Trial Update, AI SPVs, BuzzFeed Sold | Doomberg, Sahir Jaggi, Sam Blond, Kevin Hartz, Alex Shan, Glen Wise, Roger Lynch

(00:23) - Trial Update (13:10) - AI SPVs (24:28) - Thinking Machines Interaction Models (29:16) - Doomberg is an anonymous team of former industry executives who write about energy markets, finance, and geopolitics, known for their green chicken avatar and a Substack newsletter with over 373,000 subscribers. In the conversation, Doomberg discusses their decision to maintain anonymity to preserve brand mystique, the strategic choice of their green chicken logo inspired by Bloomberg's keyboard color scheme, and the importance of standing out in a crowded media landscape. (01:05:12) - Sahir Jaggi, founder and CEO of Forus, discusses his company's mission to streamline access to high-cost, complex medications by automating the intricate processes involving insurance, pharmacies, and supply chains using AI. By offering this service for free to doctors' offices, Forus aims to alleviate administrative burdens, allowing healthcare providers to focus on patient care. Additionally, the company leverages its extensive network to collaborate with life science firms, accelerating the development and market introduction of new therapies. (01:14:06) - Sam Blond, co-founder and CEO of Monaco, an AI-native sales platform, discusses the company's rapid growth since its February launch, surpassing initial expectations in customer acquisition and revenue. He highlights Monaco's all-in-one approach, replacing traditional CRMs and integrating AI agents to automate sales tasks, thereby reducing the need for manual labor. Additionally, Blond emphasizes the unique advantage of pairing each customer with a forward-deployed account executive, ensuring successful implementation and support. (01:25:55) - Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Xoom and Eventbrite, is a prominent entrepreneur and investor. In the conversation, he discusses A* Capital's recent $450 million Fund III, emphasizing their generalist investment approach with a focus on AI applications, and highlights their strategy of supporting young founders, including teenagers. (01:38:52) - Alex Shan, CEO of Judgment Labs, discusses his company's focus on enhancing long-horizon autonomous agents through the analysis of production data, emphasizing the importance of such data in improving agent performance across various industries. He highlights their recent Series A funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Green Oaks, and mentions partnerships with companies like Monaco to optimize agent development. Shan also notes that while coding agents are currently the most verifiable and thus easier to improve, progress is being made in less quantifiable domains such as finance, legal, and sales. (01:45:55) - Glen Wise, Co-Founder and CEO of Cinder, discusses the company's recent $41 million funding round led by Radical Ventures and its mission to help companies combat AI-powered abuse across the internet. He explains that Cinder's platform enables clients to set specific policies to detect and mitigate various threats, from cyberbullying to state-sponsored espionage, using AI-driven solutions. Wise also highlights the challenges of scaling their services to accommodate large clients like Spotify, emphasizing the importance of processing data quickly and making rapid decisions to effectively enforce content policies. (02:00:46) - eBay Rejects Gamestop (02:03:05) - BuzzFeed Sold (02:09:46) - Roger Lynch is the CEO of Condé Nast, where he oversees global brands including Vogue, The New Yorker, and GQ. He previously served as CEO of Pandora and Sling TV, and is known for leading digital transformation efforts across media, streaming, and publishing businesses. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Tuesday, May 12, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra on the Temple of Technology, the Fortune's Finance, the Capital Capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  I'm boycotting.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  John's boycotting the soundboard.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  The soundboard. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have a bunch of guests and a bunch of news stories to go through. Of course, the trial is ongoing. Did you say that this might be the last week of the trial? I thought it was a four-week trial, but it sounds like it might wrap up.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Are they ahead of schedule?

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Mike Isaac said it might end this week. I assume just because they're getting through the, like, you know, depositions, whatever, faster than.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like Ilya has gone, Mira's gone, deposition.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Sam, Satya.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  And Siobhan Zillis, and then Sam's on the stand right now, I think. Mike Isaac is live tweeting it, so we'll run through that. We will also run through the run of show and what Brandon Gorrell wrote in the newsletter this week, this morning. Sam Altman took the stand in the OpenAI versus Elon Musk trial this morning. Just as a reminder, here's what's at stake, per the Wall Street Journal. Musk is suing OpenAI and its leaders, Altman and Greg Brockman, for allegedly manipulating him into giving tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit organization only for them to turn the AI lab into a for-profit venture. Musk is also suing Microsoft, OpenAI's largest investor, for aiding Brockman and Altman in their alleged deception. So, a big point, a big turning point in the trial

• 1:24John Coogan?

  was last Wednesday, when former OpenAI CTO Mira Maroti and former board member Helen Tonner gave testimonies about the events leading up to the November 2023 failed board coup that were critical of Sam Altman's leadership style in Candor. They call it the blip, where Sam was out and then back very quickly with a couple other people stepping into CEO for just a few days. But last week, OpenAI's side also began to land some punches on Musk. Earlier, testimony from Siobhan Zillis and Greg Brockman also had already suggested Musk was not just defending a pure nonprofit vision. He had explored scenarios where OpenAI might become a part of Tesla, where Altman might help lead Tesla AI, and where Musk could retain deep control. Brockman also testified that.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Musk supported a for-profit conversion if Musk could control it. According to, including a version tied to raising money for his Mars ambitions. Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever took the stand. Satya largely buffed OpenAI's side, defending Microsoft's partnership with the company and saying that Musk never contacted him to complain about the deal violating any agreement Musk had with the, with, with OpenAI's nonprofit, despite Musk having Satya's number. Ilya testified that he spent a year compiling a 50-page document documenting Sam's manipulative behavior, but also said he never promised Musk that OpenAI would remain permanently nonprofit.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Also, it came out in the trial that Sutskever's stake in OpenAI is probably worth around 7 billion, which probably complicated how the judge and jury feel about his own motivations. So the story is, since Maroti is first, the trial became a referendum on Altman's trustworthiness, then it became a referendum on whether the 2023, the 2023 board was brave or incompetent, then Microsoft came in and tried to make it look like it was the stabilizing partner. Now Altman has to personally answer the core questions hanging over the whole case, whether OpenAI's evolution was a necessary adaptation to build Frontier AI or a betrayal of the nonprofit mission Musk says he funded. The trial is expected to conclude this week and you can

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Max Zeth pulled out a quote from Ilya.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  This is

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Explaining why OpenAI has a for-profit. And he's, he, I guess, yeah, was, was playing, I don't think intentionally playing into the meme potential, but certainly that's how it played out. Ilya said, under oath in a federal court, if there's no funding, there's no big computer. Max Zeth says, in the running for quote of the year.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  If there's no funding, there's no big computer and you need big computer if you want big AI.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Yaseen says, bro walks around like he knows someone is going to make a movie about him. Probably thinks of quotes that are going to sound good in movies to help Christopher Nolan in the future. In fact, I bet Christopher Nolan is messaging him close. To say as an early investment.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, the Iliad. That's what they're calling it. Well, Sam Altman takes a stand in Musk versus OpenAI. Mike Isaac has a live blog going on X under Rat King with lots of, with lots and lots of side notes about his diet for the day. He seems to have continually be depending on a single banana for sustenance, which I'm surprised by. But let's run through some of what Mike Isaac is finding and saying. Where does this start? In the coffee line now? It's so confusing because he has a butt pillow in the car. Okay, I'm going to go back to the other one.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Wait, he forgot it?

• 5:01John Coogan?

  No, I think he got it, but he's very upset. There are many, you will get, there's many twists and turns in the Mike Isaac saga.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's really the meta story.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Happening around the trial.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Potentially bigger.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Potentially bigger.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, is there, is there a world where Mike Isaac sues the court for having uncomfortable chairs? Sue, sue the federal government. It's a federal courthouse. So OpenAI begins questioning Altman, much in the same way that the plaintiff's side had questioned Elon Musk, establishing that Altman, like Musk, has been enamored with AI for years and wanted to build inventive things with it. This was a very interesting tidbit from that, that original, like, that viral quote from Sam where he's like, AI will probably destroy the world. Like, that was, that happened in 2015 and it was an answer to a question of like, what do you think the key problems to solve are? And then the next sentence in that quote that always gets clipped out is like,

• 5:55John Coogan?

  and I'm starting a company, oh, it's more of a nonprofit, to work on this problem exactly. But that doesn't make it in. But, so they were clearly both very interested in building beneficial AI, although they ultimately butted heads. And they were also very worried about Google. Rat King, Mike Isaac says, theme of the trial is basically everyone hates Google.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  We know the origin of the Rat King Nick sort of moniker.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  You don't know what a Rat King is? A Rat King is where so many rats come together that they ball together into one single organism and become a Rat King. I believe it's a reference to 30 Rock. It's a

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Asking chat.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  It's a bit. Anyway, Altman email from 2015. Been thinking a lot whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. And so this was what Elon and Sam were talking about back in 2015. Author status update. Hungry, uncomfortable, hit points taking tiredness, poison damage. Dota mentioned again, and Sam had to explain the difference between Dota, Dota 2, and the 5v5 player game. Just keep going back to Dota. Altman said Musk once said he would potentially pass control of OpenAI to his children upon his death. I would love to know more about

• 7:21John Coogan?

  what that means, because if you fracture it into like 20 different children at a certain point, like that can create a whole different dynamic of like succession, right? As opposed to

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe, maybe he wants to set up a reality TV show where they compete.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  To take over the company.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  So I think this is new, but there's an old email that says Altman might have joined the board of Tesla as part of old AI discussions. Also came with a nascent threat of Musk doing this AI work inside of Tesla. Very, it would be a shame if you didn't accept my offer sort of moves. The Tesla is off, the Tesla offer is interesting, says Mike Isaac. Musk's offer, Musk offers a board seat. Altman says it was something he felt was to assuage concerns that Altman would have no direction over the development of AI if it were folded into Tesla. But Altman also said it appeared to be a nascent threat. If Altman had not accepted the idea, according to him, Musk hinted that it may

• 8:19John Coogan?

  have done, that he may have done work developing AI on his own at Tesla regardless. And Mike Isaac gives some more context here. He says, this sort of talk is fairly commonplace these days on the battlefield that is Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, has in the past made overtures to companies he's interested in acquiring, though he is often more explicit about his intentions. If you don't take the deal, we'll come for you. Tony. Vibes. His back hurts. Continuing. Altman is criticizing stack ranking of engineers across AI labs, something Musk loves to do across his companies, apparently, and something very common across big codes like Meta and Amazon. And also, Microsoft is known for the for the stack ranking. They

• 9:00John Coogan?

  almost like invented it or certainly popularized it throughout the 90s and 2000s, I believe. But Altman says AI engineering labs need more psychological safety. You have to be willing to let a researcher go off and try something random in the corner. Very bottoms up. This is where the deep research project came from and a bunch of other AI breakthroughs came from. LMAO. Altman says there was a meeting at Tesla during the evening about folding OpenAI into Tesla for AI research and then a long, long period of time with Elon showing us memes on his phone. And apparently, the court reporter asked Sam Altman to repeat memes on his phone loudly. I

• 9:43John Coogan?

  don't know why they didn't hear it the first time. But Rat King, Mike Isaac is laughing at this. I am going to have Sam Altman stating memes on his phone into a booming courtroom mic playing inside of my head on repeat for the week. Memes on his phone in all caps. Getting hungry. He only had a banana this morning. Mike Isaac is suffering. His stamina points are draining. And he says LOL email between Altman and Siobhan talking about how to handle Musk and Altman telling him about a Microsoft investment. So Microsoft's going to invest. How how should we tell Elon? Altman narrates the email verbatim. Hopefully, it's easy. Cross fingers emoji, because you have to read it out. So really funny to hear cross fingers emoji in the court record. Altman is going through

• 10:27John Coogan?

  his real first postmortem of his firing, appears to have gone through all five stages of grief multiple times over the course of five days. What are the five stages of grief? Stages of grief?

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  Cope, seethe.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Cope, seethe, mauled.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yeah, that is, that is actually cope, seethe. The five day period is what is referred to internally at OpenAI as the blip, since it was a brief intermission, for what it's worth. He said, Altman said, "I had poured the last years of my life into this. I was watching it about to be destroyed. There was something appealing about going to work at Microsoft. I was also very angry, hurt, and upset. It felt like an incredible betrayal. It was definitely one of the hardest times in my life." Altman finally broaches the issue of his widely rumored untrustworthiness. "Clearly, there were misunderstandings and a breakdown of trust," he said. But with, but, but with what comes of a bit of a practiced humility in his voice, quote, "I was not trying to deceive the board.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  I feel badly for the misunderstandings, but that was never my intent. This goes to the heart of how Musk's counsel has tried to portray Altman across the entirety of the trial. A fundamentally slippery operator who says one thing to one party and something else entirely to others." OpenAI's rebuttal to that line of thinking has been to depict a board of directors at OpenAI rife with dysfunction. And as Microsoft Satya Nadella put it earlier in this week, "Directors who are operating from amateur city." Interesting. Taking shots at the board. Okay, Sam is giving a full jury Sam treatment again, trying to bat back against Musk's picture of Altman as a serious liar. "If I knew how difficult and painful this was going to be, I never would have tried, but I'm very glad I did." OpenAI is done. Cross-examination begins.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Steven Molo, lead Musk counsel, who has the flair for dramatic, will probably give us fireworks. And this is continuing. Says, "Oh, my God, Molo, are you completely, are you completely trustworthy?" Altman says, "I believe so." Molo says, "Do you always tell the truth?" Wow, this is getting heavy. It's all about Musk counsel painting Sam as a liar. Brutal. Altman is on the defensive, but taking more of a muted tone with some attempted humility in his voice. It's very clear contrast with how Musk appeared combative on the stand. Interesting. Cross-examination is basically Musk's lawyer, Molo, reading off a list of questions, saying, "Hey, bro, do you remember, do you remember all this messed up stuff you did?" And Altman saying, "No, I don't know. Not true, no."

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Absolute chaos. Well, you can follow along at Mike Isaac. He has a whole thread and he's live posting and I believe that there's a New York Times Live Blog as well that you can follow along with, although the Live Blog does not have nearly enough snack updates. But anyway.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Should we talk about SPVs?

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Cover this. Yes, let's move over to SPVs, the special purpose vehicles.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  Post from Frankie.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Rocking the valley right now. People are raking in the dough with SPVs.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  But not everyone's happy about it.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, we can actually go down a little bit and pull up this post, which has since been deleted.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  The post said, a few days ago, "Simply brokering an anthropic secondary deal made me more money than my entire net worth from working in my twenties. This is insane. It is especially insane because this is not legal. It is insane to post."

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Uh, is it not legal?

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you need a broker dealer license to broker securities.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, I mean, she didn't say that she doesn't have one. She might.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, very, very unlikely. It's very burdensome. Just the compliance, to actually get your own broker dealer.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Even there's people that I know that just do secondary transactions. They don't even have their broker dealer license. They work under a firm.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  That does. They basically like contract with a firm.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  So they're kind of like, almost like a real estate agent working under a broker.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  I'm smelling an intern challenge. Tyler?

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  Get your broker dealer.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Get your broker dealer license.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Figure out a way to use AI to bring down the compliance burden.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Slash goal. Throw that slash goal down. Get me a broker dealer license.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  X high.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  X high, 5.5 codex.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Uh, and try and, try and get your broker dealer license.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Let's see what it does.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, turns out that if you want to broker securities.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Transactions.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  It is, uh, there's a big regulatory burden.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  For good reason, right?

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  We're talking about, you know, uh, transactions that are

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  At the scale of high-end residential real estate in this case.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, if, if this individual was maybe getting like a 5% fee on the deal, paid in cash, who knows?

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Now.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  It could have been, you know.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Wait, there, there is another take here, which is that. There's the term brokering, which requires the broker dealer license. But there is also the format where you set up an SPV. The SPV takes in money from an investor and then buys secondary from someone who has the right to sell it. Maybe an investor who is not subject to the form that we saw Anthropic put out, right? And in that case.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to that.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  We'll get to that. But hypothetically, there are SPVs that they are not technically brokering the secondary deal, but they are facilitating it and they do take a fee, right? Because SPVs often have fees associated with them. And that does not require a broker dealer license, right?

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  But the straightforward interpretation of the post is that they had some sort of side letter, which was like, if I can find you, yeah, if I can find you a buyer, if I can find you a buyer for 100 million of your shares, you give me 5 million dollars.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  That happens a lot, but it usually and hopefully is happening through.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Legal channels, yeah.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Dealer. So this seemingly prompted both.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I think this is what started it, right? This must be what started it because that post went really viral.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  More specific language on their site saying Anthropic said unauthorized Anthropic stock sales and investment scams.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  And said, you know, basically saying any transfer or sale of Anthropic's stock or any interest in Anthropic's stock that has not been approved by our board of directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, typically, yeah, typically like these are, there are so many ways to like transact without informing the company.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  Right? A common one would be, you know, futures contract.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Basically selling the right to

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  The right to the investment and the future performance.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so I think the futures, the economic exposure enthusiasts, the futures contracts teams would say that, well, we didn't, there was no sale of the stock. We didn't transfer the stock and it's not a direct interest in the stock. And so it doesn't need to be approved by the board of directors. And the board of directors would say, absolutely not, that doesn't count. You think you found a workaround and it doesn't count in this world, but that is going to be, you know.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the funny thing is there's these sort of digital asset equivalents, like people making

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Some of them put out comments.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Basically meme stocks around that are trying to track overall interest or the overall valuation of these companies. They sold off, which is funny because I don't believe they're actually tied to any real underlying equity.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  And even in the case

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  It was purely sentiment based.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  And even in the case that they were like saying that they were tied, it was typically like it won 1% to 5% of the fund in Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX. And they were like already well disconnected from the fundamentals of the book value, right?

