Leopold's 13F, Data Center Fixes, Shein Buys Everlane | Mike Isaac, Rowan Trollope, Dean Leitersdorf, Joanna Stern

(00:17) - Jury Rules Against Musk (02:23) - Leopold's Situational Awareness 13F Is Out (16:03) - Data Center Backlash Gets Serious (44:47) - Mike Isaac, a technology reporter at The New York Times, discusses Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, highlighting Musk's strategy of using memorable phrases like "you can't steal a charity" to appeal to jurors unfamiliar with nonprofit contract law. He notes that OpenAI's defense centered on the statute of limitations, a more technical argument that ultimately swayed the jury's decision. Isaac also mentions the unexpected nature of the verdict and the various protest groups outside the courtroom. (01:07:52) - Rowan Trollope is the CEO of Redis, where he leads the company’s efforts to expand the popular in-memory database platform into a broader real-time data and AI infrastructure business. He previously held senior leadership roles at Cisco and Five9, and is known for scaling enterprise software and cloud communications companies. (01:28:26) - Shein Buys Everlane (01:39:04) - Dean Leitersdorf is the co-founder and CEO of Decart, an AI company focused on generative models and real-time AI infrastructure. He works on building systems that make advanced AI applications faster, more interactive, and easier to deploy at scale. (01:54:56) - Protein Shortage (02:04:02) - Joanna Stern is a senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, where she covers consumer technology, AI, gadgets, and the impact of tech on everyday life. She is also the author of I Am Not a Robot, a book exploring the increasingly blurred line between humans and machines in the age of AI. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  Today's Monday, May 18th, 2026. We are live from the TVP L3, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Massive day today. Tons of big stories, five big stories I want to go through. Obviously, the first one is that the US jury finds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman not liable to Elon Musk for straying from charitable mission because Musk waited too long to sue. Weird like technicality, I guess, but good news for OpenAI. Judge confirms verdict and that Musk's lawsuit is dismissed. We're having Mike Isaac from the New York Times join the show in just a few minutes. When is Lindsay joining? Around 11:45 today. That'll

• 0:48John Coogan?

  be fun to hear about the story from the ground because he went to the.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, apparently they deliberated for about 90 minutes.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  90 minutes.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  And they didn't really make any type of statement other than the statute of limitation.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  And so Max Zeff over at Wired says, jury unanimously rules that Musk's claims are dismissed on the timeliness issue. He filed the lawsuit too late. Court affirms it will uphold the jury's decision. It's over. Musk loses the lawsuit against OpenAI. And Mike Isaac, the Rat King, says unanimous verdict in Musk versus OpenAI is in after only 90 minutes of deliberation. So did they deliberate today? They showed up at nine and went from nine to 10:30 and then delivered the verdict? Is that what we think happened? Because Friday's off in the jury, right? No Fridays.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, jury showed up this morning.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Okay, talked.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Talked for 90 minutes.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  So they got to think about it all weekend and Friday? Interesting.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Of course. Yeah, it's a full-time job.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  I guess. It's just an interesting, interesting dynamic because you know, you'd think you'd want everything really fresh. You'd go into it on Thursday night or something like that. Rat King says huge day. Wow. And what did Tyler post? He posted a video of Drake talking about something. What's going on over here? Let's play this clip. W's in the shat. Shat. W's in the shat. Is that the song that OpenAI slacked right?

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  I think that's when he is gambling in front of.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Oh, it is a funny way to pronounce chat, but I enjoy it. Uh, anyway, uh, the big news that was going on all weekend, actually, there was a lot of anticipation for Leopold Ochenbrenner situational awareness hedge fund to drop the 13F. It was supposed to go out Friday night, 5:00 PM. Everyone was saying, oh, if he, if he's not.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, people were expecting it throughout the entire day.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were very excited.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  And then there was some speculation that he had been able to petition, uh, to not have to release it.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  That was one theory.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  That was one theory. The other theory is that he was just entirely in cash.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't need to report it. Just wind it down.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Said it was a good run.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's like, I counted the ums and there's none left to count. We're done. Pack it up. No, quite the opposite. Uh, Leopold Ochenbrenner, the hedge fund's chief investment officer, is known for making extremely successful investments based on his core assumption that Frontier AI will continue to improve at half an order of magnitude, 0.5 ums per year, which translates into a thesis that AI will create unprecedented demand for compute and its associated bottlenecks.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  John, they're saying it is blindingly light.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  It is brighter today, isn't it? Yeah, I think we got some new lights. We're, we're sort of, uh, you know, tweaking things. I do like that the wide is less dark. There's been a number of times where we've gone to watch videos and we've been very dark in the front. So we're bringing some light around. We'll see, maybe, maybe we overdid it. Maybe we'll dial it back. I need to brush my hair. My hair's a little, little scruffy today. I also need a haircut, but we'll get to that some other time.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to that later in the show. John will be getting a haircut live.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Live.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  On the program.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but before we go any further.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, Nick, over the weekend.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  Picked up a little gift for our very own Tyler.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Tyler, let's pull it out.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Open.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Can we go to?

