SpaceX/Cursor Deal, Images 2.0 Reactions, Fake Bear Attack | Anil Chakravarthy, Naveen Gavini, Avlok Kohli & Ankur Nagpal, Joel Edwards, Renen Hallak, Darian Shirazi

(00:46) - SpaceX & Cursor (18:10) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (23:03) - ChatGPT Images 2.0 Reactions (31:32) - Anil Chakravarthy, President of Adobe's Digital Experience Business, discusses the company's collaboration with Nvidia to integrate 3D digital twins into marketing and customer experiences, exemplified by HP's use of this technology to streamline product design and marketing. He emphasizes the importance of customer experience orchestration, leveraging AI to deliver personalized experiences by combining the right content and customer data across preferred channels. Additionally, Chakravarthy highlights Adobe's $25 billion buyback as a signal of confidence in the company's profitability and growth, underscoring the focus on AI adoption to provide real value to users and enterprise customers. (47:25) - Naveen Gavini, former Chief Product Officer at Pinterest, is the co-founder and CEO of BuildForever, a company dedicated to creating personal and human-centric products. In the conversation, he introduces their latest product, Extra, an AI-powered email application designed to transform personal email management by organizing inboxes around users' lives, reducing clutter, and enhancing clarity. Gavini emphasizes that Extra aims to make email more manageable and enjoyable, addressing the common issue of overwhelming personal inboxes. (56:58) - Avlok Kohli & Ankur Nagpal. Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList, discusses the launch of USVC, a fund designed to democratize access to venture capital by allowing individuals to invest with as little as $500. He emphasizes the fund's unique structure, which ensures that the price investors pay and redeem at closely reflects the value of the underlying companies, avoiding market-driven fluctuations. Kohli also highlights the fund's commitment to direct ownership, avoiding layered SPVs to maintain transparency and alignment with investors. (01:09:44) - Joel Edwards, a geologist and co-founder of Zanskar Geothermal, discusses the company's mission to discover and develop hidden geothermal resources in the western United States using AI and advanced sensing technologies. He explains that these "blind" systems lack surface indicators like geysers or hot springs but can be tapped to generate electricity by drilling into underground pockets of hot water. Edwards highlights the bipartisan support for geothermal energy due to its baseload capacity, zero emissions, and domestic sourcing, and notes that Zanskar recently raised $115 million to expand its AI-powered geothermal discovery platform and develop new power plants. (01:20:34) - Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data, discusses the company's decade-long journey since its 2016 inception, focusing on developing new infrastructure to support AI's evolving demands. He highlights the early recognition of AI's need for rapid data access and the company's collaborations with leading AI organizations, including hedge funds and life science institutes, to build scalable, efficient systems. Hallak also emphasizes VAST Data's role in simplifying AI adoption by providing a unified software infrastructure that abstracts hardware complexities, enabling enterprises to deploy AI agents securely and efficiently. (01:31:00) - Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures, began his career as one of Facebook's first software engineers, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg, before founding Radius, a B2B Customer Data Platform. In the conversation, he reflects on his early experiences at Facebook, the challenges of founding and scaling Radius, and his transition into venture capital, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with smart individuals and the evolving landscape of AI investments. (01:51:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:53:46) - Fake Bear Attack (01:58:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra down the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. A bunch of major stories today. SpaceX and Cursor partnering up. More news out of Images 2.0, a bunch of news out of OpenAI. And Mythos, a group of unauthorized users have been using Claude Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Bloomberg. We'll go through. There's a whole bunch of timeline. We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe, Build Forever, Angel List, Zankar, Vast Data, Gradient. We're going through all the news of the day.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Well, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor, who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this a gong already?

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  This is gong worthy, because it's an option to buy the company, but a $10 billion

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  breakup fee. Incredibly, incredibly, I think it's a win-win. It's a win-win. I think it makes sense.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  It's a win no matter what. Well, let's go through the facts first. So SpaceX partners.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Just immediate takes. We assume you already know all the industry.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Do you know all the information? Do we need to give you any information? We'll see. But let's run through it. So SpaceX partners with Cursor to quote, "create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." The deal gets Cursor, who's a Gentic coding model, Composer 2, basically operates at frontier level performance, access to compute from SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer. And that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer. There were some other terms that Elon was throwing out. Fantastic terminology from the XAI team over there. What was the other one?

• 1:56John Coogan?

  It was like AI.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Compute Gigafactory.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Compute Gigafactory. They're all hilarious and very good. I like all of these.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Computer?

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Computer.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Were they saying computer?

• 2:07John Coogan?

  I don't know. The XAI timeline, I was like, I was thinking about it and I was like, when did this actually start? Like, I, I, cause it just kind of came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on like, the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where it's like, now, the thing that started as like, Elon sort of being like, I want to buy Twitter, is now like, a NeoLab with a massive supercomputer data center, and a coding agent, and code review for the age of AI, because don't forget, they own Graphite now, or potentially will. And, and, and a social media app.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  The space code review company?

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Exactly. So.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm really, I'm, I'm, I'm genuinely so.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Excited for Mer.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  For the Graphite team. I'm thrilled for the Cursor team. I'm thrilled.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  I'm thrilled for Scott Woo.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, Scott, Scott Woo's licking his chops. He's like, what are you gonna, what are you gonna leave out in the wreckage?

• 3:08John Coogan?

  He really is gonna have fun with it.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  I also think we need to, we need to take one moment.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  And, um, and, uh, and, and, uh, just send some thoughts and prayers to SBF.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, I, I don't know how this works.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  In, in whatever prison he's in, but I imagine, you know, what, hopefully every few days.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  He can go and like, talk to the outside world.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  And you can imagine him going, you know, making the call.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  And he says, you know, for the last few weeks, it's like, you know, sir.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  What would the mark be?

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  How, how, how, how's Anthropic doing? How's my, how's my baby doing? And it's like, uh, sir. It's traded up north of 800 in secondary markets, and it's, it is quite possibly going to north of a trillion. And then he's like, thank you. Hangs up. Comes back the next day. Uh, I, I haven't checked in with Cursor a little bit. How are they doing?

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Sir, you may not want to hear this, but.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  There's a 50 billion dollar acquisition on the table.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  They've agreed to sell for.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  60 billion.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  60.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  And if they don't sell, they're gonna get 10 billion of non-dilutive capital.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Absolutely wild.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  What a, what a, what a wild, wild turn of events. Uh, anyway, let, let's go through the timeline, uh, because it's, it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon in, in over the past just four years when this all started. April 14th, 2022. It's April 22nd now. So we're talking four years to go from just proposing buying Twitter. He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, hey, maybe I don't want it.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that $44 billion because there, this was when the interest rate hike happened and, uh, the end of Zerp and basically all software companies, uh, sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and, uh, basically anything that was, uh, even Meta sold off like 40, 50% post, uh, although that was like an anomaly and they built back up, but, uh, the question about like, okay, well, Reality Labs is a, what, a 10 billion, tens of billions dollar bet on, on revenues that might come in like 10 years.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Like it was so far away and the revenue ramp on VR and metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues, even if they were still bullish on the idea of Meta winning the VR race, winning the metaverse at some point. It just wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So you got to discount that back at 6% instead of 3% or whatever your risk free rate is, uh, in your DCF. And so everything sold off and you, and Elon had locked in that pre end of Zerp price. And there was a big question about could he get out of it? Were they going to twist his arm? They, they, there was a little bit of arm twisting. The arm was a little bit twisted, uh, but Morgan Stanley came on board and a bunch of other.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  It was almost broken.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  But, but the people who get, who were, whose arms are twisted, Morgan Stanley and all the VC backers who came in, they wound up with SpaceX stock. And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with XAI stock and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy, it was, it was never bet against Elon. Like that was the thing was like, surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for $44 billion. It's a crazy idea based on the market, where things are, but everything's sort of penciled out. So. He closed the Twitter acquisition on October 27, 2022, and he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sync day, of course. He comes in with a sync, something about the, what was the joke about the kitchen sync?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Let that sink in.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Oh, let that sink in. Okay. It wasn't, it wasn't like I'm doing the whole, the whole, isn't the whole kitchen sync another phrase as well?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, like throw the whole kitchen sync at it.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Well, he did that too, because he threw everything together. Yes. Good job. Yay. So XAI came later. He publicly announced XAI on July 12, 2023, and that's only nine months after ChatGPT, maybe eight months after ChatGPT. Google quick followed with Gemini, and it was like, it was a very fast following, I think, to get to XAI off the ground.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  And that was like, just for context, that was right around the time you first publicly talked about the potential for a tech livestream, right?

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, I did. I think that was, I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah, I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition, and I was sort of trying to justify it as a, you know, it was, it was more about his desire for free speech than anything else. Like, you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock on effects for Elon's strategy. Anyway, so he was, you know, coming out on July 12, 2023, saying, I'm back in the AI horse race. I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind still. Remember, that's why he founded OpenAI. He wanted to push back against DeepMind. I'm going, going to go up against Anthropic,

• 8:18John Coogan?

  going to go up against OpenAI. And so the first major product milestone came just a couple of months later, November 3. That's when they introduced Grok, November 3, 2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on December 7, 2023, when Grok started rolling out inside of X for premium plus subscribers, which was a new tier. It was, it's actually crazy.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Everyone got verified, remember?

• 8:44John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, that year on Twitter was insane, like just product feature, product feature, and they were shipping stuff that had been. Been clearly developed beforehand, like I think the community notes idea had been workshopped and even like engineered in the pre Elon era. But he just got there and was like, ship that tomorrow. And like, there were a lot of things like that that happened. And there were other things that got pulled back and review and like, there were other pieces of the puzzle that were like not doing so well. And he was just a cut, cut, cut. And so he sort of like put it back in startup mode and it felt a lot more agile and it still does.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  And so that was the moment Grok finally became a part of the X product experience. In early 2024, XAI started shipping updates quickly. March 17th, 2024, it open source Grok 1. March 26th, 2024, Grok access expanded to X premium subscribers. Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on April 12th, 2024, they announced 1.5V, which added multimodal capabilities. Then Grok 2, Grok 2 Mini. By the end of 2024, Grok was available to all X users. And so 2025, XAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On February 19th, 2025, XAI announced Grok 3 Beta.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Then March 28th, 2025, so over a year ago, for some reason, this feels more, more recent than that. XAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. So March 28th, 2025, effectively merging the AI company with a social platform. After that, X kept releasing faster model updates. They did Grok 4 Fast, Grok 4.1. Then came the SpaceX deal. That was February 2nd, 2026. So the clean sequences that Musk first proposed, the Twitter acquisition, then founded XAI, then brought Grok into X, then merged XAI with X, and then SpaceX bought XAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team and.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this just makes, this just makes, uh, it makes so much sense, right? Cursor needs compute, they need the resources, they need the capital to train a frontier coding model.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  They've also never done a pre-training, I believe, whereas XAI team has, right?

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and the, the big, big thing is that the Grok brand has, you know, been through so much.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  There was, uh. Some, an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplaces

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  than it had been adopted.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  So more people had said like, you cannot use this product in the workplace than we're actually using it in the workplace. Cursor's a great brand, right? It's a, it's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of, outside of coding, right?

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Say in the announcement.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  And you.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Best, uh, to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  We got everyone on earth building, building a box that you can tell to do things and it does things.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist?

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I don't. I think, I think, I think the competition, I think the competition is great.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  You want the government to.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  It's bringing out the best in, it's bringing out the best.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  But I think Cursor's like.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Knockout, drag out, fight.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  Cursor's always had a great brand. Uh, I saw someone else.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  We, SBF replied to SpaceX's tweet, saying, that's me. Pull up, pull up the first post here and then scroll down. The SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely. Uh, with that, that, uh, it should be like the first one in the, in the timeline. Um, SpaceX and Cursor, SpaceX AI is what they're calling it now. Uh, is it not up there? Uh, and Cursor, I can find it and send it in. Um, let me, uh, let me find this post and send it into the production chat.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tuxedo Sam says, do you think they'll, they'll make Elon take his shoes off at the Cursor office?

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, Richard Wu has some context. Yeah, there you go. Look, SBF is, is somehow on Twitter. How can you be on Twitter from jail?

• 12:38Avlok Kohli?

  All these people in jail on, on X, I don't understand.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  No, it says it in his bio.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  It says it in his bio.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  It's management.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  He says, uh, "We can use BOP-approved phone calls, emails to tell others what to post on our socials."

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  I think it would be a free speech violation to say like, if you are in jail, you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity, but it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre-internet.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  It seems like having like a ghostwriter on your account is a really good way to like start, you know, kind of like influencing public perception, right? I think this is, Elizabeth Holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like, she, you know, her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining and over time that just wears on people and eventually people are like. You know, maybe, maybe, maybe she isn't so bad after all, right?