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'm trying to think through how this plays out. And overall, I think the reaction from the internet was like being more dramatic than maybe, maybe is necessary because already like if you're, if you're, let's say, an early investor in Anthropic and you at some point sold your shares, you didn't go to the board and get permission, but you structured some deal to sell your shares.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  You get your shares back.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  That is so, so

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Win-win.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  Waiting, well, waiting for that.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  On one hand, neither party, if you bought the shares or you sold the shares, neither party is that incentivized to go to Anthropic board and be like, hey, I'm really sorry. Like, we did this. It was against. Because on one hand, like, there's probably some scenario where the investor or the Anthropic employee could get their shares, like, voided or reclaimed in some scenario. So they don't necessarily want to do that. The investor is like, well, I bought these shares and now they're worth a lot more, so let's just, like, be chill and let this play out and we'll all forget about it, right? But there is a scenario where the seller tries to then make the case of, oh, actually, I'll just give you the money back because now the stock is appreciated so massively.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  There might be a weird. But what ends up happening is like, there's sort of this, like, legal tension, right? Tension between both these parties. And then there could be some incentive. Again, the person that bought the shares at a lower valuation wants to just let it ride.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  But then, but then, somebody might be like, well, I kind of would happily ride up another 20x or something like that. But then if this starts going, if, once it goes into, like, an actual complaint or a lawsuit, then it becomes public. And then you have this third party in there, which is Anthropic, which is like, gonna just be like, hey, like, you guys have been messing around. Like, this isn't, this isn't cool. This is against, against, you know, multiple sort of agreements and, and terms. So, anyway, it's gonna be very messy, right?

• 20:40John Coogan?

  So there's, there's, there's already been- This blog post is also, these blog posts are not new rules. It's merely they are publicizing rules that are probably already in the stock documents.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Because if you invested earlier, you're an employee.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  You should know all this.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Which isn't a surprise, right?

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Well, it's possible that very early investors don't have transfer restrictions for some reason. I don't think so. It's pretty standard.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  No, you always, you always set this up as a company because, imagine you have an early angel investor and your company does well, and they just sell it to somebody who you don't like. Like, part of the reason to be private is you can control who-

• 21:15John Coogan?

  I just mean, like, every deal is unique and every deal gets negotiated points- And there might be of some point when some investor employee was like, I'm not joining unless you give me this. And they're like, okay, yeah, we'll give, we'll pay you less, but we'll give you this.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  There's always like horse trading, like double trigger, single trigger.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it would be, it would be like.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  I, I, I agree with you. I agree. I agree with you. But.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, who knows how many transactions there's actually been.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Right? I would expect like, certainly like, I don't know, there could be like, when you actually look down through all the trees of SPVs and SPVs.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  A lot, a lot.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Be, what, what?

• 21:52John Coogan?

  A lot.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  10 over.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  20,000.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not like taxi cab driver telling you about the SPV that they got into yet, but it's like close to it. I mean, there was the story of the guy who was like selling his house for Anthropic Secondary, right? Like, there's a lot of examples of this, like.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's bad too. Imagine, imagine the, the, the, the like record updates.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Like, like you'll be able to look at the deed or whatever.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, who's the new owner? Oh, you work, you're an early.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  Like, so that transaction, that whole transaction doesn't really work.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. And that's extremely public.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  It's way more complicated. Yeah. Yeah. Very odd. Well, let's break it down for the Frog and Toad fans, the children in the audience, because Frankie over at Paradigm, put it in terms even a child could explain, potentially a four or five year old. So if you're familiar with just Frog and Toad and you don't know anything about all the buzzwords we've been dropping for the last five minutes, you can think about it this way. Frog and Toad, the loved children's book. Frog put the shares of Anthropic or OpenAI in an SPV there. He said, now we can transfer these shares freely. But Anthropic can still exercise its transfer restrictions, said Toad. That is true, said Frog. The Frog and Toad, it's a great one.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  It's a great one. Is there anything else we need to talk about there? Ankur says, if Anthropic deems all secondary sales of Anthropic's stock should be voided, does that mean the original buyer retains financial interest even after selling it away? Lawsuit territory? Yeah, there's gonna be a messy thing. People have been talking about unwinding SpaceX AAA or SPVs for a long time.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's gonna be a billion dollar, that's gonna be almost a billion dollar industry.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to get the Mac, we need to get the MacGrom clip up again. It goes viral every time we talk about SPVs.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  What does Mike Isaac say? He says, yeah, look, all the Privcos draft this language to scare employees who don't know better from trading on secondary markets and from buyers seeking those shares, and yet SPVs find a way. Funny to see the saber rattling in Twitter accounts doing hyperbolic posts, though. And so it'll be interesting to see, like, how far does the legal implications? How far do they actually go? Well, over at a different AI lab, Mira Maroti, who is just, was Mira on the stand? She was actually testifying in person, or was she just a video deposition?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  When I saw her, which was last Wednesday, it was just a deposition. I don't believe she actually has testified in the trial yet.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  It was Siobhan that was on the stand.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay. Well, Mira is cooking over at Thinking Machines Lab. TML launched interaction models with a delightfully concise YouTube video that we should play so that we can watch this. Mira Maroti says on X, "Today, we are sharing our work on interaction models, a new class of model, trained from scratch to handle real-time interaction natively instead of gluing it to, onto a turn-based one." Let's play the video.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Hey, I need your help with something today. You ready?

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I'm ready. What's up?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're giving an announcement today, and I've got two of my friends coming to help. Every time one of them enters the frame, I need you to say, "Friend."

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Look at those speakers.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Absolutely insane setup, audio file.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  So we've got a new system for full duplex audio and video, which means that you can stream input into it in real time, and it can respond to you even while you're speaking to it simultaneously. How does that sound?

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Sounds like a solid setup. Full duplex with real-time interaction is super useful.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  It seems faster than the original voice mode, which was lamented by viral Instagram reel producers.

• 25:46Speaker 05

  Can you translate in English in real time for my friend and for audience?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Absolutely, I'll translate as you go.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Today, we're taking a look at our preview model.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  I saw, or I heard about, a version of this in China. That's a mask that you wear that translates everything you say out of a speaker on the front. And I was hearing this and I was just like, why is this not in America? This seems so sick. Like, we hear about the AirPods, but then you... So, the example was a mom in China teaching her kids English. And so she basically wants to be talking to them in English constantly, but she doesn't know enough English to teach them, but she wants them to learn. And so she will, I think, wear...

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Put on the mask.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  No, it's literally a Bane mask. It looks exactly like a Bane mask. Yeah. Yeah. You merely adopted English. She was born in it, or born in the AI translation minds. So she wears this Bane mask that does the live translation out to her kids. Her kids speak back to her in English. Smart headphones translate back.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Does it have, like, metal that wraps around?

• 26:57John Coogan?

  I don't know. I couldn't find it. I was listening to it on a podcast, so I didn't have any visuals. But we gotta find this thing and get a pair in America. Because in theory, we could do the whole show speaking Chinese to each other, and the audience would hear Chinese. But we would be hearing English that we talk to each other.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Isn't that cool?

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  So I would be hearing English on a massive delay, probably. But I would be speaking Chinese as it comes out of my Bane mask. And it was just a whole story. The whole thrust of the New York Times Daily was like the optimism of AI, optimism in China around AI. Just tons and tons of examples of, you know, everyday people being like, "Oh yeah, AI is amazing. I'm teaching my kids English. They're gonna have a great life." And like, I would not... I'd be able to do this before and now I can just do this. And there's like so many examples of that. It's the exact opposite.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  David says the moment Jordi gets a live translation button, it's over. Yeah, we're not that far away from me being able to press the button.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  We're working on that right now, actually.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, for, I guess.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  You're serious? Oh, yeah, for yes.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  For that mask, I would actually be very surprised if that's like real or at least if the audio sounds very good. No, because like you can just look at like, okay, what are the best like real time translation models? What are they like API prices? They're like not super cheap. So you can't do it locally, which means it's somehow in the cloud, right? Um, and just like even the best models are, there's still some delay. And they're just basically now getting to a point where it like sounds like a real person and not like super computer sized audio.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  It has a, it has a clanker dialect to it.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Okay, so yeah, maybe, but, but just like getting the latency down is like extremely difficult. Because people have been working on this for, I mean, this is like Google Translate.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  You don't think you can do it on device at all? What if you basically bake a phone?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  At some point you can, but I think it's still like very difficult.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Phone ASIC for this one model, you take the Llama 3 version of it, you bake it down. Huge battery pack, you're wearing a whole jet pack full of batteries to power the H100 in the back. It's on device inference, but they didn't say how big the suit is. You have to wear the connects for the mask.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like the Nathan for you. No, it's like the Nathan for you, the chili suit.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's an NBL 72 that you're just like dragging behind you like a washing machine. Uh, anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Doomberg, the anonymous poster and analyst with us in the waiting room. We'll bring in Doomberg to the TV panel. Doomberg, how are you doing?

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  Stunning.

• 29:20Speaker 06

  Hey guys, doing great.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. I love an animated avatar. Uh, can you, what can you tell the audience about who you are, why you chose anonymity, pseudonymity, any of that? Just as a way of an introduction.

• 29:36Speaker 06

  Sure. Brief intro. First, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 29:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, we are a anonymous team of former industry executives that write about the energy markets.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:47Speaker 06

  When we launched Doomberg five years ago this month, um, we had nothing. And so we decided to build Doomberg on Twitter back then. And, um, the, the choice came down between another middle aged white guy in a tie.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 06

  Or a green chicken. And, um, you can't be remembered if you don't stand out. And so. That decision actually accelerated our early growth and then once a brand kinda kinda blows up, we observe other other Twitter accounts de-anonymizing and it kinda destroys the brand mystique. So it's nothing more than that, really.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree. Why is the chicken green?

• 30:28Speaker 06

  Um, well, another master stroke of marketing by our co-founder and editor in chief. So our ideal clients have Bloomberg terminals. And the colors on the Bloomberg keyboard are pretty iconic.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  I get it.

• 30:43Speaker 06

  And and the most dominant color on that keyboard is is a cloaks proximity to the green that we currently wear.

• 30:52Speaker 06

  So yeah, just a it's the a brand is the gut feeling you induce in people when they interact with your product. And if our ideal clients have a Bloomberg keyboard and they see the green chicken, you know, doom, burg chicken, little gets a terminal was our first uh first tagline and they don't know why they like it. Some combination of the colors and the stunted eyes, we think. But yeah, it works. And when you got a winner, you know, just keep riding it.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  I love it. I love, I love, I love combining this this high love, right? Which is like, you know, serious content with uh.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Sorry, I yeah, I want to talk about energy and AI, but I also want to talk about the like the workflow here. Because like, am I just watching like a looping animated GIF or MP4 file? Or can you actually puppeteer this like a VTuber? Or have you considered that?

• 31:45Speaker 06

  This is very low tech.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:48Speaker 06

  There's no new Coke yet in design.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:51Speaker 06

  This is a GIF.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  Animated as our background on Zoom.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 31:56Speaker 06

  And I'm speaking to you through a Roland VT4.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  Slightly modified in real time.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:03Speaker 06

  The latency is perfect.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  To build on your last discussion.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've had a couple of guests come on and want to do voice changers and no one's landed the plane like you have. So congratulations and for dialing in.

• 32:16Speaker 06

  Technology is one of the five pillars of any business and we decided to invest in our technology plan to execute. The vision of the green chicken. Come on. I mean, it works. Every time I see a advertisement of all these serious finance people in suits and ties, speaking at a conference, and then a green chicken is sitting there.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  Let me take this suit off real quick.

• 32:34Speaker 06

  It makes me laugh every time.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  That's so good.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  All right. Talk about the other four pillars.

• 32:39Speaker 06

  Uh, brand, channel, technology, demand creation, and operations.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Okay, makes sense.

• 32:44Speaker 06

  And we have a plan for each. One of the hallmarks of Duneberg's execution on Substack is that we openly shared how we built Duneberg from the beginning.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:53Speaker 06

  In a series of monthly pieces called The Work of My Life.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  And it's been fun. Been a fun ride. We've got almost like 400,000 email subscribers now.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Congratulations.

• 33:04Speaker 06

  Crazy. Crazy run.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  You said it was just a couple of people, right?

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Um, our official statement is that you could count them on one hand with a few fingers left over.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Sure. Okay.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Leaving some ambiguity, but with a few is a few, three?

• 33:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Uh, let's, yeah, let's start with, uh, let's start with energy markets. Let's start with the Strait of Hormuz. I've heard it's closed. Is that good? How bad are things? How serious is the situation in the, in the oil and gas markets? And then we can go through some of the knock on effects, but just in terms of like, like, you know, a lot of people have been tracking this, but where are we on the cutting edge right now in terms of where this all goes?

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're launching a piece tomorrow. Look, if you had given us this fact set in February and asked us to bet the over under of 150 on oil, we would be homeless because I would personally have, um, mortgaged the house to greedily bet more on the over.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Right.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  And, and would have lost. And I think one of the great mysteries of this whole affair is why is oil still so cheap?

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  Um, and it's a really interesting mystery. Go ahead.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that feels like that's true for also just like the broader market. Like the market is not processing in the same way. And maybe it's like the AI narrative, which we can get into, but it feels like there's a very, very big, historically significant thing happening and everyone's just sort of like closing their eyes. I don't know. How do you explain it?

• 34:31Speaker 06

  So we've got a deep think on it. Nobody knows. So one of the things about the oil markets is everybody lies. That's the first thing. And one of the sort of theories I was bouncing around with a guy who traded oil for 50 years over the weekend was There was an enormous excess of oil all of last year. China bought most of it. They lied about it. And they're bleeding that into the market now to keep a lid on prices. Got it. Um, that's one sort of conspiratorial look. Yeah.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, and sorry, just a double tap there. You're saying they were lying about their, the, the levels of their oil reserves. So saying like, you know, basically under, underselling.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. So there's a lot of dirty oil. There's a lot of dirty oil on the market and they were buying it, you know, sanctioned oil, shadow fleet, Russian oil, Iranian oil. Sure. Um, and, um, and so you.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Because back at the beginning, when it first closed, weren't people saying China has 40 days of oil or something like, something.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  Oh, they have, they have 1.8 billion barrels is our best guess. Um, they probably bought a million or two million and a half barrels a day extra all of last year. Wow. Um, and they're using that for geopolitical leverage now. They're cutting refined fuel deals with Australia. They're helping out their neighbors, um, looking like the mature, stable, don't have a true social, uh, a true social account to post on during the day. Um, you know, um, ascending power with Trump going there this week. Yeah. Look, I just want to say in a world where oil is more expensive, oil doesn't matter like it used to. Mm hmm. It used to be 55% of global energy. Now it's 30 and change. And to the stock market, look, the AI revolution is powered by coal in China and natural gas in the US. Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  And natural gas in the US has been made cheaper by this war for reasons that we can explain. And, um, coal is basically insulated from oil. And so I, I don't think it's all that crazy, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah. Doesn't mean we would have predicted a hundred dollar oil 60 days into the Strait of Hormuz being closed or 75 days, whatever it's been. But I, anybody saying that they would have not predicted a calamity is lying.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Going back in time, are you learning any lessons or pulling any historical lessons from the previous wars in the Middle East? I grew up at a time when the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq were breaking out, and the protest signs said "No Blood for Oil," which is a completely reasonable thing to say. But I was surprised by the fact that if you look at the oil markets during that time, it feels like, even if you took the cynical approach that the US was going there to steal the oil, it didn't seem like that oil was successfully stolen and flooded the market. And I'm wondering what else you've learned from history and the various conflicts in

• 37:24John Coogan?

  the Middle East about oil prices that you can like draw on today, if anything.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  Well, for that war, James Baker went around the world and told all of our allies to start pumping ahead of it to insulate the world from it. The real comparison everyone draws is the Iran embargo following the war in the Middle East in 1973.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:44Speaker 06

  But the big difference between then and now, aside from the fact that oil just matters less, is that there's an organization called the IEA that exists, and they have worked with the developing world to ensure that countries have a stockpile of oil for this exact situation. And they flooded the markets shortly after the strait was closed with 400 million barrels. You know, there's still, when you do the math, there's, oil prices should be higher, and they just aren't. So it's, there will be lots of time for an after-action report when this war is done. But for AI and for the tech world, natural gas in the US being cheap and coal in China

• 38:27Speaker 06

  being cheap means those data centers are humming and all is good.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  What's driving natural gas prices right now?

• 38:36Speaker 06

  Great question. So the shale revolution in the US not only made the US a net oil exporter...

• 38:44Speaker 06

  It twinned the production of natural gas and oil. It used to be that natural gas was drilled for on purpose, oil was drilled for on purpose. And now in the shale patch, in the same well, you get natural gas and oil.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  Especially in the Permian. We're drowning in natural gas in the Permian. So when the strait is closed, oil spikes, drilling goes up, and you've got all this natural gas to get rid of.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep, got it.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  It's co-production economics, which is actually not widely understood. And that's like pulling on our industry days. Whenever you have to compete against a co-producer, it's terrible. Because if either of the markets are hot, they're producing too much, and they're flooding the market with the unwanted byproduct, which happens to be what you make. And so when the war broke out, we correctly predicted that natural gas in the US, despite a global energy shortage, would, prices would go down. And in fact, as we're talking today, natural gas is trading in the US for like three bucks, a million BTU, which is about eighteen dollars a barrel oil. And in the Permian Basin, it's negative spot prices. They're giving it away.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  They're drilling for the oil, the natural gas is a nuisance.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  So it's possible there's a superintelligence that's already in control that wants to feed on natural gas. And so they're playing, yeah, this 4D chess, political chess.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  This is the ultimate, you know, Claude, Agent Conner, where I am.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. How is China, is China potentially the biggest loser here? Because I imagine that coal and oil cannot be co-produced in the same way. And so you don't have that dynamic playing out. Are they being squeezed? Like, who, who is suffering the worst from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, I suppose?

• 40:30Speaker 06

  Europe and Australia. China's going to come out the big winner in this.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  Okay, why?

• 40:35Speaker 06

  A variety of reasons. So first of all, China has been building out something we've chronicled to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, the ability to convert coal into oil products.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:44Speaker 06

  The only two regimes to have done this historically are the Nazis and apartheid South Africa. It's quite the exclusive club the Chinese have decided to join. You do that out of necessity when you're worried about losing access to oil. It's very expensive, very environmentally taxing. It's not something you would do spontaneously to create shareholder value. You do it for geopolitical insulation. But also, China's sway in the Middle East is going to grow if Iran continues to resist the US Israeli strikes and controls the Strait of Hormuz because Iran is being backstopped by Russia and China.

• 41:29Speaker 06

  And so, in a world where the US has lost some geopolitical leverage in a zero-sum game, China benefits. And we'll see what happens this week. I think this is going to be a historic summit.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you next. What are you expecting?