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Open it on, on the video, on the video, Nick.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Hold it up, hold it up.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  We waited in line.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  Waited in line.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Hey, what do we got for Tyler?

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Waiting in a very long line, just for you, Tyler, because.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm trying to open it.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Okay. Little anticlimactic.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Wow, it's a, uh, what is, I don't know how to pronounce this. Am I reading upside down? It's a little, little watch. Let's go.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Another watch for Tyler.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  It is not.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you thought it might be, it might have been something else, like the Swatch AP collaboration.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  But really, like, the whole, you know, everything in the Swatch portfolio is fantastic, including this. I don't know. Describe what's on there. What is on there?

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nick, what is it?

• 4:57John Coogan?

  It has a rotating bezel.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  He says it has a rotating bezel. Okay, but just to be clear, it's not the, it's not the royal pop.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  Which was completely sold out and, uh, causing like stampedes all over the country, all over the world. I saw footage, I think from an international country, uh, around people really mobbing it. Uh, you, you were mentioning that you thought it was maybe an aura loss for both companies because of the craziness.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, the, the.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Your brain is now associated with chaos.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  That's not good.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Right? Uh, and AP, although it's, although it's exclusive, like you have to sort of wait in line. The waiting in line is like, here, have a, have a Diet Coke and sit in this private room while I tell you that you will not be getting an allocation in the skeletonized AP.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  Come back soon.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Royal Oak or whatever, right? Uh, come back soon. And it's a, and it's a, it's a very highbrow waiting in line.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  And this was sort of a disaster.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  Come out over time and say, these are not going to be limited. We're selling them a lot.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so the, the people that waited in line just to sell on the secondary market, I think have done pretty well.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  At least in the short term, but I would expect that over time, uh, prices will, will sort of retrace toward retail. I did see a funny graphic of somebody that was like, uh, basically saying like, uh, you know, comparing like getting a job versus waiting in the line to get it. And you actually did quite a bit better if you just got a job on Monday instead of getting in the,

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I saw that.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  And then over time, you know, your, your earnings really ramp out.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, sorry Tyler, if you thought that was a royal pop. I don't know why you would.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Oh. He's doing the Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful, two watches on, one on each wrist. Looking good.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  I think that could be a good, uh, good daily for you. Who knows? It's got a little character to it. You make it your own.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it looks good.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Sometimes the man makes a watch.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should make a string that you can turn it into a royal, like a royal pop.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Oh, like a lanyard?

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Type of thing? Okay, okay. Yeah, that's possible. 3D printing. Uh, plenty of, plenty of opportunities. Well, uh, let's go back to Leopold Ashenbrenner and his 13F, the infamous 13F. Uh, there's a lot of discussion around it on the timeline. Really, like, we have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time. Uh, it's, it's because it's breaking out of fin twit. It's breaking into tech, teapot and tech X and all of that. Uh, uh, mostly because the, a lot of the discussion centers around, uh, the filing shows he's made some massive puts across the semiconductor sector. Uh, 2 billion on SMH, the Van X Semiconductor ETF. And so there's, there's, and it feels

• 7:51John Coogan?

  like maybe more, um, more of a pointed thesis, less broad, hey, semiconductors are going to do well, more, I actually, me, Leopold in this case, understand where the real value is, what companies within the semiconductor industry are undervalued, which ones are actually going to be useful in the next iteration of the build out. Uh, and a lot of stuff has been priced very hotly. Some stuff is overheated. The Nvidia trade for a while became like crushingly obvious and then it grew so much that that was not one of his early positions. Now it is looking like he is going long Nvidia, which is interesting in the backdrop of is Nvidia a car? Do they still have a moat? Well, there might still

• 8:35John Coogan?