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Okay, well, Richard Wu broke down the structure of the deal. He says, the structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what's happening is, one, XAI is having trouble training a state of the art coding model, hence co-founder departures. They might have a bunch of idle GPUs. Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a $5 billion training run to compete with Codex and Claude. XAI 3, XAI says to Cursor, use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state of the art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you. Four, Cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for 60 billion or get 10 billion that pays for all the GPUs you rented. Win, win.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  And I was reflecting on Michael Truell's, I mean, fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young, but his aesthetic is, is very much in like the Stripe world, I imagine, because I feel like the one really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with, was it Patrick Collison? Is that the one I'm thinking of? And it's like them at the coffee shop and it's so welcoming and warming. It's like, that is, that is welcome in every corporate entity in America, right? Like, and to your point about like, you know, oh, like if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics, blah, blah, blah? Do we really want Grok running around with Mecca and Aon and all this crazy stuff? But if it's just like Michael Truell from Cursor, he's so reassuring.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Like I, if I'm like Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, yeah, of course, like we love Cursor. That's great.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Very, very, aesthetics do matter, vibes do matter. And I think makes a lot of sense.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Matt Slotnick says he loves math.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  Okay, what is the math here?

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  What he's talking about Julian, he's, so Julian says, at a 30x revenue multiple, at first glance, it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for Cursor. However, the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX, given it is expected to go public at more than 100x revenue. A 70 turn multiple expansion on 2 billion of revenue adds up.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  This is, this is a notorious thing in corporate M and A and, and occasionally it's gone poorly. But there is like an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple and maintain your current multiple, that is accretive to the stock. And so there's a whole philosophy around that. But the smart investors should price each earnings stream differently. And having like a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than a super competitive oligopolistic coding market, if that's what this winds up being. It's a tricky, tricky situation, but.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  Will Brown. Wow. Mercer just hit a $10 billion run rate.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  They did. It's guaranteed, right? There's no way that they won't make 10 billion this year. That's not even a run rate. That's just like, it's locked in. It's more than contracted. I don't know.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and, and it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit in that it's, you know, by, by itself, where they can, you know, they, they'll be in a position to actually, you know, reinvest that. That's like a, a nice little Neo Lab kind of series A, basically.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  But Ken says, no, you got to multiply that 10 billion by 12 because in that month, where they get the $10 billion check from SpaceX, it will be 120 billion run rate. They will be the largest AI company in the world that month. And then they just have to figure out, they don't collect until end of year if they're still independent. Otherwise it's more like 25 billion. Okay. Well, so Flea and Bess has some other thoughts. Where are you on?

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  What is this post from Patrick?

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Wait, which one? Which one?

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  This is, he, Patrick is quoting Scott Wu.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it because despite, this does not look.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  See, without images too, without images too, we just, this, this kind of asset, I actually think this might have been the old fashioned.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  No, this is an open air. This is an open air.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  It's good at cutting our faces.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Watermark.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yes, he says, here we go again, last the Mohicans. Yeah, Scott Wu is the last one standing in this particular category. And yeah, he's licking his chops, thinking about who might want to hop over to cognition cursor cognition windsurf Devon cursor zombie corp as the as the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of Scott Wu's territory. What else should we go through with the cursor cursor cursor's

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  I think that's it. I think that's it. I'm very happy for everyone involved.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, some news from Space News Inc.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  This is very interesting.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  China backs orbital data center startup with 8.4 billion in credit lines.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  They're pilled. They're pilled.

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  Elon is interested.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  8.4 billion in credit lines. That is a lot of money. A Beijing based space startup has secured early stage funding, early stage funding to the tune of 8.4 billion. What are we doing here? And extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space based computing infrastructure, Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  This is a new meta.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is, what is cursor's real name? Any Sphere? That's a pretty good name. I like, I like any sphere and I like cursor, but doesn't hold a candle. So Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited, also known as Orbital Chengguang, announced the completion of a pre AI funding, pre A1 or is that pre pre A1 funding round, April 20th. The round saw participation from venture and industrial investors, including Hyson Capital, CITIC Construction, Investment Capital, Cathay Capital. They got everybody. It's a murderer's row over there. At the same time, Orbital State said that it has obtained strategic

• 19:31John Coogan?

  credit lines totaling 8.4 billion from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China. Are they going to build rockets with this? I mean, I don't, I don't understand why this would be so capital intensive if they're not going to fab the chips and they're not going to launch the rockets.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're gonna put a lot of GPUs in space.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  I guess they're just gonna buy a lot of Huawei chips or something? Are they gonna go to Huawei and get some special stuff?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is pretty interesting because I feel like, you know, generally, the main bull case for space data centers is that the like regulatory environment in the US is gonna be so hard to build data centers.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Like, you know.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Supercomputers, but yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Normal land. Oh, yeah. Yeah, supercomputers. So you gotta send supercomputers to space.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Because there's less.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  No, we can do data centers in space. We just, we, if it's on the ground, it's a supercomputer.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Because we don't want any more data centers on Earth. It's Earth Day, by the way. Congratulations, Earth. You've done fantastically.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the whole thing, like in China, it's like they, you know, you can just like build things there, right? There's like very little regulatory overhead.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  So it's like, what, like, I feel like the space data centers.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  It's a lot more sense for the US.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  If you're worried about, i- if the, if the bull case is regulatory, which it seems to be, that's like generally consensus.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was laughing about how, you know, how there's all this fear about like data centers using water in America. But over in China, they have the Three Gorges Dam, which generates electricity from water. And it technically uses a lot of water. The water's not destroyed or anything. It just passes through the dam, generates electricity.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  They're using.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  They're using.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Ocean of water.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Exactly. The Hoover Dam, that's a nightmare. If you just, like, like, there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unpotable. So you can't drink it anymore. But there's another one where you think like water has individual rights and should not be used at all. Like, it should not be used, it should not flow through a water wheel, it should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all. It should be left to its own devices, still, and just chill. Maybe. Anyway. Orbital has incubated, was incubated by the Beijing Astro Future Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Science Park Administration. The institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations, the rationale for the constellation in November briefing.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  So, large-scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide, but further growth faces major obstacles, including heavy land use, weird, soaring energy consumption, weird, limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China, but maybe they are skating where the puck is going. And maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  So they're planning a dawn dusk orbit about 700, 800 kilometers above the earth, aiming to achieve a large scale space data center to support space based computing by 2035. Wow, thinking in decades over there. So they're, they're, they're, they're going slow. Getting there. An initial phase spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait, why are they talking about last year? Uh, we'll focus on core technology changes and a first computing.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  They're manipulating time, John.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 26, but it does not appear to have launched. They have, uh, they, they have like decent launch capacity with the long march rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but uh, you got more money. You can just YOLO more rockets up there, I guess. Uh, problem solved, although uh, I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the Three Gorges Dam. Anyway, uh, moving on, more images out of ChatGPT images two, image gen two.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Pull these up.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Images V two. These are crazy. Has anyone done that rune test of the, of the, the guy driving the car into the, you know, the whole thing where he was like, it, it's AGI if it can understand this meme. I wonder, I wonder how, I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been uh, saturated on the internet. And so it, it no longer is a challenge.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna have it make an image.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  This is a crazy image.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  I am a, I am a tiny man.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  What is this? My space?

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  My son was born.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  This is truly never.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  They handed me to him.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Never forget where you came from. Blink 182. It really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing, um, the uh, Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens. Cows are flying, horses are flying, trampolines are flying.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  The next one by Ethan Mollick has like every image benchmark in one.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Yes. You were, you were asking about this. You, you said, and explain the history of this.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So originally like when, when like Dolly first came out, the, the like image that everyone was like, oh, this is crazy. It was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  So then it's like, okay, that's like very easy. And it became.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Well, it's very hard to Photoshop that. It's very hard to go get an actual picture because if someone's just like make a picture of a dog and it's photo real, everyone's like, oh, who cares? We have a picture of a dog. We don't have any pictures of astronauts riding horses on the moon.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  There's people riding horses, right?

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  And so like.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  It should be able to process.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  There's a sense where it's like, maybe it's not like, doesn't need to fully understand like everything that's going on because there's a lot of like references it can pull from.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  So then it became, can a horse ride an astronaut?

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Right? It's like the reverse.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  And early image models would always just do the flip. They would just put the astronaut on the horse.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yep. Cause that's more logical generally.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  So there's a numbers, a number of these things where like, if you ask a person to draw it out, it's like, okay, you just think logically like this is how it would look. But there's just like no reference images online. So the another, another one was like a full wine glass.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  So you think of a full wine glass is like, it's still only like technically, you know, halfway, three fourths.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  I never understood why that one didn't work. I, I saw the whole video.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Very few images online of a full wine glass being like.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Oh, full to the brim because people typically fill them halfway. And so in the training day, okay, got it. Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then there was the, you know.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  What is this image? This is not the one.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  This is not the one.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  This is not the one for the timeline. That one's way more aggressive than, than the, this is the one. This one looks aesthetic and it still looks weird.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is, is it would a horse's belly really look like that?

• 25:37John Coogan?

  It is sort of like a humanoid horse.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  It kinda looks like a human that.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  But it does have the wine glass completely filled and, and then explain the clock.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Was Grok, I think.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Okay. Explain the, explain the clock. What's going on with the clock?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. That one's just another like understanding thing where like, can it, if you give it a time, can it do the, the clock?

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Like the correct time. There's also one where you do a bunch of clocks on different time zones.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  And.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  It couldn't do the clock. It couldn't do the clock. It has two hour hands.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  You know what that means? We're moving the goalpost.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 26:11Avlok Kohli?

  Moving the goalpost. The goalpost.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Do it. It's time. It's time.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  We got a, we got a one shot. It's 99%. But it's not, it's not complete yet. It's not complete yet. You guys have more work to do.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  No, no. Sam was talking about this with Ashley Vance. He was saying that like, you know, he thought, he thought job was finished with like chat GPT images because it was really good. And then they worked a lot harder and they realized that there was more to do. And this is like the car pathy thing about like, yeah, you get the self-driving cars to 99% and then it takes another year to get it, add another nine. And then it takes another year to add another nine and then another nine. And it just takes forever to improve these things because we demand perfection. We do not accept two hands on a clock. Keep grinding, folks. Keep grinding. Anyway, there are a lot of other fun posts. Semi analysis, I thought this was just a real image of Dorkesh taking a selfie and then it was recontextualized via meme.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  It is in fact an AI image. And it

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  This doesn't even look like the new model, though.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Hi, I'm Dorkesh. I grew up all over the US and now SF based and always down to nerd out about AI, science and history. A little about me. I host the Darkesh Podcast, study at UT Austin, just published a book on the history of AI, AI scaling. Let's grab coffee or do a fun activity this summer. Because of course, this is a meme template that is very popular and has gone viral with a lot of new people that have been hired and moved to San Francisco.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  So the other thing I've noticed with images too.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Is that I think it has fully, the new model has, actually has taste.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  And it has fully democratized like high quality lifestyle and product imagery.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  And I'm shedding a tear just a little bit.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Because you used to be able to tell like the kind of

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  If somebody is working on a CPG company, you could kind of clock their ability.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, as a founder, based on the quality of their images, right? Cause maybe they're not super creative themselves. Maybe they haven't raised a bunch of money, but if they're scrappy, they can meet the right photographer. They can put stuff together.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  And now it's like everyone just has a great product photography.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  And I saw it this morning with, uh, there's that Andreessen back company that does, uh, like electric scooters.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  They were just like ripping out a bunch of images that look like they spent tens of thousands of dollars doing them, but they're clearly like images too. Uh, which is cool. It's just like funny that we've entered a world where.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen, I've seen some people, I, I, I think that the, the end result will be like, you will see more opinionated and creative and, uh, and more people like, like there will be a collapsing around like everyone will copy Apple or linear. But then on the flip side, you will see people that are, um, that are doing things that are really unexpected. And those things will be copied, but if the, if the brand can run through and actually establish itself is like, oh, it has this unique aesthetic. Uh, it won't matter that somebody can, can recreate it because plenty of people did that with the red antler stuff. It was like, that like, there were brands that really owned that and carved that out as like their aesthetic. And then there were a bunch of copycats and no one really liked this.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Um, I was reflecting on the fact that like, for a long time, mid journey felt like it had a very unique aesthetic, like, uh, uh, like, uh, art station and like painterly and sci-fi really well. And then chat GPT images, V1 and some of the other image models just felt like stock photography. And now I feel like I'm starting to see more stuff out of images with chat GPT that feels more opinionated and has a stronger aesthetic. And it can do more of like the sci-fi stuff, although sometimes it leans in a little bit too much to the photo realism. I think you gotta get kind of crazy with the prompts to actually get something that's abstract. Because I was taking some mid journey prompts and I was putting them into chat GPT images. And I was noticing that like, it was just putting out stuff that was like, it was like, like with a prompt was like,