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive into that, I did want to, one more question around oil. How are you forecasting whether we get high prices or massive shortages with, you know, oil, you know, everything from gasoline to other oil-based products? Because I think there, I think, like, a lot of people right now are kind of projecting, hey, we're just going to pay more at the pump. But then, there is some scenario, depending on how things play out, where you actually have, you know, you can't just go to, you know, we were talking yesterday, and, you know, maybe there's a scenario where, depending on the last digit of your license plate,

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  if it's an odd or an even number, you can only go on certain days, and you get actual rationing.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  That's not going to happen in the US. It depends where you are. So, the US is a net oil exporter. It's a bit complicated. We're detailing it all tomorrow. Trump is playing a careful game where he is allowing the export of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel to try to help the rest of the world. And the US is still well-supplied, but is paying more. So, we see $5 gas, $6, $7 diesel. Trump could reverse that at any time, just by limiting the exports of refined products. He's choosing not to yet. But if you're in Australia, you're already in a situation where you have to have urgent intervention by the government, who have done a great job, by the way. And you're up, you know, when you don't make your own hydrocarbons, and you're beholden

• 43:17Speaker 06

  to the rest of the world, well, if everybody turtles up and says, "We're not going to export until our domestic, you know, demands are met," then you will see real shortages and no amount of price will clear.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  And so, North America is fine. If you draw a circle around Canada and the US, the two countries are self-sufficient in oil, diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, fertilizers, wheat, corn, sulfur, helium, all the things that people are worried about globally. We have not yet instituted export controls, but before the stocks would run dry, especially with the midterms coming up, you would assume that Trump and Carney would collaborate on such a, such an action.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Have you been tracking the Diet Coke shortage?

• 44:04Speaker 06

  I have not been tracking the Diet Coke shortage.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Apparently, 8% of aluminum goes through the strait of her moves.

• 44:10Speaker 06

  Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  The cans are in short supply now.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is top of mind, top of mind for us, because John could run to the, to the studio if he didn't have gas, but, you know, the show wouldn't be possible without him going through three or four of these.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  Well, I got one word for you two.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 06

  Plastics.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Plastics. Not gonna be popular with some people.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, you technically can get a Diet Coke.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  You could just buy a 2-liter bottle. Or maybe fountain. Maybe fountain is the future.

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  Fertilizer was, was my last, last question around, yeah, how, you know, how are you, I don't know, if you're covering, you know, future, you know, food prices, commodity pricing, etc. But...

• 44:54Speaker 06

  We, we sure are, again, North America, both in, well, in nitrogen, in, in phosphorus, in potassium, the big three. Canada and the US are self-sufficient. Canada has the world's

• 45:09Speaker 06

  biggest, most fantastic potassium deposit, potash deposit up in Saskatchewan. We wrote about this a couple of months ago, before the war. The US, you know, ammonia is basically just a natural gas play, and the US is drowning in natural gas.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 45:23Speaker 06

  Through the Haber process, you just take natural gas, long story, but you make ammonia that way. There will be shortages of fertilizer around the world, there will be food shortages, and all that really means is it'll be more expensive for the rich countries, and there won't be food in the poor countries. This is what we see historically, is the market clears, and the poorest countries in the world suffer, and the rich countries complain.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Black pill. Do you have any white pills? Is there a good ending that you are guiding towards optimistic about? Is there anything that you're optimistic about right now?

• 45:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think a major deal is in the works between. Look, I don't think Trump would be going to Beijing. I know we wanted to talk about that. Trump wouldn't be going to Beijing if there wasn't a major deal and the list of CEOs going with him is quite the tell. Broadly, you don't have the President of China and the President of the United States get together in such a high-profile visit without a bunch of stuff worked out in advance. And I would, I personally, being vehemently anti-war, would love to see a solution to Iran and Ukraine all tied up in a nice bow. And the US focus on its neighborhood here

• 46:38Speaker 06

  in the Western Hemisphere and we get back to growing and computing and competing and drilling for energy and making money in stocks and let the President make all the money he wants in crypto. I don't care. But another war in the Middle East was not on the bingo card for us in 2026.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  I don't think many people voted for it. Well, let's shift over to what's happening in America if we can get back to domestic policy. What are you tracking on the AI build-out? How important is energy? Everyone's been going back and forth on the chip bottleneck, the energy bottleneck, the chip bottleneck, the energy bottleneck. Do you have a viewpoint? Has it evolved? Where do you see the build-out going these days?

• 47:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're an energy newsletter and so, holding that hammer, all we see are energy nails around the AI space. Look, I think natural gas is so cheap and abundant. So then, okay, what's the constraint downstream from being able to produce electricity from natural gas? That's gas turbines, sold out. So then, okay, can I make electricity with anything other than a gas turbine? All right, well, solid oxide, fuel cells by Bloom Energy, their stock is booming. Okay, if I wanted to get sophisticated, half the energy used at a data center is for cooling. And, boy, there's an awful lot of natural gas in British Columbia. And last I checked, it's colder up there than in Texas. And so, maybe I might

• 48:04Speaker 06

  want to look at British Columbia, Alaska, Iceland, cold places to build my data centers. And you're seeing some of that. But there's just so much fuel that it's become almost... Taken for granted in the US that this is the fuel of choice and now you're running into grid connection issues and so one of the pieces we wrote, again before the war changed everything, was called irreconcilable differences where we predicted that most data centers would have to go off grid because like the clearing price for retail electricity is not what a data center is willing to pay for it and no politician can absorb those increases for industry and for you and I at home.

• 48:46Speaker 06

  And so we sort of envision these buildings where natural gas goes in one end and data comes out the other. Yeah. And everything happens under the same roof. So in your-

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's, sorry to interrupt, but what's the downside there? Hasn't it been in some instances generally beneficial to bring a bunch of new energy production onto the grid just due to, yeah, the, yeah, more supply overall?

• 49:13Speaker 06

  So prices are set at the margin and the rate of demand for electricity for data centers is growing faster than the bureaucratic ability to bring on new grid-connected power. Yeah. The way in which the grid is operated, managed, and built out in this country would shock you and it is utterly incongruent with the Silicon Valley break it, you know, move fast and break it mindset. And so-

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Little Freudian slip there, sometimes just go, just break it.

• 49:43Speaker 06

  Just break it. Yeah. Yeah, you might be moving slow, but you're still gonna break it.

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  Break it, then try to fix it.

• 49:50Speaker 06

  That's the Mastodon funded, I'll just pour money on the founder until they get it. Look, we wrote a piece called "The Exception That Proves the Rule" where we showed that, you know, Elon Musk built this major natural gas power data center for XAI in Tennessee by breaking all the rules, right? He just built his own natural gas power plant and it proved to us, the exception that proves the rule, that the current rules need to be broken for stuff like that to happen and so you, since Microsoft and Google aren't ever gonna behave like Elon- You need to do this stuff off-grid. And so there's a hybrid solution where most of the power is off-grid, but they still connect for backup. And you build these at old shut-down coal plants.

• 50:33Speaker 06

  That's another trend that we're seeing in Appalachia. There are the big natural gas shale patches up there. So you have an old coal plant with all the connections there that's shut down. And you build new natural gas plants there powered by local natural gas. And you use the connections to the grid for backup. But you're not leaning on the grid for most of the power. And that's kind of a win-win.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Walk me through what an off-grid natural gas-powered data center in Alaska would look like. I'm a big Alaska fan, but do they have natural gas deposits up there that you would need to go set up drillers and then turbines?

• 51:09Speaker 06

  Well, yeah.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  How would that work? And what is the timeline for that versus something like nuclear?

• 51:14Speaker 06

  Much, much quicker depending on bureaucracy. One of our operating mental models is that the US has an infinite supply of natural gas. It's just a matter of going and getting it. And so if you made it, for example, if we made it a, let me put it this way, if Trump issued a nationwide price floor of $5 a million BTU for natural gas, the US would be the drilling stampede that would erupt, would blow the world's minds. The US produces so much natural gas, I'll just give you some numbers. The entire European Union's dependence on Russia before the war was like 15 billion cubic feet per day. And the US alone produces 110 billion cubic feet per day.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 52:00Speaker 06

  It's just this mammoth machine of fuel. And so, yes, there's plenty of natural gas in Alaska. You could build it in British Columbia, next door, a little to the south, I suppose.

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  What about the infrastructure? Like, isn't part of the strategic importance of the Strait that they have the infrastructure to, what is it, liquefy the natural gas so it can be transported? Are we way behind on that infrastructure?

• 52:25Speaker 06

  Oh, no. The US is stampeding to the lead in this regard. So when I was in industry, Freeport LNG...

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  But when did that stampede start?

• 52:35Speaker 06

  2015.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so it's been in process.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  When I was in industry, Freeport LNG was meant to be an LNG import terminal. And then the share revolution happened. So just to go back to those same numbers, by the end of this decade, the US plus a sprinkling from Canada and Mexico will have gone from zero LNG export capacity to 30 billion cubic feet per day. And in Qatar today, about 15 to 20% of the world's LNG capacity sits at a place called Ras Laffan. And a couple of trains were blown up there, two out of 14. But LNG is still a small part of the global natural gas trade. So the Strait of Hormuz is not really a natural gas problem in the way that it's an oil,

• 53:23Speaker 06

  fertilizer, you know, refined products problem. Right. Qatar is, let's say, just to make the numbers round, Qatar's 20% of LNG and LNG is 20% of natural gas. That means Qatar is 4% of natural gas.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  What has the environmental pushback been around natural gas? It feels very intuitive. It's burning fossil fuels. Sure, it's not scarce, but it feels like it could create global warming. And yet I've been shocked that there's been so much focus on the water that's consumed by data centers because that feels much more plentiful and much easier to debunk.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a certain irony that fear around global warming has been replaced by fear around AI, at least mainstream media narrative.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Yet the...

• 54:13Speaker 06

  So...

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe the root cause is the same.

• 54:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's always a fear campaign around whatever America's excelling at. That's sort of our mental model. Like, hey, America's dominating with AI and data centers, we better whip up some fear.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of like a tall poppy syndrome in our culture.

• 54:30Speaker 06

  It's, well, who knows, foreign actors who don't necessarily want to see the US succeed.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:35Speaker 06

  So to your specific question, natural gas is super clean burning, produces the least amount of CO2 per energy.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 54:43Speaker 06

  In fact, well, you can cook with it in your homes with no ventilation. Nobody would say that you would bring your barbecue indoors.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Which is basically coal, right?

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  And so you have natural gas in your furnace and you have it on your stove top, you have it in the restaurant, and it's just burning away nice and cleanly. There is one made up problem with it. Well, I say made up. There's, if natural gas leaks... It's considered a very potent greenhouse gas. Methane leaks, they've even launched satellites to try to track where industry is leaking methane directly into Got it.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were talking with Will from Planet Labs.

• 55:23Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  And he was saying that you can use, you know, sort of like real-time satellite imagery to track natural gas leaks. And they've been pretty effective, I think, at helping countries and companies identify these leaks.

• 55:37Speaker 06

  This will blow your mind. Natural gas is so cheap historically and such a nuisance that they would just release it and vent it into the air to get the oil. This is before the Peaker Plan, right? Before people cared about methane leaks, to be honest with you. And look, this is a much, much smaller problem in the US. The US is very regulated. Environmental permits and controls are tough. Where it's a big deal is places like the Middle East, Venezuela, where there's, you know, weaker governments, weaker environmental controls. Yeah. But you can go online and find a bunch of people really hyperventilating about methane leaks. Who else is big in natural gas across the world? Like, who are they? Do you know what countries, number two, three, something like that? Yeah, I know them all.

• 56:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the US is by far the biggest. Okay. Russia's number two. Oh. Oh, is that some kind of? It's an eagle.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  That was an eagle for us.

• 56:31Speaker 06

  For America. Yeah, chickens don't like eagles. Oh, no. Yeah, so you're kind of triggering me over here.

• 56:43Speaker 06

  You have to be careful. So Iran, Russia, Iran's a big natural gas player. Obviously, Canada is a growing natural gas player because of the shale patch they have up there. Australia is a big LNG exporter. Qatar is a big LNG exporter. But Russia is the second biggest. They probably produce about half as much natural gas as the US. And then, you know, a sprinkling throughout the old Russian, the old Soviet Union, the Confederation of Independent States, I believe they're called now.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  What are you tracking on the nuclear side? Every time we talk to a nuclear founder, they're ready to run through walls. They're well-funded, they're ex SpaceX, ex rocket scientists, geniuses.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  They're like, that's like in 2035.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Yep. Is there any optimistic scenario where we get nuclear a little bit earlier?

• 57:32Speaker 06

  So there's only one way to do it, which is not seductive and doesn't require any technology, which is just build a lot of the stuff we already know how to build. So that's AP1000s and Can Do reactors up in Canada. There's no, like, fusion is a fake solution to problems that don't exist.

• 57:50Speaker 06

  Like, we don't really have a nuclear waste problem and we don't have a meltdown risk problem with our latest designs. And so, all we have to do is build what we have, but that's not sexy. And that's not a technology story you can sell on Wall Street and have your IPO and, you know. So that's our scientist.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, there are some companies that are not trying to reinvent the wheel and are just saying, like, let's just do more of what we already know.

• 58:14Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  Whether or not they should be venture-backed is another question.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  I think there's better use for venture money than nuclear, yeah.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  Where is solar in all of this? How much, out of all of your coverage, how much is dedicated to solar? I think that will...

• 58:34Speaker 06

  We write about intermittent renewables from a pretty critical lens.

• 58:40Speaker 06

  Broadly speaking, there's an awful lot of misinformation and disinformation about solar. The biggest one is that the sun is free, as though the price of a fuel is the only input into the cost to use it.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  As we're learning with natural gas, it's free in the Waha hub. Doesn't mean that you can buy your turbines and build your data centers. And the biggest challenge with solar is that sometimes the sun doesn't shine. And dealing with that intermittency is a real challenge. And the expenses associated with making room for solar when it's there and getting out of solar's way, you know, when it's really hot and the sun is really shining, but also standing in for solar when it decides not to show up for work. Those expenses are never ascribed to solar. They're just piled on to all the other technologies that have to stand ready. And so...

• 59:36Speaker 06

  Historically, whenever you reach a certain threshold of solar on a grid, things start to break. I could explain technically where that breaking point is, but it's probably beyond today.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Doomberg, is the name Doomberg, like, reflective of your demeanor at all times?

• 59:57Speaker 06

  It's mostly tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. We're techno-optimists, and we are defensive pessimists. We spend a lot of time pondering worst-case scenario risk, and then, once those are properly abated, we feel that we're in a position to take more risk personally. I'm personally a prepper, for example.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  That's good to know. I wouldn't have guessed that Doomberg was a prepper. Actually, maybe I would have. I had one question. Do you, one last question, and then I know we're out of time. Would love to do this again soon. I enjoy talking with the chicken, although your eyes do make me kind of go cross-eyed myself, which is a good challenge. Any, do you believe that we've seen videos online of people filming data centers with, you know, generators outside them? They seem to be not exceptionally loud, but loud enough to be mildly annoying, like, you know, lower decibel than sort of legal limits, but still maybe not something that someone wants in their backyard?

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  59.9.

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe not something that someone wants in their backyard. Do you, do you think there's any innovation on reducing overall, like, noise pollution on that front? Or is that, to date, you know, at least we talked to somebody yesterday who was like, "That's the least of my issue," you know? But it feels like something that probably can and should be worked on, unless we put them all in Alaska.

• 1:01:28Speaker 06

  Nibbyism is real, and I don't think should be dismissed, and I think local concerns are... Always worth listening to, especially if you want to be durable as a good neighbor and as an industry that has persistence.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, historically, factories were very ugly, but they provided a lot of jobs. And so if you come through and you're like, hey, we're going to build a new factory, but it's not going to create a lot of jobs. That's not a super compelling pitch.

• 1:01:58Speaker 06

  Right. And it's going to be loud. So I assume that the diesel generators are there for backup power predominantly. That's what we're looking at. And I would suspect that there's all manner of venture-backed companies pitching stationary batteries. You know, a stationary battery for backup at a data center is a different problem set than, say, a battery for an electric vehicle, which gives you some more degrees of freedom in design than as, you know, because with a car, for example, you care a lot about gravimetric energy density, whereas you might have different CTQs for a battery setup to provide backup power for a data center. And so there's lots of people working on it. I see some private deals floating around in our own personal lives.

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  Look, the speed with which this revolution is unfolding means that you're going to break a few eggs, you know, like we were talking about earlier, you know, move fast and break stuff is happening, it's real. And you'll see local communities embrace it because there are jobs, construction jobs, and, you know, so on, that come with these things. They're not all yet staffed by robots. Chicken eggs or eagle eggs or both? What are we breaking? Yeah, I'm in the egg business, you know. It's a renewable resource from where we are. It is a renewable resource. It's an optimistic.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question. Do you think California will be producing more or less oil in 10 years than it is today?

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  Oh, way more. Yeah, they're heading for a big crisis and, you know, California needs to drill more, refine more, and connect pipelines to Texas. And I do think one of the big laments of the Trump supporters is that this war in Iran may have squandered the opportunity to get. Domestic energy projects like that over the line where he had political wind at his sails, we'll see. But I think, let's put this way, I'll leave you with this.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 1:03:47Speaker 06

  California has as much oil and gas as Texas. And the reason why Texas is a global energy superpower and California is a flaccid energy vassal is little more than politics. And you get a big enough energy crisis, politics is easy to wipe away.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had the pleasure of having dinner with a guy who had basically like an oil drilling SMB in California for like a decade and then ended up shutting it down about a year ago because of some new regulations. And he was just sitting there being like, I don't, you know, just kind of at a loss because he's like, we use so much oil, we depend on it. We should be making it here versus just importing it. So.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was a pleasure.

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  Appreciate it guys.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  And we hope you have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:04:38Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:04:39Speaker 06

  Thanks guys. Talk soon.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  There's a good note for the listeners. If you're looking to build a diesel refinery in Malibu, reach out to me. I'm happy to finance it. It won't be a problem. We'll build a massive diesel refinery right in Malibu. George is not paying attention. Westinghouse, they make nuclear reactors. We are in an AI boom. We are in an energy crisis. What do you think the stock's done over the last six months?

• 1:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Down.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Completely flat, up 0.4%.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Perfect store value.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have our next guest, Sahir from For Us. He's the co-founder, founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:05:18Speaker 07

  Good guys. How are you doing?

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.

• 1:05:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, thanks for having me. So today we are publicly announcing for the first time our company, For Us, which has raised $160 million from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, etc.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  This is such a hard of the game.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  What a lineup.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  You have coming out of stealth with a $1 billion valuation. Congratulations. That's amazing.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  I usually give this advice to founders.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Like, don't even talk about what you're doing until you're a unicorn. Just focus on the basics. Don't worry about the news.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  It's kind of true.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Media. No, it's actually true. Underrated underrated strategy if you can pull it off.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, but let's talk about what you're actually building. Talk about the business. Talk about the development, maybe a little bit of the history that went into building the company, start deciding to start the company.

