any workflow that doesn't expose an API. You can now generate and iterate on images with GPT Image 1.5 and Codex to create front-end designs, mockups, game assets, and more without leaving your workflow. Usage is included in your ChatGPT account, no API needed. Automations can now run in the same thread. Lots of updates here.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  And Thibault says Codex just got a lot more powerful. Computer use, in-app browser, image generation, editing, 90+ new plugins to connect everything, multi-terminal SSH, lots and lots of stuff. So go give it a test, go take it for a spin. OpenAI.com, of course. You can download it for macOS. Well, speaking of websites, DJB went to the Oreo website and hit "Accept All Cookies." Now we wait. I love this. Very funny. What else is going on in the timeline? The West creates the internet. Try nailing that Jell-O to the wall. CCP nails it. The West creates LLMs. All right, try nailing this.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  And the CCP picks up a hammer. There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal Opinion section. "AI is bound to subvert communism." This is a very contrarian take because people, at least with the internet, there was the perception of decentralization, permissionlessness, anonymity, a lot of things that felt very democratic. AI is very centralizing by default. This is the teal take of like AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. And so this is a pretty wild thing to argue, but you know, read the opinion piece and see what they say. The nailing Jell-O to a wall, I believe that's from the Clinton administration, the idea

• 36:22John Coogan?

  that the internet would spread so widely that the Chinese Communist Party would not be able to control the population. Everyone would be coordinating. It'd be sort of like an Arab Spring-type moment, but of course, the firewalls went up, the surveillance happened, and nothing really changed, and the Communist Party seems stronger than ever. But this does sort of undergird a lot of what Dwarkesh has been saying about the risk of China and having strong AI and stronger control over the population. It's always hard to get a read on exactly how things are rolling out in China. There's some people that... Teams seem to like it over there. Of course, Dwarkesh took a whole trip to China and made

• 37:02John Coogan?

  it back. Okay, so it's not all doom and gloom, but there are, it is, it's a tricky, tricky thing to argue, but we'll see.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  YouTube, according to The Verge, now lets you turn off shorts. It is getting community noted.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  What does the community note say?

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  This feature is a new setting for YouTube time management. Does not hide the shorts tab in the app, nor does it hide shorts from appearing in recommendations. When set to off, the only change is that a dismissible warning screen will appear when the shorts tab is selected.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've tried, I've tried, I land on YouTube on my phone, it immediately recommends a bunch of shorts. You can hit the three dots.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  And say, like, show me less shorts, and that feature does not work at all. And I don't watch shorts on, and I don't watch shorts on YouTube.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  The shorts in the feed have been a lot. I wonder if they're seeing, yeah, I mean, they must just be seeing data that shows that the shorts are more retentive or keep people on the.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, there are, when you're using YouTube as a video search engine, there are so many, there are so many types of searches where it can be vastly preferable to watch a 60-second video on something. An example is like, if you're doing research on cars.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  And you want to like quickly understand how the seating, I'm, I need to get a new, like, family car, right? So I've been looking up different cars, trying to get a sense of, like, how spacious the cabin is, what, what the seating arrangement is like. And so I'd rather just click into a short and just get a quick 60-second overview and then bounce. I don't need to see like a 15-minute review of the entire car. But, yeah, it's.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  That YouTube Shorts creator, Forrest Auto Reviews, sort of pioneered the, the perfect 60-second car review, where he talks really, really fast and says, like, inside you get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and, you know, the heater, heated leather and massaging seats and vinyl on the dash and carbon fiber here. And he sort of runs through the whole car in 60 seconds, shows you how fast it takes off if it's a fast car, opens the door, shows you all the features. And it's sort of like a 20-minute Doug Jamiro video cut down to 60 seconds, which of course is, is doing very well. Doug's response has been to create one-minute cut downs of his content. And so you can enjoy that as a short as well if you want. But if you do want to turn off shorts on the YouTube feed, the way to do it is to

• 39:25John Coogan?

  uninstall the app, use the mobile version and then get a plugin that there's an extension for Safari, I think, that will just go and remove the actual shorts as they pop up. But it's a hassle and it's much slower than using the app. So hopefully, this feature becomes more real in the future, since it does seem like some things that people are demanding. But always tricky to ask a platform to give you an option that would, in theory, increase churn. Very, very tricky. Well, we have the beginning of our guest lineup, starting now. We have Ben Smith from Semaphore. He is the editor in chief. He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVB and LTR. Ben, how are you doing?

• 40:09Ben Smith?

  What's going on? Doing great. Can you guys hear me all right?

• 40:12John Coogan?

  We can hear you.

• 40:13Ben Smith?

  Loud and clear.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  We can see you, but we don't know where you are. You're looking very sharp.

• 40:17Ben Smith?

  Dapper, I might say. Thank you. That's, you know, we're convening a biggest gathering of business leaders in the US this year, here at Semaphore World Economy. How many business leaders is that?

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. How many people are attending?

• 40:31Ben Smith?

  500 global CEOs and then lots of political figures from the US and Europe. And Scott Best and earlier, we got a Lutnik later. I assume they all just kind of came over from Hill and Valley. But, you know, we do our best.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  That's great. What's the structure of the conference? It's a few days. Are there specific breakout sessions, talk tracks, certain themes? Or is it sort of more driven by the individual who's on stage at the moment?

• 40:56Ben Smith?

  You know, it's five days, three consecutive, three simultaneous stages, a bunch of really interesting kind of Chatham House rules, breakfasts and dinners and things like that. And, I mean, the core topic is really, I mean, kind of where we live is the intersection of politics and political power and finance and technology. And so, I mean, that's, that is what, that is what people here are obsessed with.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And within that intersection, what are the top topics that people are discussing in particular? Obviously, the conflict in the Middle East is big, but then AI is big. What's actually driving the conversation today?

• 41:36Ben Smith?

  You know, every conversation winds up coming back to AI.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Really?

• 41:39Ben Smith?

  Um, and yeah, and I think whether that's, you know, Besen, actually, I had an interesting conversation with Besen on stage where he really downplayed the conflict with Anthropic.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 41:49Ben Smith?

  You know, said they have, they have kind of like some minor technical issue with the Department of War.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 41:53Ben Smith?

  The Treasury is working with them to make sure, you know, the banks don't go down.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 41:57Ben Smith?

  Um, but just, you know, I think there's, there's just a sense in particular that like really big enterprises and the kind of big brand name American companies are the ones most at risk.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Ben Smith?

  Uh, in the transition and, and I think people who work for those companies who advise them, who compete with them are thinking a lot about that.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about on the labor side of big business? We've seen some reasonable strength in the job market recently. At the same time, there's a lot of layoffs going on. How are people grappling with the, uh, with the, the unemployment situation in the economy?

• 42:31Ben Smith?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, the numbers are good.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Ben Smith?

  And yet there is this sense, you know, among the American public that AI basically exists to put everybody out of work.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Ben Smith?

  And they hate it.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Ben Smith?

  And so that like, that's lingering over, over things. And I do think there's also a sense that like the class of 2026 is not a great time to get out of college.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Ben Smith?

  And, and, and I don't, I think there is a, I would say like we're both like kind of authentic nervousness about, you know, what is everybody's labor force going to look like? Cause of course class 2026 are also the ones who are native to these tools.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Ben Smith?

  And are the ones you ought to be hiring.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Ben Smith?

  Um, and then also of like, are they going to come and chop everybody's heads off when they realize they aren't getting jobs? So I would say those two, two competing questions about the youth.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Has there been any discussion around, uh, resolutions to that or economic policy that can strengthen the safety net or, or, you know, deal with taxes or more weekends or, uh, anything that can sort of offset the anxiety about weakening labor markets?

• 43:39Ben Smith?

  You know, every member of Congress is like thinking about this all the time, taking questions about it all the time, and yet also aware that this is an institution that spent like 20 years talking about regulating social media. And only now is sort of getting to it, but most of it's happening in the States.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Ben Smith?

  And so I think there's a lot of pessimism that Washington will act. But I think there's also is a sense that I think a lot of companies are seeing unexpected jobs coming out of AI. I talked to somebody who operates like basically the sort of call center dealing with financial fraud that you would think would really get wiped out by AI.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 44:16Ben Smith?

  But the good news is there is so much more financial fraud being driven by AI that they're keeping people very, very busy.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  You can see something like that emerging in the legal space is like you just get way more contracts because contracts are easier to create or you get more lawsuits. So a lawyer is spending less time per lawsuit, but there's a lot more of them to work on. And so you still have full.

• 44:41Ben Smith?

  Yeah, that's the good news.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you using AI in the newsroom at Semaphore? Are there, I imagine you're not just writing AI articles, but are, is there internal tooling that's been built or you understand metrics better?

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I feel like you guys are well set up for this because you're, there's like, hey, here, here are the facts and then here's like takes and like separating those two things out.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't care what you use here. I want, I want the takes to be generally pretty organic and coming from the author. But how do you think about it?

• 45:12Ben Smith?

  Yeah, you know, we use it. It's interesting because I think like a lot of media, there's these two sort of huge trends. One is AI and automation and the other is creators and individual connection. And people do not want AI in the way of that. I mean, when you, when they realize that you're just avatars, you're going to be in trouble.

• 45:29Ben Smith?

  And, and so we use it all, all over the place behind the scenes to try to like help amplify our journalists. I vibe coded something that predicts meme tweets about stories that I'm personally very proud of, though I cannot say that I have driven wide adoption with my, with my team.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  That feels like that would just create like anxiety in the newsroom.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  If you want to get pre dunked on, use this tool.

• 45:50Ben Smith?

  That is what the tool, I called it pre dunk.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Pre dunk? No way.

• 45:55Ben Smith?

  They spent a whole day, it's in Google app script, I love it.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 45:58Ben Smith?

  I would say more, more usefully, one of my colleagues, because actually, one of the challenges with an event like this is you've got three simultaneous stages and the reporter do, the reporter who's most qualified to write the story, or even to know what's news, is often the same one doing the interview and sitting on stage.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 46:13Ben Smith?

  And so we did build a great tool that, you know, just takes the transcript of every interview instantly and pops out what's new.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:20Ben Smith?

  So that a reporter who's maybe more of a generalist.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:22Ben Smith?

  Will know, oh yeah, this is news, this isn't, which is incredibly useful. And we, you know, obviously we check it, but that's a great starting point.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense because there's so many times when people fall back to a talking point, but you're looking for something that's actually novel, or a new data point, or a new prediction, or something announcement, and that just might sneak in.

• 46:42Ben Smith?

  Yeah, you must get this. Like, how do you do that? You do an interview and you think there's one part that's interesting, but you're on the air and something else goes viral, right?

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. And we've, and we, I, that's a very interesting tool. We should probably think about integrating something like that because we, yeah, we've found that it's very, very hard to predict, even with the best AI tools, what content, what clips will actually perform, what is news. And we see a lot of coverage downstream of our show, where something that's said on our show will then turn into coverage on other news sites. And we've never really figured out how to grapple with all of that, but that's, that's an interesting tool.

• 47:18Ben Smith?

  Yeah, it's not just performance, right? Like, it's also, you might like think, this is the new part, this is the interesting part. But if you're doing it live, it just sort of floats by.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Ben Smith?

  So that's, that's probably the thing that I'm, just this week, that I'm most kind of jazzed about.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  What about overall market sentiment?

• 47:32Ben Smith?

  JD Capello who made it, sorry.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  What about overall market sentiment? I don't think, if you told me last year, we would be, you know, over a month into a war with Iran and the S and P 500 would be at a record high, I would not have believed you.

• 47:50Ben Smith?

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. And, you know, people who CEOs, people who show up at events like this tend to be optimistic people. It's sort of a job quality. And so there is like a pretty positive vibe here and driven this or parallels and is driven by the markets. One thing about Washington now, though, is there's also a lot of self censorship. And there's a real difference between what people say in public and what they say in private. And I think, you know, in our kind of Chatham House rule gatherings, you're hearing a lot more concern about a kind of about, but just about the long term direction of US power, the US economy, the US markets, people hedging away, and no one's saying that stuff in public.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, biggest, biggest ever disconnect in my life between like group chat conversations and like timeline conversations among, among people who have something to lose, is how I would put it.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, interesting times. Hopefully, what's the plan to turn the synthesis of what you're hearing in the Chatham House context into reporting or content? Will you be writing op eds that are informed by what you learned? How do you think about actually distributing that information?

• 49:01Ben Smith?