  be something else going on there. You have to dig in through this and understand what's going on.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  But the filing is hard to interpret cleanly because a 13F is only a snapshot of holdings as of March 31, 2026. These positions are stale. He might have rotated out of these, meaning these positions were in place during the early phase of the Iran war. It also doesn't include private and international.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Copy trading senators tends to work pretty well, right? They tend to be, you know, maybe they, they, they're very knowledgeable on some of the subjects that they're trading on, some of the companies, right? But they tend to take a more longer term sort of thematic view.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Whereas Leopold, he's operating a hedge fund, right? You don't really know. His, his holdings could, could be wildly different just, you know, just, just weeks or days after the end date of this.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  There is the, the team behind the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker, stock ticker? I forget that's called. They have one for Leopold now. Although, of course, it's based on the 13F. It's a loose, it's, it's probably has massive tracking error, but it's directionally on theme, like, you know, their interpretation of what Leopold would do if he was managing.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  It's very accurate for three months ago.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah. So, reminder, 13Fs do disclose put and call options. They don't disclose the strike prices, expirations, premiums paid, hedge ratios, short position swaps, and/or whether the options are part of broader structures. So you have to be careful out there if you're trying to read the tea leaves too precisely. You're, you're, you know, you can only take away so much from these. So Fei Zhao, I don't know how to pronounce that, says, unfathomably bad takes around this morning and a good reminder of why 13F digging is mostly a waste of time. March 31, we were in the heat of the Iran war. Makes

• 10:34John Coogan?

  sense to put on hedges at the time. Options exposure on 13F gets quoted notionally. So as if it were 100 Delta, i.e. all 100 shares per contract. So when you see something like, oh, he owns a billion dollars of Intel, it's usually, he owns the right to purchase a billion dollars of Intel and he has actually deployed far less capital into that position, although it is sometimes an important sign of things to come. We have no way of knowing whether these were five Delta convexity hedges. Convexity hedges and represented a fraction of what people are saying were billions in puts or whether they were ITM puts in the money puts. Further, outright shorts don't get reported either. Too much noise associated with the things that happened back in March that aren't

• 11:18John Coogan?

  relevant now. We have no idea about his turnover in assets and trade frequency. A lot happened in the months of April and May. His positioning could be completely different. Making investment decisions for 80 vol assets based on data from months ago. Sounds like a good way to burn money. So don't idolize people and develop your own thesis for why you own and sell things. That is a good takeaway from an account that I can't pronounce, but has good takes. Now, there were a bunch of funny memes about this. Leap Trader says, now drop Leopold Oshinbraner's portfolio where he sold all his holdings and went full cash. That certainly would roil the market. I do wonder, is the market actually moving on the 13F? Are we

• 11:59John Coogan?

  seeing like when a position is disclosed, there's a pop of copy trading going on? Or is this just sort of like online fun and games for the tech folks?

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at like T1 Energy.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  T1 Energy is up on the news.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Seventeen percent today.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  And we talked to the CEO of that company, right? T1 Energy is building solar panels in America?

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  That is very exciting.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Chinese company.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  That had to divest.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  And turned into T1 Energy.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I think we first talked about T1 in Q4 of last year and done very well since then.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  I'm excited about it. We can bridge into that in just a second. But Investor Nick says, did that leprosy fella tank the market with his 13F? Forty-seven likes, but very, very funny to just massively mispronounce Leopold's name. Anyway, where should we go from here? Options on 13F. Everyone repeat after me. Sitrini is reminding everyone that options are reported with notional value. So be careful out there. The interesting bridge is. Just around the AI backlash and the fact that a lot of

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Situation in the chat says Bloom Energy is actually down.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Well, he's owned Bloom Energy for years, or maybe not years, but like three or four 13 F's have disclosed Bloom Energy and that one has been fully digested by the by the the copy traders, I imagine. Anyway, um, the AI backlash is continuing in a bunch of different ways and one interesting sort of twist on this is that a lot of the AI maxis, the AI bulls were sort of concerned at least that this would all be fossil fuel based build out because everything else was too slow. They might be in, they may be fans of nuclear, they might be fans of of

• 13:57John Coogan?

  of solar, but it was seen as infeasible, seen as the timelines being far too long. So if Leopold is in fact taking a position in T1 Energy, that sort of leads me to think that there's a little bit of a shorter timeline to at least bringing some solar power to bear during the AI build out, that it's not all just sort of you know, a hope and a dream that there will be solar power on the grid in any near amount of time. A lot of the nuclear power companies are moving on the backs of the AI build out, but it's still 2032. You know, when we talk to the folk, even even the optimistic ones.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  So there has been big pushback on AI data centers across the board. We've talked about this a bunch and it's both a left and right wing issue now. Sagar and Jetty predicted this, I think, last year when he joined our show. And it's been interesting, left wing is worried about job displacement, theft of art, destruction of creativity, right wing sees them as surveillance centers. That's the latest term is that they're they're they're used to spy on people. So that's an anti libertarian, anti right wing position. But there are a whole bunch of others, just, you know, this hollowed out coal town is voting right wing.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Then data center comes to town and they see it as, you know, just making their town works off and benefiting like the coastal elites and like the