• 1:06:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure. So what we do today is we help people get access to medicine faster, easier, cheaper. Most impactful are people with high costs and complex conditions. So think things like autoimmune diseases, COPD, cancers, anything where the drugs are unaffordable without insurance coverage or financial assistance or complicated supply chains, where my take a doctor and patient weeks of phone calls and research and paperwork, get their medicine on time affordably. What we're doing is using AI to take on all that complexity and extract it from them to get their medicine without any of the burden falling on their shoulders. But we do all of that entirely for free. It allows us to build a large network of doctors, patients, and the data and systems between them. And we're then using that network on the other side of our business to partner with life science companies. Think companies like Pfizer, Lilly, Johnson and Johnson, helping them develop and bring

• 1:06:53Speaker 07

  to market new drugs faster and more efficiently. This is really a two sided model.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Okay, two sided model. I feel like every time I talk to healthcare, it's like 10 sided model with like insurers and healthcare networks and doctors and then the hospitals have private equity back and they have a different set of incentives. Like, who, who are you, are you cutting anyone out? Who are you not interfacing with? Are you interfacing with insurance or not? Is that a deliberate choice? Will that change over time?

• 1:07:19Speaker 07

  No, we, so that's actually part of why this is such an impactful product for the core users. So we sell the doctors offices as free product to help them automate all the complexity involved in dealing with all those other pieces. So think the insurance companies, the PBMs, the pharmacies, any other of the aspects. And really, the goal is to automate every process that involves them working with those folks externally so they can focus on treating their patients and not have to worry about all that complexity underneath the hood. We interact with all those folks to kind of push things through the system, but it puts us in a position where we are kind of at the center of each individual transaction and have kind of a unique view into what's going on. And that's what sets us up to partner with these life science and biopharma companies to help them in a unique way on bringing to market new therapies.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Have you developed fax machine superintelligence yet?

• 1:08:06Speaker 07

  I would bet that we have some of the best fax AI.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  No way. And that's both on, is that both on sending and then receiving and transcribing, OCR-ing and understanding and then putting in some sort of database? Like, are you bidirectional in your faxing?

• 1:08:24Speaker 07

  We are bidirectional. There's like a pretty decent chunk in transactions that can only go through fax.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 07

  And in reality, fax is actually, A, considered HIPAA compliant.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 07

  So you have a lot of leeway there as opposed to in other transactions, but it's also very reliable. If you can't get someone on the phone, you don't have their contact information, you can almost always find their faxing repubblically. So despite the fact that it seems insane, it's a shockingly reliable form of communication in the system.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so what else is, what else is enabled or accelerated with AI? Because I can imagine you can use AI to build, you know, business logic and software. Like, you can build SaaS faster for deterministic workflows, but then you can also do sort of agentic things. When I hear about like finding someone's fax number online, that sounds like, yeah, you could Google it, but that's usually a person. There's not really an API, but with an agent, there sort of becomes an API. And so where, where are you doing agentic tasks on an ongoing basis versus using AI to develop sort of SaaS?

• 1:09:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. So there's really two layers we think about and what makes the problems hard. The first is kind of what you're describing, a genuinely hard set of agent problems. You're navigating this multi-step path-dependent process where there's almost never an obvious correct answer. And so it's usually not even cataloged anywhere what you're supposed to do or what the right answer is. You're working with imperfect information every turn. What insurance does someone have? Well, what does it cover? What pharmacies work for this specific drug? What approval criteria exist? What medications have this person tried before? And you're interacting with all of that, like you mentioned, through faxes, phone calls, poorly designed websites, and scattered information. So that's kind of one huge piece of it. The second is a set of really complex ML problems, where you're using dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pages of medical records per person

• 1:10:09Speaker 07

  to answer very precise questions about someone's medical history, across thousands of medications and diagnoses, dozens of subspecialties, and tens of thousands of doctors, who all document and write notes about their patients and diagnose them and treat them differently. And so that same capability is what powers everything from navigating insurance authorizations to identifying whether a patient might be eligible for clinical research. That system kind of never stops evolving, right? New drugs, new guidelines, new insurance policies. And so as we're building and scaling, the complexity keeps increasing and you're kind of constantly regeneralizing everything you've built in your platform.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Talk about the data side of the business. I imagine that there's, you know, you want every doctor's fax machine number. That's a data problem. You might be able to scrape it. You might be able to buy it. There's also the data that goes into maybe fine tuning models, maybe just setting up models for success, giving them the correct context. Like, what is the shape of the data problem? And how is it evolving?

• 1:11:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like what you described. It's through every single step in the process. You can imagine where we sit, we see this from end to end, right? So we see everything from the clinical information, how the doctor made their diagnostic decision, all the way through to, logistically, what got stuck in the system and prevented someone from getting their medication or resulted in it being late. All of that's really relevant in understanding not just, A, how do we translate that into helping us automate more effectively and have more predictability in every step of the process? But also in then informing decisions that our partners are making on how to kind of move therapies forward in the research and development process, how to think about launching them, where to allocate their resources so those medications can reach as many people as possible.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  How big can the business be?

• 1:11:52Speaker 07

  So, I mean, there's two parts, right? We think this can be the most important company in life sciences. Our goal number one is ubiquity, right? Every doctor's office and patient in the country should be using our product. That position doesn't obviously just let us eliminate friction for more people, but it puts us in a position to accelerate every step of bringing new therapies to market on the other side, right? When a new molecule is ready for testing.

• 1:12:12Jordi Hays?

  Do you become, basically, just like, is a legacy, like, legacy version of this and maybe in another industry, like a distributor? Is that like the last?

• 1:12:20Speaker 07

  Distributors are like a partial analogy, but like, a lot of what we're gonna do is not the actual physical supply chain. We're really helping on all kind of decision and actions around that. So, think about when you have a new drug, right? There's a ton of stuff happening right now in AI drug discovery. All of that is translating into more and more hypothetical molecules. But how do we translate those molecules into production, real-life, mass-market medicines? From the moment a new molecule is ready to test in people, all the way through all those steps, you have to figure out, you know, how do you identify the right clinical trial sites? Which patients do you recruit and are not contaminated by their medications? When a drug launches, which doctors have the most patients that look like the patients that did best in the phase three trials? And therefore the right, you know, early adopters and can benefit the most. As it scales, how do you kind of use real-world usage to identify where there are new conditions where the same drug can be effective?

• 1:13:05Speaker 07

  Or there are gaps in the market? That full loop from clinical development through mass-market access hasn't really been possible before. And we think we can kind of be the main chassis through which that happens. Today, we are, as you can imagine, kind of growing in a ton of different specialties. And the kind of first specialty we launched were already kind of approaching a third of the country. So you can imagine, you really can get really far along and become the best partner to facilitate all these decisions.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress and congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Great, uh, great day of media.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Very dialed. What were you doing before this?

• 1:13:39Speaker 07

  Uh, so I used to work at this company called Oscar, if you're familiar with it.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  That makes so much sense.

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking this whole time. I was thinking this whole time. You must have been in Oscar.

• 1:13:47Speaker 07

  Drive Universe.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Drive Universe. Cinematic Universe.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Uh, great. You and the SF Giants, similar portfolio. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:13:57Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Up next.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Before our next guest.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Who do you want in here?

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we actually are running behind, so we're gonna bring in the legend, the living legend. Sam Blonde.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in from Monaco. Sam. Companies Monaco calling in from San Francisco, I assume, but get that cash register ready.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Count out a CRM.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Don't count it out.

• 1:14:22Speaker 08

  Guys, great seeing you. Thank you so much for having me. Round two.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Round two.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you wait, by the way, do you leave?

• 1:14:31Speaker 08

  Did you guys want to hear the gong?

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:14:33Speaker 08

  You want to hear the gong?

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  You have a gong?

• 1:14:34Speaker 08

  Okay, here.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Show us the gong. You have a gong?

• 1:14:36Speaker 08

  Hang on, let's see if we can find the gong.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  If you have a bigger gong than us.

• 1:14:40Speaker 08

  Do you guys need a gong?

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, look at this.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Hey, team.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong.

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Congrats, everyone.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I have a question for you. Do you leave up the whiteboard behind you to just kind of torture and mess with your competitors? So they're like screenshotting it and trying to stupid man and trying to.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Trying to reverse engineer this right now.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Like you just.

• 1:15:06Speaker 08

  It's mostly art at this point. It's kind of funny. It's like, it is a cool, it is a cool wall because it goes like all the way around.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's big.

• 1:15:14Speaker 08

  Like whiteboard wall. There is something up here that still has dates from last October.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:20Speaker 08

  So I don't know that it's like current, currently functional, but we use it every once in a while.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  It's seen some more. But yes, kick us off with the news. What happened?

• 1:15:29Speaker 08

  Let's see. Well, thank you for having me on. Round two. Great seeing you both.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Always.

• 1:15:33Speaker 08

  And we were, we're so fortunate. We launched in February. Things are going really well. Jack Altman was an investor through Alt Capital and so he receives the monthly updates. We've known each other for a long time now. And recently, you know, the business is, is performing, I think, better than we would have anticipated last time we caught up, which was sort of like mid-February. And Jack reached out and said, we're sort of interested in doing something with you and in the space. And we caught up and I think this is just sort of the dream round for us. You know, we did Founder's Fund in the Series A. That's a firm that John, you and I have a lot of history with. Couldn't have trimmed a better round for the Series A. And then we're repeating it with the B. I think both with benchmark leading.

• 1:16:17Speaker 08

  Founders fund tripling down, Jack joining the board. It's awesome.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  I thought this was an Evrando special. I thought you were just like, I gotta make some money, my former colleague. But interestingly, it's Jack Altman. Makes sense, though. I mean, Lattice, a lot of experience, like adjacent to the space, a lot of career lineage there. But take us through the product. How has the company evolved? What's traction like?

• 1:16:42Speaker 08

  Let's see, launched in February. We entered February pre-revenue. We had some design customers. It's tough to do this thing where you like predict how the first few months are going to go, because you have no data history. On February 10th, literally no one knew who Monaco was, because we didn't have LinkedIn's that were up. We didn't have a website that was up. We went from sort of like this deliberate stealth mode with design customers, where there are a small handful of people that we were partnering with to build the product, to trying to make as big of a splash as we possibly could. And I think like, you know, we sit here three months later in May, and we sort of blew past all of the sort of business performance expectations that we had

• 1:17:23Speaker 08

  in that period of time, measured by like, you know, number of customers, revenue, customer sentiment, which is maybe the most critical of those things. But, you know, just sort of couldn't have hoped for a better start to the business.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Okay, in go-to-market, in sales, I imagine that there's a ton of processes that you just want to make reliable, more efficient, all of that. And I'm sure you're executing on that. But I'm interested, has anything stuck out to you that's sort of like the Studio Ghibli moment for this for this sector? Like, you know, Image Generators came out, it was like, yeah, you can make a picture of a horse or a cat. But then like, there was this thing where it was like, oh, no one really knew that that was coming. And then all of a sudden, it was like this delightful new experience. Now you can like turn yourself into a cartoon if you want. Is there is there some like net new process or like your customers, when you see them use the product, you're like, oh, they're

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  doing things a little bit differently. It's not just sending the email. It's not just the CRM management. It's not just all the other pieces. It's something that like, oh, this is uniquely enabled by AI.

• 1:18:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, um, I think there, there are three things that come to mind that differentiate Monaco uh relative to anything else in the market. And the third one is sort of the like.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  It will shock us.

• 1:18:41Speaker 08

  It will shock us.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  The third one will shock us.

• 1:18:43Speaker 08

  This is good. It, it'll be the like Ghibli moment. Perfect, let's do it. It, it, that, to use Coogan's language, um, the first two, and I won't go like super deep on these things. I'll, I'll time box this to thirty or forty seconds. Yeah. The first two, um, we're, we're an all in one. So we replace traditional or legacy CRM. Yep. These are your sales forces, Hubspots, Adios. Yep. And we also replace all the disparate tools that integrate to those traditional CRMs over APIs. Yeah. Uh, and so we're an end to end platform, an all in one, maybe like the Rippling version for go to market. So that's like the first category. Um, that in and of itself isn't like the Ghibli moment. Uh, the second category is, uh, that we are AI native. Um, you know, just sort of definitionally, we started, let's call it post chat GPT. Um, the way that we think about being AI native, agents are the first line of defense.

• 1:19:28Speaker 08

  The things that historically speaking, sales users like me, people in RevOps, SDRs, um, that, that, those workflows that we were doing with, uh, manual or human labor, we now have agents doing. And you should think about the user of Monaco as having this like front row seat to all of the work that the agents are doing on their behalf. So that's number two. The third thing, and this one is like a little bit contrarian, uh, uh, like Peterism. Um, and, and, and it is maybe the thing that I think, um, we have a unique competitive advantage in. It's very difficult for any of our competitors to get right or even be able to do. And that is, you know, there's this thing right now that's like the forward deployed A, the forward deployed engineer,

• 1:20:07Speaker 08

  the FDE, is like the most valuable asset in deploying AI successfully across enterprise. And you see these, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic investing billions of dollars in these almost like Accenture style, uh, uh, consultant type companies. Well, we sort of invented this concept of the forward deployed AE.

• 1:20:28Speaker 08

  And every customer that we have is paired with a startup sales expert. Somebody that has deep experience doing startup go to market. And you should think about a lot of our customers. These are seed and series A startups that one, don't have a lot of experience in go to market. A lot of technical founders and technical early teams. And so this is a very complimentary skillset. But two, just definitionally, they have no experience working with the platform and agents that we have in Monaco. And so that buffer, that layer between the customer and the technology itself that is our forward deployed AE. That is some of like the secret sauce for us in terms of making Monaco work better than any of the competitors

• 1:21:12Speaker 08

  that you try and just like deploy these agents in the technology in the wild without anybody making sure that you're successful.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  All in one, compound startup, rippling philosophy. I imagine that eventually you'll get to a point, if you're not there already, where some big company will come to you and say, ah, but like, we're not ripping out this thing. And you have to build a connector. Do you have a strategy for that? Or is that a moment where someone comes to you and says like, yeah, we have this weird niche, like, you know, B two B SaaS product for just our industry that we need to keep around. Is your philosophy agents will connect or you'll just go and rebuild that?

• 1:21:49Speaker 08

  We have an open API. Okay. Read write API, ability to do Claude MCP.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:55Speaker 08

  And so we will integrate and do integrate with third parties.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:59Speaker 08

  Examples would be like, we have a granola integration. We have a Slack integration. We have a G suite integration and many more.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Speaker 08

  We don't today have native sort of traditional CRM integrations. And if you think about the category of sales technology.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12Speaker 08

  The market leader today is Salesforce.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:16Speaker 08

  And Salesforce is a system of record. And then you think about other system of record companies, there are some large players that exist in the space. The other type of sales technology company is a point solution. These are tools that integrate into the system of record. And if you think about the outcomes, the terminal values, the sort of market caps of these point solution type companies, they are less interesting to us to sort of be like, I think this word is politically correct now. We don't want to be the tallest midget. We want to be the market leader in sales technology. And in order to be able to do that, we have to disrupt the system of record companies today, like the Salesforce's of the world.

• 1:22:59Speaker 08

  But the space will become much larger than it is today because we are not just taking the IT budget away from companies that today are spending on platforms like Salesforce. We are taking the labor budget. And so Monaco is far more expensive than the traditional competitors that exist in the space. And it's because we're not a replacement for the traditional CRMs, which we were not just a replacement for the traditional CRMs. We were a replacement for you hiring a bunch of people to do this for you in a deeply integrated platform.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  Okay. Where can people go to get started? You're in public beta?

• 1:23:34Speaker 08

  We're in public beta. GA in the next couple of months. I would love to come back. So that would be fun.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Who's the best sales rep at Monaco?

• 1:23:48Speaker 08

  Guys, I can't do that.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  You can't pick a favorite.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it objective?

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  There is an objective truth. You can't leak it right now. They'll get poached. Mark Benioff will be flying him out to Hawaii.

• 1:23:59Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Comes to him at the dolphin.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  He'll do his little thing.

• 1:24:03Speaker 08

  We don't have a worst sales rep, but I should say that name if we did.

• 1:24:09Speaker 08

  We don't.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:24:10Speaker 08

  No, this is a little, this is maybe like philosophically against what I would recommend for folks. We are in the fortunate position that we are just inundated in demand. We're still on team goals. The whole team is like really working with one another just to try and manage the demand that we have. And so we actually don't even yet, to your point on like, isn't it objective? If we don't have a leaderboard, it's just all winning.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  So what you're saying is Mark Benioff has to buy.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  How has the billboard campaign gone?

• 1:24:44Speaker 08

  It's great. You know, I think these things we do, we do the launch videos and a bunch of the like, you know, launch posts and those sort of things that hopefully get amplified. We do the billboards. Our billboard strategy right now are just doing like a dollar symbol and then monaco.com. It's a little provocative. We have these big poker tournaments and a whole bunch more.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Who won the poker tournament?

• 1:25:05Speaker 08

  It was the CEO of Sendoso. His name's Chris Rudigarp.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Nice, nice. Another sales chat.

• 1:25:12Speaker 08

  All of these things, it's sort of like one plus one, plus one, plus one. It like equals 10. It's like the billboards compound the poker tournament that compounds the post that compounds the truck that are driving. Today we have a plane with a banner trailing Monaco behind it.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  I love this. This is Blimp adjacent. We're huge fans of this. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the milestone and always. Counting down the days till GI. Talk to you soon. Have a great day.

• 1:25:43Speaker 08

  You guys are the best. Thank you for having me on.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Great to hang with you. Goodbye. Up next, we have Kevin Hartz from A-Star. He's a co-founder and general partner. He's a star himself. He is a star. Is that why he named it A-Star? He's like, I think of myself as a bit of a star. Kevin Hartz, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:26:02Speaker 09

  Hey guys, I'm doing great. So great to see the both of you. First time on the show.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. That's crazy. I feel like you've been on. We've talked about so many, we've talked about so many of your investments and so many of the projects you've worked on.

• 1:26:14Speaker 09

  Well, it's funny you say that because I'm sandwiched between Sam and Monaco and Judgment Labs. And we have a, A-Star has a small check in each one of those. So it's very comfortable in this position.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Wow, you're the man. The man behind the curtain with a curtain behind him actually. But that's not, we're not here to talk about Judgment Labs or Monaco. We're here to talk about A-Star. Give us the latest news. What is the update with the fund?