  I mean, the basic Chatham House rule is that you can steal the ideas and pass them off as your own, but you're not allowed to contribute them. So that's the plan.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we'll look forward to it. I'm sure everyone can follow along at SEMA4. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  And we'll make it next year.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  I'd love to. Yeah, that'd be fantastic.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Have a great rest of the conference and congratulations.

• 49:23Ben Smith?

  You guys too. Thanks for having me on.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Jonathan Criss from Vital Lyfe, working on desalination with a fantastic new fundraising round. Jonathan, welcome to the show. How are you?

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm doing fantastic. How are you guys doing?

• 49:39John Coogan?

  We're great. I'm so excited to talk to you.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Insanely fired up.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  We were talking, yeah, we were talking with Peter Diamandis about desalination, and it's always been such a fascinating, just not even a sci fi technology, but just a, just an underutilized technology that has incredible promise, but hasn't felt like it's hit the takeoff that it needed to. And so excited to hear your plan. But why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and how you're thinking about things?

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I'm John, CEO and founder. I was at SpaceX for 13 years before this.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Ever made success.

• 50:20Speaker 06

  Started off in Dragon. Elon was like, "Stop using dragons or building dragons, you idiots." And I was like, "Oh, man, I'll figure that out, boss." Started off with a small team to go figure out Dragon reuse.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  The whole program became reuse vehicle, so just took over as product manager slash RE. And then kind of got bored of spaceships, wanted to take on a new challenge. Jumped over to Starlink team to figure out rate manufacturing, where we got really plugged in on how you design for really high volume manufacturing. And then, you know, my co-founder and I started really talking about how do we make a meaningful impact in the world? What's the next big challenge? And then got our heads wrapped around answering that question that every eight-year-old kid has. How could there possibly be water scarcity when there's oceans everywhere?

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  And then, just like you said at the top of the segment, it's like, "Man, this technology feels like it's really cool, but it's just right on the cusp of becoming awesome." And we think if we apply the lessons that we learned on Starlink with high rate manufacturing, driving down the costs and really delivering this technology to everyone, we can really make that meaningful impact.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  So walk us through the first product. I was always thinking that the next big desalination company would be a huge desalination plant, but you're going much smaller. So walk me through the thesis there.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love that because that's pretty much where everyone in the industry has focused, right? We got to clean a ton of water. These systems are super freaking expensive for upfront capital costs. So the only way to make your unit economics in that use case work is by going really large and cleaning a ton of water.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 06

  We just looked at it from the other end. It's like, "Man, if the upfront cost is negligible and you can keep your energy and maintenance costs low, you can probably do about the same and just scale it in terms of number of units, not a large centralized system." And then it's just kind of blown up the thought process entirely inside of that because now you're looking at infrastructure resilience and people being less reliant on centralized systems. And then you can open up to people that are more on the move, people that are island-struck. And really, man, the customer base kind of exploded from there. Like, "Oh, man, if you could just deliver a low-cost product, people will want to use it."

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, so so walk me through like a textbook customer. Where are they?

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Can you explain first? Can you just explain the product like I'm five?

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, like how big are we talking? Is this diesel generator size like?

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we launched Access this week, which is our first consumer product. We're a little bit more in the middle market. Going into customer bases that already exist. So maritime industry has these these types of products. It's a reverse osmosis. Is at the core of our technology. What we do is we're able to do that manufacturing process at a much, much lower cost and then a much higher volume. So so the product that you're seeing on your screen, Access, the facility that we got here in Torrance, we're able to produce more of these devices in a single month than currently exists. So we're kind of really taking that, taking that whole, taking that whole process.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but explain, but but sorry, sorry. This is you put a hose into saltwater and then it goes into the machine and out comes potable drinking water.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah, so we always say we design for Terry.

• 53:37Jordi Hays?

  I just for the audience, I wanted to to to be clear.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  So how many people?

• 53:42Speaker 06

  Hydrate.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, how many people off grid actually have access to saltwater or dirty?

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, this should work for springs and lakes and.

• 53:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Is that the idea?

• 53:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So you can clean what we say is any naturally occurring water source. Saltwater being the hardest one to clean and and why desalination has been kind of out of reach for most people until now. But yeah, well, water is is super common in the United States. I think it's like 11% of homes live on well water in the US. And then brackish water is super common, I mean, in marshlands. I mean, lots of lots of south, pretty much all Florida.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you deal? One of the common things we hear about desalination is that, yeah, you you get clean water out, but you also get all of the dirt and all of the salt and and whatever else you don't want in your clean water. What do you do with that? In in your case, what what happens normally?

• 54:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the stigma is in your, what you call brine or your concentrate. So when you run a very large plant, you want your recovery as high as possible. So your concentrate is much, much higher, like two times the salinity in your salts. We actually run our system efficiently at a much lower recovery rate in like 15 to 20%. So as long as you're putting your brine or your concentrate back into a source water greater than five gallons or so, it almost immediately dissipates into that, into that volume. So we get, we get the, the wins inside of there in terms of, hey, you can use this product. It's not making that environmental impact because it's smaller form factor, lower flow rate and lower brine concentrate as well.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  What about battery? Is this ba- is it battery powered? Do you plug it in? What's battery life like? Could you eventually create some type of solar array so that it's entirely self-sustaining?

• 55:32Speaker 06

  A hundred percent, yeah. So it runs on AC DC. It's got an integrated battery. If you're cleaning ocean water, you're running for about an hour. If you're using fresh, fresh water, anywhere from about, probably closer to three hours. So it all depends on the source water that you're cleaning. So ocean water has a ton of salts inside of it. So it's really difficult to remove those with higher pressure. Fresh water is much, much easier. You're essentially just killing bacteria and viruses. So yeah, you can run it on AC DC. We do integrate with solar as well. So, you know, if you have a decent sized solar panel, you can run this thing as long as you have sunlight.

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Talk about what you've learned about the traditional large scale desalination operations. There's actually an article in the Wall Street Journal today about San Diego producing surprisingly a ton of water from desalination. San Diego now has so much water that it's selling it. Once a drought poster child, the California city now generates enough water to rescue parched states like Arizona and brew beer from recycled sewage. Are you optimistic?

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  What about that last part?

• 56:43John Coogan?

  Recycled sewage. So they take sewage water and they clean it so effectively that they can brew beer in San Diego. They might have to disclose that on the label, but I think we can get past the stigma at some point.

• 56:55Speaker 06

  The wastewater once fun, Bill Gates solved this problem a long time ago and it's like no one wants to drink poop or pee water, right?

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 06

  Locally, the ocean is arguably the most abundant resource on earth.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 06

  And that's kind of the resource that we want to tap to bring this technology forward. But large plants, you know, they serve a purpose. We want to be a partner with them, not a disruptor in the near term, right? Similar to a Starlink, you had your, what was it, $10 billion infrastructure bill to give internet to rural areas that service zero people. Yet Starlink could do that at a fraction of the cost. So we look for those people that are kind of high and dry right now and need access. And that's kind of our initial customer base that we're going through.

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much does the product cost? Where's the business? Give us an update on the round.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, so $7.49 is our launch cost right now, but you can preorder for $8.00 total year fundable. We're getting into production here over the next, actually our first PCB show up next week, which I'm very excited about. The round was towards the end of last year. We have a great table, really awesome partners with GC and Interlogos. And that capital has gone a really long way to help us accelerate. Like, the business has only been around for a little over a year. And we're about to step into production here over the next few weeks.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looks like you're in a production facility. How big is the warehouse? How many people do you have on staff?

• 58:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're 37,000 square foot facility here in Torrance. We're actually right next to the K2 guys.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  I keep seeing all my friends on your guys' show. Man, it's kind of a rite of passage at this point.

• 58:39Speaker 06

  We have 37 full-time employees right now, plus a ton of contractors that help out. And we'll probably be closer to, man, 70-ish when we're at rate with a bunch of associate and production staff. Just waiting to hire once we get into production this summer.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that the business will remain almost entirely direct to consumer? Or do you think there will be applications for business-to-business, construction crews, military, government, all sorts of different things?

• 59:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I use this a lot. Gwen gave us a talk in 2013. She was like, yo, guys, we gotta get NRO certification because NASA is pretty much supporting this entire business. So when we started the business, we wanted to have multiple revenue streams that in the event of a macro event, we could, we can be reliant on. So the US military has a water logistics problem. Half of all casualties coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan were related to convoys moving water and fuel. So they're excited to be able to open up where they can get water, water from. And then, you know, NGOs humanitarian groups are almost solely reliant on bottled water, which is another logistical nightmare. So these, these are both groups that we've engaged with and we have a lot of exciting conversations with, but then also some partnerships that we're going to be announcing pretty soon.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  And then direct to consumer is the hardest problem. Elon used to tell us all the time when we were starting Starlink, like go after direct to consumer because they're the, gonna give you the biggest feedback. You're gonna get roasted on Reddit and you're gonna know quick whether or not you made a mistake. So after I've been personally roasted on Reddit a number of times, you, you learn really fast. So that's who we want to go after first. We want to solve the hardest problem first and then open up to, to those other larger customers afterwards.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Very, very, very, very cool product. And I'm, I'm, I'm gonna preorder one just to play around with it, bring it to the beach, just to

• 1:00:30Speaker 06

  Come.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Just to have some fun.

• 1:00:32Speaker 06

  Come by the factory. I always say, bring a bucket of your favorite ocean water. We'll clean it and drink it. It's a lot of fun.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  That's amazing. How long does it take to clean a bucket of ocean water?

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

  Uh, five, well, we do six gallons of ocean water an hour. Uh, so about one hour, well, little under an hour because most buckets you find down.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Five gallons. Cool.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna need two. John's like horse size, so he, he could easily get to like 10 gallons an hour.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Okay, the chat wants to know what happens if you put a Diet Coke through it?

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  It'll separate all, we, we do this all the time. We did a reverse Jesus the other day. We removed all the alcohol and water from wine.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, you'll, you'll pull out all the gross stuff and, and just have a

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Pure glass of water.

• 1:01:13Speaker 06

  Some water. We did, we did Monsters the other day. We, we removed all the water from five Monsters and then drank the concentrate, which was just a super caffeinated syrup.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Wow. That's insane. Uh, it sounds like a fun time.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Well, congrats on the progress and thank you.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you, Jonathan.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Company and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  Such a pleasure, guys.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Paul Scher from Egan.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  I've been raising $15 million from Bunksmark to build a mutual friend platform. Paul, how are you doing?

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:01:48Speaker 07

  Hey, so good to meet you guys.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you and excited that you're not building another agent for the enterprise. You've got, you've got something new for us.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down. Introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:02:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, so great to meet you. Thanks for having me. Um, you know, uh, we're, we're, we're building, you know, we call the world's mutual friend. Sort of, you know, instead of all of, all of these things that are, you know, out there trying to, you know, optimize our own bubbles, we're sort of, you know, they're diverging more and more and, you know, the world that's super hyper personalized for all of us is also really isolating because it's different for all of us and we, we want to bring these bubbles a bit closer together again.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, so walk us through the experience. Well, first maybe like, where are you in this journey? Uh, you've raised some money, but, uh, do you have a team? Is the product live? How are you thinking about actually building the company?

• 1:02:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's super early. Um, we're, we're really, really grateful for all the support and all the partners that we've, you know, been able to meet. Um, I'm from Germany. I literally grew up in this like tiny village, less than a thousand people. Um, I moved here like last night, a year ago to San Francisco and I've been, I, I literally landed, I had a one-way flight here, uh, stayed in a hostel and a few months later I've been, you know, meeting some of the greats and they've been, you know, so incredibly helpful. And we've built a small team. It's very early. We don't, you know, we haven't launched anything that we're working with, um, you know, early, early users to build something really special and something really meaningful.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  So, uh, what can you share?

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Living the SF dream.

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, maybe take us back first and, uh, what were you doing before this? How did you get into startups? Walk me through that.

• 1:03:35Speaker 07

  I, I, I've been building things, you know, forever. Um, I grew up, you know, in this middle-class town and I never knew anything about entrepreneurship. So I've always been building things and then during the pandemic, I actually just went on Twitter and I started to spend a lot of time, like 12 hours a day on Twitter. I think of like 25,000 tweets and replies from like a, like a.