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  People have flagged too that both sides are using AI to create graphics to oppose data centers.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah, there's all these like deep ironies. There's there was a whole piece on someone who's protesting data centers and using a lot of AI to research how she can push back.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says data centers need to be rebranded to data ranch.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Data ranch. I like a data ranch. That's a good one. Um, anyway.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Ox. We got ox powered.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Salty says that Leopold sold Blue Energy in the latest thirteen F. So.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  Trained.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Or trimmed. So if that's if that's the case, then there you go. And yes, Lulu does have a good breakdown of the narrative mishap, which we can go through. But the the latest debate that I saw was over this huge data center in Utah that's being championed by Shark Tank's Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O'Leary. Are you familiar with this whole thing? There's some renderings. It actually looks really cool, but it's weird because it's like, I see this like beautiful glass building. I'm like, it's not going to look like that. There's just no way. There's no point. Like, why would they ever build that? But someone dug into.

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  In the render economy.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, someone dug into like the plan and the plan actually seems pretty reasonable. But Mr. Wonderful, he is a, he's sort of an over the top caricature of a businessman. Like he plays one on TV. He is a real businessman, but he also plays a businessman on TV. And so he's a bit of a soft target. Like he was recently seen sporting not one, but two expensive watches, not unlike Tyler Cosgrove over there. He went to the Oscars wearing a Cartier crash skeleton and a ruby Rolex or Daytona. And I believe he also had a like a trading card around his neck. So very ostentatious, very over the top, a very soft target.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  If you're looking for someone to target in like a, he's doing it for the money, you know, like it's pretty, pretty easy. And so if you want to paint data center construction as maybe not in the best interest of average Americans, Kevin Leary is going to do a lot of the, a lot of the heavy.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Wonderful, in the context of developing large scale infrastructure that people are afraid of, sounds like a supervillain too.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yes, and also, like, you can put this in contrast to Eric Schmidt or Tim Cook, where the the previous generation, like the major hyperscalers, like the big tech companies, they've done a pretty good job building a lot of infrastructure, making really, really bold climate pledges, saying we're going to be net zero by this year, our data centers are really clean. They built a lot of data centers without really any disruption. There was no backlash to Google Cloud through 15 years or 10 years of building AWS. And and and so now-

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Neither of them were rocking dual iced out-

• 18:13John Coogan?

  So you're making the case for quiet luxury, the quiet luxury of a of a Tim Cooker and Eric Schmidt, potentially.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in this case, it seems like-

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  I think Mr. Mr. Wonderful is not not the guy to be the face of-

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Potentially not, but apparently his his actual data center plans are reasonable. It actually seems pretty by the book, according to current plans. It's in a remote area. It uses its own power and water, and it doesn't seem to disrupt any local communities. We can pull up this video from Quick Thoughts that has a little bit of a breakdown and and goes through, I think it's called, I think Quick Thoughts calls it, "Why I'm Not Opposed to the Utah Data Center." I think the big Utah data center is fine. So this is a four-minute video, but we can we can watch this and break down-

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Do you have a link?

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Quick Thoughts is thinking- It's in the timeline. Because there was a TikToker that was reacting to how bad it was, and he is saying it's actually not that bad. So let's play this clip.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  ...a million views complaining about a giant data center in Utah. And I'm kind of confused by that, because I would think that an uninhabited desert valley in Utah is the perfect place to build a giant data center.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  I've been following really closely what's happening in Bucks Elder County, Utah, where Canadian billionaire Kevin O'Leary is trying to build the world's largest data center. A $100 billion project, okay? This would be the largest data center in the world at over 40,000 acres. And at full capacity, the data center, which is called the Stratos Project, is set to use nine gigawatts of electricity.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Gigabytes, you saw that?

• 19:52Speaker 04

  It would double the entire amount of electricity used by Utah as a whole.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, she said it correctly.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  First, the data center is built on...