• 1:26:41Speaker 09

  Well, we've we've just announced today that that we've raised our third fund. It's 450 million. Let's do it.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  So, seed fund, 450 million dollars to like one AI lab? Is that the plan? Or you're going to split this up between like two companies these days? I mean, valuations are high, but what's the strategy?

• 1:27:03Speaker 09

  It's a good point. It would be, you know, if it was a lab, it would probably be just about one company. No, we are we are sticking to our knitting. We are generalists, so we're looking in all different, you know, all different types of businesses. Certainly in this super cycle that we're having right now, it's driven by AI and the application layer of AI, and we're investing pretty aggressively in that space. But, you know, our checks tend to be three to five million, although we we go higher up to 10 and so on. Now, certainly, there's a Neo Lab that will raise a big round, but that's really in the 1%. We're still in this this core market.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are you fishing? Where what lakes are stocked these days? Are you fans of the mafias or the or the, you know, universities or the dropouts? Like, there's so many different pools of entrepreneurial talent. Where are you finding success at seed?

• 1:28:03Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's the right question is is how to source this talent, how to be in front of everyone else, how to meet these founders when they're still working in their gigs or still in college or in sometimes even high school. I will say ages have declined on average, you know, like you're now seeing more and more founders that are teenagers. And, you know, I like to think of it as having, you know, seen like, you know, we had Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the 70s when they were teenagers, they started their company, and that was such an anomaly. And you fast forward to today, and it's it's really dramatically changed.

• 1:28:43Speaker 09

  So to answer your question, I think of folks like Corey Leeby at Z Fellows, who's just terrific at finding dropouts. And, you know, more and more, they're high school dropouts as much as they are college dropouts.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's remarkable when you meet a founder and it's like Corey did the deal like three years ago and you're like just getting started.

• 1:29:06Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about incubations with this new vehicle? Is that going to be opportunistic? Do you, do you expect to have it or do you expect to have kind of a certain amount that you're aiming for? What's the philosophy?

• 1:29:18Speaker 09

  Well, incubations are, I mean, I don't like the term incubation. It kind of sounds like this like kind of sort of contrived venture. We like to find founders and spend time with them and, and help them kind of develop ideas. And we've done this a couple of times. We did this with a mortgage AI business. That's run by a founder named Michael White who came out of Block. And that business has grown substantially. And we've done that very recently with a company called Soron, which is a physical security business. So it's starting in the high end of alarm systems or, or monitoring systems.

• 1:30:02Speaker 09

  That is really just a bet on, you know, you see all this stuff happening in autonomy, autonomous cars and robotics. And a lot of money is invested in that space. And when we see that happen, you know, that usually means there's like dropping price of LiDAR, cheaper sensors and the like. And, you know, that means an opportunity in this case, in the home security space.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  Wait, is there an application for LiDAR in home security that I'm not aware of?

• 1:30:31Speaker 09

  Absolutely. You, if you have sensors around, LiDAR sensors, you can know exact distances. You can track objects more effectively in, in different weather.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:44Speaker 09

  And that doesn't become available when they're, you know, so expensive, but it absolutely becomes a very meaningful aid to understanding a scene when the price drops.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  That's fascinating. You're obviously have an incredible track record in Silicon Valley. But I'd love to know about the mood in among LPs around a $450 million seed fund. Because we talked to a lot of the mega funds and then we'll talk to solo GPs. We had one on the show last week that raised a $50 million fund. And I'm wondering about are LPs looking for a particular strategy with that size of fund? What's the appetite? Like, how do you talk about like where you're positioning for the long term? Just any of the dynamics around that particular fund size at this particular time in the market?

• 1:31:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, great question. It was a step up. Our first two funds were about 300 million each. And we went up to 450, but we do have five of us on the investment team and we're expanding the team. So if you look at, you know, kind of divide the amount of capital by the number of those putting that capital work over the period of time, over a couple of years. We've been successful and, you know, our first two funds are in top 5%. You know, kind of category. Thank you. I'm a venture capitalist, so I have to brag a little bit. But, you know, and we've been very good at sharpshooting. Like, meaning like we haven't clout money and we've really waited for the right companies

• 1:32:20Speaker 09

  and spent the right amount of time with these companies and helping them grow. You know, it's kind of expressed in like we have an incredibly high conversion of seed to Series A, which, you know, if you would imagine, like typically, most companies don't even make it past the seed stage, the zero to one phase. And, and so, you know, we don't want to disassemble our model by spraying capital out there. We think that's very different from the multi-stages that have almost this incentive, you know, with the, with the fees against very large capital bases. We were very opposite of that.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you, how do you stay collaborative? Or is, are there, are your elbows getting sharper with this fund? I mean, we have a, we have a mutual friend who has like a similar sized seed fund. I know you guys have collaborated a ton on deals in the past, but I know you guys are also both very competitive and want to put up, you know, top funds and I'm sure it can get, you know, tempting at certain points of, hey, I could get 20% ownership in this company and I don't necessarily want my, my buddy, you know, it doesn't necessarily benefit my fund to, to give 10% to someone, even if they're a great friend and could also help the company.

• 1:33:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's challenging. Our partner, Gotham, his wife is Christina over at, the GP over at Chemistry. And, you know, if, if he steals, if he wins a deal over her, you know, like I could only imagine what would happen. So, you know, like it's, it's tricky, but it is, you know, we see a lot of new funds. I spend a lot of time backing new funds and helping, you know, these fund managers kind of grow and then they get to a point where you can no longer kind of even co-lead deals. The funds get so big. So, you know, and we're going into this like massive super cycle of an incredible amount of, you know, fast pace and a lot of capital invested.

• 1:34:22Speaker 09

  So it's, you know, I want to say that it's, it's always on our shoulders to find, you know, the founders early enough and be the first ones there and just not be in those situations.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about services as a software, the AI economy expanding beyond software and IT spend? I mean, Sam Blonde was just talking us, talking to us, talking to us about like the forward deployed account executive and we talked to Long Lake about buying companies that are heavily service oriented and infusing them with AI. And I'm just wondering if there's going to be a boom in de novo companies that are more services sector focused and what you're seeing in that category right now?

• 1:35:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, you know, you really have to turn towards a palantir and just give them a nod because this for deploy engineer thing back in two thousand four or five, you know, was was like universally, you know, hated by by the world and the investors and so on. And they really gave us 20 years of a look at how to, you know, make that incredibly effective. And generally, though, I think that it's in the early stages that this kind of custom work is is done. And, you know, that that may lead to kind of automating things over time. And then the flip side that, you know, to to critique it would be simply

• 1:35:52Speaker 09

  that, you know, if you look in other kind of boom eras, the consulting services really did well. When the markets pulled back, they were hit almost the hardest. So, you know, there's there's certainly a trade off there, but to get new services into these old markets, you know, we're just going to have to get our hands dirty. I don't know. But, you know, I'm old. So I look at the services industry as this like really tough thing. We want to replace by software.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  That's tough. Second best city to invest in. I assume you'd say.

• 1:36:25Speaker 09

  It has to be. It has to be New York.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  New York.

• 1:36:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I I've been very impressed with New York. We have a number of companies there from company called WAP in the creator services side to Antioch, which is which is physical AI robotic infrastructure.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:36:45Speaker 09

  And and I'm just amazed every day of it. But I guess it makes sense that you're able to pull talent from the Northeast at college. And it's still a big financial center. There's a lot going on. So it very much in my mind is a number two. Nothing's even close, not Austin or anything else.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  How how often do you find yourself backing teams that are building things that you know are on that or you you expect could be on the roadmap of the labs? Because in certain instances, even if the labs care about a certain part of the application stack, that doesn't mean you just shouldn't still back a team, right? It's just a new version of what if, you know, Google does this or or, you know, something along those lines?

• 1:37:33Speaker 09

  You know, I want to say that the startups, you've always got to like,

• 1:37:39Speaker 09

  hope and pray and expect that the startups are going to win. This is the big question of our era is, you know, do we go ahead and build all these, put all these apps forward or build all these applications only to be steamrolled, you know, by the big labs? I, you know, we saw that happen in the 90s. You know, Bill Gates and Microsoft would watch and see what people would build on,

• 1:38:05Speaker 09

  you know, on, on the, on Windows and then they build their own disk compressor and give it away for free. So, you know, this is like a, a pattern that our, these monopolists do, you know, in this case and, and, um, you know, our, our companies need to show that they can stand on their own two legs. You know, we're, we're in businesses like Decagon, which is AI customer service. It is the best product in the market and they have to stay the best. And we know they can do it.

• 1:38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes 10 sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the round and we hope to see you soon.

• 1:38:43Speaker 10

  That you got some more.

• 1:38:43Speaker 09

  Great to see it.

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have Alex Shawn from Judgment Labs, an A-star portfolio company, apparently, but here to talk about a new round from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Alex, how are you doing?

• 1:39:00Speaker 10

  Doing great, guys. Thanks so much for having me on board. Kevin's great. Also. Nice of him for, for, uh, nice of him to open for you.

• 1:39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39:08Speaker 10

  Yeah. Some nice guys over here.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  He only gave us a little bit, so tell us a little bit about yourself and the company.

• 1:39:15Speaker 10

  Yeah, happy to. And before I do that, we got a little bit of a crowd here, which I'll take you guys out to come and be with us.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  Let's hit the dog for that.

• 1:39:22Speaker 10

  In person here out in the office and financial district.

• 1:39:26Speaker 10

  Whoa, let's go.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you here with us team.

• 1:39:36Speaker 10

  Financial District and the rest of SF, but thanks for having me.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, explain the orange suits.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:44Speaker 10

  You know, we are Judgment Orange, you know, it's the color of the company and we like to be proud about that. And so, you know, we wear it loud and proud. You'll catch us running the Beta Breakers race in SF, hopefully winning it with the whole team. So be on the lookout for the orange suit.

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  It's still such a good strategy to pick a color that doesn't have a loud startup already anchored around it, just own it.

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  Good luck going up against Facebook blue or Coinbase blue. Much easier to stand out with a funny color, yellow.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Please introduce the company. Tell us about the progress, the news, everything.

• 1:40:22Speaker 10

  Thanks a lot, guys. You know, Judgment Labs is the platform for improving long horizon agents from production data. We sort of started the company with this thought process that these autonomous long horizon agents are going to consume the vast, vast majority of the economic value that AI is set to create across the next decades in the economy. And, you know, we're already seeing the first sets of those things happening. Developer productivity is skyrocketing at rates that I don't think anyone, including myself, coming from a research background, could have anticipated. And yet, that sort of progress is also barbell in the sense that in many industries, we don't see the same progress on these long horizon agents. And so typically, that's, you know, to do with a lot how verifiable or semi-verifiable the outcomes are and therefore how easy it is to train those agents. But,

• 1:41:07Speaker 10

  you know, we believe that regardless of what agents you're building, the single source of truth to improve them to get to that point is going to be production data. You know, during the runtime of these agents, these long horizon agents emit so much production data, ranging from their reasoning tokens to the tools they call, to the retries and their memory and all the things more that are going to come out on these agents. And so that data just forms the cleanest record of how those agents behave with customers, software, and their broader environments. And when, you know, you process it right, we can sort of find out what users actually ask for. struggle with, which failures actually happen in production and where agents actually find breakthroughs to solutions that we could have never predicted.

• 1:41:48Speaker 10

  And so therefore, the goal for us as developers and sort of people that are going to bring about this agent revolution is to operationalize that production data for all these agent companies out there. To create these flywheels that convert distribution advantages of, you know, people like Sam into their product modes that are going to last them for a long time. And so we've been very lucky to partner with a lot of people across the journey of the company. Coming out of stealth today has been an amazing journey and, you know, Nova backing us at the pre-seed all the way to Lightspeed backing us at the seed and Lightspeed doubling down to co-lead the Series A with Green Oaks.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  What's the sweet spot customer look like right now?

• 1:42:26Speaker 10

  So we love partnering with people who are building, you know, agent native companies and focusing on long horizon agents. And so I can break down-

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Startups, like scale ups, like Series B companies, like what's the-

• 1:42:38Speaker 10

  Primarily agent native startups in that range of like Series A to Series B is our sweet spot. We focus on these companies that produce a lot of production data and want to figure out how to use it.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  And is it particularly focused on knowledge work and sort of like the next iteration of AI agents? Or are you doing coding work as well, both?

• 1:43:00Speaker 10

  Definitely a lot of coding work. You know, we actually serve agents across the stack. Sam and his company, Monaco, are customers of ours. And so different vertical agents require different versions of improvement. And so we work across the stack, but mainly on these new age, long horizon agents that sort of autonomously do tasks end to end.

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what, what, uh, what are you helping with specifically? Because I imagine that if Monaco builds an AI SDR and agent that goes and runs around and figures out everything about a customer and builds scripts and battle cards and all the stuff that they do, uh, all of that's logged, they have it somewhere. Where's your value at? Like, why are they a customer? What, like, are you helping them actually change production designs? Or is it more about organizing and unifying data for them to go improve their own products?

• 1:43:52Speaker 10

  Great question. Mostly the latter.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:54Speaker 10

  So if you think about in practice, improving those agents is really challenging for teams.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:59Speaker 10

  And so like most teams with all those logs that you're saying that they store.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:02Speaker 10

  Have to sort of manually comb over these tables and tables of data.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:06Speaker 10

  And so whenever they find a failure case, the question often the case is not just like, is this a problem? But it's, you know, how frequent does this happen?

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:14Speaker 10

  Are our most important customers affected?

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Speaker 10

  What task types are most affected?

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:19Speaker 10

  And so being able to chop up and parse this data using other agents, in fact.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:23Speaker 10

  To sort of pinpoint the exact failure modes and therefore the exact part of, you know, an agent framework or an agent harness is exactly what we help these companies do.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, next breakout agent category.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Use case. Yeah.

• 1:44:37Jordi Hays?

  Coding.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 10

  You know, we tend to believe here that at Judgment, we think that the domains that are going to get solved first are proportional to those that are most verifiable.

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46Speaker 10

  Meaning that if you can check the answer, you know, the, this is the smallest feedback move exactly. So I would say that a lot of these domains are going to be the ones that are quantitative. You know, these are things like, you know, um, you know, decoding agents are easy. You can imagine the site reliability and ticket resolution agents next. And then the ones that do math. But, you know, we are increasingly seeing a lot of progress in non-verifiable domains as well. Stuff that you would traditionally think is like not very easy to quantitatively measure, such as like finance and legal and even sales to say what, what Sam's agents are doing, are incredibly, you know, fast in terms of how the teams have been able to use their data to improve their agents.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Tax and accounting seems pretty verifiable and like closed loop versus, you know, like, I don't know, long horizon, how did this cancer drug respond to someone over a decade? Like, it's very hard to close that loop. Uh, well, congratulations on all the progress, Jordy. Any other questions?

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this was great.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Go Orange.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  It's great to meet you, Alex. I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

• 1:45:46Speaker 10

  Sounds good.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole team.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  Have a good day.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Uh, next we have Glenn Wise from Cinder. He's the co-founder and CEO. Good nominee determinism. We got a wise man in the waiting room. And here he is. How are you doing, Glenn?

• 1:46:03Speaker 11

  What's going on guys? Good.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for stopping by on such a big day. Introduce yourself, introduce the company, tell us the news.

• 1:46:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, I'm Glenn, the founder, CEO of Cinder. We just raised 41 million.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  Okay, good news.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Right to it.

• 1:46:25Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Radical Ventures. I got a buddy, Rob Taves, over there.

• 1:46:30Speaker 11

  Oh, yeah, they're great guys over there.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:33Speaker 11

  Really great team.

• 1:46:35Speaker 11

  But our focus is helping companies stop all of the AI-powered abuse that's happening across the internet today.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, what does that mean? Because there's like cyberbullying and like mean comments on YouTube videos or live streams? And then there's like spam and hacking and cyber attacks and all sorts of crazy stuff.

• 1:46:54Speaker 11

  Yeah. And honestly, it means the entire gambit of threats.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:00Speaker 11

  And that's really, I think, like what gets missed in this conversation, which is the fact that like they're small, right? There's small incidents such as bullying. There's large incidents such as like state-sponsored espionage.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:14Speaker 11

  But companies need to respond to all of these. And we've never before seen kind of the scale of threats that we have today. And this was a problem before Gen AI, but obviously Gen AI has made this exponentially worse.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Sure. So it says customers include OpenAI, Spotify, Depop, Black Forest Labs. I'd love to know about how much of this is happening like internal to a particular product? Like someone is effectively doing internet graffiti on like the Spotify comments. We get comments on our Spotify sometimes. They're usually pretty positive, but I could imagine a state-sponsored actor wanting to take us down and writing a bunch of mean comments versus, and that would be something where you would go to Spotify and say, I can solve your problem internal to your product versus there's a misinformation campaign that's happening on X or Instagram about Spotify and you're notifying them. Like what's the trade-off there?

• 1:48:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's a really good distinction. So we sell directly to the customers themselves.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:15Speaker 11

  So they can combat if there's some horribly racist comment.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:20Speaker 11

  Right, that shouldn't be on there.

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:21Speaker 11

  Um, and so they can combat taking that off. And so how the platform actually works is that our customers set what policies they care about. So they say, hey, we really care about, uh, some of the really big ones now, AI-generated, uh, and CIA is like AI-generated deep fake porn, right? That's a huge one, a huge issue that a bunch of people see. Um, obviously, anything child safety related, uh, anything, any egregious, uh, hate speech and things like that. Uh, they are able to set these policies on our platform and then, uh, we use AI to detect and mitigate it at whatever scale the platform is operating at.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, how, uh, what has it been like ramping up to some of these bigger customers? I imagine that, uh, if you get the fire hose of like Spotify content, that's a lot. Was that a challenge? Like, how did you solve that? Obviously, there's a lot of off the toe, off the shelf tools, but like, how big is the company at this point? How are you able to take on those clients?

• 1:49:21Speaker 11

  Yeah. I mean, we were really lucky in a sense that the whole team, uh, the whole founding team came from Meta. Um, and so like, we saw.

• 1:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Saw a thing or two.