• 1:03:59Speaker 07

  From like a three month period. Yeah. And um, and that's when I first, you know, I, you know, I didn't know what a VC was until I was like eighteen. Yeah. Um, and yeah, it's just like during the pandemic, like about to turn seventeen, I left high school um to, to do that. And so I've been, been doing startups for uh five years now, um, you know, spent some time in Paris, where I um worked with the incredible people of a company called Augment. And then, you know, I could finally get a visa and um go to the US, which I always kind of felt like was, was my real uh place to be. Yeah.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  All right, and then take us through the idea maze and how, and how you landed on this like general kind of space.

• 1:04:39Speaker 07

  You know, I think I've always been like really interested in sort of this, this intersection of, of arts and culture and, you know, technology and like, you know, growing up in this like, you know, place where I grew up and I, I really love German children's literature. And there's this book that my dad read me when I was ten about this little girl called Momo, who kind of connects everyone uh in her little town and helps sort of save the world from the time thieves. And I've always sort of been inspired by this. And so it's been something I've been thinking about for a really long time. And I think now more than ever, we really need this.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Feels very early, but you got Benchmark to come in uh and invest fifteen million dollars. They are the consumer social fund. They're willing to bet, you know, big and early, but typically I see them investing after there's like a spark or like some sign, real like sign of, of, of life. Do you feel like, do you feel like you're there yet and that you have something that uh early users love? Like, wh- at what point do you, and, and then I guess at what point do you think you'll, you'll launch?

• 1:05:48Speaker 07

  Um, so I think with Benchmark, you know, and, and just more broadly, we, we already see, I think, moments of magic. And it's very, very early, but it's been just really incredible to see how people create these moments of connections. Uh, you know, early, early users. And I think just partnering up with Benchmark. Has been your incredible experience. And I think I don't feel like I've ever pitched Benchmark. I think we just mapped and we sort of very quickly, and it's still got done like three days. And we very quickly just realized that we had very similar ideas of what the future should look like. And that we wanted to go on this journey together. And everything else kind of became secondary to just like trying to make that happen together.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there's a risk of becoming a dating app? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?

• 1:06:40Speaker 07

  That's funny.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Is I just like historically, historically, the like, you know, meet, meet people in your area. Apps, even if they're intention, you know, they're intended to create, you know, friendships. You know, you may get power users that are have other intentions.

• 1:07:00Speaker 07

  I mean, totally. I think for us, we care more about, you know, strengthening, you know, already existing relationships. Right? We live in a time where we have all made way more relationships than, you know, ever before. A hundred years ago, you might have a hundred friends. Today, you have probably like about 600 relationships. And we really care about you're making these relationships meaningful much more than like adding just random people on top of that. And so I think it's less of a thing for us.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Are you, have you been surprised that, you know, we're this far into the consumer AI boom? And yet the only AI apps topping the App Store charts are basically language models?

• 1:07:44Speaker 07

  I think it's, it's natural, maybe. I don't think we're in the consumer AI boom yet because, you know, the, the, the great product people usually take, you know, a bit of time to sort of come out of the woodworks and start, you know, imagining what the new paradigms might look like. We've seen, you know, an incredible thing, which is that the sort of single player experiences are more powerful than ever, ever before. You know, multiple orders of magnitude. And I think now the interesting thing is how, you know, how are, how are the enduring experiences built? Like what, what, what does it, you know, how, how do you build a product that, you know, is so different that it couldn't have been done? You know, five years ago, because it's just a new paradigm and sort of new primitives.

• 1:08:28Speaker 07

  And I think it takes time to, to find and invent that.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  How do you think about Dunbar's number? I remember Dave Morin had this app path that you were supposed to add no more than 150 friends, I believe, and I'm wondering if you think that number's changing, or you think that there's some sort of like optimal ground truth to that idea of Dunbar's number? Have you reflected on that at all?

• 1:08:56Speaker 07

  We think a lot about it, and I think there's a lot of interesting things in Dunbar's research. To me, the two things that stand out are that the headline number is growing, right? We have way more relationships than ever before. It doesn't mean that our brains are getting better at computing the social dynamics, but the real big problem is that we have way less close people, right? So, and I think that really is the most interesting thing to me, is how do we get that back?

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  What do you think? Do you think there's anything to be done on the social networking side to make filter bubbles less prevalent? There was some work done, it felt like, on YouTube, where you would watch one video and immediately get served another video that was similar, and so you'd wind up sort of down a rabbit hole. And then YouTube seemed to have changed the algorithm to sort of show you the opposite side of the argument. If it was a video in favor of something, you'd see a video that took the other side pretty quickly. But I agree with you on the general trend that like there is these like, you know, niches and niches and niches. And that's been good in some ways, but it's also created some isolation.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Have you just reflected on like, if you had full control over all the social platforms, what you might do differently?

• 1:10:20Speaker 07

  It's an interesting question. I think what's missing is sort of opinion, right? We went from, you know, five newsletter outlets, you know, maybe 12 radio stations, a bunch of TV stations, to like sort of infinite nuance, right? And everything, you know, every take that you could possibly have, you can find it on Twitter. And what we won... It's not the average of the world, right? Like, you don't actually care about the recommendation or the take of the average of the world, but you care about, you know, the take that your people care about.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Speaker 07

  And so you're sort of like, we, we think there's something in the middle, right? An in-between space that's really interesting, that brings you closer with actual people versus, you know, just makes you the average of the world or, you know, leaves you alone in this like hyper-isolated bubble where you, you, you know, you end up seeing things on TikTok that maybe are generated on the fly. And like, no one else will ever see that video. And you can't go to your office anymore and be like, guys, did you see this like insane thing? Like, and, and talk about it.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Hmm. How do you think about, uh, uh, just app growth? There's obviously viral loops that can happen with anything that's somewhat social, even if it's a little bit tighter. Uh, there's launch videos and paid marketing. Have you explored sort of like the current landscape of what it takes to actually make it in the app store? Which feels like more competitive than ever.

• 1:11:48Speaker 07

  I think maybe the answer is to not make it in the app store. What does it look like to build something? You know, I don't know how the, I mean, we have obviously your strong opinions on how the, how the world might look like. And where I, I, I don't, I'm not convinced that it's going to be another app.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 07

  I have this wonderful story that one of our investors, Ben Silverman, told me when I first met him uh, about sort of, uh, you know, his son describing his job, like Ben's job. And it was just like, oh, you know, he was asking, you know, all these squares on your phone. And my dad makes one of them. And I don't want to make another square. And I think we have enough squares competing for our attention. And, um, maybe the, the next thing isn't another square, but something completely different. And I think that's what's exciting about this time. You can build something that just truly has never been there before. And, um, that sort of escapes any previous incumbent.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because like even within Pinterest, the app that Ben Silverman founded, uh, there like it has more squares within the square. It's like.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  Squares all the way down.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  The layout, it tends to be a bunch of squares.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, yeah. We're extremely curious to, to try, to try what you're building when you're ready.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, come back home.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  I know the chat is, uh, I think the mystery is good. Everyone's coming out, they're launching with, you know, the three-minute launch video explaining. And you're just coming out with pure mystery.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Where can people go to, do you have a waitlist at least?

• 1:13:15Speaker 07

  On teameigen.com, you can sort of visit our office.

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Visit the office, if you want to learn more.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  It's coming in person.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, we love in person. That's why we built our office as the website.

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  No email, no email capture on the, on the website.

• 1:13:34Speaker 07

  No, where I think.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  You guys are post email, post app, post software.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:13:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, come, come visit us on our, on our office website or in person in our office. We're hiring exceptional people and we're excited to build something really special.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  I like this, this typewriter that you can play on. This is very fun. Beautiful website. I absolutely love it. The bowling balls and everything.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, great website concept. Unfortunately, it will be copied relentlessly.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yes, but.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  But you did it first and that's what matters.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Paul. Very excited to see where you guys ship and come back on when you launch.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 1:14:19Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Did you hear that Alphabet is poised for a $100 billion windfall on the SpaceX investment they made? Google owns around 5% of SpaceX and could get.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's fired.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  $100 billion from SpaceX's IPO if they manage to pull it off at a $2 trillion valuation. Not bad. That is a crazy stat and.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  They needed a windfall.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Ashay Songvi from Haystack says, what are the odds that this was a result of this? And he's showing the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel where Peter made the argument that Google is printing too much cash and needs to innovate, needs to invest in more things.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  It's funny, Dwarkesh actually asked a very similar question to Nvidia. He was like, oh, you guys have all this extra cash. Are you going to train a new model? Like do something internally, right? Because they've said they're going to do open source models.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, aren't they? Wasn't the answer just yes?

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  I mean, you didn't say like, yeah, we're going after the labs.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  It's like very different. They're doing open source, but it is, it feels like a very similar question.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. They're also doing self-driving cars at Nvidia and obviously Google's been very successful with that. It feels like the, the Google investments that burned money for a very long time, although they obviously stayed very profitable. A lot of those penciled out very, very well and, and it does seem like the, the end result of this discussion was Google should invest more and they did and they invested in SpaceX and Waymo and a bunch of other projects. And some of them didn't pan out, but certainly many, many of them did. What else is in the timeline?

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Mark is noping out. Zach says, okay, actually insane paper published yesterday. A research group in Korea built a gene switch you can control wirelessly using EMFs.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  EMFs.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Electromagnetic fields.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  They exposed mice to 60 hertz EMF.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Same frequency as your wall outlet using a pair of large coils that generate a uniform magnetic field around the animal for cyclic three day or four day off pulses. This showed that you could activate OSK to do epigenetic reprogramming in the progeroid in aged mice. Extending lifespan and reversing aging markers across multiple tissues. Conditionally switch on mutant amyloid genes only in aged mouse brains, letting them separate aging effects from amyloid to study AD biology in a way previous models couldn't. No drugs, no impacts, just a magnetic field from outside the body.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm close to taking a victory, John. I'm, I'm very paranoid about, about EMFs, but.

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  But this could be positive. There could be.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  It could be positive.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  There could be a positive outcome.

• 1:17:00Jordi Hays?

  Could be positive, but we have.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Used responsibly.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, what? Oh, we have our next guests.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  It's time.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  We have James Morrissey and Kevin Hart. Welcome to the show, folks.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  There they are.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  How are you guys doing?

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Gentlemen, what's going on?

• 1:17:16Speaker 08

  What's going on, Russ?

• 1:17:17Speaker 09

  How are you?

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Thank you for taking the time.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 1:17:20Speaker 09

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Big day. Would love to get, I think everyone knows Kevin Hart, but...

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think everyone knows James. I was gonna ask the opposite. I was gonna say...

• 1:17:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it's not about me, man. I'm gonna take a second and I'm gonna highlight my guy.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:36Speaker 08

  Yes, you know, some may be familiar with the idea of Kevin Hart. But in this space, man, it's more about my business. And, you know, business is great. We have great partners. So, take a second to highlight my guy, man. James, James has done a phenomenal job in self, with self, with his company, with his own entity. And the idea of finding cool ways to create and develop partnerships with faces that are, and can be, more than just an ambassador, but more of a brand. He's done a great job, man. He's done a really good job of vetting out the space.

• 1:18:18Speaker 08

  And I'm lucky to have found someone with the mindset, the understanding, to help me do the things that I want. So, execution only happens when you have people that can do so. James is that. He's an executor. So, give me the...

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  How did you two meet? What were the first meetings like? Where did the meetings take place? Like, where did all this come from?

• 1:18:38Speaker 09

  We met about five years ago in the depths of COVID through mutual friends. We're in the space of building brands in joint venture with well-known individuals in entertainment. Brands that they want to own, not just endorse.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 09

  And we wanted to go into the tequila space for a long time. And we liked the category. We thought it was very compelling. But the celebrity tequila space is completely oversaturated. At the time, it was very noisy. We needed something really compelling to break through and to make it right for us. And when myself and Kev started talking during COVID, it became very clear very quickly that we matched each other's energy.

• 1:19:18Speaker 08

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:18Speaker 09

  In terms of understanding the responsibilities of being... Not just a face, but the brand, being a business partner.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Speaker 09

  And the responsibilities of owning a brand and building one of these businesses for the long term.

• 1:19:30Speaker 08

  But you, I think you understood early on, um, what my, what my wants and not wants were. Like, you know, the, the biggest, I'll say the most important rule that I have, I'm never, I'm never slapping my name on anything. Right? If I can't embrace it, or I can't do it, uh, on a daily and really have a authentic response to it and engage with it as if I engage with everything in my life, then I don't want to do it. So all of my partnerships across the board, um, whether it's ownership plays, equity plays, or, um, ambassador-like roles, I truly am embedded and invested into the thing.