• 30:16John Coogan?

  make a video game, uh, of like a car racing. And it just looked exactly like a video game because it just looks like a screenshot instead of like the idea of a video game.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Last one we're going to pull up and then we have our first guest.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Post from Ben Hilek.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Says nightmare blunt rotation.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, it can do, uh,

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know it could do these.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  360 images, they can do 360 images, which is really cool.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  You got Sam, Edson.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  So it generates a full equi-rectangular image, which is something you could view in VR. And then, and then you can load that into a panoramic, you know, stereoscopic image generator. I wonder, I wonder when 3D images will come. And also, I mean, the, the, the big question is like, people are going to want to animate these. What's the downstream tool chain for actually turning this into video? Are we going back into video at some point? We will see. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with it and it should, should help with like front end and, and a lot of other stuff. It seems like it's done very well on, on, on, on design and layouts and all this stuff.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Well, we have a perfect person to talk about AI imagery, AI, generative AI, creative tooling and more because we are joined by Anil from Adobe, where he is the president. So let's bring in Anil. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me on. It's great to be back on TVN and congrats on your acquisition.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. It's great to see you. Great to see you again. I would love to just get a general update on what has changed with Adobe. What has, what have you been working on since the last time we spoke?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Well, look, I'm coming to you from Adobe Summit. We are here in Las Vegas, you know, big show, 14,000 people. You were just talking about Jensen. Jensen was here on Monday and really talking about how Nvidia and Adobe are working together. And you were just talking about 3D. I caught the tail end of your comments there. And that's actually one of the big things we announced is how do you have digital twins? So that you can take the digital twin and carry it all the way from product design into marketing and customer experience. So, you know, with HP, for example, they have 15,000 new SKUs every, every year with all the products they have. And they're working with us and with Nvidia and to bring it together into, into marketing.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  So we are super excited about, you know, what we call customer experience orchestration, which is how do you use AI? How do you use all the software you have to deliver personalized experiences? How do you bring the right content, the right data about the customer? And then put that into the channel that they care about and, and really get the most out of the customer lifecycle, build loyalty. That's what we're, that's the big topic of the conference here.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through that HP example because if they have a SKU, I imagine that there's a CAD file at some point and then they might want to instantiate that in text or imagery or video or 3D rendering and they might want to go over to one of your 3D products or bridge to another. How important is Adobe at the center of like asset management and actually creating some sort of abstraction on top of what the actual core item is versus just translating from one sort of output to the next in the way that someone might take a PNG from Photoshop and drop it into Premiere Pro?

• 33:43Speaker 04

  No, that's exactly it. So they start with the 3D image that they have or the 3D, as you said, a CAD file. From that, what we do is we create the digital twin. And then we apply the brand intelligence on their behalf. So in HP's case, for example, if it's a new PC that they are releasing, they have all kinds of things on what they want when they, say it's a laptop and the laptop is open. What's the kind of image they want on the laptop? What's the kind of lighting they want on the laptop? And then they release it all over the world. So there's pictures of people, they always want to show a business professional in the laptop, that's the, along with the laptop. They want them showing them using the laptop to do something.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  So there are all kinds of brand guidelines, of course, but then there's a lot of tribal knowledge on what makes an ad successful. And it's not only for them, then they have to get all of that traveling through the entire marketing campaign because one of the big problems has been, you know, in the current world, they use the 3D CAD files for everything in manufacturing and so on, but the marketing, the content starts with a photo shoot. They're not actually using the 3D CAD file that they have, the source of truth. And that's what we're enabling them to do. Use the source of truth so that the images are completely high fidelity, they are brand preserving, but then you can generate everything around that, you can generate the background.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  You can generate the foreground, you can generate the users. And then, of course, you can do what we call transcreation, which is the translation into different languages. All of that can be generated.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Based on their brand guidelines and what works for their brand.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  So is your relationship with Nvidia that you want to marshal enough compute that you can be delivering inference to a customer? Because I remember using Content Aware Fill back in the day. It ran locally on my device. As the models get more compute intensive, they eventually won't run on device. They'll run in the cloud. I know you have API partnerships, but is there a vision to deliver inference to the customer all in one go?

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Exactly. It depends on the campaign. Let's say HP is running a back to school campaign. Then they want a set of imagery, they want a set of things that they can transfer over to their channel partners.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Along with accurate product data. Or if they're running, for example, a holiday campaign, a different set of imagery and so on and so forth. So depending on the campaign, depending on the geography, depending on the customer segment. Making sure that they have the right campaign, that is obviously the content. But it's also the product data, making sure that that's super accurate because it's got to match what exactly the customer is buying. And then anything that's relevant for the particular channel partner. It could be through their own direct channels, but it could equally be through CDW or through other channels. And they want to make sure that the entire thing carries over. So that's what we're doing for them is not getting the workflow right. Getting the Adobe Brand Intelligence, which is one of the big things that we announced this week at Summit.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Getting all of that together so that they can have a single seamless marketing workflow and get the benefit of both AI and the 3D technology together.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Jodi?

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  You guys announced a big buyback this week and that's been exciting. But what do you think you need to do from a results standpoint to show that you guys are an AI beneficiary versus a victim, right? Because the narrative is obviously against you. The market has spoken. But at the same time, AI is a powerful creative tool. You guys have massive distribution into, you know, millions of individuals and businesses. And so I think people are waiting to actually see, see the story in the numbers. And there's like only so much you can say to kind of like give people confidence. But how are you thinking about it?

• 37:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. As you said, we announced a $25 billion buyback. That is a signal of our confidence of, you know, this is going to continue to be a very profitable business for years to come, and we wanted to make sure that everybody in the market knew that. And, you know, look, I think to your point, first step for us is AI adoption and making sure that AI is delivering real value, whether it's to individuals and real value to users or to enterprise customers like we were just talking about. And for us, what that means is, how do you really embed it into the tooling so seamlessly? Whether you are a marketer, whether you are a creative, or whether you're a business professional using Acrobat, that AI works for you flawlessly, and it does what you want.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  I love the example from the last show that you had, which is sometimes you do want the horse riding the astronaut. That was an interesting concept. But, you know, that may be, but we have a lot of customers like Home Depot that just want Sodestown nails. And that's what makes their campaigns authentic. Sure. So depending on what the customer wants, depending what the user wants, making sure that AI is helping them get value, not AI is getting in the way. That's our focus right now, is just making sure that customers, whether they are enterprises, individuals, small businesses, students, understand that AI is critical to the next generation of creative platforms and marketing platforms and tools. But it's in the context of what they're using, it brings the UI,

• 39:10Speaker 04

  the agents in the reasoning, the models and the data all together to work for them. So that's, I think we've made a lot of strides on that front here at Summit over the last couple of years. I think as the results show, one thing for us is, I think, from where we are in the market, for the market even to see us continuing to the performance that we've had. We're a double-digit grower, you know, we have very healthy margins. Even continuing to see that for the next couple of years, I think will change a lot of minds. And then I think we also see the opportunity through customer experience orchestration to reach a real inflection point. So that's what we're looking to do. Jordy, you can...

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, how are you, what's your M and A outlook? It seems like there's a ton of really talented teams building creative tools that could fit into Adobe.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, you know, you're spending a lot on the buyback, but hopefully there's still some dry powder for some talented teams.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  We do, we have plenty of dry powder, we haven't overextended ourselves. In fact, we are really pleased, we just announced that we have received all the regulatory approvals for SEMrush.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay, nice.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  And we are in the waiting period to close it, so in the next few weeks, we'll be closing SEMrush. We're super excited about that, because SEMrush, along with our portfolio, solves a real problem for marketers. You know, marketers, I mean, we heard a lot from customers at Summit. Every brand is like, how do I show up in the right way? Through OpenAI, through ChatGPT, obviously, but through Claude and Gemini and Perplexity and Grach. I don't even know how consumers, they know consumers are going there in droves.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  What they don't know is, what are they even prompting for that I should be, I should know about? So if I'm a brand in the cosmetics world.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  How are they, what are they actually prompting?

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  And I don't even know what they're prompting for that I should be aware of. Then, how should I make sure, what do I need to do to make sure that I am included in the response? And then what do I need to do to make sure that I'm included in the response in an accurate manner? And then how do I get that traffic coming to me?

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Or how do I close the sale right there, if it's something that I can close right there? This is a new world for marketers. They have, marketers have no idea how this whole thing works. I mean, they don't know, for example, what happens when you put in a prompt into ChatGPT? What is the queries that get kicked off? Where does it get kicked off to? How is that information assembled? How does it impact their brand? They don't know the first thing about it is what they're telling us. And they're saying, Adobe, help us.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm interested to see how this category plays out, because there's obviously a bunch of companies doing, they call it answer engine optimization, AEO, or GEO, whatever they're calling it. But the big question was always, this feels like a very natural thing for someone like a SEMrush to enter in a big way. They already have the distribution, so it'll be an interesting battle between SEMrush and some of the upstarts like Profound and some other players.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Well, I think the battle will be over pretty soon, according to me.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I think James, I think James at Profound, we should have you guys both on and go.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  That's great. I want to talk about video. So, I mean, we saw OpenAI pulled back from Sora. There are some really amazing models that are happening. Some of them are in China. There's a whole bunch of IP stuff. But what I'm interested in is that Photoshop continues to be an important tool, even in a Gen AI world. Because there's so many fine details, having Gen AI as just one possible tool is valuable. The models are getting better. We're three years into this boom, but video is moving slower. It's more inference demand. And I'm wondering about how you're taking lessons learned and strategies that you applied to the evolution of Photoshop, how that integrates with different model providers, different tools, different in-house solutions,

• 43:18John Coogan?

  and how you're planning to bring that to After Effects and Premiere? Because this feels like a place where you would need even more opinionated editing. Like, we're nowhere near text box editing, like, you know, two, like, 40 hours of video into a movie. Like, that's just not, like, we're so far from that.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Exactly. So, look, this is where we believe Adobe Brand Intelligence will be a huge differentiator, because that's what then gives us the right information to pass on to the creatives to say, "This is how, this is the kind of how you use the Adobe Creative Agent, and this is how, where you want to let the AI be take over, and this is where you want to be opinionated." I mean, what we have done is provided that flexibility. We know, we announced over 30 integrations now. You know, whether it's Runway or Phlox, and obviously Google with both Vio and Nano Banana, etc. So, we've been very open, and we're very open to integrating any other models that come up as well. The key, though, is the creative themselves, if you're working for a brand,

• 44:22Speaker 04

  I mean, if you're working for, I mentioned Home Depot earlier, or if you're working for Coca-Cola and so on, they don't have enough information by themselves. Unless they really get a really super detailed creative brief on what exactly to where they need to take control, where they can let the AI run.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  We believe we can automate that and provide the right information at the right time to the creative. They can bring the brand idea, they can bring the hero asset, they can bring the creative idea. And then you can apply the intelligence and exactly to your point, you can be a lot more opinionated in what you produce.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It is very fascinating that we got like fully generated video before we got a tool that puppeteers Premiere Pro in a way that can sync up music and edit to beat and make cuts just on normal, non-AI generated footage. But that's just the nature of computer use and whatnot. So I'm sure it's an exciting time, lots to build, lots to work on. Congratulations on all the progress.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to get that update.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me on.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Goodbye. I'm next.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  One, one like quick, quick thought. I think like right, right now, like already.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  The great image models, the Nano Bananas, the, the images too. It is like you're just talking to somebody who is a digital guy or girl who is very good at Photoshop.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:53Jordi Hays?

  Like that is the experience today.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  And it was not that way 12 months ago. It is that way now.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  I no longer need Photoshop.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't need to go to Fiverr to say like, hey, I need somebody that's good at Photoshop.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't need to text like Ben and be like, hey, can you help me Photoshop this? And you can just actually just prompt your way. You do not need any UI anymore.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  For, for the average, for the average.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  For, for, yeah, I mean, we're, we're.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  And I'm just saying, that's gonna get, that's gonna get there with video where you just have a timeline.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  And you can click on a scene.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  But speed is really, really important here. Like, like if you, if there's one word that's wrong on image and you need to regenerate it, you're gonna wait 45 seconds. And it will be faster to have done that in just a, you know, traditional workflow. Now it's getting faster.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  It's so fast now.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  It's, it's very fast.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  It's so fast.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  But if you're writing a two hour podcast and you say, oh, I want you to cut to Jordy in minute 45 and it has to go regenerate the entire thing like that is slow. You're going to need to puppeteer the tools. You're going to need to, you're going to need tool use in here. I, I, I think, I don't know.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  Just because I was just, I was just shocked because I was, I was playing around with like generating product photography and you're able to say like, put the text here, you know, turn it around, put it at a different angle. More shadow, less shadow, all this stuff. And it's wild what you can do without any UI. But without further ado.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  We have Naveen from Build Forever is the former Pinterest CPO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 47:32Speaker 05

  Hey guys. Thanks for having me.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  I like the bomber Jordy. Nice piece.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Thank you. It's a one of one.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  New York Stock Exchange.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  New York Stock Exchange.