• 1:49:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, we, uh, and prior to that, we were at the US government. Um.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:35Speaker 11

  So we've seen, we've seen kind of what harm at scale looks like.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:40Speaker 11

  Uh, and, um, and obviously, that's like, kind of like an infrastructure challenge, right? That we, that we deal with. Um, but inevitably, it is, um, one, like, actually being able to process data as quickly as possible. That's a big one, right? So how can we make a decision as fast as possible of whether or not something violates your policies? There's a bunch of techniques there, um, as well as just like being able to handle that scale, right? Uh, we have some customers that have a really large Gen Z audience that all log in at the same time. Um, so that adds some really great kind of distributed computing challenges that, that the team is working on. Um, that's all part of the fun of, of building this.

• 1:50:24Jordi Hays?

  Is there, is there something about this problem that makes companies want to outsource this function? Because I'm assuming at Meta, if you were working on this problem at Meta, you were working on internal tooling and platforms at a certain scale.

• 1:50:39Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they end up wanting to do this themselves, but is there, uh, themselves, but is there a certain part of this problem that makes it particularly suited for, you know, having a partner like Cinder?

• 1:50:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think there's a few. I think primarily it's taking the human expertise and really understanding the policy and understanding how to mitigate that policy, right? Like every customer of ours can't be an expert in every single issue that they might face. Uh, and so that right there means that they need to bring people on. Um, and yeah, Facebook, I was on the threat intelligence team there. Uh, they have an amazing threat intel capability, or they're also Facebook, right? So they can spend, uh, on building out that threat intel capability, but not everyone can or should have to do that. Um, so that's a big piece. And another one that we've been seeing more and more often actually is, uh, the, the third party credibility of going with a company

• 1:51:34Speaker 11

  that's also, you know, in truly a set of experts, right? And so, uh, you're not grading your own homework when you're trying to defend your platform. You have someone else that can bring that expertise in and do that for you.

• 1:51:47Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  How, uh, how are you thinking about like the actual, uh, model choice or just scaling? Because I imagine that, uh, there's so many of these like TOS violations, you know, you just ask like, is this a, of the TOS violation or threat of violence or something that's, you know, doesn't conform, uh, to any of like the frontier models and you're going to get a very accurate result, but that's going to be slow and probably expensive if you're running it like over every single Spotify comment or every single upload to the platform. Uh, and then you can go open source, cheaper models, faster models. You can also try and run models on ASICs or more advanced chips, like Cerebras is in the news, uh, this week, we has the IPO,

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  but there's obviously other providers, but how have you thought about the infrastructure trade-offs and as you scale the service?

• 1:52:43Speaker 11

  The thing that is most important for our customers, right, I talked about policy.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Speaker 11

  It's really evals and ground truth data.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:53Speaker 11

  And so, once our customers have, within our platform, set what does true look like, right? What does an actual violation look like? Because as you can imagine, these violations are incredibly nuanced.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Speaker 11

  And it really depends on what's the platform, where they're based, how old are their users?

• 1:53:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:08Speaker 11

  A really classic example, right, is like a gaming company could have two different games. One that is a first-person shooter for adults, the other one that's a game for children.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:19Speaker 11

  Obviously, they're gonna define like a threat of violence very differently.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, even within the company.

• 1:53:24Speaker 11

  Oh, right, and so you need to be able to set ground truth and really set these evals. So then from there, you run evals on these models. And so, and it kind of depends on, are you prioritizing, are you prioritizing, you know, costs or latency or accuracy?

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:42Speaker 11

  Those are basically the three trade-offs that we see.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:45Speaker 11

  And you can get really great results now, especially around fine-tuning some of these open-source models.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52Speaker 11

  But what's funny is that, obviously, these are like, these models themselves are trained to not be able to produce this content. And so, you do start hitting limitations with these foundation models.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Speaker 11

  And so, you can do techniques like model obliteration, where you can actually remove guardrails and host them yourself.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:14Speaker 11

  You can do, or you can do kind of traditional classification, again, depending on what the policy area is.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Speaker 11

  But that's why you need to...

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  I've heard enough, give them a billion-dollar cluster.

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of cluster, has there been any demand for on-prem? We were talking to David Bazooki from Roblox about this, and I was sort of saying, you know, he has a younger audience, obviously, on the platform. And there's been a lot of pushback about the communication that happens between adults and children on the platform. And I was saying, like, it feels like, although this is a huge problem that obviously needs a lot of attention, like, the technology is getting better and better to the point where you should be able to screen every single... Chat message that flows through the Roblox platform in real time with a very, very advanced LLM. But Roblox runs their own infrastructure. Is there an API call? And I could imagine a situation where Roblox wants to run this like deeper in their stack.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  And is that, is that something that's on your roadmap or you've heard customer pull from? Or do you think it will never be an issue?

• 1:55:17Speaker 11

  Uh, yeah, I would love an intro. I really appreciate that.

• 1:55:22Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think for us, because of these, the proliferation of these foundation models, our customers have gotten really comfortable on utilizing, you know, already utilizing OpenAI.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Cause they're already pulling stuff from AWS or GCP or Azure and they already have like a fabric they can pull things into.

• 1:55:41Speaker 11

  Exactly. And, and we, because of our sort of security paranoia background, we've invested a lot and we even have run a full single tendency architecture that our, our customers love because, you know, they have, they know all of their data is theirs. And so, you know, customers have gotten more and more comfortable, but I could see the pendulum swinging, especially with open source models. I could see it going the other way where they want to self-host Tinder, in which case it was built in a way where, you know, they can.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be really cool. Last question. Get me up to speed on your work with Black Forest Labs? Because I believe that that's a more unique relationship. They do benchmarking. It seems like they've shared some data, but can you get me up to speed on, on your work there?

• 1:56:27Speaker 11

  Yeah. We've been doing some really exciting red teaming work with these models. You know, I think it's a really important job that these models are able to be tested before they're released, obviously. Right? Cause once they're released in the wild, then they are subject to the rest of the world. And so that's a lot of the work that we do as well, right? Is allow companies to set up those guardrails, but also allow them to. Not only test the guardrails, but test the models themselves. And that leads to just dramatically see for outcomes when they release these models out into the world. And I think that we're going to see standards coming out of the UK, the EU, the US on expectations around red teaming, especially as these models become more and more powerful and the attacks become more.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're already seeing with that, with the, who, who was it? It wasn't Meta, but it was Google, Microsoft, and maybe XAI joined OpenAI and Anthropic in, you know, delivering models to the government earlier to test. And this could be a logical place to test as well. But congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic to meet you. Thank you for doing this work. And the chat is concerned by your coworkers posture in the back there in the blue.

• 1:57:42Speaker 11

  We're going to get some ergonomic exploits in here.

• 1:57:45Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, give him, give him our best.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Speaker 11

  I gotta tighten up the ship.

• 1:57:51Jordi Hays?

  No, no, it's good. He's locked in. That's actually a high performance posture.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  That is, that is.

• 1:57:55Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  And the window open, you get some fresh air. CO2 levels, probably not a problem.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Doing some critical work.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

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

• 1:58:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Glenn.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. A bunch of updates really quickly. First, the chat has given a name to my next project. It's the diesel, the diesel refinery company of Malibu. Get ready, Jordy, we're going to be pumping diesel fumes all over Malibu. It's going to be a boom time. Also, Swatch.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  So we talked about the Swatch AP collab, the Swatch, Audemars Piguet, Royal Pop collaboration. Well, the final design or something close to the final design has finally hit the timeline and we can pull up this image because it's not a wristwatch, it's more of a pocket watch. It goes on a necklace, I guess, and it does not come with a.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  Is this more of a charm? Like I see people tying this to like.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think this, this tells me that the, all of the fears that this would be confused with a stainless steel Royal Oak were probably misplaced. What do you think? Tyler.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, okay, so it's based off like the Swatch pop, right?

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  So this is just like, I'm talking about like this is a long time ago, they made the Swatch pop, which is like this little, it is a watch, but you can pop it in and out,

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  into a necklace, into like a little charm, or onto like an actual bracelet.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  A stainless steel bracelet.

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  There might be, like, we haven't seen anyone actually buy this yet.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:18Speaker 02

  It's just like been promo videos, so there may actually still be bracelets that you can put it into a watch form.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  But so far everyone is up in arms.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Platinum, platinum, platinum wrist.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to find pictures of the Swatch, maybe?

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  Pop. I don't know. Well, there's a release video that we do think is real. I think we verified this with Quaid over at Bezel. And it's showing how they're building it, how they're putting it together, some cinematic music. And they're making them, these are mass manufactured. They're showing them being mass manufactured, testing them. But they come in all sorts of colors and will be, will be interesting to see what happens. This does not seem like an it's so over moment for the AP Royal Oak market. It seems like they have found-

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  It's so over for the Bears.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  He, yeah, it's so over for the Bears. Everyone that sold yesterday needs to buy them back, potentially.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  I, I think it's working to the degree that I see that and I'm like, I, I kinda want one of those.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like a cute, I don't know, it's like, it just fits a different-

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a, a guess as to what the hype beast will do, John. Do you know what they're gonna do?

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna take those Royal Pops.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna use them to tie their shoes. They're gonna use them as shoelaces.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  So they'll have like, you know, a bunch of Swatch, Swatch Pops hanging off of, you know, some, some like Nike dunks or something.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  I could see that. I could see that. But why not just have the full stainless steel Royal Oak hanging off your shoes? There's levels to the game.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  Well, GameStop is going to need to level up if they want to successfully take over eBay because eBay has rejected GameStop's $55 billion takeover bid. The online marketplace, that's eBay, called the cash and stock proposal, quote- Neither credible nor attractive. The New York Times has a story here. The online marketplace rejected the proposal. GameStop announced the proposal last week. We talked to Ryan Cohen on the show about this. To combine with eBay, which is a company nearly four times its size. The offer has confounded much of Wall Street in part over questions of how the company would afford it. GameStop's chief executive, Ryan Cohen, initially declined to elaborate on how he would finance the deal.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  And much of Wall Street remains skeptical about the mechanics of the deal. eBay has officially turned down its lopsided marriage proposal, said Don Bilson, head of Event Driven Research. This news should surprise no one since the odds it would accept GameStop's brash offer were infinitesimally remote. In a letter to GameStop, eBay's chairman, Paul Pressler, listed several concerns with the bid. Following a review of the offer with legal and financial advisors, the concerns include uncertainty about how it would be paid for and the amount of debt the deal would add to the company. A cornerstone of the deal was a letter that GameStop secured from investment bank TD Bank, saying it was highly confident it would raise 20 billion to fund the offer.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  That letter, which is not binding, stated that the confidence rested partly on the assumption that the combined company would be investment grade, according to at least two of the three major credit rating agencies.

• 2:02:36Jordi Hays?

  So what does Ryan say in response? Has he responded?

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  I did, I was confused because I saw a post by Paul Branham and I thought, Paul, that's the chairman of eBay. No, it's a different Paul. And this Paul is a major GameStop supporter, I believe, who said, Ryan, we got your unsolicited. Let me translate the eBay letter. We got your unsolicited bid. Our board thoroughly reviewed it. We're rejecting it, not because the math doesn't work, not because we're highly confident. Because the, and so this person is very. You know, excited about this deal, I think. Anyway, there is another media deal going on right now. Byron Allen is buying BuzzFeed, investing $120 million in the digital media

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  company and will become the CEO. This is a very interesting story because I don't know how familiar you are or the audience is with Byron Allen, but he had a fascinating career where he was originally, he jumped straight into late night talk show host. He was, he became a late night talk show host and then eventually had this very interesting business where he would buy-

• 2:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Zero to yap.

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  Basically. He would buy the rights to broadcast on TV in certain slots, in certain hours, and then he would independently go sell advertising against the programming that he would put together. And so the money would flow from the advertiser to him and then he would pay to air his content on traditional TV.

• 2:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  He was on the hook for the airtime, basically, but any difference-

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  But he was paying for the airtime. And then he eventually bought the Weather Channel and a number of other sort of traditional over the, over the air TV stations and sort of grew. He's also, will be taking over the time slot from, I believe, Stephen Colbert, post that changeover with a show called, what is it? Comics Unleashed? It's a roundtable conversation. It's sort of just a podcast with a bunch of comics. And when I first saw it, I was like, that's so weird that they're replacing Stephen Colbert with a show about comic books. But it's not. It's a bunch of comedians. And Theo Von's been on before and it'll be interesting to see how that, how that show does in that slot.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  I think the cost structure of that show will be much, much lower. I don't think it's a live band. It's sort of just a studio with a roundtable and a couple of chairs. And so I imagine that the economic equation- Works much better, but that's not what is in the news today. What's in the news today is that he is buying BuzzFeed and will become the CEO of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed had sort of changed hands a few times, and now it is in the hands of Byron Allen. Jonah Peretti, who co-founded BuzzFeed 15 years ago or so, will step down as chief executive, but he will still serve as its president of AI. And if you love reading AI listicles, you're probably going to get a lot more of them, because I think that's part of the plan. But let's read through what the New York Times wrote

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  about Byron Allen's acquisition of BuzzFeed.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  It's time for listicles to come back.

• 2:05:53John Coogan?

  Yes. Here are five key things to know about Byron Allen buying BuzzFeed. Number four will shock you. Byron Allen, the comedian turned entrepreneur, is buying a controlling stake in BuzzFeed, the digital media company that pioneered virality on the internet. Pioneered virality on the internet? That's a bold claim. I think that's probably true, but, you know, David after dentist would like a word. Allen Family Digital, a company associated with Mr. Allen, will pay $120 million for 52% stake. And this is a huge jump from where BuzzFeed was trading. I think BuzzFeed was trading around like 40 to 80 million market cap or something. So it's like almost a three X premium, and we can get into the share price

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  in a minute. But Mr. Allen will become the CEO. Jonah Peretti will become the president of artificial intelligence. Byron Allen, pictured there as 65 years old. He will remain CEO of Allen Media Group, a news and entertainment company that owns local TV stations, as I mentioned, the Weather Channel, and a TV production arm. He also produces Comics Unleashed, not about comic books, but about comedians, which will replace Stephen Colbert's The Late Show on CBS at the end of the month. And where I'm, did I lose this? I don't know. But it's an interesting story. Yeah, I'm sure there will be more developments on what happens with BuzzFeed.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm so curious what the plan is. They had Q1 revenue of about $31 million, 31.6 million to be precise, and a net loss of roughly 15 million. Revenue was down 12.4% year over year. So, losing a bunch of money, revenue's shrinking. I don't think the brand is... I don't think it's a good, good brand at this point. Certainly has name recognition, but I don't know anybody that wakes up in the morning and

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Homebase is it?

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I gotta know what BuzzFeed is talking about today. Granted, there's probably a lot of people.

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  And Byron is a, a media tycoon.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  So now that's why I'm curious. Like what is, what's the play here?

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  No, I think he sees the opportunity.

• 2:08:02Jordi Hays?

  If you, if you had a hundred and twenty million dollars to just build a new media property, you wonder, hey, uh, what, what could you actually do? So is it, is there some massive audience that's still sneakily more engaged? Uh, maybe he sees a pivot to prediction markets.

• 2:08:21John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, I don't know.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Let's have a cover of BuzzFeed today. Let's check it out. BuzzFeed.com. Fifty. Why would you put that thing in writing photos that prove people are the worst? That's the number one trending article on BuzzFeed. Uh, forty-one celebs people used to love and now can't even stand to look at. Twenty-two, they really go, they love the listicle and they're getting longer. I was joking about five key reasons. That would be, that would never make the cut of modern BuzzFeed. Twenty-two stories about boy moms and their sons that will make you cringe into oblivion. I don't want to read that. Thirty-two people confessed the secrets

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  they've been hiding and these would destroy multiple people if they ever came out. And there are reactions.

• 2:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  I did, I was a fan of, uh, I was never a fan of the BuzzFeed quizzes, but I was a

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's an arcade. So maybe there's a gaming play.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  They also had a bunch of different like CPG spinoffs at various points. I think they got into physical goods. Uh, but a lot of the talent did, uh, did go off and venture on their own. Like the Try Guys, I think famously left BuzzFeed and, uh, and started a YouTube channel and, and, uh, there was always like a little bit of a talent management, uh, not always perfectly aligned. Anyway.

• 2:09:41Jordi Hays?

  We have the perfect guy to ask.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  We have, I don't know who's gonna comment on any of this, but. We can certainly try and ask him about it because we have Roger Lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast with us here in the TBN Ultra Dumps. Roger, great to see you again. How are you doing?

• 2:09:57Speaker 12

  All right.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  For those, I mean, we were hanging out last week, but for those who don't know, introduce yourself. Let's go a little bit back in time. Take us on your journey and then we can get into all the hot topics in media.

• 2:10:08Speaker 12

  Sure. Well, yeah, I've been CEO of Conde Nast for seven years, but prior to that, I spent my whole career really in technology.

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  And primarily a fantastic guitarist.

• 2:10:19Speaker 12

  Thank you very much. That was my life's ambition.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  That was an incredible performance. It's a little bit of just lore, I guess, but we can get into hobbies and things outside business. But yeah, take us back. What was the first job in media? How did you get to where you were?

• 2:10:35Speaker 12

  First job in media?

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that's a good place to start.

• 2:10:38Speaker 12

  Well, I mean, it depends on how you define media. Really, I spent my career at the intersection of technology and media. So the first company that I ran was a broadband business. It was one of the first broadband businesses in Europe going back to 1999. And literally, one of the first things we did is we did a deal with the NFL to stream live NFL games in 1999.

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Where, how much, how much demand was there for NFL in Europe at that time?

• 2:11:06Speaker 12

  Well, the reason the NFL was interested in it, this is back when Paul Tigley, who was the commissioner, he came over to announce this, you know, crazy idea that we had, was they were trying to build the NFL in Europe.

• 2:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're like, I hear people love football over there. Why aren't we, why aren't we making money?

• 2:11:23Speaker 12

  Why isn't it our football? They had, I think it was a team called the Amsterdam Admirals at the time. There was a European Football League they were trying to promote. And, you know, broadband was a really interesting technology and I was really excited to see how it could be used to change how people consume content. And that's why we did that deal. And then I started an IPTV company, first video on demand IPTV, and then Sling TV, streaming TV. So always sort of at the intersection of technology and media or content. Then I ran Pandora, the first company I ran that I didn't start.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  I loved Pandora.

• 2:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Pandora, Pandora is truly, when I think of magical, when I think of magical, when I think of magical technology experiences in my childhood, I think of Pandora. I think of being in my garage with my dad, we'd be like playing pool, listening to music.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  I found so many obscure songs on Pandora, it's amazing. Was there some sort of unique opportunity with Pandora around treating it like a radio stations who, because it feels like there was some sort of licensing deal on the back end that was not the same as Spotify or iTunes Store at that time where.