• 1:20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 08

  So with the wine and spirits space, having my own tequila, it was necessary because I said, look, I only drink tequila. I'm drinking everyone else's product. So developing my own version of a product that I can then drink at the same level that I drink my own, when I am in a space of comfort or celebration, could be dope, but let's put a story behind it. Like, let's make it, let's make it different and let's exist in some rare air. What, what can be defining or redefining in this space that base, that basically represents me in the best way?

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 08

  And he was very diligent in, in answering those questions and helping me, um, navigate on that road, right? So the idea of hard work and hard work tasting different and the idea of a celebration, um, being, being attached to Grand Coromino because we believe that life should not only be celebrated, but what you do on a daily should be celebrated. So hard work in whatever, whatever way, however it fits to you, how do you choose to celebrate it? My job was to give you a choice. Grand Coromino is that.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  You mentioned that the space was crowded. How did you think about finding differentiation on the product side, the distribution side? Uh, what really stuck out is like, okay, it is a complicated space, but there's a big opportunity here.

• 1:21:22Speaker 08

  I would say, man, you know, you have to have access. So Juan Domingo Beckman Jr., of course, the family, what they've done in this space. You know, you're talking about generations on generations of success and growth in the business, right? Like, from a distribution, you know, outlet or opportunity, there isn't a bigger option. So I think for us, it was getting Juan to understand the real want. Getting him to understand the passion behind my want. And that this is not a celebrity play. This is not a check grab and run. This is a want to build something that can literally be attached to my family name

• 1:22:05Speaker 08

  and give me an opportunity to build generational success, wealth, visibility, whatever you want to call it. But I want, I want that. How do I get that? You have to go to the people that have it. So I think that was our biggest, our biggest want. And as you talk about separating yourself, well, when you have that machine and that machine understands your real energy and those two things connect, well, you're already so much different from anything else in the space, right? Like, the space is crowded because people believe that, "Oh, let's get a famous person and put the famous person's name on a bottle and just put the bottle on the shelf and it's yourself." That's not true at all. Like, why did you make it? What's the story behind it? What do you care about? And do you really drink this?

• 1:22:49Speaker 08

  And if so, why? And how did you develop the liquid? What is your plan for a year, two, three, four, or five? Like, people really love a story. And if you have an authentic one, I find that people respond to it. So the years of operation and configuration as to what we want to do were the best parts of the business because after the liquid came out, well, it wasn't a shock to us of why we were happy and why we loved it. We did the work. We did the work.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, question, question from the chat. Walk us through the actual product development process. I'm assuming trips to Mexico, a lot of tastings, iteration.

• 1:23:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  But what did that look like?

• 1:23:32Speaker 09

  So there's a lot more that goes into this business than meets the eye for the consumers, right? So to your point earlier, the liquor business, the alcohol business, it's a very complex industry to navigate, based on the three-tiered system dating back to the years of prohibition. So there's certain criteria and ways you've got to navigate, and ultimately to build success, our perspective on it within consumer products and goods, and particularly within alcohol, where we saw the biggest opportunity over the last five years, is large corporations typically do not disrupt. They innovate, they innovate well with liquids, they innovate well with package, but generally they're not disruptors. And that's not saying the alcohol industry alone, it's every large industry.

• 1:24:13Speaker 09

  So it takes independent entrepreneurial companies to be real disruptors, like you guys are speaking to the guy from Gruen's the other day. Yeah. You guys are speaking to, you know, John from Happy Dad. These are independent companies that are bucking the trend, and our model has been, let's be that independent spirited business, let's make those bold, calculated decisions in real time, and be really fast and agile in terms of how we operate in the market day to day, but let's partner with the best large corporate in the business, being Proximo and Juan Domingo Beckman from the Beckley Corporation, and let's bring some real scale to the table. So that muscularity of the Proximo machine, and the agility of us in the market every

• 1:24:57Speaker 09

  day, leading on what consumers see, that's been a very successful partnership for us, and it's helped us buck that trend.

• 1:25:03Speaker 08

  And I also think, just to add to that, right, like, you know, you're not dealing with rocket scientists, right? Literally, like, people that are successful and people that have won, they've done it for a reason. So you're not trying to recreate the wheel or redesign the wheel, you're trying to better service the wheel. So sometimes the wheel, it falls into a space where everybody jumps on and the expectations are of norm, and they don't understand that you've got to energize the wheel. You've got to go in with some new energy, and what you'll find, those people will respond to that. I think our energy... Yeah!

• 1:25:39Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:25:40Speaker 08

  I don't know what that was, but yeah! Okay? I don't know. But yeah! Okay?

• 1:25:46Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:25:47Speaker 08

  Yeah. This is not real? It's not real? Just... I don't know.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need, you guys, we'll, we'll get you guys set up with a soundboard for some of your other meetings for when you're on Zoom.

• 1:26:05Speaker 08

  That just did something to me. I took an espresso in real time.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, yeah, Theresa on Strategy, uh, you have a massive platform, but you have to get the product to a place where people can buy it when you're promoting it. What was the thought between distribution, getting it in stores, and then starting to push the promotion funnel versus, uh, just telling everyone about it and they're like, yeah, I'm excited, but where do I get it? Oh, it's only available in a few stores.

• 1:26:33Speaker 08

  Well, A is patience.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:35Speaker 08

  Um, and B, it's actually realizing the real work that goes with that. Like, yes, I have a large platform and a huge social media following, but that doesn't mean that as soon as I post something and say, do it, that people respond.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 08

  Um, you have to like be on the ground.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Speaker 08

  You have to do the real work. So within distribution, you gotta go and you gotta go talk and meet and shake the hands and build the relationships, right? Um, the work that you're looking for is a response of when people feel the, the, the reason for your, your implementation in this space. Like when, when the partners meet you and they say, oh, he's not here for fiction, he's here for real. This is not fake. Yeah, we will support and we will back and we will suggest this to the new customer when they walk in. Try Kevin Hart's Secret Killer. It's really good because Kevin came in here and Kevin sat in front of us and Kevin made us understand not only why we should taste it, but why we should back and support it.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Speaker 08

  Um, it's no different from a new artist. If a new artist is really hungry, you're showing up at every radio station and every DJ outlet and you got your, you got your CD or you got a hard drive. Cause I want you to hear my sound, listen to it and you're gonna get way more no's than you are gonna get yeses. But the breakthrough yes, when it goes in the radio waves, makes the work so much worth it. In this space, the work of getting every restaurant, every, uh, brand.

• 1:28:05Speaker 08

  Every chain, every wine and spirits liquor store, independent chain, etc. Like, yeah, I read.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Speaker 08

  So I expect to see the results of my work. I expect to see people responding because I know what I did to get it in to a space of conversation. And I think for me, that energy is an energy that I'm not going to let go of. And my partners have responded to it tremendously. That's why we sit where we sit today.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Where is the business today? How big is it? What are sales? What can you tell us about the shape of the business?

• 1:28:40Speaker 09

  The business today, Grand Cormeno is now the fastest growing tequila brand in the world. Um, yeah, I tell you.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:28:49Speaker 09

  This again. Um, we grew last year by a hundred percent year on year. We've done $200 million in retail.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Two hundred million.

• 1:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong, John.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:29:01Speaker 08

  Turn into a DJ Callum video. This is better than anything I've ever done.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Should, uh, zooming out, should every celebrity launch a product? Should every influencer have a product? What advice are you giving to other celebrities?

• 1:29:20Speaker 09

  Absolutely not. I would say that from a celebrity perspective, most celebrities should not create businesses that they want to own. The endorsement model is a good model for most celebrities, but for entertainers who truly have the understanding, the know-how and the commitment to put in the work and prioritize said project over everything else outside of their day job, that's when it's compelling. And that was what was compelling in this partnership.

• 1:29:48Speaker 08

  Well, I don't, I don't even like the word, the word celebrity when it's used and attached to me because it's, it's, it's, it's underwhelming. Yes, it's, it's underwhelming to, to what I really am, right? And I get it. I get what that is.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Speaker 08

  I get the star celebrity, etc.

• 1:30:04Speaker 09

  It's not why we partner with each other.

• 1:30:06Speaker 08

  But as an entrepreneur, as a, as a real business mind, as a real like worker that's not afraid to do.

• 1:30:15Speaker 08

  Do build etcetera um you you're you're so much more right like the the the idea of a mogul or concept of that um is is just a person that wants so much and is willing to do so much and in doing so much it means I'm not afraid to partner or align with people who have done so in this space slapping somebody's name on something and just thinking that it's it doesn't work it doesn't work you're you're you're you're in rare air of opportunity and the celebrities that have had amazing success in the space of business brand um portfolio they do the work right like I just throwing out names

• 1:30:56Speaker 08

  you you look at a Kim Kardashian I don't think Kim gets the true credit that she deserves at all times of actually doing the work people don't understand Kim shows up Yeah She doesn't just have the idea she shows up like the people know that they're gonna see her on a daily the office full of employees know that Kim walked through the halls they know that her office is there and she's in meetings she's on call she does the work so I myself am a do the work uh individual and I think when you are and and you are committed there is no worth of loss you're always gonna win because you're doing what everyone else refused to do

• 1:31:40Speaker 08

  they don't have the patience they don't have the uh strength and mental ability to stay true to something through the ups and downs and see it all the way through it's not easy Yeah It's a it's a very very hard space to operate in and yes we're in amazing air right now and I love it will it stay this way who knows but no matter what if you're committed to it whether it's up down whatever you're true to the process and you know that ultimately sun is always gonna be at the end of the tunnel Yeah That's where we are

• 1:32:08Speaker 09

  That that was the most compelling part of this partnership is having a partner who understands who's willing to be on the phone every day the good days and the bad

• 1:32:16Speaker 08

  Yeah

• 1:32:16Speaker 09

  um but ultimately understanding the business behind the brand

• 1:32:19Speaker 08

  Yeah

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  So Kevin, how are you thinking about maybe not work-life balance, but work-work balance? You have multiple roles, multiple projects. If you're going into a movie, are you telling everyone, "Okay, I need to, you know, I need space, I need focus for a couple of weeks," or are you trying to have, "Okay, I'll do something in the morning and then something in the evening"? What is your workflow like on a day-to-day basis?

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be pouring shots for the whole cast and the director.

• 1:32:50Speaker 08

  This is an example of why things need to, why things need to fit your lifestyle. If things fit your lifestyle and fit your day-to-day, you'll find that you're never forcing and truly fighting for time, right? Everything can be done correctly. I am a, I'm a product of structure and operation. I have an amazing team around me. And within that, if I'm doing a movie, I'm doing a movie. But while doing a movie, well, how do I make my partners a part of said movie? Is there spaces for me to amplify partnerships or relationships? If I'm on tour, can I position or present certain relationships or partnerships that I have to be visible while I'm doing the things that I'm doing? Hey, man, I'm golfing.

• 1:33:33Speaker 08

  What partners can I align or place in within what I'm doing on a regular? Hey, I got vacation time coming up, but when I do go on this vacation time, man, it's relaxing, but I have certain relationships and partnerships that service the idea of relaxation and what it looks like and what it should feel like. As a partner, you're always thinking of how to service those that are aligned with you. And when you have a mind like that and you operate like that, it becomes a systematic thing. It's never a fight. So, yes, I am 365, I am, you know, a sun-up-to-sundown person with work, but because of my system,

• 1:34:18Speaker 08

  nobody gets left out. Wife, kids, partners, business, comedy, film, you know, company, let's just say, within company, employee, relationship, like, all of these things are embedded into an idea of my day-to-day and what I have to do. So, it's, it's, it's never left behind, it's never skipped or overlooked, it's implemented, and rightfully so.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, everyone's been tracking a million different changes in media and entertainment over the last decade throughout your career. Like, what, what has been the biggest crucible moment? What has been the biggest trend change that you felt, okay, uh, I need to adapt my strategy? I, I, I think everyone in my community needs to adapt our strategy. Uh, how, how have you processed the evolution of media over your career?

• 1:35:12Speaker 08

  I, I'll say getting older.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Speaker 08

  Right? I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm probably forty-seven this summer. Um, we're sitting and witnessing, witnessing a shift in marketing and a shift in entertainment, right? This younger generation and how they're navigating, um, and, and operating within social media, within storytelling, uh, within finding ways to present themselves to the masses. I mean, you know, the concept of a live streamer and, and a, a person that, that is literally talking to a screen all day and looking at a chat with comments, but finding a way to, to build revenue to where it's coming in droves, right?