• 47:43Speaker 05

  NYSE.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  What, what, what day was the New York Stock Exchange founded?

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  You tell me.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  1792, 11 Wall Street. Wow. That is a very old.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Great address. Great, great year to get into business.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Great year to get into business. Best day to get into business.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  But it's great to have you on the show.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

• 48:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally. So my name is Naveen Devini. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Build Forever. And honestly, we're just a group of engineers and designers and people that love building products that people love to use. And we've worked, as you said, I was early at Pinterest and we've worked on a number of consumer products that people use around the world today. But our focus has been on a product that we launched yesterday called Extra. And it's really a re-imagination of email as your life's inbox. And so for many of us, um, we spend all day kind of working, sending email. And when we have time to get to our personal email, it often feels overrun, overwhelming and just like, I don't know. I personally gave up on my personal email. I had over 250,000 unread emails.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  And so we were just kind of looking for a solution of just making email more manageable, more fun and delightful. And so with Extra, uh, it keeps track of what's important for you. So you never have to miss something. It helps you clean up your email, organize it around your life and, um, it does things proactively for you in the background. It helps you get stuff done. And so this endless to do list feels. Not so overwhelming and it just feels delightful and joyful to open up your email every day.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Is it a for you page for email?

• 49:14Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, essentially. Yeah, that's how you could think of it. That's a good, that's a good analogy. Yeah. So everything that's important in your life.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  We turn every email that you have into a short, vertical looping video.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  It's not quite that, but Joe wasn't always talking about this.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  I know what you're saying. It's basically like, yeah, just actually picking and choose, you know, I, it's always been so silly that inboxes it were primarily based around who messaged you last, not based around what was actually important or actionable or anything like that.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like we need to move, like the idea, the whole idea of inbox zero

• 49:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  is just such a pre-AI idea where you are just getting flooded with more and more and more and more and more spam. And I think products that can help here are great. Also, uh, it feels like you can kind of just, yeah, I'm curious. So you're built on top of Gmail. I don't know if you're supporting other email providers. Google is like aware that AI can be powerful in email. They're working on a lot of features, but I feel like this is one of those things that is going to require like really, really rapid iteration. And so I feel like you probably have this beautiful window of like maybe three to four years where they're kind of just

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  slow to figure out some of this stuff and, and you can probably build a cool business in the meantime, but where do you want to, where, where does this go? How, how does this, how do, you know, you know, how are you thinking about this as a venture scale opportunity?

• 50:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really, well, I mean, like maybe starting where you kind of left off, I think one of the challenges in email is historically for the past 20 years, like all of the innovation in email, if you think about it, has gone into the enterprise and it's gone into really sending emails faster, right? So that's like kind of all the email clients that you've seen have been like, let's help you get 10 bucks a year and send faster. And when in reality, like our different take on emails, that when you think about your personal email, not your work email, um, the amount of Emails you send is actually very little relative to the amount you receive. And so the entire experience actually needs to be rethought of from information consumption, not as a communication tool. And I think that's the big pivot with email to think about on the personal side is that

• 51:32Speaker 05

  it's more around information consumption, delivering to you the right information at the right time. And then from there, there's an entire business to be built on how do you actually get things done for people in their lives? How do you help them along that next point in time in the journey without them having to do work? And so you're seeing a whole ecosystem of amazing companies being built on the agentic side around fulfilling different actions. But all of them need kind of a distribution entry point of like, how do we start that journey? And what is the personal data that we actually help achieve some of those actions upon? And so I think email is a really great place for that. And if we can build an experience that starts to make that seamless for a user where they

• 52:15Speaker 05

  don't have to go and set up an API key or connect to a service and they can just seamlessly launch that from an experience that feels native to them like email, it could be a really compelling experience. And I think we previously built a very big business with ads at Pinterest and other companies. And so this idea of being able to show people products and services at the right time could lead to a really incredible consumer product that's also accessible to the masses.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Ads. I was not expecting that.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  Well, that was Pinterest.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but you're saying, are you saying like, in theory, if you build a really beautiful-

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you pay to get to the top of the inbox. I'm going to say everyone's sending you a thousand emails and if I advertise and pay, I can get more surface area, maybe?

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  Also, I think people, I mean, my, our stance and many people's stance, I'm sure your stance is like, if you get a really nicely targeted ad, it is like additive to a product experience. And so I think in the world in the future where somebody's using extra for their email- Like, and you decide to turn on ads, you could probably serve, you know, really high-quality ads.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Users.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, some of our beta users really love actually finding deals and products from brands that they actually love that often get buried and missed in their inbox today. And when we show CMOs and marketers the product, they absolutely love the idea of their products being displayed natively, not buried in a promotions tab, you know, their CTRs are through the floor with kind of the existing treatment in many people's mailboxes. So if you're actually interested in the brand and you've bought something from them before, the idea of being able to see other complementary products or things from that brand in the future could be very compelling. And I think we're thinking about multiple tiers. Like, I think there's obviously a lot of folks that, you know, may just want to not have ads and pay. And so I think there's lots of different ways to go about it. We're still early in the journey, but

• 54:07Speaker 05

  right now we're focusing on getting as many people to have a joyful inbox experience as possible before we start to monetize.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  What's the beachhead agentic experience? Is it just unsubscribe?

• 54:19Speaker 05

  People love coming in to clean up their inbox. It's crazy. I recommend everyone that's listening in, like, if you're tired of your inbox being overwhelmed, five minutes with our onboarding flow will give you an inbox designed around your life and, you know, and you'll feel a lot lighter and cleaner after using extra. But I think a lot of people...

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Is that specifically for the person that's sitting on like 200,000 emails? Or if they have like 10, like, I probably have like 10 emails in my personal and like, they range a lot from like, need to write a thoughtful response to need to do some flow in some web app, or need to send a payment, or need to do... And I'm like, I don't know that I would hand over the keys to an agent for most of those, but I would definitely love a for you page on my like promotions and updates tabs in Gmail, which are like, basically newsletters and sponsored stuff. And then I would love, because Gmail's done like an okay job with the unsubscribe button, but it misses it a lot. But then there's some

• 55:18John Coogan?

  services that are just like, we're breaking the law. And like, you have to call us to unsubscribe from our emails. And I'm like, I'm not going to like, chase this down. So I'm just going to keep getting like, you know, random, our privacy policy updated for some like telecom service usually.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think with Extra, you would get an amazing for you page with the information that you want. And I think honestly, a lot of people just feel the sense of control and clarity of being able to see it in a different view of like, here's what's important, here's what I need to do today. And, you know, it's distilled down to just a few items versus this long list of things that you have to do in your inbox.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  That's cool. Is the app live on the App Store?

• 55:59Speaker 05

  It is. Yeah, we went live yesterday.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Amazing. Your life's inbox. Here we go. Happening now. I'm getting it. Thank you.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Very excited to try this.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  It's great to meet you.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Breaking it down for us. Congratulations on the launch. Excited to give it a try.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you soon.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Avlok from Angel List. And I believe we might have someone else joining as well. Ankur is joining as well. Fantastic. They've both been on the show before. You know them, you love them, and they have a big announcement today. Angel List is launching USVC, a public venture fund alongside Naval Ravikant. How are you doing?

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Yo, yo.

• 56:43Avlok Kohli?

  Hello. Feeling great.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Big day. Break it down for us. What is USVC?

• 56:52Avlok Kohli?

  All right. Perfect. I'm gonna let Ankur break down what is USVC.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  We're working on getting a four up. Just give us one second.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  We can just hang out. Great, great, great hair. Did you just get a haircut?

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Here we go. We got everybody.

• 57:06Ankur Nagpal?

  There we go.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 57:08Avlok Kohli?

  Yep, got a haircut just for TBPN, you know?

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I thought so. Great to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Massive day. Ankur, it's been too long since last week.

• 57:20Ankur Nagpal?

  Been here every Wednesday afternoon, blocked out. But no, today's launch is really fun. I mean, we couldn't reveal that much last week, but really, the last month has been gearing up towards this. And I think Naval mentioned it when he first started Angel List, this was such a big part of his vision of what this company could become. And it's really fun to like finally get this out there.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's get right into it. How are you describing? Yeah, yeah, let's talk specifically about the product. This, the, you know, everyone, everyone is aware of the companies that are, that are a key part of it, but, but, um, yeah, talk about kind of the decision making that, that went into the product, how it's, how it's different than, uh, other, other products in the market, all that stuff.

• 58:08Ankur Nagpal?

  Cool. Um, yeah, so the idea with USVC is we wanted to open up access to the asset class of venture. Right now it's, I believe it's very siloed. You need to know a lot of people. Um, it's very, very hard for most of America to have, to have access to, you know, the place where most of the wealth is created. So that's the goal with USVC. Can we build sort of a high quality way to index into venture as an asset class? What's unique about this structure is there are a lot of private market ETFs. People may have seen the Destiny ETF, Robinhood ETF, all of that. The difference with this is this is set up differently where it's a closed and tender offer fund, which I mean, it sounds like a lot of heavy words, but what it really means

• 58:51Ankur Nagpal?

  is when you're investing in this, you're actually holding something very close to the underlying business. So the price of, it's the price of what you pay and what you redeem at is roughly equal to the price of the underlying companies. It's not driven by FOMO or like markets being super excited or down. Um, and I think that is structurally very different. I don't know if I've looked at it.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  And, and, you know, part of, part of the challenge with, with some of these other products is they can have, they can have great assets that make up the fund, but if you want to pay, but, but it's hard to justify if they're trading at five, six, seven times NAV. It doesn't matter how good the underlying assets are. No good investor can kind of confidently say, I'm going to invest in this fund unless you truly think that the assets are kind of mispriced fundamentally by five or six X.

• 59:44Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the way to think about USVC is it's meant to be a vehicle that you can think about over the long term. So rather than trying to think about, am I getting it at the right NAV? Am I getting it higher or lower than its value? You can just trust that when you invest in USVC, you're getting it at the right NAV, and you can hold it for the very, very long term. That's why we made the decision, or that's why USVC made the decisions that it made.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  So how do investors actually onboard?

• 1:00:18Jordi Hays?

  It's very easy.

• 1:00:19Ankur Nagpal?

  Right now, it's very easy. We'll get you all to invest soon. But it's fully self-serve, usvc.com. It's been, yeah, that's sort of been the innovation here. Historically, these types of funds require people to be accredited investors. But now access is truly open to anyone with as little as $500.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about number of bets? It's open-ended, so it sounds like uncapped. But is this the kind of thing where you want to, I feel like, is it, you want to concentrate on like 20, 30 core positions, similar to a venture fund? I imagine this isn't like you want to spray and pray at seed, but maybe you would if it's the right founder? How are you thinking about it?

• 1:01:06Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah, so I can talk about portfolio construction. You'll see, a lot of the names we've gone out with today are the names everyone has heard of, you know, XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic. However, long-term, I think a lot of the long-term alpha is not even necessarily in these names. So we absolutely will also start investing in a lot of seed-stage companies. The idea is, these are bets. It's not just about the next one year, but bets that will pay off in the next three, five, seven, 10 years. So about a third of the portfolio, the goal would be to have it skew early stage as well, just because we want to be finding these companies before they're actually discovered.

• 1:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so similar to a kind of a platform VC, where they're going to concentrate a lot of their capital into later-stage, establish winners. That are more stable and then you can still get exposure to the early stage of super promising companies. That's very cool.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the concept of direct ownership? How many layers of abstraction? I think that there's, there's just like FUD generally among retail investors that I've talked to that they will see a name that they're excited about and then they will find a product that sort of proxies that name, but it's seven layers deep. It's very confusing and, and they don't really know how to process it. And mostly they're not even necessarily worried about fees or, or anything like that. They're more worried about like, well, I thought I owned SpaceX and then it just turned out I didn't. And we've talked to Matt Grimm at Andorall about this. There's been all sorts of stuff.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people promoting Andorall SPVs that don't have access.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Don't have anything. And it's just like, yeah. And I think that, I think that that messaging is important. So can you talk us through like, like how you think about ownership? What rights you actually do need, what rights you don't, how you think about delivering exposure to the, to the end user or the end investor?

• 1:03:10Ankur Nagpal?

  I'm going to let Avlok take this because Angelus as a platform has drawn the line on what they will expect as an SPV. So Avlok, why don't you take this one?