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but the transcripts said gigabytes, which is funny. AI fails again, we need another data center to fix that.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Steve in the X chat says CBP in studio uses the equivalent of 23 atomic bombs of energy to produce niche technology content.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  One reason the project area is so large is because they are buying water rights of the current property owners. So the current property owners are using water for agricultural irrigation. The data center project buys that land, buys a huge amount of water.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  See, he makes this sound good, but then it's like, wait, are we gonna have less food? That doesn't seem that good. But the point is, is that he's not taking it from like, someone who is going to be paying water, or some local community, it's like, there's already water rights there, that are staying in that valley.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  It's not drawing power from the grid. If we look at electricity consumption by state, we can see that Utah just doesn't use that much electricity compared to other states. There are plenty of states that use double or triple. Tennessee is about triple, Pennsylvania four times, Texas is like 10 times, more than 10 times what Utah uses. So if, over the course of this project, they reach their goal and they double or triple Utah's electricity usage, so, why is that bad? It's not incurring more cost to the people of Utah because they're building their own power plant.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  By Utah as a whole. Robert Davies, a physics professor from Utah State University, says that he actually thinks the project will require an additional seven to eight gigawatts of waste heat energy, meaning that the project in total will be 23 gigawatts of total thermal load energy, which is the equivalent of... Twenty-three atom bombs in Utah every single day.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  No.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Okay, electricity generation across every state is going to have that same thermal load property. Not every generator is perfectly efficient, so they're going to generate waste heat as well. So if you say, okay, we're gonna have twenty-three atom bombs a day worth of electricity going off in Utah. Well, then currently we have two-hundred-thirty atom bombs a day going off in Texas.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  You gotta put everything in the atom bomb comparison. Like, your car is like the size of like five atom bombs. Like, an atom bomb is like maybe this big, maybe a little bit bigger. Yeah. Your car weighs as much as seven atom bombs. That's right. It makes it sound so much more like weighty when you're like, just comparing everything to atom bombs.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  This is actually pretty crazy. Twenty-eight degrees feels like a lot.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Daytime temperature could increase two to five degrees throughout Hansel Valley. Not the state of Utah, the valley where the data center is being built. Same with nighttime temperature could increase up to twenty-eight degrees trapped in the valley. Hansel Valley is an uninhabited desert valley. So if you build a big power plant here and a big data center here, maybe it'll increase the temperature of this valley by five degrees. But, okay, nobody lives there. I think this project solves a lot of people's stated concerns with data centers. Worried about water usage? They're reallocating agricultural water to cool the data center. Worried about power cost? They're building their own power plants.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Not helping. Helping is... But I like vegetables.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  In the middle of an uninhabited desert valley where it's already hot. And you're worried about this is such a huge project? This is a giant data center or something, world's biggest data center? Well, that's just data centers that don't have to be built in other places, that are being built in this uninhabited desert valley. I think the concerns in her video are just fear mongering for reasons that I hope I've explained here. Thanks for your time.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  I guess the question is, like... They say that there's water for agricultural usage right now in that valley, but the valley's uninhabited and it seems like a desert. So it doesn't seem like they're growing food there. So like, where is that water actually going? Because is it just getting piped to some other farm like far away? Or was it like they were planning to farm there?

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Way, way, way back in the day, way back in the day. You could just have a piece of land, you could drill a well, and you could pull up as much water as you wanted.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  And then people realized that you might, if you have a property here, and there's property here, here, here, here, here. They're oftentimes all pulling from the same aquifer. So you, all of a sudden, if you come in, you move in next to me, and you start pumping, you know, billions of gallons.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  I drank your milkshake.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're drinking my milkshake, right? And so it's very possible that all these parcels of land, which they collectively bought, they all have their own water rights. That doesn't mean they're being used, right? Because people will sell their water rights to like a neighboring property that is.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. But my question is like, it sounds like they sold the water rights previously, or they had some sort of deal to send the water that they were getting out of that desert, which I can't imagine produces that much water, but I guess it does. Use it for like agricultural purposes, like what were they growing?

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, agricultural could mean you have some, like you have some cattle. Like there's a, there's a bunch of different potential meanings for that. It doesn't mean you're growing fresh produce.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  But were they actively using it or were they just like?

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  No, that's the other thing. That's the other thing too. It could have been agricultural land.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  But not.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Could have been like a failed farm. It's not farming anymore, like a former livestock, like farm, something like that. But I don't know. I feel like people are going to want to go a click deeper on that. Like he rebuts a lot of the good, the good rhetoric, like, but there's still like another, another layer there.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Dave says the water could be used at Amangiri.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Influencers are protesting in the flats outside of Amangiri.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  You drain the bullet, Amangiri, it's gonna be, uh, it's gonna be a big protest.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be over.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Well, uh, yeah, I mean, these, the, these points, like, as you said, I think are gonna be hard to break through, just because AI is so deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons. Uh, and we should watch the video of Eric Schmidt, uh, getting booed onstage at University of Arizona. Alex Kantrowitz played a video here. I don't know if we need to watch all of this, but he says, "This is incredible. Artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement speech it's mentioned in, maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs, wasn't the best strategy." Let's watch this clip.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  The architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know. We do not know the precise contours of what this, if you, if you let me make this point, please.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Step one. If you're giving a commencement speech, you gotta bring a soundboard. Yeah, I'd be like, "AI, yeah, it's not that bad, but also, I hear you."