• 2:12:32Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the trade off, I remember I must have been, I must have been intuitively at the time, I was like, okay, this is a fair trade off. Like, I'm used to going to iTunes, I'm going to pay ninety nine cents, or I can just kind of like roll the dice, maybe I'll get my, maybe I'll get my favorite song on Pandora. So I found myself on Pandora a lot.

• 2:12:52Speaker 12

  Pandora took advantage of some rights that allowed them, compulsory rights, allowed them to stream all of that content. And, but, you know, one of the trade offs was you couldn't choose the song.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:05Speaker 12

  Yeah. And so they did launch a subscription, this was long before I joined, subscription service, but we're late for that game, they were quite late for that game. By that time Spotify already had a very strong presence and some of the other big tech companies were getting into it. But you mentioned AI, I mean, to me, one of the key things with Pandora was the way it combined sort of human taste with AI. So we had a team of musicologists, and one of the, you know, you mentioned, I've been a guitar player all my life, one of the best parts of that job is they were all fantastic musicians. So we do these company events and we'd play all the time and these guys were so, and they were mostly men, were so good.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:44Speaker 12

  But then we had the data scientists also, and they would take the work that the musicologist did and create their machine learning algorithms around that. And each of the algorithms, they had, I can't remember, around ninety or so algorithms, each one would get tuned for every individual listener. So it'd be weighted a little bit more, Jordy likes this, John's like this, and so it creates a personalized experience. And to me. You know, I still listen to Pandora. I also listen to Spotify. But when I want something, just to put something on and let it play, I'll go to Pandora because I think those algorithms still outperform.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we talked to this, the new co-CEO of Spotify, but like the, that AI-driven feature, the promptable playlist is just coming to Spotify like this year. And I'm sure it's souped up and powerful and stuff, but it is, it is remarkable how long that like internet radio lasted. These things have long, these things have long lives. I'm wondering about your view on durability in media generally. It feels like anytime that there's some platform shift, there's endless think pieces about legacy media is dead, linear TV is dead, this is dead.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Everyone loves to talk about that, but in your experience, how does, how does the media industry actually change as technology arrives?

• 2:15:08Speaker 12

  You know, the media industry is, has a history of not changing quickly enough. And you can start with the music industry, you know, music, recorded music industry peaked in 1999. And then, you know, Napster.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  And that's sales revenue.

• 2:15:24Speaker 12

  Yeah, and recorded, recorded, recorded music industry.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  We, we found out like last week or the week before that vinyl record sales are like something like 10% of streaming revenue.

• 2:15:36Speaker 12

  So vinyl records, so that's an interesting trend to talk about. But, but what the music industry did or didn't do is, and this is one of the big mistakes and, you know, like most lessons that you learn, you learn the biggest lessons from your mistakes. What the music industry didn't do is look at how their customers were behaving and say, okay, let me craft my business around that. They said, no, I don't like that behavior. I'm going to change the behavior. Let me sue these teenagers in Iowa who are downloading music or sue the ISPs or their parents or whatever. So I could change the behavior back because I really like it when they buy CDs. That's really good for my business. That was disastrous for the industry. So finally, once they had, you know, embraced.

• 2:16:19Speaker 12

  You know, downloads and then streaming, it started growing again. It's only just gotten back to the size it was in 1999, you know, 27 years later.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  There's more people and people still like music just as much as they did before.

• 2:16:32Speaker 12

  Of course, of course, but they fought it for far too long and it's a mistake. Vinyl records have grown every year for the last 18 years and sales of vinyl records. And it was, it used to be people my age buying vinyl records and collecting them. Now there is many people in their twenties buying them as there are people in their 50s or 60s buying them. A lot of people in their twenties don't even own a record player. They buy the vinyl records. There's an interesting trend that we, and we see it a bit in our industry too, like young people buying physical magazines.

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yep.

• 2:17:04Speaker 12

  It's like, why? Well, I think it's a search for authenticity. I think when you have so much.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  You've got the paper right here.

• 2:17:10Speaker 12

  Digital content that is in your pocket and it's all free or free to consume, it becomes less valuable and maybe less authentic to you.

• 2:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's, there's something that's always been missing from like part of the, the experience of being a music fan to never actually go and trade your dollars. Like I think people do like to vote with their dollars and express their interests and actually have this physical embodiment of their, of their taste.

• 2:17:37Speaker 12

  Well, they're doing it with live music now. That's where the money has gone. The money is, you know, really moved to, to live. It used to be, you know, in the nineties and eighties and everything, people would go on tour to support their record sales. And now it's the reverse. You release a record so you can go on tour and sell tickets.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  And it feels like the in-person events stadiums are getting, like the CapEx is just skyrocketing across the sphere. SoFi Stadium here in Los Angeles, there's like more and more ways to draw people in with like ever larger spectacles and these like shelling points where like, did you see Taylor Swift in the Eras Tour? Like that was a key moment that even like the casual fans needed to find.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  So after Pandora, talk about the, the journey into Conde Nast.

• 2:18:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, it was. You know, I wasn't at Pandora very long because we sold it to Sirius XM. Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next and I was fortunate enough to be in process in four different companies. Two were in New York, two in LA, where we're from, LA. So LA had a lot of attractions for us. And I was flying back and forth between New York and LA and having trouble deciding what I wanted to do. And my wife was like, "Usually you're so decisive." I was like, "I know, it's really tough." And then I finally realized on one of these flights, that when I'm sitting here, I had all the information on all these companies. Every time I'd go to the Conde Nast information, I wanted to read about that. And that's literally how I made my decision. Like, that's

• 2:19:03Speaker 12

  the most intellectually interesting to me, I'm going to go do that. So, and I, but there were a couple of criteria I was, I had for what I did next. One was, I still liked the intersection of content and technology and distribution models. Yeah. But, non-exclusive content was going to be dominated by big tech companies. You know, music. Sure. Films, TV, whatever. The stuff that I had been doing, it had all been non-exclusive. Like, I wanted to go somewhere where we had our own content, we had our own brands, we could control our distribution more. And so that was certainly one of the criteria. But also, still the opportunity to innovate around technology, how you use technology to create new business models, distribution models. And, you know, Conde Nast really fit that well. Yeah.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there is, it's interesting, I mean, we've talked about this a ton, because, you know, thinking about all the new categories of media, which we joked about, we put out this really like unhinged market map of media as a joke. And then unfortunately, people, we like called ourselves Neo Traditional Media, which was a joke. And then now people will tell us and be like, "You guys are a pioneer of Neo Trad Media." We're like, "We created that category as a joke." But, but something that we've come back to over and over is just the value of these legacy brands that have been built across decades and how

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  You know, take away like the business models and how those are evolving like it just seems like the value of a Vanity Fair or a Vogue or The New Yorker are shockingly durable because we're just, you can make more of these kind of properties, but you need decades, right? And, and, and so I'm wondering your strategy around kind of how you think about counter positioning these brands against the content that is flowing so freely across.

• 2:21:03Speaker 12

  You're referring to the trough.

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  What's that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the trough of social media apps. But yeah, but yeah, like even, you know, I've also talked about the, the challenges with Substack around certain stories. Substack, if you're an individual selling a subscription, it wants, it will reward people that publish multiple times a week that sell a subscription. And yet there's so many stories that take months to tell. There's, there's great stories out there that you'd want somebody writing, spending a year on it.

• 2:21:35Speaker 12

  Seymour Hersh is not going to break the MyLion massacre on something.

• 2:21:37Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so there's this opportunity of like the value of brands and curators that, that is maintained and we're not creating, we are like, again, I would say we're creating new iconic media brands, but it'll take, you know, 20, 30 years, right? It's just, you cannot do it overnight. And then how these things can operate as platforms where there are a lot of super talented writers that shouldn't be trying to publish every single week because their calling is to publish maybe once a month or even once a quarter at different points, right? And finding, finding those lanes. So I'm curious about how you're thinking about the role of the different brands under Conde Nast and, you know, counter positioning against platforms like traditional social media or Substack.

• 2:22:21Speaker 12

  Look, I think you bring up a really good point about Substack in particular, which is it is a great platform for certain creators.

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:30Speaker 12

  And if you are, if you want to be on that bit of a hamster wheel, meaning, but it may not feel like a hamster wheel to a lot of people. They love to publish content multiple times a week. That's great. It's a great platform for that. If you want to spend six months, 12 months, deeply researching something, and Substack is not the medium for that. It won't reward that behavior. The New Yorker is, you know, it really is. And that's, and we get rewarded for that by our subscribers. When we come out with these really deeply researched investigative pieces, that, you know, we have a huge army of fact checkers at The New Yorker that comb through every single word, so that when it is published, it has really, really been thoroughly

• 2:23:13Speaker 12

  fact checked. When we publish that, we see the numbers spike on subscriptions. Our subscribers reward us for that type of journalism in a way that I don't think works so well with Substack. Other things work really, really well with Substack.

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, that said, there's been, there's been, you know, we, we're, we cover tech primarily. So we've seen a lot of people from tech leave the sort of like brands or platforms to go to Substack. And some of the, some of the times they come out and they're just scooping every single day and it's, it's amazing. But more often than not, I'm like, I actually wish that at least a few of you guys would go to one company and I could subscribe to you and you weren't feeling this pressure. And, and I don't actually want, like, for a lot of people, I'm like, I think you, selling ads is a waste of your time. You should just be writing, right? And a lot of them feel that. And then the hamster wheel thing, I was talking to, you know, really big Substacker yesterday, and they were feeling that. They

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  were like, I don't, I don't want to publish every day, right? But you built a business around that and then you're sort of like trapped to this business model. So, so anyways, I think we're gonna, I've, I've said it, I think in this, in this age of AI, in this age of slop, and sort of like ultra fast media, I believe that being a true journalist, being a reporter, being a writer is only gonna, I think it was always relatively high status, but I think it will even go up and up and up over.

• 2:24:41Speaker 12

  And become more valuable.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's more valuable. It's like, we want people that are doing original journalism, fact finding. It's so essential. And then also.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just spending the time. I mean, we're sort of a symptom of the internet, right? We make ultra-fast content, right? I don't expect people to watch most of any of the shows from last week, right? Maybe there's some interviews that are sort of durable, but the majority of the commentary, it's just, it comes and goes, right? We expect people to watch it in the 24, 48 hours that we create it. But there's so much content that I think about, you know, sitting down on a Saturday. Where I'm like, well, maybe I want to read, I have limited time. Maybe I want to read something that somebody put six months into.

• 2:25:25Speaker 12

  Look, I think it's important to know what you're good at and take advantage of that. And not try to be something that you're not good at. And you guys are really good at exactly what you just described. And so you've made the most of that and you've attracted a really important audience. And it's really worked for you in a business model. For us, to try to chase that would be to move away from what we're really good at and try to become something different. And I agree with you. I think where, you know, with the amount of AI-generated content or low-quality content that is being flooded into the market, that only, I think, accrues to the benefit of companies that can really stand out from that. And so, don't try to be that. Like, I always tell our, you know, we're going to always have human-created content.

• 2:26:09Speaker 12

  First of all, I think it's what our, I know it's what our audiences expect and want. Secondly, we have no competitive advantage over just creating AI-generated content. There's, that doesn't leverage any of the advantages we have. And so, knowing what your advantages are, competitive, and really building upon that, I think is always important in any business. And for the industry changes that are happening right now, I think there's real value in it. Because unfortunately, there's going to be fewer places that can do that. Because the ones that are more marginal may not survive the changes that are happening. And, you know, our brands have been really thriving in it.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  What is, how do you compare your philosophy of running like a house of brands versus, let's say, an LVMH? Is there similarities, differences? What is the philosophy?

• 2:26:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I, when I first joined, I spent a lot of time talking to those companies to try to understand how they were organized because one of the things I had to figure out is what I wanted to do with the way we were structured because we were structured very differently. We were really a loose collection of companies all around the world. Every country operated entirely independently from every other country.

• 2:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:27:20Speaker 12

  Oh, my God. It was crazy. There was no technology collaboration. There was no, they competed, literally. I remember literally three weeks into the job, I'm start traveling, I go to Milan, you know, I'm trying to visit all their different offices and I get a call from my assistant, like, you know, some of the team in Milan is upset you're not visiting. I'm like, I'm in the office, I'm here visiting.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Wrong office.

• 2:27:43Speaker 12

  I found out we had seven offices. Conde Nast, US had an office there, Conde Nast Russia had an office, France had an office, all in Milan, all different offices. Because, of course, they couldn't be in the same office because they were competitors.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:56Speaker 12

  So, a lot of changes to make in that model. But, look, actually, it was a great strategy when the company was a print publication business. It worked by definition. Conde Nast became a very big, successful company following that strategy. But it was not the right strategy for the internet age and a digital age and, you know, how, and how audiences had changed. Audiences moved from, oh, I read my local, you know, newspaper or my local content to, I want to see what's, you know, happening around the world. I want to consume content from Korea or China or Sweden or Israel or wherever. Much more cosmopolitan in their approach to how they consume content. And, so, really, we used that as a guidepost to say, okay, how should we structure ourselves?

• 2:28:40Speaker 12

  And just, you know, question everything about, you know, how we organize ourself. And even the culture of the company, which was very, very territorial and fiefdom-based to what it is today, which is much more collaborative.

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  So, obviously...

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Plenty of efficiencies across the portfolio geographically. The brands are power law driven, right? You have a few brands that drive the vast majority of the revenue. Have you been in a portfolio expansion period or a portfolio contraction period? Is there a benefit to going more focused around the tent pole brands? Or do you want to expand further? How are you seeing like the

• 2:29:20Speaker 12

  What we find is certainly our largest, most important brands have done very well in this. You know, like Vogue is our largest brand.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:31Speaker 12

  Vogue has grown every year I've been at the company. It grows revenue, grows profitability every year. And Thank you. It is good news. And, um, and, you know, the New Yorker also, the New Yorker just had its most successful year ever by a long shot. Those brands, whatever's happening with search algorithms or AI, they seem to just be able to rise above it.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:57Speaker 12

  We have smaller niche brands, Pitchfork, a music brand, very small, so 1% of our revenue. But it has a very strong loyal audience in the category that it covers. It's doing very well. And so there's this sort of barbell effect that's happening, at least within our portfolio. And then we have some that are in the middle that, that are impacted more. Either they don't have as strong authority in the category or they're a little too broad that they don't go deep enough in a specific

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were just talking about BuzzFeed and it felt like for a long time it fell into that category of, you know, decent sized audience, but ultimately built on a shaky ground of another platform without that really strong core audience that would stick around through thick and thin.

• 2:30:40Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about talent identification going with sort of discovered talent? Let's say a writer who's established that, uh, that's, that already has a, you know, following versus somebody who, you know, has a lot of potential, but maybe hasn't had a breakout moment yet. And then the same thing with executives.

• 2:30:59Speaker 12

  Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, for writers, we're a great home for the best journalists in the world. In part because, you know, I wouldn't have thought this was a necessary competitive advantage several years ago, but it is today, which is That we're not impacted by political influence. We're not under the FCC's thumb. We don't have licenses that they need. We're not trying to buy Warner Discovery and need merger approval. And so, and we're owned by a family who's owned Kinding Ass for seven decades. That, you know, I've been at the company now seven years and not once have they ever called to interfere with anything we do. Therefore, I don't need to do that with our editors. We can just hire the best editors and stay out of their way and let them, let them do

• 2:31:44Speaker 12

  their job the best. So that is very attractive to journalists because they know when they come to our company, they're not going to get a call from the CEO or the board or whatever about, why'd you say those things about this advertiser or whatever it is? No, the journalism comes first and will always come first. So that helps us attract very established writers, but at the same time, we also are a great place for people earlier in their career to learn because they can learn from the best. So we always try to make sure that we're recruiting really high potential new journalists into the company as well as, you know, the best external. In terms of executives, you know, other than Anna Wintour, every other executive has turned

• 2:32:29Speaker 12

  over since I joined the company, every single one. And I did most of it immediately in two reasons. One, if you want to effect culture change, change people. Change people that, that, that don't reflect the culture that, that you want to have. And when I got to Kinding Ass, I felt like this is not the culture of, there were great things about the culture. You know, the, the focus on excellence, really, really deep at the company. But there are other aspects of it, very internally competitive and political that I, that I didn't like. And I just decided, I'm going to, I want to create the culture of a company that I want to work in. So let me find people who think similarly about, about the importance of culture.

• 2:33:11Speaker 12

  And then secondly, because, you know, we were going from, like in the US, it was a, had its own CEO, was a separate company from the rest of the world. It was very focused on the US market. I wanted people who had much more global perspective and global experience. And so the skillset I wanted to be broader than, than what the company had traditionally had.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Probably 2018, this idea of like content to commerce incredibly popular. And even by the time we were starting this show.

• 2:33:42Speaker 12

  You're thinking New Yorker protein powder. When's it coming?

• 2:33:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I love that. But even when we were starting this show, a lot of people said, wow, you have this audience of entrepreneurs, why don't you build your own software and spin out software companies or develop stuff internally. And we said, with what hours in the day are we going to do that? And why would we deserve to win over a team that is entirely dedicated to a certain problem? Where has content to commerce worked within Conde Nast? And where have you experimented or avoided it?

• 2:34:17Speaker 12

  You know, if you think about from an advertiser perspective, the reason advertisers have always come to Conde Nast is the influence that we have with audiences, right? Whether it's fashion or travel or home, you know, it's the influence that we have. Now, you know, that was very, very true in the print era. It's very true today, but they also have many more avenues to reach audiences than they used to. So for us, when we look at commerce, we think that ability to influence audiences certainly exists even more than before because of how much larger our reach is.

• 2:34:59Speaker 12

  And so we can use that, maybe not to create the New Yorker protein powder, but to sell fashion, to sell travel. So we've been investing in commerce, but not creating our own products per se.

• 2:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Partnerships.

• 2:35:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, in partnerships. And that also has grown every year. And we announced it'll be launching soon, an initiative we announced last year called Vet, which is really at the intersection of.