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:19Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah. One of the unique things about USBC is that it, it runs on Angelus. So we're able to have it take advantage of all of the infrastructure of Angelus. And one of the things I tweeted out a few months ago was Angelus as an example had banned all layered SPVs by default for the reasons that you mentioned. In fact, when we did it, we lost revenue because of it, but that's because we didn't know who the underlying owners were and we had no way to actually even trace it. And so we banned it. So in general, when it comes to the infrastructure that we're running at Angelus, we are always thinking first and foremost about ownership of the underlying assets because

• 1:04:02Avlok Kohli?

  we're running infrastructure for funds, SPVs at scale. So from that vantage point,

• 1:04:09Avlok Kohli?

  You can think of it as USVC in the way it thinks about acquiring assets as the exact same ethos, which is you want to only look at assets where you actually know where the underlying assets are coming from, rather than these layered SPVs that have fees that are not disclosed and carry that's not disclosed. That's something that we effectively banned from Angelist a while ago.

• 1:04:37Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. What is the pitch for founders? Why should they take USVC money? I can give reasons, but how are you positioning it?

• 1:04:47Ankur Nagpal?

  So I think that this is the most fun part and you're going to see this soon where, okay, you know, you'd argue that Anthropic doesn't really need more promoters right now, but we're going to be taking some bets on companies and startups that have very loyal, very passionate communities, but they may be a $50 million business, $100 million business, something in that range. And to them, it allows them a very scalable way to actually let their community share in the upside. And that's going to be one of the magical things here where it's not obviously an IP or anything, but now we can have a vehicle for people to get their communities involved in their upside. And for most founders, it's generally pretty cool to be able to say, hey, by the way, if you are a customer and you want to participate

• 1:05:31Ankur Nagpal?

  in this, you can invest in USVC.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Is a $500 minimum? Is there a maximum?

• 1:05:38Ankur Nagpal?

  There's no maximum, so load up the truck.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  What happens if Elon, Sam, Dario, these guys are like, you know what? I want to just team up with the other guys. Let's throw $50 billion collectively into each other's companies.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Through USVC.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Through USVC. Let's just all create a Keiretsu. This is the Japanese way, correct?

• 1:06:01Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Ankur Nagpal?

  You did strike something interesting. The nature of this fund is different, right? Effectively, it's an evergreen fund, which means we can accept kind of unlimited amount of capital. But from a deployment perspective, every time that happens, effectively, we have, we have to kind of come up with a strategy for that. So it's a very different structure.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, how should investors think about the time horizon? If you're, if you're going, I've talked to people that have LP'd into VC funds and they're like, I don't even know if I'll see it before retirement. I mean, there's people who got into like early rounds of SpaceX and they're, and they're like 20 years into like, it looks great on paper, but I still don't have liquidity. And that's, that's a benefit, but it's also a drawback. And I think going in with eyes open is important, but how should the investor, they think about this as 10 years journey or something that they're throwing in retirement bucket mentally? Or, or should they think about it? Obviously it's not something that they're going to be trading in and out of on a day to day basis, but what's the right mindset to go into this with?

• 1:07:07Ankur Nagpal?

  So I'll caveat that this is not a liquid instrument, right? Like we've been told to repeat, this is not a liquid instrument.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Ankur Nagpal?

  However, the goal with this type of structure is at our discretion. Things are looking good and this is our goal. We will have up to 5% of the fund available for redemption every single quarter.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:28Ankur Nagpal?

  So the idea is that people theoretically, once we get into a good rhythm, can kind of pick and choose for how long they want to be a part of this journey.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:37Ankur Nagpal?

  Again, it's not the most liquid instrument, but from a timing perspective, there's, it is, you know, people can kind of come in and come out. However, you know, only through quarterly redemptions.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Jordan, anything else?

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great. I'm very, very excited. This is the most angel list product ever, I think, even though you guys are more than a, more than a decade in now, right? And yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes. I feel like, I imagine you guys are going to be spending a little more time on the East Coast with this. I guess you're already over there, Ankur.

• 1:08:10Ankur Nagpal?

  We're already in New York and on the West Coast, so we have good coverage.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Well, the website is usvc.com. There's a beautiful video of Naval.

• 1:08:19Jordi Hays?

  And I have, and I have no doubt we'll have many, many of your new Porco founders on the show.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  We can't wait.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  So keep us in the loop.

• 1:08:27Ankur Nagpal?

  Excited for it.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you guys.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

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

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  This this launch video is very funny because there are clips of Naval and then there are clips of founders and the first the first clip sort of makes it look like Naval is talking to Steve Jobs if you if you just have the sound off. But what a what a fantastic portfolio. Go check it out at USVC. There are seven companies in the portfolio currently XAI Crusoe, who's been on the show, Anthropic Sierra Technologies, Brett Taylor, Legora, OpenAI, and Versel. You have seven different companies here represented. Go check it out at USVC.com.

• 1:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Wow, before we go into the next guest segment, I'm trying to this hasn't been posted by any any super reputable sources yet, but there's a number of sources saying that Toma Bravo, actually, according to Reuters, is nearing agreement to turn software for Medalia over to creditors, which would be a $5 billion loss.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal. We'll dig in here more next.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have Joel Edwards from Zankar in the waiting room. Let's bring Joel in to the TVP and Ultra. Joel, how are you doing?

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:09:52Speaker 07

  Good. Hey, guys.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:09:54Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me on.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. And thanks for cleaning the camera. I appreciate that. Always want to look sharp on TVP. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:10:04Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. Joel Edwards. I'm a geologist by training. I'm from Zanskar Geothermal. We're a group that we wildcat for new geothermal resources out West to make power.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. What's the best? Actually, music to my ears.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  What's the best?

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  If I got one more AI agent, I was kidding.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Name every geothermal resource. Like, what are we actually? We just concretize it for me. Like, what are we talking about here? What is you striking gold look like?

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 07

  striking gold in in your head have you guys ever been to Yellowstone National Park first National Park

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  yeah I think so

• 1:10:41Speaker 07

  seeing the old face if faithful geyser any of those thermal features

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:10:45Speaker 07

  uh these are the types of systems we're looking for

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:10:48Speaker 07

  except for the systems we're looking for are hidden or blind

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:10:51Speaker 07

  so there's nothing at the surface there's no geyser there's no hot springs

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:10:54Speaker 07

  nothing but there are massive geothermal resources

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:10:58Speaker 07

  at depth that you can tap with a well field you can pull that heat out of the ground and you can put it in a turbine and make electricity

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  interesting yeah take me through the the the geology 101 the where's the heat coming from why is this underground how do we get it out is it just it there there are just like pockets of hot air hot water I I really dumb it down for me

• 1:11:24Speaker 07

  there are pockets of hot water underground

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:11:27Speaker 07

  not hot air

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:11:29Speaker 07

  uh and they're fairly discreet fairly local but when you find them they're incredibly energy dense so think in your mind like volcanoes

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:11:38Speaker 07

  right that's a that's a manifestation of a geothermal system

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:11:41Speaker 07

  um think hot springs and so forth there are parts of the world of the crust where there's just a lot of heat

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:11:48Speaker 07

  and um that gets manifest in these different thermal features and you can drill into these things and you can pull steam or hot brines out of the ground and then you put it into a power plant just like you know all thermal power plants nuclear

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:12:04Speaker 07

  coal combined cycle gas

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:12:06Speaker 07

  they all put heat into turbines turbine spins

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  generates a generator

• 1:12:10Speaker 07

  generator and you make electricity and so forth yeah

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  is that classic meme we we discover a new way to generate power and we are going to use it to boil water and generate steam and spin a turbine so we get more electricity and this is like

• 1:12:20Speaker 07

  exactly

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  we do every time we discover something new we

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  what what does the what is what is the business actually going to look like is this a whale hunting where you're really trying to find a single site in the next 24 months and then you'll spend years

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  do you want to commercialize it or do you want to sell it off to another company at that point uh like how how full stack do you wind up going here

• 1:12:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, we already own and operate a power plant, geothermal power plant in New Mexico. So we sell electricity to an investor owned utility and then they service Albuquerque and Santa Fe and so forth.

• 1:12:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:12:53Speaker 07

  So the business is to find geothermal resources, build a power plant and then sell the electricity to a customer.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Speaker 07

  So this is part of that.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry, sorry. Is there, uh, is there, this feels like eco-friendly. Is there pushback to geothermal energy production generally? Uh, like people are worried about earthquakes or something. I don't know, like, wait, wait. It feels like this is.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  There's a, yeah, people are gonna find a way to hate anything. So what are they gonna hate about this?

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Like, are you in, like, are you renewable? Are you clean energy? Like, what category are you in, do you think?

• 1:13:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, right now we are beloved by both sides of the political aisle. So you show up in DC.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Enjoy it while it lasts, buddy.

• 1:13:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  Somebody will find a way.

• 1:13:41Speaker 07

  We're, we're one of the few, like, bipartisan things where you show up in DC and everybody loves you, shakes your hand. It's a really exciting moment. There's, there's attributes about geothermal that people love. It's baseload, there's no emission profile, it's domestic, so all these resources are in the US. You know, it uses US supply chains, it uses drillers, everybody loves drillers. Not everybody, but a lot of people love drillers and so forth. So it has a lot of those attributes that speak to both the left and the right. And then probably, you know, another attribute is the underdog attribute. Everybody loves a good underdog. Geothermal's an underdog. We're a niche, small industry. We have a lot of the same setup that oil and gas had like 100 plus years ago where it looks like there's a lot of resource out there, looks like a ton of potential.

• 1:14:26Speaker 07

  It's still niche. Is it gonna scale?

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is this one of those things like rare earths are not actually that rare?

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  It's just hard to find, hard to get to.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  We don't like doing the refining nearby.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  How rare is like

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  How much geothermal energy is there? Like, are we talking like tens of gigawatts potentially? If we were to put in like AI data center parlance?

• 1:14:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think tens of gigawatts is near term, super duper realistic based on the tools and the tech that we have today.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 07

  So exciting. Yeah. Obviously, there's people talking hundreds of gigawatts, terawatts. We'll see what happens, right? As things, as industries scale, nonlinear, unpredictable things happen, right? Costs and technology and all these things change. So it's hard to predict what's going to happen 10 years from now. But basically, there's two things that drive scale for resources. It's the number of resources out there in existence. And then it's your ability to extract the resource. And that's really technology dependent. So geothermal, where Zanskar's really focuses on finding more geothermal hotspots. We have a thesis that there's a lot more out there. We've already found a bunch of sites. We've announced a few of them. There's more to come. And then there's other groups that have focused on how do you get more out of these systems?

• 1:15:42Speaker 07

  And those are in the unconventional bucket. It's like, it's like the oil and gas play in the Permian in West Texas.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:48Speaker 07

  Right? They came in with unconventional wellfields. They drill horizontal wells, they stimulate, they get more hydrocarbons out of the rock.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:55Speaker 07

  That process is happening in geothermal right now as well.

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:58Speaker 07

  So you have the exploration piece, finding more and then getting more out of it.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, double clicking on the exploration piece.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  It sounds like AI can be used to do more computational discovery, actually interpret data. But what's the gold standard for actually obtaining the data? Like, what, like, what sensor are you using to detect the potential of a geothermal, you know, discovery?

• 1:16:28Speaker 07

  System, what's the secret sensor? We, the trick in geothermal is that there's not a single type of geologic data that tells you if a system is in existence other than just drilling a well into the thing and measuring.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  So there's nothing you can do, just like radar or like pull something through the ground and find it that way?

• 1:16:47Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, no. I wish it was that easy.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:49Speaker 07

  In, in oil and gas exploration, they use seismic reflection imaging and that was kind of their silver bullet toolset to find a lot of these reservoirs.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 07

  In geothermal, we use a mix of data sets to try to find these hidden systems.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:02Speaker 07

  And that's where, that's where like AI tools really flex because they can, they can handle the hyperdimensionality problem really well.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Speaker 07

  Better, better than humans.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:11Speaker 07

  We basically build a sandbox in which the models learn how to find systems.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:16Speaker 07

  And the building the sandbox piece is the really hard piece. You have to put the right data in there. You have to put the right learning.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:21Speaker 07

  Objective rates and so forth. That's, that's the piece that we live in. We build the sandboxes for the models.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Interesting. Uh, la- last question for me.

• 1:17:28Jordi Hays?

  I feel like you guys are bending towards, uh, the, the, you know, the meme template, like the world, like the world if it ran on geothermal energy and it's like, you know, this idyllic, like, you know, there's flying cars.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Everything's green.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Uh, hypothetically, uh, friend of the show, Mark Benioff, he's out in Hawaii. He's big on AI. Could we put a cap on a volcano and capture all the energy out of a volcano and use that to power Salesforce AI?

• 1:17:58Speaker 07

  Sure. Why not? A cap? What is, what does the cap look like?