• 27:00Speaker 05

  Including the perspective of the immigrant, who has so often been the person who came to this country.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  They're really going crazy.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  We thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge that humanity had been constructing for centuries.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  There's just a low-level boo the whole time.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  It's so rowdy. Like, normally you'd think there'd be like a little bit of boo, and then they just like get quiet down, okay. This is about to turn into a riot. This is crazy. Did he just bail on this thing?

• 27:33Speaker 05

  Surrendering your agency. We have only seen.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  At this point, I mean, you gotta go off script.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  You could, you could.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  You can't stay.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  It is funny that if you cut it up in the right way, you could make it seem, sound like the most evil. He's like, "You will surrender your agency."

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, now we need to take this clip, uh, do that thing where we.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Ray says he's lucky they didn't flashbang it.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  True.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  We need to do that thing where we take out the boos and just leave his words and then add cheers. So it's just, it's just the same exact speech, but everyone's just like, yes, this is amazing.

• 28:10Speaker 06

  I could try to find it, but there's a video of him after the speech, like getting mobbed by students. They're all like yelling at him. Yeah.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Really?

• 28:16Speaker 06

  They were not fans.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Wow. This is rough, rough, rough. Uh, yeah. Good. Uh, I mean, the, the, the big thing is like, I don't know that that is like, everyone is booing for a slightly different reason, but it's like this ensemble of, of, uh, of problems and grievances with AI generally like, uh, everyone is, one thing that I'm, that I've been like frustrated about is, uh, everyone is vibe coding like 24/7, leaving MacBooks open, talking about like productivity. And yet, uh, the like, the magical moments, the consumer technology has been like completely left behind. Um, like there was a time when we got the cloud,

• 28:59John Coogan?

  we were building a lot of data centers, but every year you'd get like a cool new thing like Yelp would come out. And it was like, it wasn't changing the world, but it was like, oh, you could find a cool new restaurant. And maybe like, or Groupon, like Groupon was like not a great business ultimately, but like for the first couple of months of Groupon, you could like go try a restaurant for like half price. And it just felt like magical or like Uber. When that came out, it was like, wait, I can go out and, and the car will be right outside instead of having to like, call a phone, call a taxi cab service. Maybe it comes, maybe it doesn't stand outside in the cold, try and fly a car. There were all these things.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  They were, I'm just, I'm just thinking now, do you think they were, uh, do you think they were like angry at usage, nanobanana usage limit?

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Probably, probably.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is this whole thing just a misunderstanding?

• 29:45John Coogan?

  They, they might think we're in a plateau and they might just be upset with the lack of progress outside of coding domains. They say, yeah, the writing is just still not that good on any of these models.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  I can clock it.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's still clockable. Yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. At first I thought they were mad that, uh, like at Google, Eric Schmidt was, he was doing too many, you know, stock buybacks.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, too much cash on the balance sheet.

• 30:08Speaker 06

  Innovation, yeah.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Having a hundred billion on the balance sheet and cash is just unacceptable. Like yes, you get Waymo. Yes, you get DeepMind.

• 30:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. Cause they don't know what to do with the money.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. They weren't innovating for a long time. And then that makes a lot of sense. Why you would boo them. Sort of the Thielian.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  The Thielian boo.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  No, um, and then, and then also like, yeah, the, the, the jobs thing is super real. Like, uh, whether or not AI is affecting the jobs.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  It's also so, so we should pull up Lulu's critique because I'm sure it'll be way better than this. But just in those handful of sentences, like, is that, that felt like a speech more potentially like oriented towards maybe like the Stanford student body, which is like, how are you going to contribute to AI? That's what I was like, sort of, that's, that's what was standing out to me, being like, don't be afraid of this thing, like, jump in and help shape it.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  And if you're maybe someone in Stanford.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  And you have the opportunity to go actually be involved and you're at the epicenter of all this progress, maybe that would land.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  But at U of A where people are hearing like, hey, all the different career paths that I'm.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  I would prefer, in terms of commencement speaker, I would prefer someone like a Sam Sulek to give the commencement speech. That would be, that would be like my, like Eric Schmidt is like, he's kind of like a meh. Sam Sulek, that's an inspirational speaker. That's going to fire me.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  He's on the come up.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Do you have a question?