• 1:35:57Speaker 08

  Like, that to me, it's exciting. It's exciting to see a shift. So, you don't fight that. You find a way to be a part of it. You find a way, um, to support it. So, where I think I've had an amazing lift is in amplifying that younger generation, right? Like, when I have a chance to sit beside, uh, some of these younger guys that are doing these amazing things, or it's dope for them to have stars like myself on their platforms or supporting them in that space. I don't need nothing or want anything in return. I just wanna see people win. But when you're supporting the new, it just makes you aware. Not being aware is ridiculous.

• 1:36:38Speaker 08

  Fighting with, what is, what is in real time, a new, um, space of success, you're seeing ad revenue, crazy spins from the biggest brands in the business, and you're seeing where they're now spending it. Television is changing. The on-demand feeling want has changed. How we watch movies and want movies have changed. Law of entertainment still exists today, but it's bigger than ever because people still wanna go out, but you realize they still wanna be home. You gotta go and you gotta say, how do I basically fit into these pockets? And how do I deliver in a manner to where it's real and it's never forced? Where you do that with support first and and elevation for them and then things come back to you.

• 1:37:22Speaker 08

  Right now, it's all about me saying, I see you, young guys, you young women. I love what you're doing. I wanna see you win. How can I help you? And then in return, their audience gets to say Kevin is cool. But it's it's a it's a them first me second now.

• 1:37:37Speaker 09

  This is a prime example, Jordy, of you guys. When we when we've been tracking what you guys have been doing for the last two years, it's it's incredible. And when the business outlets came up and turned to the list of targets, TVPN was on the top. We wanna be in the story. We wanna know what's new. We think it's bold and exciting what you're doing. Congrats on the deal with OpenAI. But I mean, you guys are just getting started. But us knowing you, us knowing that we wanna be on that platform, that's what it's about. And big companies don't often think that way. But we're empowered to be able to make those decisions day to day to be here with you.

• 1:38:11Speaker 08

  It's a great point.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Last last question, guys. Uh, James, is there a competitive dynamic between some of your different partners? The chat is talking about your work with Post Malone and ASAP Rocky. Uh, I know all these guys are very competitive. Is there any kind of dynamic internally who who can build the biggest brand? I know you don't. I know you don't want second or third, Kevin.

• 1:38:35Speaker 09

  It's not. It's not. It's not a competition, but there is no shortcut to success. And it's hard work is required.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's a it's it's it's looking like it's a competition.

• 1:38:46Speaker 08

  Whenever somebody says it's not a competition, you know it's a competition. I I would say this. Uh, we should all look at what each other are doing. And you figure out ways to take small pieces of the recipe that that's working, right? Like, I think ASAP and Post have done a great job in building businesses and building brands. Um, myself included. And when you see what's working for for each other, you find ways to take pieces. Like, ultimately, I want to see everybody win. I would love to see us all win. I would love to see his company succeed and be everything that it should be and more. But

• 1:39:23Jordi Hays?

  You would just hate for somebody to win, win more than you.

• 1:39:30Jordi Hays?

  I want everyone to win, just slightly less than me.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  I'm winning.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  I love it, guys. I, I, hey, hey, if I was a betting man, I'd be betting, I'd be betting on you. I know you, I know your work ethic is gonna be insane. I know while they're sleeping, you're gonna be at every restaurant, every club.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Getting everybody, uh, on the program. So, uh, I'm excited to, uh, to follow along and thank you guys for, for sending. We will, um, we will enjoy it, uh, this weekend.

• 1:40:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, the next time, the next time I'll be in the studio.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:40:09Speaker 08

  The wrong and I want to get all the effects, uh, in real time, man. Yeah, I need to, your, your energy is unbelievable, man. You guys deserve the high.

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Here, scoot over, scoot over a little bit there.

• 1:40:27Speaker 08

  That's what I'm talking about. Thank you, guys, man.

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great, great, great to see you guys.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Out of control.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic response from the soundboard, really working overtime. I love the soundboard.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Poor Matan from Factory.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  That's a tough act to follow for sure, but he'll be joining us in about 10 minutes. We can go through more.

• 1:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of entertainment, Variety has a post Val Kilmer has been, is this a movie?

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Val Kilmer is an actor who passed away recently. He was in Top Gun and in the new Top Gun as well, but that was his final movie. Very sad.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  Has been resurrected by AI to star in the new movie As Deep As The Grave. Here's a first look at the film's trailer. Kilmer's digital return has the support of his daughter Mercedes, who previously told Variety, he always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling. This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part. I'm curious, does this mean he was involved with it prior to his passing? Or she's just saying?

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  I mean, there's been, there's been a couple of companies in Hollywood that have done facial capture, high-res digital scans, trying to capture as much performance data. But of course, there's just the raw training data of every movie and every shot that was recorded while they were on set. And a lot of those, even the outtakes are captured and saved, even if they don't make it to the, to the final movie, the final cut of the movie. So this has always been an option. And then you imagine with the advance of models, you'll be able to train a really high, high quality output, even just on what's like out there in, in the, in the final cut.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  You don't, you might not need special capture or special, special data. But this is a very interesting, very interesting time. I imagine that there will be a ton of pushback on this broadly, but if the audience opts in and the actor opts in, I imagine this will be written into a lot of wills and a lot of, you know, contracts and agreements. I imagine that all of Hollywood will be grappling with how they process this going forward. But if it makes for good entertainment, you know.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the reason that I think it will become extremely frequent is that just the financial incentive for the family.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  For better or worse. I'm sure a lot of people will be upset about that, but.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Do we have our next guest in the waiting room already?

• 1:43:12Jordi Hays?

  Before we get Matan in, we gotta talk about Zach. Zach has this app, Share Aura. It's a running focused app. They now have a feature, from what I've been seeing, where people can basically go on a run. It's like a live stream of your run. So people can come in and like heckle you, they can cheer you on. You can come on with like video or it just has you on the map. So it's like tracking your pace, your mileage, all this stuff. It's very, very cool. We gotta have Zach on to talk about it.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  This used to be such a hard feature to build and it just, I mean, of course, there's services and APIs that allow for live streaming to be bolted on pretty quickly. But remarkable that Zach was able to roll this feature out with such a small team and so early in the in the journey for the app. So it seems fun. Feels a little hard to walk, to run with your camera there to show your face. But I guess certain runners will adapt if it's good content. Well, we have Matan from Factory. He is the co-founder and CEO.

• 1:44:12Jordi Hays?

  You dog!

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  You dog, absolute dog.

• 1:44:16Matan Grinberg?

  I'm doing well.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 1:44:17Matan Grinberg?

  I'm doing well.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Tell us the news.

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  How, how, how, how big is this market? Because...

• 1:44:25Matan Grinberg?

  This is the, this is the most important market there is.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  It seems like it.

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  It really seems like it.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Break down the news for us first. What happened?

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Hit us with the news and then we'll get into it.

• 1:44:34Matan Grinberg?

  Yes, so, well, first of all, so I'm reporting live from, and let's play a quick word association game. I'm going to tell you where I'm calling in live from. You gotta give me a first, first word that comes to mind. Coming in live from the Rosewood in Menlo Park.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Oh, Andrew and Horwitz.

• 1:44:54Matan Grinberg?

  Enterprise software, come on guys.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Enterprise software, the Rosewood.

• 1:44:57Matan Grinberg?

  The temple of selling enterprise software. I'm in here closing deals, but more importantly, here to share with you guys about our latest fundraise. We raised $150 million from...

• 1:45:10Matan Grinberg?

  There we go. The great folks at Coastal Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Blackstone, Insight NEA, and some other, some other great partners, and we're very, very excited to have their support.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Talk about the last, I feel like it's at least three months, maybe a bit more, since the last time you were on the show. Talk about how the, how the space is evolving. I mean, there's just so much noise, like every single day, you know, somebody's saying, you know, this company is over, this entire paradigm is dead. You guys clearly have just kept your head down and are making a lot of progress. But yeah, walk us through kind of how, how the space is evolving, how your business is evolving.

• 1:45:55Matan Grinberg?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I guess, first of all, I think, you know, there's obviously a lot of excitement in this space because there's just so much to be done in terms of software development. There's so many things that software developers don't enjoy doing, but they unfortunately have to be doing. And I think there was a, there's kind of an early phase of excitement where everyone was just, you know, thinking about all the possibilities and kind of investing, kind of the resources, both from the financing side, but then also in the enterprise side in terms of, you know, making sure they stay up to date. But I think there was a bit of a lag where first, you know, they were like, hey, here are all the things we want to do, let's go and tell our developers to actually do it. And there's kind of a lagging period where they didn't do it.

• 1:46:40Matan Grinberg?

  And then in the last six months, really, everyone started adopting a GPT-5. You see that in the revenue numbers of every, you know, model provider. And I think now there's a bit of a, a bit of a hangover where, you know, some people are realizing that they wanted their engineers to go and adopt things, and adopt, they did. However, they might not be doing so in the most efficient manner. You know, there are large enterprises that we work with that found that on a monthly basis, they spend on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers saying things like hello to Opus 4.6 best, or GPT 5.4 like ultra high, which, you know, is probably not the best.

• 1:47:20Matan Grinberg?

  Best use of those tokens. And I think, you know, a tool like Factory where we can be model agnostic and dynamically route them to the appropriate model for the appropriate task.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:47:30Matan Grinberg?

  That has been something that's been that's been really getting getting a lot of enterprise excitement.

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the token, this token kind of token maxing trend, Meta, Meta, of course, was they love to spend money on on AI. They've they had their internal leaderboard to see who could basically produce the most tokens. There had been some chatter that that people were effectively just created loops to just like go to get to the top of the the chart, even though I'm not sure it's an award worth winning. Do you think that like large corporates are already like, hey, this like, do you think this is a period where it'll be like, for the first half of this year, people are like, yeah, just try a bunch of stuff and then we'll see where we land? Or do you think there's already going to be more of a pullback?

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  I know the Uber CTO had went on the record and was talking about like, hey, we basically spent our whole inference budget in in in, you know, the first quarter and we got to figure out what our plan is on a go forward basis.

• 1:48:34Matan Grinberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing is that every company kind of has to go through these phases. We're like, phase zero is reluctance to adopt. Because, you know, developers have their workflows that they've that they've had for the last 20 years. They might not want to change it. And phase one is kind of throw the kitchen sink, just use as much AI as possible. Whatever you do, just change your workflows. And then I think a lot of people and maybe more of the frontier companies like Uber, who's always kind of very ahead of the curve as it relates to these things. They're now getting into the phase two, which is Meta, obviously, is an example as well. Okay, great. People are now adopting, we're proving that they can change their behavior and use these tools. Now we need to make sure we're actually doing it efficiently and effectively.

• 1:49:17Matan Grinberg?

  And I think that's it's fine. It's like a natural process. Yes, you'll overspend in that phase one. But the point of that is to get to the phase two, where then you're actually really efficient on a on a per token basis, moving the needle for for the business, delivering software faster.

• 1:49:31Jordi Hays?

  What's going on international? We saw you in SF, I believe, the day of the Super Bowl, and you talked about going international. How are companies and developers abroad thinking about code gen and the category?

• 1:49:46Matan Grinberg?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one thing that's really important is that, you know, people build software around the world, even though the best software is probably based in the US, there's still some fantastic software out there. And so I think, you know, the way we built Factory in particular is amenable to, you know, places like Europe or Asia or Australia because, you know, they have different rules about where the data needs to live, where the models need to live. And Factory is one of the only solutions that is fully on-prem, fully modular. So, you know, my co-founder, Eno, likes to say you could deploy Factory on a nuclear submarine as long as you have GPUs down there. And, you know, in places that tend to have a lot of regulation like Europe, that actually works quite well.

• 1:50:29Matan Grinberg?

  And so with some of this funding, we're opening up an office in London and-

• 1:50:33Jordi Hays?

  Air horn for European regulation.

• 1:50:36Matan Grinberg?

  There we go.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  Can you talk about some of the projects that you're seeing speed up on the back of AI agents? Because there's this weird dichotomy where we see huge token budgets, huge AI spend, a lot of, and then you dig in and you see people tell stories about building a lot of internal tools, a lot of new dashboards, automating workflows, being more efficient. But people, it feels like they haven't really felt the external-facing, I don't know, it just feels like if you, like Meta is using a bunch of AI. If you open Instagram, it's sort of the same app. It's not like, oh, wow, they have like an entirely different paradigm and it feels like an entirely new app.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  And maybe that's just because that particular platform is mature. But where is, like, in terms of internal tooling, customer-facing software, entirely new ideas, automations, like where are you seeing the most adoption, the most impact?