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm just imagining, I'm imagining a physical.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Something to trap the heat.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Something to trap the heat that comes off of the volcano. Maybe you want to drill into the volcano and extract the lava that way, but has anyone actually at least theorized about capturing energy from volcanoes? They seem very powerful.

• 1:18:18Speaker 07

  They're, they're pretty powerful. We have a lot of active operational geothermal wellfields on volcanoes today.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:18:25Speaker 07

  So the main island of Hawaii.

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Speaker 07

  Has a geothermal wellfield. They've drilled into the side of that volcano and they make electricity out of it.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:18:34Speaker 07

  I guess if that's the cap.

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, yeah. The cap is the wrong approach, but they.

• 1:18:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  But, but, but they are extracting energy from the volcano. That's remarkable.

• 1:18:43Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:18:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. So there's a lot of geothermal operations, power plants in Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, where a lot of these big volcanic systems live. In the US, we have some volcanic systems generating power in California.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Speaker 07

  And then the, most of the rest of the systems are generating from, from cracks or fracture zones.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:03Speaker 07

  In the crust.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  That's very exciting. Uh, did, did you raise money?

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  We raised some money, yeah, we've got some cash.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  I want to ring the gong for you.

• 1:19:12Jordi Hays?

  It is exciting.

• 1:19:13Speaker 07

  The gong is, the gong is coming. I knew the gong was coming.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:16Speaker 07

  Uh, we, we raised a hundred and fifteen million a few months ago and

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Wait, forty million dollar what? Credit facility?

• 1:19:26Speaker 07

  It's a, it's a credit facility, yeah.

• 1:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  It's all good.

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm really glad you're doing this.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is amazing.

• 1:19:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm really glad you're doing this.

• 1:19:33Speaker 07

  Appreciate it.

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, the people talk about AI, bottlenecks in AI, right? You know, uh, talent, chips, can, you know, uh, energy, uh, and there, there's, and there's sort of like this cycle in technology live streaming right now. And right now, there's sort of like a talent bottleneck, but, uh, and an equipment bottleneck. But, uh, you know, if, if we keep doubling from here, there will be a, an energy bottleneck in, in technology live streaming. So I'm glad you're, I'm glad you're doing this work.

• 1:20:02Speaker 07

  Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Have you ever been on a drill rig?

• 1:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't think I have.

• 1:20:08Speaker 07

  You guys have not lived yet. I mean, this is the American experience is to be on a drill rig.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. Tell us, tell us when you're in Southern California. We would love to go live from, from the rig.

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  So anyways.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. We'll talk to you later.

• 1:20:23Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Uh, up next, we have the founder and CEO of VAST Data, uh, just hit a thirty billion dollar valuation.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on staying.

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  With a one billion dollar Series F. Absolutely. It's massive news. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:20:42Speaker 08

  Good. How are you? Thanks for having me.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  We're good. Uh, would you mind, uh, just giving us a little bit of the journey, a little bit of the background? I'd love to know, uh, all the things that went into, uh, building the company to this point, since it's such a, you know, massive milestone.

• 1:20:59Speaker 08

  Of course. It's been ten years in the making. We started in twenty sixteen.

• 1:21:06Speaker 08

  We wanted to redo infrastructure. We thought AI required a new infrastructure stack way back then. If you remember 2016, it was the very, very early days of AI. But it was already clear that you needed fast access to a lot of data to train these massive systems. And now we needed to infer and to fine tune and for reinforced learning. And so we've been on this journey with AI throughout its various evolutions. We started from storage, building a massive.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Was there, was there any, any, were there any points on that journey where you were like, maybe, maybe we were too early? Did we pick kind of the wrong category or was it kind of like steady? You felt like there was steady progress being made and you had line of sight to getting to where you are now the entire time?

• 1:21:57Speaker 08

  We definitely did not have line of sight. When we started, if you looked at my presentation that I built for myself, the last slide had a picture of a brain on it. And it asked, can we build a thinking machine? I, I'm not sure we still have today line of sight to doing that, but it's been our North Star. And over the years, we always partnered with the organizations that were on the bleeding edge of, of AI. Before generative AI, it was hedge funds and life science institutes that were doing massive analytics using GPUs. And then of course, once generative AI hit, it became the labs and the AI clouds that became our biggest customers.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Do you have insight into how hedge funds are scaling compute resources? I just saw, didn't Jane Street invest a billion dollars in CoreWeave? And it seems like, I, I saw another company that they funded that was doing custom silicon. And it feels like they have incredibly advanced compute stacks that are a little bit more opaque because they're maybe just have a different recruiting flow or a different public messaging flow.

• 1:23:06Speaker 08

  That is exactly right. In fact, Jane Street is a customer of ours both directly and through CoreWeave, and so we know them well. We play in that space now for seven or eight years. I found that before the big AI labs, the hedge funds were the ones that had the biggest GPU clusters. Yeah, they're ahead of their time and they're very secretive, so we don't know much about what's going on there.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  What about the social networks and the social platforms? I feel like ad delivery is also potentially underrated as a source of like large-scale machine learning, large-scale compute clusters. We've seen Meta trained the Llama model on the Reels-sized cluster that they built as sort of a bonus. But how big is that of a business for you? And how do you think it comps to the hedge fund world?

• 1:24:02Speaker 08

  I think the hedge fund world is a lot more secretive, but I would dare to say that it's bigger in terms of size. There are very few of these metas out there, and there are a lot more hedge funds.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, talk about what the next phase for your company is on the back of this financing round.

• 1:24:25Speaker 08

  So we're trying to fill in that software infrastructure layer. Jensen gave a really good analogy of a five-layer cake: power, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. We're that middle layer. We want to abstract this new hardware away from these new models and applications. We want to make it easy, make it secure for everybody to generate AI agents and use AI in production. And especially as we move from the labs into enterprises, I think it needs to be simplified. And it's always been that software infrastructure layer, what I call the operating system,

• 1:25:07Speaker 08

  that took a new technology from new hardware and a killer app to making it widespread, where everybody can use it. And I think we're at that moment with AI, and we're trying to do our part in... And accelerating the adoption of AI.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  How have you been processing the CPU shortage? This idea that like as agents get more and more robust, they need more CPU. They need to be fed. You gotta feed the GPUs. Is that something that you're working on particularly? Or do you have a view on the overall just CPU shortage? Which sort of blindsided, I think, a lot of people in tech who'd been following the GPU ramps. But then they're saying, oh, well, what's going on with the CPU crunch?

• 1:25:54Speaker 08

  I think these AI factories are bigger pieces of technology than we've ever built before. It includes CPUs, it includes DPUs, it includes GPUs. In some cases, it includes TPUs.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Sorry, what were you saying? DPUs? Can you break that down?

• 1:26:10Speaker 08

  D, data processing units.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Oh, data. Okay, yeah.

• 1:26:12Speaker 08

  Yes. And so all of these chips are in high demand. We're seeing a NAND shortage that's extremely severe right now. We're seeing a memory shortage. And so I don't think there's anything that is of abundant supply right now. The fabs need to be built out. Nobody was expecting this type of curve in the growth of AI. And I think it's going to continue for definitely a few years to come, if not many years to come. And so the hardware vendors need to build out a lot faster than they have been.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you walk me through at a deeper level, your relationship with CoreWeave? And how that fits together? I think a lot of people think of CoreWeave as servicing, you know, the companies that are training and inferencing models specifically. What are you getting out of that partnership?

• 1:27:06Speaker 08

  So CoreWeave has been an amazing partner for us. They're the biggest of these new AI clouds like N-Scale and Crusoe and Lambda. You see them around the world also as sovereign clouds. And Basically, they're building this new stack and they're making it easy for end users to consume this new stack in a cloud environment. We're just the software builders. And so, we try to provide them with as much software as we can such that they can turn that around into cloud services, whether it's a storage service, or a database service, or a streaming service.

• 1:27:47Speaker 08

  As we add more and more layers of this stack, those are the things that are required from those end users.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Okay, so, I mean, we were just talking to the president of Adobe. It sounds like Adobe is doing inference and they're training some models and they're doing a lot of different things. They might go to CoreWeave and then vast data might be powering the software underneath and they might not even necessarily have a direct relationship with you because they're getting just access to the best possible product from CoreWeave directly, effectively. Is that right?

• 1:28:17Speaker 08

  It is right. Adobe specifically does have a direct relationship with us. Most of these larger enterprises tend to have both a cloud environment that they're leveraging and on-prem and hyperscale. And what we've built, what we call the data space, basically allows them to do all three of those and have one abstraction layer that enables a seamless experience.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Given your exposure to the world of hedge funds, are there a bunch more situational awareness-esque funds that have absolutely printed over the last year or so but just done it a lot more quietly and the West Coast kind of hasn't picked up on it?

• 1:29:04Speaker 08

  That's a really good question. I actually met those guys from situational awareness a couple of weeks ago. They have a really interesting view into the future and I think they're capitalizing on that view for every phase as it unrolls.

• 1:29:21Speaker 08

  I am not the right person to ask because those funds tend to not have as much infrastructure. The ones that we work with tend to be more quant-driven. Situational awareness, I think, is just a few very smart people. They don't need that much compute power.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's more macro research.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Doing it the old-fashioned way with guts.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Conviction.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, conversations and research and having a contrarian view. Well, congratulations in the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Appreciate you breaking it down.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

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

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you imagine situational awareness with a couple gigawatts of compute under the hood? Anything's possible at that level. I was, what was that, what was that copy trading profile? You know the one I'm talking about where you can like create the Nancy Pelosi?

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Autopilot.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Autopilot. Autopilot has a tracker for situational awareness.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Every time they post about it, they use this like AI image of him. It doesn't look anything like.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. But there are so few images of Leopold on the internet that that AI image has just become like what mainstream media will pull for him because they just assume that that's actually him and it's not, but it's just very funny that it's.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  A man who has only appeared under our cash.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  There's no other, there's only video of him.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  SBF just posted his full holdings. If lawyers hadn't fire sold, he's up 165x on Anthropic, 72x, 27x on Solana, 8x on Robinhood, Genesis Digital. Anyway, he's taking a victory lap. We have our next guest, Darian from Gradient Ventures in the waiting room. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:31:09Speaker 08

  Hey, how's it going? Good to see you, Jordy.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you. It's been a long time.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Good to see you too.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Where are you calling in from?

• 1:31:16Speaker 09

  I'm in our office in Jackson Square. We just moved in here about eight months ago and we're right next to Thrive and Obvious and IVP. It's like a VC community now. We could live here even. There's apartments upstairs, you know. That's amazing.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Since this is the first time on the show, I'd love to get some of your backstory, some of your journey to venture, just a little bit of like how you wound up in this particular seat in Jackson Square.

• 1:31:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, I grew up in Silicon Valley. My father came here in the 70s. He worked in tech as well.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  What was he doing in the 70s? Like, what was tech like in the 70s?

• 1:31:54Speaker 09

  Semiconductors.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Semiconductor.

• 1:31:56Speaker 09

  There we go.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  The true Silicon Valley.

• 1:31:58Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah, true Silicon Valley.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, we actually made stuff. He was industrializing. Now we're re-industrializing. But so he was working in semis, okay?

• 1:32:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, and then he sort of fast-tracked and coached me through everything on what startups were, venture financings, all those kinds of things. He was actually fortunate because in business school, his closest friends were Vinod Khosla and Bob Kagle. Probably everybody knows Vinod, but Bob was one of the founders of Benchmark. And so he had been steeped in all these different kinds of communities that were very, very venture-focused and startup-focused. And the industry's evolved a lot. Then I was fortunate because I actually got an introduction to Sean Parker when I was 17 through my cousin Hadi Partovi, who I think you've had as a brother on the show. And he introduced me and I visited the Facebook office and met Mark. And Mark was like, oh, you should come work here. I think they were

• 1:32:50Speaker 09

  struggling to hire people at the time because I wasn't exactly the best engineer. But it was a fun time. We built a lot of stuff. We launched newsfeed, photos, et cetera. And then I left to go to college.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Really quickly, is the story, is the apocryphal, potentially apocryphal story of like, everything was a single file and you would yell, hey, I'm changing the code? Is that, do you think that story is real at all?

• 1:33:15Speaker 09

  Oh, I mean, like, when we wanted to push to the web tier, we would just R-sync the latest folder on Dustin's laptop. Wow. That was the push process. And then we introduced Subversion. Actually, there was a guy that I worked with, Aaron Sieg, who was brilliant, who we put together, like, Subversion, checked in files in and out. We created templating, I worked on that project too. But when we got there, there was like tons of SQL interspersed with HTML. It was hilarious. But, you know, that is what startups are about, is it's super messy. Yeah. And that's what I learned there. Although I also learned that, you know, only one in a billion are as anomalous as Facebook. You know, not every startup can go that way. But also hilariously...