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Derek Marple, it's more dates.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  That would be fantastic too.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was trying to, Gabe's asking about the, why would he give a speech there? I was trying to find a connection. I think, I think he's just a big name.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's very, obviously his experience is very relevant in this moment.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Show up to Mo, none of you are getting any jobs. Just terrible. Yeah. No, no. I mean, there, there is this thing where like AI needs to create jobs because like, even if AI isn't destroying the jobs, if we have a weak economy, there won't be good jobs. And then like you're still hold, you're still held accountable for that. And so you gotta, you gotta create jobs. Um, and then on the data center side, like there's just so many issues within that that we can go through, environmental impacts, which are probably real. If you burn a bunch of fossil fuels, you're going to have negative externalities, diesel generators, these things are smoky, uh, the, the air. Quality, all of this stuff is is fairly real when done improperly, which is happening.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  The water use thing mostly fake, but still like needs to actually be walked through fully and digested by the public. The noise issue, which is solvable, but still like not that great. And then a bunch of other issues that are just not going to happen magically. Ben Thompson had a wild, wild proposal. He had a great, great piece, which I wish we had time to read through the whole thing, but we, we can sort of run through it. So he starts with a, with an anecdote from Politico. A Texas county southwest of Dallas this week passed what may be the state's first county level moratorium on data centers. Not what everyone was expecting in the free state of Texas.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Everything's bigger in Texas, except for the data centers, which are getting smaller. Now that there is a county level moratorium, seeking to buy time for lawmakers to soften the blow of development across, sweeping across rural areas. Hill County's commissioner, Hill County's commissioner vote court voted three to two Tuesday to put a year long moratorium on data center in power plant construction in unincorporated areas, citing an influx of as many as eight data centers planned there, many of which could have, could have their own power plants. Opposition to data centers is spreading in regions led by both Democrats and Republicans as politicians try to balance economic development.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  Yes, apparently according to, according to AI, there's no official public count of operating data centers in Hill County, but there's eight proposed or planned data centers. So this is a place, this is a place that.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  They're going to be delayed.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  In Missouri, one small town unhappy over its city council's approval of data centers voted last month to oust all four incumbents running for reelection. In North Carolina, Governor Josh Stein has made a point of saying that sales tax exemptions for data centers cost the state up to 57 million per year. Texas has hundreds of data center locations operating or in development, second only to Virginia among US states. Has stirred pushback from environmentalists and rural residents who worry about the effect on water supplies, the electric grid, or their quality of life. Officials in states across the country are starting to have second thoughts about data centers, and some are looking to roll back tax incentives. And Ben Thompson says, I chose this story because it happened just, it happened to have happened over the weekend.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  In truth, there are an exploding number of options, including one just up the highway from where Ben Thompson lives in Wisconsin in DeForest. And they are hardly isolated, isolated sentiments. Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local areas, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% stronger in favor. Now, I was thinking about, what do Americans want to build? Because it's easy to look at the data center stuff and be like, well, everyone's against building data centers, but I do think that there is an element of like, Americans don't want to build anything.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Like, I was reflecting on the whole reindustrialization meme this weekend. I, I got a, I got a version of that sweater mailed to me that I picked up. And, and I was thinking about the actual knock-on effects of reindustrialization. Like, most people don't want a car factory in their town.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  But we do want new roads. Well, not necessarily new roads.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  No. People don't want new roads, and they don't even want the roads paved because they're, I'll just buy a bigger car. Like, I don't know.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Hospital?

• 36:17John Coogan?

  You want a bunch of people dying next to you? I don't think people want hospitals. I, I literally, golf courses, they have poisons, they're bad for your health. Like, I actually think people just don't really want change necessarily. They don't want things built broadly. Like, data centers are probably at the bottom of the list. Like, they're the least popular, but they're, like, high-speed rail. I thought that would be popular. It was not popular. And, like, I'm just going down the list of like, oh, like, you want, like, oh, we need to, we need, maybe you're a national defense person. You want a missile factory next to you, blowing up bombs? Like, no, everyone, no one wants that. Like, what do we want? Like, we don't really want anything. We're kind of good on building in America. I don't know, I just think we're good. Like, we're just like, we're fine, it's good, don't change anything.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  No new trains, no new roads.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think when there's self-interest, right? When people want to build their house, right?

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  When people want to create their new restaurant.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Everyone wants to build their data center. Yeah, their data center for sure. But people don't want other stuff built generally. Like, there's very, there are very, very few things that people are like, "Yeah, I'd be down for that to be built." People, people like the status quo. They're, they're happy with things as they are and they don't like change. So, um, like, any, anything new is going to be like somewhat, uh, somewhat unpopular as nuclear power was. Uh, not building out nuclear power 50 years ago was, of course, one of the greatest mistakes humanity has made and one that contributes directly to data center opposition today, given questions about the impact on energy bills. Also, interesting, uh, we have to do this another time, but the, you know, did we run out of nuclear scientists? Was that what stopped the build-out? Did we not have enough geniuses?