• 1:51:37Matan Grinberg?

  So I love the framing of that because I think there's kind of two separate types of usage that we see. There's one that's like the fun and cool stuff of like, let me build all these new apps from scratch.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:48Matan Grinberg?

  Which probably doesn't move the needle for the business.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:52Matan Grinberg?

  And then there are the less sexy things, but actually save developers a ton of time. And that's where we're seeing kind of under the hood, a lot of the ROI coming from. And I think generally the name of the game there is, you know, developers are really smart. They spend years of their lives becoming experts and they get paid a lot of money. They should not be spending their time on low leverage things like documentation or testing, or, you know, spending two years doing legacy code migrations. So generally the the orgs that we see get the most ROI are the ones basically play whack a mole with what is the lowest leverage thing that our developers are doing right now? Great, let's use droids to automate it. Or, you know, some language that's really emerging is, let's build a software factory.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:36Matan Grinberg?

  That goes in and automates these low leverage tasks. And I really think we take a lot of inspiration. And it is even where our name comes from, is what Elon and Tesla did to the physical factories. Like if you go to Tesla factories, they're mostly like, you know, machine arms going and going and doing things. And there's no reason that software can't be very similar. Like obviously you still need humans involved, but those humans tend to play a role of more designing that software factory, figuring out what is the most efficient way to configure that factory so that you can move the needle on your business, you know, produce more, more output.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  How important are, is wide diffusion of models? We've been following the latest model from Anthropic Mythos, that's only available to a few companies, is the strategy to focus on being cross-platform, or get access to that model earlier and then act as a diffusion layer for that? How are you thinking about the future where more advanced models are sort of gated?

• 1:53:37Matan Grinberg?

  Yeah, I think for us, the biggest thing is enterprises need to be model agnostic. It's just, it is a non-negotiable that they cannot standardize on just one provider. For a number of reasons. One might be, you know, if that API endpoint goes down, which, you know, some models these days haven't been the most reliable. And if you're a highly regulated industry and you get your developers to become agent native and, you know, start delegating tasks to, to these agents and that endpoint is down, what are you gonna do? Like, it's just, it's non-negotiable. And so being model agnostic for every serious enterprise is kind of table stakes. And for us, what we can do is make sure

• 1:54:18Matan Grinberg?

  that we get those models, you know, day zero, that they're released, just so that they can stay at the frontier. Same with the open models. Cause also, different models end up being good at different tasks. They're better at different languages, perhaps. And making sure that we kind of give the optionality to the enterprises to, to adjust accordingly is pretty important.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the forward deployed model? Is that more important now? I, I know that you have a very small team. It's what, 70 employees, probably growing very fast. But how much about, you know, enterprise adoption is actually spending time onsite with the customer, answering questions, integrating deeply into these like large enterprises?

• 1:55:02Matan Grinberg?

  Yeah. The way we think about the, the deployed engineering is they should never be doing the same thing more than once. Because with the tool that we've built, if they've learned, hey, here's something that enterprises care about, we should be able to build that into the product very quickly. Like, our core competency is not providing services, but it's building product. And we treat our deploy team kind of as like the tip of the spear, where they're figuring out live, you know, shoulder to shoulder with the enterprise engineers, what are the things that if we put into our product would allow them to become agent native faster?

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  There was some news from Cursor today that they're teaming up with XAI to potentially train the next version of Composer. Are you thinking about training your own model at some point? Is that interesting to you?

• 1:55:48Matan Grinberg?

  I think it's interesting at some point. I think it doesn't make sense right now because I don't think there is a

• 1:55:59Matan Grinberg?

  I don't think right now enterprises need another, you know, open model that you fine tune.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:05Matan Grinberg?

  I think there's sufficiently good ones out there and I think most of the alpha is actually on the research side as it relates to the agent itself. So for example, Droid, which is our agent, ends up, it's model agnostic, but it also outperforms all of the agents that are coming out of the model labs. And so as an agent lab, most of the alpha on every incremental hour of our time is from the agent itself. And then we'll probably get to a point, you know, where eventually maybe there's just, there's sufficient alpha in, you know, RLing a model for ourselves, but right now, every incremental hour on the agent ends up being very, very high ROI. So.

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  No. Great update.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:56:48Jordi Hays?

  Great progress. Congrats to the team.

• 1:56:50Matan Grinberg?

  Thanks for having us, guys. Cheers.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Goodbye. And up next, we have Akhil from Ulysses. He's the co-founder and CEO. How are you doing?

• 1:57:03Speaker 11

  Hey, fellas. Good to be here.

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  Look at that. Look at that beautiful drone.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  Massive day today. Kick us off with the announcement. What happened today?

• 1:57:12Speaker 11

  Well, you know, I've got, you know, my friend, my Mako here, one of our pet robotic sharks. And we're going to be building a hell of a lot more of them. We've just announced our Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, American Diamondism Fund at $38 million.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Very, very, very, very, very cool. And yeah, why don't you give, yeah, what, what, what is, what have the last like six months been like? Will's been on the show before. This is your first time, but kind of walk us through what you guys have been focused on, what the, what the opportunities are and what the future looks like.

• 1:57:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, for sure. So, you know, as you guys might already know, you know, we're building autonomous maritime robotics to solve the most critical challenges in what is arguably the most critical domain on the planet. You know, we're talking commercial applications, ranging from just monitoring and maintaining infrastructure for offshore energy, oil and gas, renewables, also telecoms, you know, maintaining and securing that, you know, our critical communications infrastructure, also shipping terminals, ports, that kind of thing as well. And then, as we, you know, recently started doing a lot of work in the defense space as well, taking our commercially available and deployed robots,

• 1:58:40Speaker 11

  like this Mako behind me, that's been on probably a dozen missions for various commercial customers till date, and taking the exact same technology and helping to fill capability gaps for allied forces, you know.

• 1:58:56Speaker 11

  You look at shipbuilding, where China is ahead of the US by, you know, 200 times or something like that. And unmanned underwater vehicles, the gap isn't that big. You know, it's the gap that can be easily closed, we're the ones closing it. And it's the underwater domain where most of the work happens. It's where all the infrastructure is, it's where all of the communications is, and it's a place where, you know, we have a chance to deliver an asymmetric advantage. And over the last six months, we've been hard at work taking our commercial tech and bringing it in front of allied forces to get it in the water with them.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  So, talk about the commercial applications. If I have a, I don't know, a oil rig, and I want to inspect and make sure that the barnacles aren't getting out of control or something, I drop this in the water, am I piloting it remotely? Does it have an autonomous sort of path that it can swim around on or, you know, fly, drive around on and, and collect data, imagery? What are the sensor stack? Like, how, how am I actually getting value from this on day one?

• 2:00:02Speaker 11

  So that's the beauty of the product. It's modular, which means that you can put, you know, it's made up of all these sections. You can change the thruster configuration. You can put different sensors on. You can take other sensors off. So it depends on what you want, you know. Are you trying to do a magnetic analysis of your structure? We have a magnetic magnetometer payload. Are you trying to just see what's there? We've got cameras like we have right here.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:27Speaker 11

  Are you trying to see through really dark and murky water, really wide areas? Then we have a variety of acoustic mapping, sonar payloads and things like that. And so then in terms of, you know, can it work autonomously? Can your remote control it? Well, you can do both. That's the, that's the fun of it, you know? You could have it, you know, just dropping in the water with a pre-programmed path and be like, hey, go and search this wide area or, you know, scan all these pylons supporting my rig. Come back, pull the data off and have a look. And then you might see something interesting. You might see something, I want to take a closer look. But then you can connect the cable, live stream the data.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:05Speaker 11

  And drive it down yourself. And then you can look at it. And we support robotic payloads as well. So then you can start interacting with it. You know, you might want to scrape something off. You might want to cut something that's entangled, entangled. You might want to place something. We have payloads that do all of that.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about range and, and battery life? And, and just all the different trade offs that go into actually getting something that can have an impact for a meaningful amount of time or across a meaningful amount of space? It doesn't look like the biggest ship. How far can it go? How deep can it go? What are the options here?

• 2:01:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, this is one of our, this is one of our more compact vehicles. You know, this one's about sixty, sixty-five inches in length. But, you know, we can go in excess of one hundred and forty inches because you can stack batteries. You know, this one here, in this configuration, it's not the most hydrodynamic configuration, which means it's not the most efficient. So it's only going to go maybe twenty nautical miles with one battery box. But if you wanted to go sixty nautical miles with three battery boxes on.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:16Speaker 11

  Or if you take the thrust your pods off and you just have this big tube, that's the most efficient. And then you can actually go, you know, four, four battery boxes in length. Uh, cause you take the pods out, that gives you space for another battery box. Then you can go up to two hundred and fifty nautical miles.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  It's going slower, but farther. That makes sense.

• 2:02:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, uh, yeah. And it's also a more efficient shape.

• 2:02:37John Coogan?

  Yep, more, yeah, more efficient. Uh, I saw that there's two cameras on the front. Is that for stereoscopic vision? Or is one of them telephoto, one of them wide angle? Why two lenses on the front?

• 2:02:48Speaker 11

  In, in this case, it doesn't really show up, but they are actually two separate lenses.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:52Speaker 11

  Uh, uh, two different sensors as well.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:02:55Speaker 11

  Just different use cases, but they're, they're modules. You can see this port is actually blank here. But we make, we actually make our own cameras as well and you can plug them in with different lenses. You can have a stereo configuration. Uh, you know, we've actually got ones on top here as well. Cause this one, uh, you know, the idea is you can have it like swim like underneath structures. And you can be looking up and doing inspection up above. So, um.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  You're making your own cameras. How, how vertically integrated are you? This feels like with defense applications, it's really important to be onshore. But I would imagine trying to take advantage of as much of the supply chain as you can. Uh, what's been the build versus buy strategy?

• 2:03:36Speaker 11

  Well, we, we found, you know, coming into this, we, there was, there are a lot of things we honestly wanted to buy. And we looked into buying, but we found the, the idiot index in maritime is, is insane.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 11

  You know, it's.

• 2:03:48John Coogan?

  What is the idiot index again? Can you break that metric down?

• 2:03:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, that, that's, uh, you know, the, the metric that Musk came up with where, you know, what's the ratio of the cost of the raw materials in a part?

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:04:00Speaker 11

  Versus what you're actually paying for it.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:02Speaker 11

  Uh, and you know, there's been like, you know, sensors and, you know, motors and other parts that we like. We get in, we take them apart. We're like, why are we paying $150,000 for this thing? It's got like a microcontroller in here worth $10, some networking and power switches. And it's not even like, okay, this is really new, really advanced technology and they need to amortize the development costs. It's like, we're buying a sensor that's 20 years old. Why are we still paying this much for it? You know, and the thing is, the tech and the knowledge and the fundamentals have been publicly available for a long, long time for a lot of the stuff that we're bringing in house. So for us, it's like, if you look at the maritime industry, it's been the same for centuries.

• 2:04:46Speaker 11

  You want to do something big and important, you get a big ship, lots of expensive equipment, and you're really CapEx and OpEx heavy, right? But that's not the case anymore in space, in the air, on land. You know, we want to bring that moment to the ocean as well. And what that's necessitated is a ton of vertical integration. All the metal that you see on this, all our pressure vessels, they're machined and the machine's just over there.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:05:14Speaker 11

  All the internal brackets and mounts, everything also machined on those same machine. The plastic fairings and propellers and everything 3D printed on the 3D printers over there. All the internal printed circuit boards with all the electronics. We don't make the boards ourselves yet, but we do have the ability to actually assemble the boards. You know, we get the raw components in, place them on the boards, and we've got an automated line doing that. And that's massively brought our costs down, made it much easier for us to have a product that's fundamentally very easy to scale, but also massively saved us tons of money in terms of development time and iteration speed.

• 2:05:56Speaker 11

  You know, there's things we've done that we did in three days that before we brought machining in-house probably would have taken us three months.

• 2:06:03John Coogan?

  Well, that's very exciting. Thank you so much.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Incredible progress.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  And breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Good update. Congrats to the whole team.

• 2:06:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, thanks for having me on.

• 2:06:11John Coogan?

  See you, guys. Our next guest is Charlie Cheever, the co-founder of Expo. Previously, he co-founded Cora, raised his CTO, and helped scale the platform to millions of users.