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, did that warp your, your kind of, like, where, I don't, I don't, I don't know the full story.

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  Did you come out and you were like, "Everything I turned, everything I touch is turned into gold." And then it's like, okay, normal VC world, like, there's gonna be failures.

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I feel like I'll, I feel like I'll talk with founders sometime and it's their first company, it's going so well, and they had, they don't even know that, that, like, how anomalous it is. And sometimes I'll just be like, "You have something really, really special here." And, and stay locked in, because the odds of this happening, you know, another time in this way are very low.

• 1:34:27Speaker 09

  Oh, totally. I mean, I ended up starting an enterprise software company, which was much more difficult. I remember meeting Aaron Levy when he was starting Box. He was in a bunk bed with Dylan in a house in Berkeley, and they asked me if I'd invest, and I thought they were crazy, and I didn't, and that was a huge mistake. So, you know, but then there are positive stories. Like, I met most of the founders of Palantir and invested personally early in Palantir, and that was, ended up being an incredible company. Or, you know, when Luke Nosick was talking about SpaceX, like, almost a decade ago, and I was like, "You're crazy, we're gonna launch rockets to the moon? Like, we're not gonna do that." And ultimately, you, you, you really just have to surround yourself with really smart people. Fortunately, I've always been surrounded by people much smarter than myself, and so I think that's why I'm in this chair.

• 1:35:12Speaker 09

  Ended up being a founder, invested in a lot of great companies, like, first investor in CaseText, which got bought by LexisNexis, one of the first investors in Logora, which is now on a tear. And then a gradient, we've, you know... Lando Labs, my partner did that deal. You know, I joined here about eight years ago with the goal of investing in AI, mainly because I didn't get crypto. And I was like, I don't understand why crypto is interesting. And so I joined the nerds at the AI fund.

• 1:35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, during the 2021 era, like you guys, you know, you were the Google's early stage AI fund, but you were still like, as a fund overall, some of the partners were like branching out and would do different stuff, obviously. But, but you guys now get the benefit of like, we were doing all these companies like, you know, almost a decade ago or a decade ago. And now they're, they're like.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  What was, what was the enterprise software company that you built? And, and like coming out of consumer social, why enterprise?

• 1:36:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I was always obsessed with data. Like I actually thought that the edge that Facebook had was how clean the data was on everyone's profiles. Like you, people would just give us their birthday, like what classes they were in, like all this information and it was very well organized. And this is before LLMs where, you know, you couldn't organize and massage that data very easily. Now you can, things can be amorphous and it's easy to process. But before you couldn't. And so, you know, I was very interested in, you know, small business data. I thought that we could compete with Dun & Bradstreet. It was a company called Radius that we scaled to pretty significant ARR and we sold it. It was a huge, it was a long journey. It was full of crisis, full of learning.

• 1:36:55Speaker 09

  And actually that kind of helped me with a, with becoming a VC, mainly because I, I really empathize with like how founders are going through a terrible time. I mean, running a company is not fun, regardless of whether it's going well or not. Like the best companies in the world, it may look like everything's going well, but the mess is just masked by growth. It's like, that's the difference between a good company and like not a good company. And, and in general, like founders, I really have a lot of respect for, because I decided not to sign up to found another company after my own. I decided to go, go to the dark side and be a VC, which sometimes I say is a cop out. But, you know, being a founder is really what it's, is really the most difficult job. And if you can sign up for it multiple times. That's incredible. That's a sign of like just incredible resilience.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Or a masochist.

• 1:37:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, that too.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  What are you, I'm so curious. I'm so curious what you're excited about investing today. And I know it's probably like comes down to like just backing great teams because that that typically works well, but we're in such an interesting time right now where it feels like all software, all enterprise software is like converging on the same kinds of simple use, you know, use cases, this It was like collapsing. interface to get agents to do things like everything is, everything is converging. Just the text files. And, you know, you guys were, you know, you did Neo, you did Lambda, you did a NeoCloud eight years ago. That was like the best time to be investing in a NeoCloud.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  And then now that it just feels like, you know, that you have the SaaS apocalypse in the public market and then a lot of early stage companies that are getting investment are still SaaS. Like, so I'm curious, like, do you still believe, do you still believe in SaaS? Like, what kinds of opportunities are you most excited in?

• 1:38:44Speaker 09

  I believe in shorting SaaS if I can. Like, that's, that's probably what I believe in right now. Like, I generally think that software is like

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Bullish on puts.

• 1:38:53Speaker 09

  That's a good, that's a good laugh back.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Bullish on puts, yeah.

• 1:38:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'm bullish on Salesforce puts is what I'm saying. But, you know, I think, I think that the reality is that we are doing a lot of soul searching, like a lot of seed funds, you know, there are a lot of things that are still very interesting and investable. Like, we just invested in a robotics company that I'm super excited about that has a hardware component. I wouldn't touch hardware with a ten foot pole five years ago. Now I'm very interested in it. You know, we've invested in, you know, tools that help you manage multiple coding agents. We've invested in, you know, video editing solutions. We're investing in an AI hedge fund. Like, we are investing in a lot of really interesting things that are outside of the software as a service scope. And the real reason is just that, you know, if you want to build anything, you can in a few hours.

• 1:39:36Speaker 09

  Like, it's just so easy to, and I think that that is a major change, not just for software companies, but generally for like the bottom forty percent of work that you don't, that you sit behind a desk for, maybe the bottom sixty percent. And so, you know, we're spending a lot of time thinking about ways in which we can, you know, think about new areas. Now, we have the benefit of having done this before because when we launched in 2017, right after the transformer paper came out. There were no AI companies.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05Speaker 09

  That like, there were none and like OpenAI was a nonprofit and Propic didn't exist. You know, like DeepMind had, you know, was still like a small division within Google. Like, you know, now, you know, so we had, we had to go and hunt and find companies like Lambda, like RadAI, like Streamlit, like Writer, you know, like a lot of these businesses. And, and so we're, we're getting back on to what we had done before, which is scouring and doing a lot of outbound, going and meeting founders, getting to know founders and, and really slowing our deployment pace until it's very clear where the value is going to accrue at the seed stage.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Speaker 09

  And that I think is the smart thing to do right now. I think that software in general is really in jeopardy and there, we've made some software investments, but we believe they have strong moats because they have network effects or they have data network effects. But in general, like 80% of software companies are really in trouble.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the pipeline for founders and how it might be changing. Uh, I'm sure you've been tracking like, there's this crazy falloff in the number of computer science grads and that used to be just fertile ground for, it used to be general casting, right? Central, uh, you know, uh, central casting for, you know, VC back founder was like Stanford CS. And I don't know about Stanford specifically, but it seems like we're getting a lot less or, or fewer, uh, computer science grads. And I'm wondering if you envision a future where you'll be pulling more physicists and mathematicians or theologians or philosophers into entrepreneurial stuff. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg did not study computer science as his primary major, right? Wasn't he a philosophy major, I think, or something?

• 1:41:41Speaker 09

  Psych major.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:42Speaker 09

  Psychology.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  Psych major. So like, like there's plenty of examples that say it works.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  A lot of sense for social media.

• 1:41:49John Coogan?

  Brilliant, brilliant. But, but I mean, do you see there being like a pipeline crisis? Is the contrarian move now to study computer science at a time when coding jobs are going away? Like, walk me through how you're processing this idea that, you know, our best and brightest aren't going to, you know, just learn to code and become computer scientists, you know, at the same rate.

• 1:42:11Speaker 09

  Oh. I mean, absolutely. You talk to any scale up or, you know, tech company today. The mid-level engineers are managing coding agents in English.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Speaker 09

  They're not even coding. They're managing like hundreds or many dozens of coding agents at once. Um, I think this, at the senior level, the engineers are probably okay because we do need more code reviews and evaluations because a lot of these coding agents are spitting out bad code at volume. And that will, that'll get improved over time, but I think it is a challenge. Um, but I do think for entry level positions, we've told a whole generation, including my generation, that you should go to college when like, I don't think that that's necessary. Right? Like, college was originally formed, especially liberal arts, was formed for the process of being creative or thinking or philosophy or things like that or writing. You know, we, we've told people that they can go to college and get a good job at a tech

• 1:43:04Speaker 09

  company, all those kinds of things. I think that that's kind of in jeopardy currently. My hope is that we focus more on like real trades, right? Like welding and plumbing and a lot of the, or, you know, ceramics and pottery, like, these are going to be like more respected work, lines of work in the future as knowledge work just because completely replaced by AI. Um, I don't have a great answer for you, but I generally do worry about this because I don't know if colleges should be teaching computer science to everybody. That being said, I think everyone should take a course to understand how AI works, how these LMS actually work. Um, I think that everyone should do their best to read the transformer paper, you know, everyone in the world because it is kind of the Magna

• 1:43:45Speaker 09

  Carta of this generation. Um, but, you know, I do worry about this. I worry about, you know, workforce displacement and how that transition works. And if our government is even capable of helping, helping people transition from one phase to another.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 09

  Or one era is another.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm just wondering, like, is the next great, like, pottery entrepreneur going to go through pottery trade school or like be a business major and be able to like marshal a billion dollars of capital to like build the pottery empire of the future? Like, like, do you, do you go deals guy route and then tack on the trade? Or do you pull from the trade school? Maybe it's a moot point because you'll know it when you see it and you meet the person. But it's a fascinating world to imagine because for the longest time it was like, oh, you want to do something into pottery? Well, it's going to be a SaaS company and you're going to have to know computer science. And now it's a little bit different, right? I'm like somewhat right here.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Do you think?

• 1:44:37Speaker 09

  I think actually, go ahead, Jordy.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  No, I was gonna take the conversation another way. So finish, finish.

• 1:44:43Speaker 09

  Oh, I was just gonna say that like, imagine being someone that's incredibly good at like some form of ceramics. You would create your product and then AI would market it, take photos of it, would, you know, design it, buy ads for it, do the back office and do the finance for it. That's actually the future that I think we're gonna end up in. Now, ceramics is kind of a weird example, but you know what I mean? Like a car mechanic, like an antique car mechanic or a welder. Those are examples of like how AI would help those people. So I think we'll have many, many more entrepreneurs that are not building unicorns. They're gonna be building, you know, smaller lifestyle businesses.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree. It feels a lot like what happened when everyone got an iPhone and a YouTube account. There were a lot more creators. There's like this Shopify, same thing. Like you're democratizing these like long tail businesses that like previously it would be like, oh, you wanna, like during the dot com boom, there was like, oh, you wanna, you wanna sell t-shirts online? Here's a $10 million check so you can buy some servers and rack them and, and just have a website.

• 1:45:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, remember Teespring?

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, Teespring was like sort of a meta platform a little bit, but yeah, I mean, it's a good example of like a lot of hot, a lot of expensive infrastructure for doing something pretty basic. Sorry, Jordy, what's that?

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  I was curious, do you think you'll write more checks this year than last year or vice versa?

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, have you gotten to, or have you reached a point of frustration around valuations? You're like, you've been through, you've been, you've been through, you know,

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Cycles.

• 1:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Cycles enough to, to kind of know when things are getting probably overheated.

• 1:46:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, we don't feel as the valuations are out of control at the pre-seed and seed stage. Where they are out of control are probably in the later stage, you know, like Series A, Series Bs, even really late stage are trading at incredible multiples. I mean, you know, I think that we did this robotics company at like sub 50. We've done, you know, this other multi-coding agent company at sub 50 as well. Like, we're pretty focused on keeping valuations below 50. And I think that capital constrained companies are the ones that end up being very successful because they sort of figure out how to build better products and become more efficient. It's when you overfund companies, like some of these new Neo Labs that are raising billions of dollars, people like start making bad decisions when they have, when they're overfunded.

• 1:46:56Speaker 09

  And so I think that where we play, which is not funding the next contender to Anthropic or OpenAI, the valuations are pretty favorable.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Jordy, anything else?

• 1:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thoughts on solo GPs today? Is it overrated to be a solo GP?

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And should there be a trade school for becoming a GP? Should we, should we take millions of plumbers?

• 1:47:21Jordi Hays?

  We need to create millions, millions of venture capitalists.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Everyone who's doing pottery, you know, we keep coming back to the pottery example. If you are a top level ceramicist, which is the actual term, it is incredibly lucrative, incredibly prestigious, like it is, it is.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know you had this pottery.

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Ceramicists are real, like it is an art form and it is incredibly high skill ceiling. Similar to venture capital.

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Not as high of a skill ceiling as venture capital.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Jordi Hays?

  Not as high as an art form.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it is an art form. But yes, thoughts on solo GPs?