• 2:35:26Speaker 12

  You know, certainly e-commerce growth, social commerce in particular, and the creator economy. And so what Vet is, you know, we have relationships with all the luxury fashion companies. We're using those relationships, creating a marketplace commerce platform that then creators can use to connect with their audiences. And so we'll be working with initially a small number of real tastemakers in fashion and then using the relationships and the technology we've built to create this creator marketplace called Vet.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  How do you think about journalists becoming influencers? Can be great, develop their own audience, and then that draws more people into their stories when they do have something to publish. Double edged sword, because if they leave, they have an audience that might sign up on day one. They might say something that doesn't necessarily represent the views of the publication. There's sort of, you know, some organizations have gone back and forth on it, either saying everyone needs to be posting on Instagram every day, to you can never post on Instagram any day. How have you toyed with that or dealt with that tension throughout your career?

• 2:36:38Speaker 12

  You know, because we have, you know, as you said, a house of brands. Our brands are very different. So, you know, a journalist for The New Yorker may be very different than a journalist for Vogue in their approach to that question. So, you know, we don't have hard and fast rules that we would apply.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  So no one size fits all?

• 2:36:55Speaker 12

  Definitely not one size fits all. But we do know that, you know, journalists that are able to build profiles for themselves tend to be good for business. So we certainly support that.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Got it. I want to talk about events.

• 2:37:10Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  Are events more power law driven? Do you want to like raise the long tail of events? Do more events and try and elevate to something where there's a Met Gala happening every week or something? I don't know. Where does the event strategy go?

• 2:37:28Speaker 12

  Events for us. Are one of the fastest growing parts of our business. But not because we're just doing more and more events.

• 2:37:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:36Speaker 12

  We're actually doing fewer events.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:38Speaker 12

  Than when I started.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:39Speaker 12

  Doing fewer events, but we're focusing on events that really are what we call cultural moments.

• 2:37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:45Speaker 12

  Met Gala is a great example of that.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:47Speaker 12

  Yeah, Met Gala was last week, you know, last Monday.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:51Speaker 12

  You know, in the first seven days, I just saw the numbers last night, we had 3.1 billion video views of the content we created.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 2:37:59Speaker 12

  It is. It was up, I don't know, 60% over last year.

• 2:38:02John Coogan?

  And isn't a lot of it like off the record too?

• 2:38:04Jordi Hays?

  That is insane.

• 2:38:05John Coogan?

  Like there aren't necessarily, I've never seen like, you can't just livestream it. You can't watch what happens inside or like, there aren't like microphones on the dinner tables.

• 2:38:12Speaker 12

  We do a livestream of the red carpet.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's even a limit in terms of what you're sharing.

• 2:38:17Speaker 12

  Livestream had 200 million people tune into view it.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Wild.

• 2:38:22Speaker 12

  So it, every year we do the Met Gala.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:25Speaker 12

  It just grows at a level that's hard to believe. And we finish it and we go, oh my God, how are we ever going to exceed that next year? And then it grows 65% again the next year.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:38:34Speaker 12

  And it was the same thing for the Oscar party, venue or Oscar party this year. 65% in growth year over year.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  Remarkable.

• 2:38:39Speaker 12

  So I think we found a playbook.

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41Speaker 12

  On that, but it's not a playbook where you can say, oh, great, let's just do one a week.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:45Speaker 12

  You can't create cultural moments like that. What you can do, what we found is doing fewer and doing them at very high quality.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:53Speaker 12

  And make them global events. Like the Met Gala is a global phenomenon now.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:58Speaker 12

  In a way that it wasn't, you know, seven years ago when I joined, it was an important, very important, you know, event that people in the US knew about and, you know, people in the fashion community around the world knew.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:09Speaker 12

  But by bringing the company together

• 2:39:13Speaker 12

  into one organization, now all of our brands globally promote it and promote the livestream and the content from it. And that's really helped elevate it to become now a global cultural moment.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Help me, I don't know how much you'll be able to say here, but help me understand why BuzzFeed is worth something like 120 million.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  No, 240. That is about half the company for one time.

• 2:39:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, half the company?

• 2:39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the both cases?

• 2:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Revenues declining, decent, you know, run rating 60 million a year of losses.

• 2:39:48Jordi Hays?

  I would guess aging audience.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any idea where the, where the value is?

• 2:39:55Speaker 12

  Well, look, the only thing I read about that is there was like $20 million going into it.

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  Oh, I thought it was 120.

• 2:40:02Speaker 12

  There's a valuation of that, but there's, there's a stage, you guys may have read.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:08Speaker 12

  But look, I can't speak to specifics of that business. That was a business that did very well. They were very innovative around a different era of the internet. And you could take search traffic and social media traffic and turn it into commerce dollars or other things. That era is gone.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Why? Why? Yeah. What killed that era? Like, people are still spending time on social media. They're still searching on Google and yet publishers have not been able to monetize traffic or generate traffic from the activity.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  My thing is like, I look at BuzzFeed as like, you know, I, I look at Conde Nast and this is like luxury media. That is what, that, that's my personal view on it. It's like this is the LVMH of media and BuzzFeed was like a fast fashion.

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  Just so you've never been to the BuzzFeed Gala.

• 2:40:56Speaker 12

  But think about, it's really interesting. We, we did this for a board meeting about six months ago. Took a snapshot of search results from, I don't know, seven or eight years ago.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41:07Speaker 12

  And what you saw were, you know, a few sponsored links and then the 10 blue, you know.

• 2:41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:12Speaker 12

  The traditional search page.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:14Speaker 12

  Do the same search term today, you get an AI overview.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:17Speaker 12

  Then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:21Speaker 12

  And then you get sponsored stuff.

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Somebody last week was saying, how is search revenue up? Have you, have you done a search recently?

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  I basically have to go to the second page to get an organic result.

• 2:41:33Speaker 12

  It's been good for Google.

• 2:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been great. It's been great. Great for business.

• 2:41:36Speaker 12

  If you're a publisher, you've, you've.

• 2:41:38John Coogan?

  You're crammed out. Okay.

• 2:41:39Speaker 12

  So if you were, if you had a business that relied on that.

• 2:41:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:44Speaker 12

  To arbitrage that traffic to sell whatever, that business got very, very difficult.

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:50Speaker 12

  So. You know, and look, the changes in search traffic have certainly impacted our business, but not to the point that we haven't been able to grow our revenues and grow our profitability, but it's a headwind.

• 2:42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:01Speaker 12

  But, you know, last year, so, you know, each of the last three years, we would do our budgets and we'd put some forecasts in of search traffic declining. You know, why? Just because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes and generally those algorithm changes were negative, had negative impacts. So, we're going to forecast it to be down and then every year it was down more than we forecast.

• 2:42:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:22Speaker 12

  So, last year I told our teams, assume there's no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:32Speaker 12

  But, we, you know.

• 2:42:33John Coogan?

  Don't bank on it.

• 2:42:34Speaker 12

  We expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic. Very low. So, we started working on plans for each of our brands around that. And some of the brands we looked at said, hmm, they don't really have a good plan for that.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:46Speaker 12

  So, we're going to reprioritize on the ones that do. And, uh, but if, you know, if you don't have those paths forward, you know, and if you don't have really strong authoritative brands or brands have very strong niche in certain areas or direct audiences, um, then you're just going to be fighting that all the way down.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Talk about subscriptions, bundles, uh, subscription pricing in a time when we have little spurts of inflation here and there. How important has that been? How resilient has the subscriber model been? What are you seeing there?

• 2:43:20Speaker 12

  You know, it's, um, it's a, it's a very important part of our revenue stream. But, you know, our digital subscriptions grew 29% last year, revenue.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:43:31Speaker 12

  And, um, you know, they're growing double-digit percentages this year. So, it's a really important growth area of our business.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:37Speaker 12

  And we're launching more digital subscriptions for more brands like Pitchfork, small brand, just launched a subscription earlier this year. Tattler, another small brand in the UK, launched it. But, you know, our big brands, The New Yorker, you know, very, very strong growth. Vogue is showing incredible growth in digital subscriptions. So, that's, that's an area that's important to impress. And we think we've built up some really good capabilities, both on the technology side, but then also on just the people capability side, too.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, uh, do subscribers get stuck in a mentality of I pay a certain amount and they're resistant to a price adjustment in a time of inflation? Or is there some price elasticity there?

• 2:44:14Speaker 12

  You know, we have, um, We have raised prices on subscriptions fairly materially over the last couple of years.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:21Speaker 12

  And, you know, each year we think, okay, we're raising the price.

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:26Speaker 12

  We're gonna, the retention is gonna go down and actually the retention has gone, gotten better every single year.

• 2:44:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:31Speaker 12

  So, um, Elastis, he looks pretty good.

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 2:44:34Speaker 12

  For us so far.

• 2:44:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some ways, uh, you know, and we're the biggest fans of independent creators on, on Substack and other newsletter platforms. Like we, we really, uh, we have a lot of them on the show. We subscribe to a lot of them. But in some, in some ways they're helping your, your guys' like pricing dynamic.

• 2:44:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:54Jordi Hays?

  They're like, well, I want $20 a month for my newsletter that publishes, you know, twice a week. And I just kinda like write what I'm thinking and you guys are like, well, we're gonna give you, you know, all of these stories and all of this like video and images and, and, uh, you know, these deeply researched stories. And so your product or a subscription for one of the brands starts to look like incredible value. Cause you're like the alternative. My dollars are gonna go way less far with an independent creator in terms of a volume of stories. Now you don't get the same dynamic that they have, which people just like to support independent writers and content creators. That's a part of it. It's just you enjoy saying, putting, you know, kind of helping somebody be in business. But, um, I think, uh, that's an interesting dynamic.

• 2:45:39John Coogan?

  Can you talk about, uh, the further niche-ification of media? Um, Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, these are already not niche publications, but they have a category. Vogue, GQ, right? There's a, there's a, a theme to the, to the product. Um, and what we've been tracking over the last couple of years is that, uh, the internet native media properties, the creators have been able to find even smaller niches. So we've talked to, uh, someone who just does, you know, car reviews or Jess does, uh,

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Car dealership.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Car dealer, the car dealership guy was a good example of like,

• 2:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:46:24John Coogan?

  That, that would not be a national magazine, but he's made a business work there. And I'm wondering if there's opportunity for... More niching, or if there's value in not over niching a product and how you're thinking about, because you see all these niches and you think, okay, maybe there's a roll-up strategy, or maybe there's some sort of synergy between them, but that's already sort of playing out on the platform in the sense that YouTube is making money from both Doug DiMuro reviewing every car and the car dealership guy talking about the dealer side of the automotive industry. And these are separate from an automotive magazine that might sort of in previous era, address both sides.

• 2:47:01Speaker 12

  You know, I think where publications can get hurt is if they're caught in the middle.

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:47:11Speaker 12

  If you, if you try to be too broad, too large of an audience, this is not the era for that.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:17Speaker 12

  You know, five years ago, maybe that worked, but not today. You either need to be large and authoritative in a big category.

• 2:47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:47:24Speaker 12

  Vogue is a good example.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Or Architectural Digest.

• 2:47:26Speaker 12

  Yes. Or Kanye's Traveler would be another one. Or you need to be really nailing a specific niche where you have a loyal audience that's willing to pay. And, you know, ad-supported only, tough. That's, if you are, if you have a brand where you're investing in the journalism, if you have to make significant investments in journalism, supporting that just with advertising is, is a tough place to be. But if you've got, you know, really content that people are willing to pay for, then, but to do that, don't get caught in the middle.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:02Speaker 12

  Tough place to be.

• 2:48:03Jordi Hays?

  The Devil Where Prada's, The Devil Wears Prada 2, box office hit. Do you expect that to be a pretty major catalyst for Vogue?

• 2:48:13Speaker 12

  You know, it's, it's actually, it's actually been a catalyst for Kanye and Ast broadly. You know, obviously the movie is based on Anna Wintor, and the company is based on Kanye and Ast, and But I was talking to our chief revenue officer a couple of weeks ago and like, you know, we had a really good first quarter. We exceeded budget and second quarter was looking strong. And I asked her, like, you know, what's driving the strength? And she stopped for a minute. She said, the movie. And I said, what?

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:42Speaker 12

  Like, that's driving even other brands. I think there's just more interest in Conde Nast in general. I think it's more than just that. But, you know, I think the movie has created a lot of intrigue. And it's been fun.

• 2:48:54John Coogan?

  I imagine it's good for hiring, but can you zoom out and talk a little bit about the hiring pipeline? There's so much uncertainty in the job market. Should you become a software engineer? Are there going to be no software engineers? AI can write stuff, but can't really do investigative journalism. But there's still a lot of anxiety. Like, how are you seeing the next crop of great journalists develop right now?

• 2:49:15Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Or advice that you give to like, new grads who want to work at Conde Nast?

• 2:49:20Speaker 12

  Well, you know, we hire journalists and we hire software engineers.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:49:24Speaker 12

  And it's different.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  And everything in between business and finance and legal.

• 2:49:30Speaker 12

  Look, you know, I remember my mom, growing up, she always said, there's always room at the top. And it was good advice. Like, if you can be at the best of what you're doing, there's always going to be room for you.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 2:49:42Speaker 12

  Moms have the best.

• 2:49:43John Coogan?

  That's so good.

• 2:49:44Speaker 12

  So for us, journalists who really excel, I think they'll always have a home. You know, in terms of software engineers, we brought in a new head of product and technology, really fortuitously, in December. And December was really, you guys covered this very well.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Agent Melman.

• 2:50:05Speaker 12

  A step function change. And so when he started, you know, I told him, you need to question everything we do. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Rethink everything that we're doing, how we do it, and how we can use AI. And the first thing he did is he started some small pilots, three or four people on a team. Eliminating certain roles that that would have been on a much bigger team to create new products. And we he ran the pilot six or eight weeks and like there was enough information already. Where we said, okay, let's go make big changes now. And so we just, you know, last month made big changes in that in that org really centered around how we use AI at the core of not our content, but how we develop technology and

• 2:50:50Speaker 12

  products. So, you know, the the result of that is there there were whole departments that we no longer needed. Like, we used to have a, it might be a team of ten or twelve people on a big project. When you have that big of a team, you need a technical project manager, you need QA engineers, you need, you know, product analysts and all these other things. Well, we just redesigned it and said, actually, you have a product manager and they're going to be the product analyst also. Uh, maybe there's a designer and there's an engineer and we're going to have AI create the software and also do the QA of it. And so these teams that were ten or twelve people became three or four people and they moved at three times the speed. Um, so what does that mean if you're software engineer?

• 2:51:34Speaker 12

  It means there's going to be fewer jobs, without a doubt, fewer jobs for now. But like, if you're a product manager, you can do things that you could never do before because you can actually create the code yourself.

• 2:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:50Speaker 12

  Using AI.

• 2:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and Conde Nast is a unique company because you guys don't sell technology, you sell content. And so you want to make great technology to serve the content, but it's not the core. That's not the thing that you sell.

• 2:52:03Speaker 12

  Exactly.

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  Whereas, um, yeah, we we've noticed something is that we basically, we hired a full-time software engineer early in the company, Tyler, sitting over there.

• 2:52:13Speaker 12

  Tyler.

• 2:52:14Jordi Hays?

  And we're a, uh, we're the kind of employer that never would have hired a software engineer historically because for a small podcast at the time, why would you?

• 2:52:24Speaker 12

  Build software.

• 2:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why would you build custom software? And so there's job creation happening by companies that. Never made sense to hire software engineers, but now they can.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about, I imagine that almost all the publications, there's essentially no AI doing writing or creative work, but have you had to confront anything on the advertising side? Like, I imagine if I flip over the back of The New Yorker, I'm sure I've seen a 3D render of a watch at some point.

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  Will I be seeing an AI render of a watch?

• 2:52:59Speaker 12

  Very.

• 2:53:00John Coogan?

  Does that matter? Does anyone care?

• 2:53:02Speaker 12

  It matters. What, you know, last June.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:06Speaker 12

  There was an ad that was run in Vogue, print magazine. And the ad used an AI-generated model.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:53:14Speaker 12

  And it blew up.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:16Speaker 12

  But people who were angry, they were angry a little bit at the advertiser.

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:21Speaker 12

  They're mostly angry at Vogue.

• 2:53:23John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:53:24Speaker 12

  And I loved it. I thought it was fantastic because it reaffirmed what I had hoped was going to be the case, which is our audiences want human-generated content.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:33Speaker 12

  They want to know what they're reading and seeing is real and not AI-generated.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:53:37Speaker 12

  So to me, that was a really important indicator of frankly, our future, that our future strategy about using AI in many, many places to drive efficiency, to reach audiences faster, speed up the velocity of what we do, all to enable us to invest more in human-generated content. That that was a really.

• 2:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very, especially clothing is really interesting. There's a slippery slope where, let's say you generate, you know, you have a real piece of clothing and you say, put this on this, you know, even if it's a real model, but put this on this model. And then what happens if like, you know, you could just prompt it and say, make it fit like slightly different. It's like, well, then now that you're, that's not the product that you're selling. You're now selling a product that doesn't really exist anywhere. So there's certain, certain, certain categories that I think will.

• 2:54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:26Jordi Hays?

  And just, yeah, it'll be a brand decision. And I think ultimately that, that is why, that is why I think your brands will endure because there will be plenty that make the opposite decision. We're going to lean into it, but there's always, there's always room at each end of the barbell.

• 2:54:45John Coogan?

  So lots of care with regard to AI advertising. Zooming out, are, are ads a bug or a feature? If I open up a copy of Vogue?

• 2:54:54Speaker 12

  Well, in a print magazine, it's absolutely a feature.

• 2:54:57Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 2:54:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, without a doubt. I think for digital, it can be both.

• 2:55:02Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:55:03Speaker 12

  You know, programmatic display ads may be more of a bug than a feature.

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:08Speaker 12

  But, you know, really high quality.

• 2:55:10Jordi Hays?

  It's just, it really, it's mostly the visual disruption of like, I'm reading this like beautiful story. I actually like integrated, sort of a native ad from the publisher that was, you know, considered. But anything that becomes, you know, display ads, just the...

• 2:55:28Speaker 12

  So our biggest advertising category is branded content.

• 2:55:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:32Speaker 12

  And it's, it's great because it leverages a big competitive advantage.

• 2:55:37Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:55:37Speaker 12

  Our brands, our audiences, but our creativity. And so that's, that to me is a, is a really great place to be in our business. And to see the growth of that every year. You know, of course, we have display ads. We have print ads, some of which can be branded content, a lot of video, video ads.

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:57Speaker 12

  Anything else, Jordy?

• 2:55:57Jordi Hays?

  No, this is fantastic.

• 2:55:58Speaker 12

  This is fantastic.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  Really glad you made this work.

• 2:56:00Speaker 12

  We'll wrap the show right now. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sure. Goodbye.