• 2:06:21Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:06:23Speaker 12

  Hey, I'm great. How are you guys?

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  I'm good. Welcome to the show.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Excited to chat.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  I think most people are familiar with your background, but would love to get the introduction on Expo and go through the news today.

• 2:06:37Speaker 12

  Yeah, we just raised a $45 million Series B from Georgian.

• 2:06:47John Coogan?

  And yeah, what's the shape of the company now? What's the plan?

• 2:06:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, we're about 62 people right now and we're all over the world. We've got great people everywhere and the plan is just that we've got a ton of stuff to do and this will just let us do it. What's basically happened over the last year or so is that expo sort of become the best way to make apps with AI and so just gotten really popular. And so that's meant that there's just a ton of stuff to do.

• 2:07:23Speaker 12

  And so we're working on it.

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean coding models are clearly aware of React Native and Objective C and Swift to some degree, but there's always been a disconnect between X code or, you know, actually delivering the product. And it feels like when you click on some vibe-coded app, it's almost always in the web. And, you know, this, it feels like there's going to be a boom. We're already seeing some stats on on the App Store, but walk me through what it takes to actually deliver value in app creation that's differentiated.

• 2:07:59Speaker 12

  Yeah. So what we've been, our basic philosophy for the last like couple of years is since the beginning has been, you know, that we want to take everything that's good about web development and bring that to mobile so that it just is easy and everything that's just easy and fast about building and distributing on the web, we bring that to mobile. And so a year and a half ago, I would have said, you know, what's great about expo is that you can take your, you know, React web developer team and you can point them at mobile and they can build a great mobile app that feels really, really good. And today, the pitch now becomes like You know, these AI models are so well-trained on React and JavaScript, TypeScript, et cetera, that like, they're really, really good at this, for this. But the other really important thing there is, like, Expo isn't just a way to build mobile apps with JavaScript.

• 2:08:44Speaker 12

  Like, we kind of see, saw that attempted in the past, and it just didn't work out that well, because people would use, you know, the HTML5 as a content delivery mechanism, and it just wouldn't feel right.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  There's like Phone Gap was one of the popular ones.

• 2:08:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, stuff like that. And so what's different here is just that, like, Expo is really a way to make, you know, apps with TypeScript and React Native and stuff like that, but also lets you drop down really easily to Swift and Kotlin and stuff like that. So wherever you need to, you can go make that polished. It's sort of in the same way that, you know, a developer making server-side software might write a codebase in a mix of Python and Rust, or something like that. You can move in between them seamlessly, and that's, that's a huge deal, and means that, like, the people who are making apps with Expo are making sort of like, stuff that's, you know, top-tier, top of the App Store charts, that kind of stuff, because you can hit that quality bar that people expect on mobile these days.

• 2:09:36Jordi Hays?

  What's your view on how, like, maybe I won't ask you that, but I would say, like, what do you think Apple, how do you think Apple should be approaching?

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  The vibe turning boom?

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Explosion of, of new software applications? Like, they, they are, I, I, there's been so much frustration with them, they've been under pressure because of, you know, billing and, and payment policies, but they certainly, specifically just looking at, like, if you just, if you 10x or 100x, or maybe someday 1,000x the amount of software, that is a real challenge for them. And so they're not gonna get everything perfect, but I'm curious, like, what advice you'd give them?

• 2:10:14Speaker 12

  I think one, one place where I think they've done a nice job is on, on the Macintosh, where, or Mac, I guess they call it these days, where, like, if you want to get software on the Mac, you can go to the App Store on the Mac, or you can get it from the web, or you can just, you know, a lot of places, like, if I install, like Slack or Notion, I typically go to their website and download an installer, and it works. And what they've, they've done a really nice job of, like, tightening up the security model around the kernel and the operating system and things like that. And there's not really any significant security problems I'm aware of on the Mac, and I think that's, that should be a really good model. And also, you know, nobody's, on the developer's side, I don't know of a lot of developers who are super frustrated with distributing software on the Mac either. So I think, like, From my perspective, I feel like they've actually figured out a pretty good model and they just should apply that to iOS.

• 2:10:59Speaker 12

  And, you know, I, it's true, like, you know, I was reading an article the other day that I think App Store submissions are up sort of eighty-four percent this quarter. And obviously, like, a lot of that is new expo apps, a lot of those are vibe-coded. There's a lot of new app-building tools out there. A lot of those are built with expo, uh, most of them. And so like,

• 2:11:21Speaker 12

  yeah, a lot of people are frustrated that, you know, they're getting rejected for strange reasons, or they don't know what's going on or why. And, but, I think overall this will get sorted out. I mean, like, there's just, it's too possible and there's too much demand for like, building new software and building customized software and building software with bigger surface areas. Like, it's clearly gonna happen. I don't know, I feel like, sort of like, when Uber launched, there was a bunch of regulatory things and policy things to find out, but like, it was just such a good idea and just needed to happen. And so like, eventually the dam, kind of, I don't know if it burst, but it like, things got sorted out and, and, um, people take Uber's now. And I think people will be able to, I think people will be able to make software and distribute it in the future.

• 2:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, what, uh, what percentage of your growth do you think is like agent-led? As in, you know, various coding agents effectively choosing expo or helping, guide the, the team or entrepreneur to using the product?

• 2:12:20Speaker 12

  I think it's still, uh, word of mouth, like it, when people make a decision big enough to sort of pick your stack that you're gonna build your mobile app on, that you're probably gonna be stuck with for a bunch of years. And for a lot of companies, it decides their business. They're not gonna use one thing to decide that. So I think that like, it's a combination of word of mouth, which is the strongest thing. Like, the, the story that we hear over and over again is sort of like, oh, you know, our company needed to build a new mobile app because we had this older thing that just wasn't cutting it anymore. Someone in our team came in on a Monday morning with a prototype that already had six screens built, and felt really great, and the CEO was really impressed. And so, we just kept going with that.

• 2:12:58Speaker 12

  But, a lot of times that person found out about it because an AI told them about expo, or they just asked an AI, hey, how can I build a mobile app prototype really quickly and it directs them to it? Or they also find out about, like, YouTube is a huge referral for us. Uh, like, there's a lot of great content out there.

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Is this, is the story about Facebook writing a compiler from PHP to C++ apocryphal? Or is that roughly correct?

• 2:13:24Speaker 12

  I think that I believe that's correct. This guy, Hei Ping Zhao, made something called like the PHP compiler. And they're actually kind of doing something like, one thing that's really relevant to Expo is for React Native, they've, they built this custom JavaScript virtual machine called Hermes. And they're actually working on something called static Hermes, which will come ahead of time, compile TypeScript and JavaScript to native code. And so you'll be able to take, you know, any React Native app, if, assuming this project completes, which it hasn't yet, but hopefully it will soon, you'll be able to take any part of your, you know, JavaScript-driven app and convert it into native code seamlessly and have that, you know, if you want to speed up that part at the cost of a more brittle, bigger binary, you'll be able to choose that.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's exactly where I was going with it. We're, we're moving up these like levels of abstraction. You, you say that, you know, you think people will be able to build apps and develop software in the future. Do you have a view on sort of like real-time UI, instantiating things at runtime? And whether or not Apple embraces that? It feels like that's something that could be coming with artifacts that are generated on the fly based on a query. Doesn't make sense for every app, but does that seem like something that might happen in the future?

• 2:14:39Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, basically every big app that you know, like, does something like this. Like, even if you just think about something, you know, that you think of as kind of basic, like Yelp. Like, at first, it's like, oh, like, this is a really structured, every restaurant page, like, this looks the same. But then they start to add more features and there's like, oh, well, this restaurant wants to post its hours in this way, or there's a chain here, so we need to link to other locations. And they start to, you know, make some sort of like JSON format that describes the complexity of the UI, and then they keep extending it and extending it, extending it. And so like, there's, there's an old saying that's sort of like, you know, every, you know, sufficiently complicated C++ program contains a poorly implemented, half-baked version of Lisp in it, or something like that.

• 2:15:21Speaker 12

  And I think every mobile app that gets sufficiently big basically ends up with some sort of custom dynamic on-the-fly rendering system for, you know, as, as their content becomes richer and richer. And I think like, what's nice about using JavaScript and React and React Native, it's like, it's a fully featured, like... You know, real programming language takes care of all the problems, like makes sure things are, you know, correctly updated, et cetera, et cetera. And like you, you, why not use the real thing once you're going in that direction?

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does it take to get a job with you these days if you're a software engineer? There's a lot of people that are stopping, they're not studying computer science anymore. There's a bit of a reckoning. There's a question about where young people should go. How do you counsel someone who's in college right now and interested in technology?

• 2:16:12Speaker 12

  I personally, there's three things that I look for.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Speaker 12

  I would say like taste is probably the most important thing. I mean, and like I've, I've said this for years, but now with like AI, this is even more important. We're just like, we still need somebody to say like, this is good. And like, this is what, what we should be doing and what, what, you know, like what, what you're actually trying to build. And that's, that's really hard to, to replace. It's, it's, you know, it's rare to have someone with really, really good taste. And so, um, someone who just has good judgment, that's incredibly important. Then, uh, the second thing is like, we call it like high APM. APM is like a term from like real time strategy video games where it's basically like, um, if you've played like, you know, Starcraft back in the day or something like that, part of it is a strategy game, but part of it is just like,

• 2:16:58Speaker 12

  if you just do more stuff faster than other people, you're going to beat them. And so like, we look for people to just like do a bunch of stuff really quickly, but like with a precision and, you know, that you're not, you're not just doing like totally random stuff, but you're doing like effective stuff. And then the third thing we talk about is just high agency where like,

• 2:17:18Speaker 12

  you know, you can see right now that like writing code has become not a big problem for a lot of companies.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25Speaker 12

  But shipping good software is still a big problem for a lot of companies. And that's because the problem of like actually making stuff and getting over the finish line out the door into your users. And, you know, properly messaged and all these other things and supported and, you know, iterated on to, to match what your customers actually need, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are all pretty hard and a lot of times they involve like doing annoying stuff or solving like problems. Nobody ever wrote a manual on how to solve before. And just so people were just like, oh, I'm going to get this done. And I'm just to figure it out. And I'm just going to like, you know, run through walls to, to figure that out. That's, that's always really important, I think. And it, you know, whether it be, you know, a coding engineering context or any other role at the company, I think that's super important.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's great. I like it a lot. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much and congratulations on the round and the progress. Very excited. Have a great day.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Thanks. Great to meet you, Charlie.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Victor from Slash.

• 2:18:24Jordi Hays?

  I take it back. I did have one more question, but it's too late. The question was going to be around payments.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, would they, this feels like something they would build in?

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Helping you bring your product to the App Store.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  App Store now has more flexibility around payments, but I'll save that one.

• 2:18:39John Coogan?

  For the next time.

• 2:18:40Jordi Hays?

  For the next appearance.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Well, let's bring in Victor from Slash. He's the co-founder and CEO. Victor, how are you doing?

• 2:18:45Speaker 13

  What's going on? Doing great. Thanks for having me on. Long time watcher of the show, first time being here, so.

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  I know. Long, long overdue.

• 2:18:53John Coogan?

  Long overdue.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  You guys have been probably 100 X'd since we started the show.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Speaker 13

  Definitely.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  So, better, better late than ever.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  But, for those of you who don't know, introduce yourself and the company first, and then we'll get into questions.

• 2:19:06Speaker 13

  Of course. I'm the founder and CEO of Slash. Slash is one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing, business banking platforms in America. Over 5,000 businesses spend nearly $10 billion a year on our corporate cards. And the reason all these business owners are coming to Slash is quite simple. We live in an age where you can talk to machines, where cars can drive themselves, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs in America are still banking with an institution that has an interface that was last updated in the year 2003. So, core to the Slash thesis is this idea that your bank can do so much more for you than just let you hold and send your money. It can be the place where you invoice your customers, where you reimburse your employees for out-of-pocket expenses, where you figure out how to just run a much more efficient operation. And we have ambitions to be this generation's JP Morgan,

• 2:19:51Speaker 13

  and we're going to do it by building the most powerful banking platform imaginable. And John, I'm not sure you remember, but we met one time.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:19:57Speaker 13

  At a Steel Falls retreat.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  Oh, very cool.

• 2:19:58Speaker 13

  Yeah. It's like around an opera or somewhere like that.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Very cool. So, yeah, what is the go-to-market strategy? Obviously, it's a crowded space. Do you want to go bottoms-up, top-down? Startups, enterprises, somewhere in between SMBs, Silicon Valley darlings, or Main Street everyday companies?