• 1:47:53Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I, I met one this morning. I've invested in a bunch of them. I, I think that the sub $50 million solo GP is a great business. If you can raise the money, you can get allocation around, you don't have to compete. It's when you get above 50 million that it's really challenging because you're going to be ownership constrained. You're competing against someone like us. And, you know, we have, we have, we write a larger check.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:14Speaker 09

  Um, I think also another thing is that the solo GPs are really effective at feeding companies to the multi-stages and to, you know, pure play seed funds like us. Um, and so I think it's actually a fantastic place to be.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:26Speaker 09

  Um, but it's just going to be really rare for the solo GPs to break out fund size well beyond that. So you have to be comfortable with being, you know, a company, a fund of one with no help. And you have to be, because your fee structure is not going to be able to support much more than that.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41Speaker 09

  Um, and so, but I am bullish on it. And especially with these AI tools, you can really diligence companies without needing more people. You can run your back office entirely without needing other people. Um, and so I'm in general, like pretty, pretty excited about them. They have struggled to raise more recently, right? Like LPs are not deploying capital at the pace that they were when solo GPs were breaking out in 2021, 2022. Um, and so I think that you're going to see a lot of them probably go join funds. And a lot of the really good ones with good returns be able to raise their next fund.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think more? Of them should be thinking like, okay, I'm gonna do a $30 million fund, a $30 million fund, and then a $30 million fund because it feels like a lot tend to be like, okay, I'm gonna do the $25 million fund and then I instantly wanna ramp up as much as possible. And then suddenly you have a different strategy. Suddenly you're actually competing head to head. Where it feels like if you do wanna break out and become a brand and a platform over time, if you have like three really high quality funds back to back, but in deploying them on a shorter time horizon, maybe it could be a better route.

• 1:49:46Speaker 09

  Yes, faster deployment cycles, smaller fund. Because there are just sort of liquidity constraints across LPs. But a lot of the fund to funds I've noticed are now focused on sub $75 million funds. And so there is a market for that, excuse me. And so I would generally focus on keeping your fund size consistently small at 30 million, maybe deploy over a shorter time horizon. And then you can also get LPs to, you know, pre-commit to multiple funds, which is something I've seen people do is that, hey, I'm gonna do this every 18 months. Do you wanna commit, you know, some amount every 18 months? And that actually ends up being a better story for people than raising one bigger fund.

• 1:50:26Speaker 09

  And so I generally do think that the faster, that the smaller fund on a faster cycle will yield better results. Because you also have to put a lot of companies in the portfolio. Like if you run portfolio modeling, which we do quite often here, at our fund size, it's usually 40 to 50 companies per fund in our Monte Carlo simulation that yields a 4 to 5X fund. In the smaller funds, it's really like 80 to 120. And so you have to be writing a lot of checks and get to conviction quickly and be willing to own less. And then you can run SPVs into the follow-on rounds, which I think has been really successful for a lot of people. But the smaller the fund, the more work in my mind. Because you have to constantly be looking at deals every week.

• 1:51:11Speaker 09

  You have to be putting capital out every week into different companies in order to make the math work out.

• 1:51:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, tell us about the latest fund at Gradient. What's the structure? How much did you raise? I wanna hit the gong.

• 1:51:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, we hit, we raised 220 million.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  I think we already talked about deployment and how and

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  It's also possible we already hit the gong for you. Well, just, you know, whenever, whenever it got announced, but um, great, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate all the insights and let's get, let's get your new robotics bet on the show as soon as they're ready.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  As soon as they're ready. That'd be amazing. Yeah. Have a great rest of your week. Have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  See you.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Thank you so much. Great to see y'all.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Anything else going on in the timeline? There's a bunch of stuff. Tons of images. Where else? Where else do we want to go today?

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  What other news?

• 1:52:11John Coogan?

  Oh, I wanted to get your take on this.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Imagine if Codex existed in 2005 and it's this very retro, people are doing, imagine if Codex existed in 2012 and it's the It's the Apple design cues from the early Mac OS X and then the Windows XP aesthetic. Do you think the Windows XP aesthetic is overdue for a comeback? This is in the middle of the GPT image two feed right there. This aesthetic.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta come back.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  This is a Mountain Dew.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  It would fix you.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  This would fix me. No, I, I, I, you know, I have somewhat memories of XP.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  John, John, imagine playing Halo while you just look over and this is just running there.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:53:05Jordi Hays?

  You're just drinking a Mountain Dew.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  For some reason, I don't know, that a lot of the Windows features that were launching during this time were a little bit rough. This was when Mac was starting to take off and these releases, Windows Vista, Windows post XP, post, what was it? I don't really, I don't even remember the other versions, but Windows 8, I think was one of them. They were starting to be less loved. They were starting to be a little bit more like, is it worth the upgrade? Is it a good, is it a good vibe? I mean, it's not nostalgic for me yet, I guess is what I'm saying, but

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  there are, there are a couple other important warnings in here. One of them, let me find it.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  I know, I know you had thought about potentially putting on a bear costume and trying to defraud your car insurer. And if you in the audience were thinking about dressing up like a bear and attacking your car in order to collect a insurance payout that's up to $141,000, think again, think again, because humans, this is in the New York Times, humans who used a bear suit to defraud car insurers are sentenced to jail. You might be thinking, I'll just throw on this bear suit and I'll attack my car and then I'll call my insurer and I'll collect a check and it'll be easy, easy money, easy money, get rich quick scheme.

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  No, three Southern California residents were sentenced to jail after masterminding a scheme in which they staged fake bear attacks on their luxury cars, then collecting more than $141,000 in insurance payouts. To carry out the attacks, the residents had a person in a bear suit climb into the cars and use claw-like kitchen essentials to leave scratch marks. The Los Angeles residents then filed claims to defraud three different insurance companies. So I don't understand why they had to be in a bear suit. Like, were they filming? Were they filming? Yes, there is security footage. Okay.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Okay, we're gonna pull up the security footage. It's absolutely.

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Rolls Royce Ghost.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost. I know someone who has one of those. I don't think he's responsible for this, but they are dressing up like a bear to get into the car and rip everything and destroy it so that you can file an insurance claim.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I'm just a bear. I'm gonna just get in this car.

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  The schemes are really out of control these days. That is a wild, wild one. The California Department of Insurance began its investigation called Operation Bear Claw after an insurance company flagged a suspicious claim about a, about a bear rifling through a 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost in Lake Arrowhead, California, where there are in fact bears. So it's not that unreasonable. The defendants. Claimed that a that the bear had damaged the interior of their Rolls Royce with photos they submitted to the insurance company showing scratched seats and doors. Video footage submitted with the claim and released by the department shows what appears to be a bear crawling around in the backseat of the Rolls Royce and swatting at the dashboard.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Investigators later discovered fraudulent claims submitted to two other insurance companies that claimed a bear had damaged the same interior.

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  They're just.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  Two Mercedes Benz.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Just scratching everything.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  That is like the most perfect scratch line. Like it's so suspicious. Like it's so clearly like, I feel like a bear's claws would be way more organic and like.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Also hopefully doing more damage. That looks like the weakest bear ever.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it's not a bear. It's a human. After its investigation, the department concluded that the culprit was not in fact a particularly nimble bear. The defendants were arrested in November of 2020.

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  So I would, I would, my, my first thought is not super believable that the bear walks up to the Rolls Royce, goes, opens the door and just goes around. But a few weekends ago.

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  I was hanging out at a former guest of the show's house. He has goats.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Friend drives up in his car, parks and leaves the door open. A few minutes later, what's in the car?

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  A bear.

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  A goat.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  A goat.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  A goat.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  Goat went in the car.

• 1:57:24Jordi Hays?

  Got into the car and was just like, and this was a, this was a, a Land Rover Defender.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  It was like quite a, quite a jump up.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Goat's a jump.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Goat jumps up and is just hanging around like actually just.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Was there damage to the Land Rover Defender?

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that, if, if there was, he didn't bring it up, but there were maybe some hoof marks.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Hoof marks?

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Some hoof scratches.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  And then this is all a complicated.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  It just seems like such, such a, such a wild scheme.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Here's a real bear going in a car.

• 1:57:51Jordi Hays?

  From Tyler.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Okay. It really can open the door.

• 1:57:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I feel like they had to have seen this video and thought, finally.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  I thought, I, I feel like most cars will automatically lock the doors. You know, this wouldn't happen with those, everyone loves to hate on the flat door handles that all the electric cars have. But bear's going to struggle to open a Tesla door for sure.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  This is, uh, is, is the bear still in there or is he, he's, wow. There's, there is, uh, there's a history of, of bear visitation.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  What do they know?

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Pasadena.

• 1:58:26Jordi Hays?

  What do they?

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  Uh, there was a woman who was on the local news and said that a bear came and, uh, and swam in her pool. And she seemed like oddly happy about it or like excited, like she sort of liked having the bear come and visit. And it felt like she wasn't exactly like building the strongest fence and maybe, uh, was sort of excited about the idea of a bear coming for a dip in the swimming pool. But people do odd things with animals. Uh, people dress up as bears. Scientists also apparently have been giving salmon cocaine. I have no idea why. But, uh, the New York Times has a post, the, these salmon got high on cocaine. That wasn't the craziest part.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  Scientists in Sweden made an unexpected discovery. I think Tyler read this piece and can spoil the ending because.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  What are they doing over there?

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  What is the unexpected? I think, I think they tested like what happens when you give the fish cocaine.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  And I think the answer was that they swim much faster and they can swim for longer.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:26Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  And that was unexpected? That feels like.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being the scientists that like didn't get a grant for their research.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, and they were working on something.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  I'm really close to breaking Alzheimer's.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  And they're reading this article and they're like, wait, like I was gonna do Alzheimer's research and then these scientists just wanted to give hard drugs to fish.

• 1:59:46Speaker 02

  Nearly twice as fast.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Nearly twice as fast. I guess that's somewhat interesting, but this does feel like something that could be one shotted by an LLM.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  There's no way, there's just no way you could have.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  You had to prove it.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  You had to prove.

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  You had to prove it. Uh, I mean, I guess it's relevant in the, in the field of environmental toxicology as much as we're joking around.

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  This is a good quote. While it's unclear if swimming faster and further while under the influences harm these fish, experts say it's probably not great.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, I guess if you're an environmental toxicologist, it is useful to have various data points on what happens with contaminants in the environment to the fish populations in specifically. And so I, I am willing to, uh, to believe that there is good that will come out of this, other than just a viral, a viral post. Uh, he wasn't trying to bring a Halloween hoax to life. He wanted to see how salmon in the wild reacted to pollution from the illegal drug. And there might in fact be pollution if the, you know, if, if importation goes poorly and, uh, and narcotics are delivered to the water supply, that would certainly not be good. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of waterways polluted with the drug cocaine, prompting

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  scientists to wonder how fish might be handling their highs. As it turns out, fish indeed get wired. Uh, in a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Brandon and his colleagues showed that coked up salmon, this is in the New York Times, coked up salmon swim, isn't there, isn't there some account that just says like, in like, like first time it's ever been printed in the New York Times and they just screenshot like words and phrases that feel funny in that particular, when they're shown in the gray lady in print. Uh, it makes them swim faster, travel farther than their sober counterparts. The study prompts additional questions about the effects that human drug habits may be having on salmon and other freshwater fish. Well, we certainly want clean waterways.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of things under the sea, Red Lobster brings back endless shrimp for a limited time, starting April 20th. Luke Metro says this is an EA cause area, hostile takeover of Red Lobster. Make it vegan. Make it vegan.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  No, they gotta, they gotta make a play to make it come back. And this seems like, uh, something that customers were clamoring for. So I don't, have you ever been to a Red Lobster?

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Nope.

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  I don't think I've ever been to a Red Lobster. I've done the Outback Steakhouse.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  There are things in life that I don't think I will ever do.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  And Red Lobster, I believe is one of them. Ben, have you been to Red Lobster? I've been there.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Jordi Hays?

  You, what's your? They're vegan in Minnesota. One to 10, wanna, uh? It's fine. I think they're all gone now.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  One, one, one to 10, what, what are you rating it?

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Like a five.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  Like a five.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  I think before it was. No fives, no fives. You gotta pick a side. Four.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  Four.

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Four. Okay.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  Subpar. It's sub 5 in fact. Anyway, thank you for watching. Anything else, Jordy, you want to run through?

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, it has been an honor and privilege to...

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  Well, this is kind of cool. ESPN launching sports-only trivia show called ESPN Jeopardy. I like this. I know this is a really, really good idea. I can't believe it took them 50 years to come up with this concept. But, uh, apparently Joe Buck is closing on a deal to host the show. ESPN Jeopardy is expected to air on Hulu, Disney Plus, and may make a run on linear TV on ABC or ESPN streaming platforms. Uh, very, this seems like, you know, so, so obvious in hindsight. I think it'll be very, very effective. A lot of sports fans love trivia, and now you can watch it.

• 2:03:15Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:03:17Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.