• 2:20:18Speaker 13

  Totally. I would say a very underappreciated fact is that fintech is very underpenetrated in the US. The vast majority of businesses in the US still bank and spend with a legacy financial institution. Less than 5% of American businesses work with a fintech company like Slash or others. And so there's a lot of market up for grabs. The crux of a Slash thesis is that business owners deserve banking products hyper-tailored to the needs of their specific industries. So I would say we work with companies that have, you know, a very small amount of employees. We work with very large companies, but usually it's very sector-focused. So we figure out how do we deliver a ton of value for a business in one segment? And we really tune out the rest of the markets.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  And in terms of actually getting those customers on the platform, is it some sort of like magical demo? That is AI-enhanced that wows them? Or is it, uh, you know, just gumshoe getting to know folks and reassuring them that this will be, you know, uh, just a reliable banking platform for them?

• 2:21:19Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, banking is a very relationships-driven industry. All else being equal, people prefer to bank and spend with an institution that they have a great relationship with. And so the crux of our go-to-market is, is, depends on building amazing referral flywheels. So part of, part of this, um, vertical-by-vertical strategy exists because we have a phenomenal product that works on a vertical-by-vertical basis, but also because once we penetrate and acquire a few customers in one particular sector, willingness to refer is quite high because we deliver very strongly on customer support and, and on just going above and beyond.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about integrating AI tools, AI agents, AI chief of staff? Anything that can help a business owner understand their spend, understand their business, actually manage their finances better?

• 2:22:12Speaker 13

  Absolutely. The future of software, generally speaking, is moving away from click and drag UI and towards just textual interfaces, natural language. Right now, today, we actually announced our AI agent. It's called Twin, and it allows you to take every single action you can take from within the Slash dashboard, but in natural language. So that's where everything's going. That's where all software is going, and we decided to practically take that step today. That's number one. And then number two-

• 2:22:40Jordi Hays?

  That's the most Gen Z name for an agent ever. I love it. That's my twin. That's my twin.

• 2:22:45Speaker 13

  It's my twin.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  It's a super under-unified term.

• 2:22:48Speaker 13

  Yeah. And the really cool thing-

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Digital twins were a thing, yeah.

• 2:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:52Speaker 13

  Is it can buy, is it can buy things on your behalf because we're the issuer of the card you use to place all your expenses. Your employees can actually go out and tell, hey, Twin, you know, make this DoorDash order for me. Place this order on Instacart. And I think that's a super, super powerful thing, an agent that can actually go out and make purchases on the internet on your behalf.

• 2:23:11Jordi Hays?

  You just raised a bunch of money. What is VC sentiment around fintech right now? I know you guys have stablecoin functionality. I'm sure that that was interesting. And at this scale, like you have a bunch of real, really, really positive metrics that you can lean on. But I'm curious what, what, what overall sentiment was from the investor base?

• 2:23:35Speaker 13

  I think there were two things that investors found quite compelling about Slash. The first is that we're a very revenue efficient company, that our business approaching $300 million in annual revenue. We have a team of just around 70 people. So our business does over $4 million in revenue per employee. And the reason, thank you, we've been able to do that is because so many of these processes that legacy banks and the fintechs that came before us throw a lot of headcount at, processing disputes, parsing documents when somebody applies for an application, submitting a SARS filing to, to, to regulators, we've agents automated away. So Slash's leanness and this differentiation, differentiation of we're building this backend AI operating system was super attractive to investors. And then the other thing that's super interesting to investors is-

• 2:24:21Speaker 13

  We're living in a super interesting time in fintech history where for the first time ever, an American fintech company can serve businesses all over the world. It used to be the case that if you were a fintech company and you wanted to expand internationally, you had to get licensed on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis. But now, stablecoins are this enabling force that allows you to deliver USD banking products to businesses all over the world. So, a lot of this funding is going to go towards making slash this global product and bringing the caliber of product we've given to to to American entrepreneurs, but to business owners all over the world as well.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congrats on all the progress and

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally meet.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Great to have you on the show.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super impressive.

• 2:24:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Victor.

• 2:25:00John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Powerful nominative determinism.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Victor, yes, you will be the victor. I like that. Well, our next guest is Theodore Marcu from Cognition. He's the head of product growth. Theodore, how are you doing?

• 2:25:15Speaker 14

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  It's good. Good to see you.

• 2:25:18Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Obviously, everyone here on the show is familiar with Cognition, the makers of Devon. But take us through sort of how you're positioning the company, the updates and any any big announcements we should be aware of.

• 2:25:33Speaker 14

  Of course, yeah. Thank you again for having me. This is a very exciting day. So, yesterday, we had a huge, huge moment for the company that that I think a lot of us are very excited about. We had the biggest launch since the acquisition of Windsurf last July. This is something that has that the team has been looking forward to a lot. We launched Windsurf 2.0, which did two big things. It brought Devon to Windsurf. So, finally, the world's, you know, software engineering agent is is available in Windsurf. And we have now an agent command center. So, our sort of vision for the future of software engineering, which is managing a team of agents, both remote and local, that works sort of alongside you, have an army at your back.

• 2:26:18Speaker 14

  Windsurf 2.0 makes that easier than ever.

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  Got it. So, how, what goes into an agent command center to make it effective? We were talking about Gas Town and having different agents for different tasks. I think the buzzword is like orchestrators. There's a various amount of, you know, open source projects and sort of the idea of orchestration is percolating in the AI industry. How do you think about educating customers and enterprises about why they should be using an interface to manage agents instead of just having a bunch of different terminals open?

• 2:27:00Speaker 14

  Yeah. So first of all, this is something that I think frankly arose as a need internally and at cognition. What we're seeing is some of the best engineers here are, and we think this is sort of where the future is going, the best engineers are using local agents and they are planning their tasks. They're going very deep into the code base, architecting systems, creating, coming up with a plan, and then they're handing those off to cloud agents. And when we launched cognition, Scott and Walden and Stephen and the other folks had this, sort of they saw into the future and they saw that cloud agents were going to be the future. But we also saw that engineers are sort of, you know, around and they will

• 2:27:42Speaker 14

  be, they are working very closely with their code and they want to make, there's sort of like golden age of engineering where like, you know, we can sort of, we can sort of like go very deep into what you're excited about and then hand out after cloud, cloud agents. So with WinSarF 2.0, the bottom line is that, and what we're telling a lot of our customers with the command center is that you get to have this overview of your agents so that you can, your limits on your attentions are no longer there. Because as you're working with dozens of agents at a time and you switch contexts, it gets really hard. So we built, we actually were very intentional and we built this Kanban view. Sort of anyone that's familiar with project management can, has seen a Kanban view before,

• 2:28:26Speaker 14

  where you can see all your agents working on different projects at a time and then you can sort of like switch in. Between them and quickly check on them and then spawn or create new sessions when you need to. And then those sessions are actually grouped into spaces, which is sort of this way that we built to made it easier for agents to share context and also share sort of states together. So from our perspective, what goes into a great command center is just making it very easy for a single engineer to work with a team of agents and have sort of like this army at their back.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  For big enterprises, they have so much different development work to do. What is the like the most low hanging fruit? Like if you're talking to a customer who wants to get spun up with Winserve and Cognition and Devon. Are you trying to understand their backlog, the hairiest tasks, the most miserable? Are you trying to get them excited about greenfield projects and new dashboards and automated workflows? Are you trying to get in the hands of their best engineers, their youngest engineers? Like what is the greatest foothold for you right now?

• 2:29:42Speaker 14

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think that is something that has been evolving ever since the beginning of Cognition. I think early on with Devon, what we found was that we would go in and talk about all these sort of very specific use cases that we'd find inside companies, whether it's migrations, whether it's building internal tooling, whether it's these sort of like big backlog projects that they've been wanting to work on. I think more recently, like as models have been getting better and as our agent harness has been getting better and better, what we're finding is that there's a lot of frankly, everyone can use a software engineering agent. And the universe of possibilities has expanded greatly.

• 2:30:26Speaker 14

  And I was talking about how you can start working locally and you know, there's this sort of like gold. The way I think about it is there's this golden age of engineering where like the best engineers in the world can do more and they can offload their tasks and not just the best engineers, frankly, everyone. Can offload the tasks that they don't want to spend as much time on to agents in the cloud that can sort of like handle them sort of very quickly or you know over many minutes or long hours and then they can sort of like stay in control and work on the things that they care most about and the hardest problems that are most exciting to them. So Scott always uses this sort of like this idea of you're going from being a bricklayer to an architect and I think a lot of what we're seeing a lot of our customers is that

• 2:31:10Speaker 14

  in the entire teams and individuals on those teams are moving from being bricklayers or sort of like writers to architects or directors where they're sort of like managing an orchestra of agents.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, that makes sense. Jordy was asking this question earlier about just model agnosticism, how valuable like do you see demand from customers and companies for wanting to switch between model providers, use open source for things, like how much is using the right tool for the job, understanding the Pareto frontier and not, you know, blowing up your budget in one month if you're token maxing?

• 2:31:51Speaker 14

  Yeah, that's something that comes up all the time and as you know cognition has been model agnostic from day zero. We've always worked with the best models and all of the models that are available, evaluated them internally, figured out how to make the best agent harness for Devon, how to make the best sort of agent harness for Windsurf as well. And what we're seeing from our customers is that there's a lot of demand from trying out different models for different tasks. We're constantly working with them actually to make sure that we can sort of like advise them on what are the things that, you know, models have this sort of jagged line of intelligence from like some of them are really good at specific things, others are less good at

• 2:32:36Speaker 14

  those things like for example Opus 4.7 came out today and congratulations to Anthropic on a great model launch. That model is very good at deep investigations. So we're sort of trying to look at how can we use that in our sort of for example Devon review workflows where Devon can go in and look at a PR and try to figure out all the bugs and all the issues that might be associated with it.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much.

• 2:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you and give our best to the team.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Thank you guys. Have a good rest of your day. There's a ton of breaking news. The big one is Netflix.

• 2:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Reed Hastings.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Reed Hastings is stepping down.

• 2:33:16Jordi Hays?

  The board of Netflix and the stock is down tremendously and but this is good.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  He's not stepping off the board. He's stepping off the board in June. He announced that he's stepping off the board. But yes, I mean, it's a thing.

• 2:33:30Jordi Hays?

  No, but but but again, it's good because it's good for Reed specifically.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Because it shows that people have confidence.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  In his vision.

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Jordi Hays?

  And and and I'm sure that I would expect Netflix to make a quick recovery.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's up 12%, 13% in the last month, down 8.5% overnight after hours. But we'll see where the stock settles, you know, tomorrow after the market processes this.

• 2:34:02Jordi Hays?

  The alternative is a nightmare for Reed because if he if he announced this, announced this and the stock popped 20%.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  He was, you know, a handicap, handicapping the company.

• 2:34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, the flip side is that Ted Sarandos, it seems like he put on a master class over the last six months with the Paramount negotiations, not getting over his skis. The shareholders wound up really liking how that all penciled out. And so it seems like the company's in good hands. And all of the different strengths that Netflix has continue to show across advertising and subscriptions. And while they've kept their, the big, the big headline with Netflix is that they've kept their content budget essentially flat or slightly growing while they've grown subscriptions and revenue and top line very precipitously

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  and very consistently, even at a time where they've, they haven't needed to invest exponentially more money in content. Obviously, they spend a fortune on it, but it's not, it's not growing as fast as their revenue is growing. So their profits are growing, which is good news. Hastings' departure marks the end of an era for Netflix, which, under his leadership, transformed from a DVD by mail business to a juggernaut in subscription video streaming and disrupted Hollywood. He said, "My real contribution at Netflix wasn't a single decision," Hastings said in a statement. That was in a company letter to shareholders. It was a focus on on member joy, building a culture that others could inherit and improve and building a company that could be both beloved

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  by members and wildly successful for generations to come. Well, we wish him the best on his next chapter, whatever he winds up doing. What an absolute run. Well, Jordi, is there anything else we should talk about? TSMC, of course, has earnings. We can cover those later. The chipmaker TSMC is more bullish than ever on AI despite the Iran war. So some good news there. And lots more stories to talk about, but we will be back with you on Monday at 11 a.m.

• 2:36:02Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  And we'll see.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  To be with you here today.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

• 2:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Of your day.

• 2:36:10John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.

• 2:36:13Speaker 15

  Throwing flashbang.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Throwing flashbang.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Love you.