• 37:54John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe. We'll dig into it. But Ben Thompson has an interesting solution. He points out a bunch of ways to fix the problems of data center construction and opposition. He says, "First, this is ob-"

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are saying homes in the chat, but then again, people don't really want more homes in their area once they already own a home.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  They block them all the time. They block, they block home construction all the time. And, and also permitting and also, uh, expansion of existing homes. Like, these things, I'm, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they're like as unpopular as data centers. No way. Data centers are, are at the bottom, but, but homes are something, maybe in the abstract, but like new housing in communities is like razor's edge, 50/50, 60/40. Like, it's, like, there is a lot of opposition to building, just in America, probably. Like, that's just the nature of our society. Um, so Ben Thompson has some solutions, though. What do you got to do to build a data center properly? He says, "First, this sounds obvious, but tech needs to fix its messaging problem, the issue, and if an answer seems obvious, then there surely must be some other problem at play." It's threefold.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  First, a good number of people in tech, particularly at one of the leading labs, genuinely believe most jobs are going away. They could lie more effectively, but beyond being dishonest, it's also betrayal of the fanatical devotion with which they are pursuing AI despite obstacles, including the challenge of spending billions and billions of dollars on models that are obsolete in months, if not weeks. Second, it is extremely hard to describe the benefits of inventions not yet made, cures not yet discovered, economic activity not yet engaged in, et cetera. This is always the burden of those arguing in favor of progress, and the sheer potential of AI actually makes the problem even harder. Fifty years ago, everyone was like, electricity isn't that expensive. Why do we need to build nuclear power plants? They're scary. And now electricity is expensive, and we're like, oh, we should have built those. That's

• 39:44John Coogan?

  the way these things always go. Third, tech is and always has been terrible at understanding and relating to the rest of society. I go back to how Silicon Valley was extremely skeptical of Facebook, a company predicated on connecting with friends and family, precisely because it's filled with people running away from their friends and family. You can optimistically say that people in tech live in the future. You can also more cynically say they live in opposition to and denial of humanity for better, and in this case, for worse. Second, tech could control the misinformation. TikTok is a major point in this. He talks about how the algorithm is still controlled by the Chinese, and maybe there's misinformation

• 40:27John Coogan?

  there. Second, in a rather ironic twist, Meta has learned the lesson of trying to control misinformation, doesn't want to overtly censor, but now the company gets no credit for not censoring misinformation about data centers, and so it's like this weird thing. And then third, this was a wild card, which I didn't think of, but X is the social media platform, X and Twitter, formerly Twitter, is actually Incentivized to be anti-data center in a weird way because X is owned by SpaceX and a big part of SpaceX's upcoming public offering is the possibility of building data centers in space. This is like total tinfoil hat, I think, but it's interesting, like, okay. And he says, to be clear, he hasn't seen any evidence of thumb on the scale or not.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  I certainly haven't. But, you know, part of the problem, though, is that we would never know if there were. And so he goes on to propose something very, very bold, very, very bold, he says. Instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass. Simply start giving people money. Not universal basic income, though. If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren't sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately, I was talking to Tyler about this earlier, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot of people on board. So he put some numbers together and he says for the data center up the road, it was expected

• 41:55John Coogan?

  to be 1.6 gigawatts, which could generate around $3 billion in annual operator revenue. DeForest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. So you could pay every person in that village $10,000 a year and it would only equate to 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the data center. And he says, I bet that that proposal would have been approved and I bet the operator could very easily pass on those costs to actual data center users. It also highlights how relatively pathetic the original commitment that I think the data center said, hey, we'll give you 50 million, which is like nowhere near what that math

• 42:40John Coogan?

  works out to. So data centers coming to town, you get to vote for it, but the data center company says, hey, we'd like you to vote for this and we will give you a $10,000 check in the mail every year forever while we're operating this. And that seems like that could actually get people on board.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this goes back to even months ago at this point, we were saying, you know, AI is not a, is not like a, you know, natural resource where you benefit from having it in your backyard, right? If you're just an everyday AI user, you do not care where the data center is at all. And so if someone is coming to put it in your community. It's pretty fair to want to benefit from that in some way. And like a direct payment like that, I think I'm sure that will happen more.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And what I was talking to Tyler about was, does the, like, do local communities feel a difference between $10,000 in the mail directly to them or $10,000 to their local government that says, we're going to use this to build roads and hospitals and all the different things that we do. Like, I think that on net, the average American is a little bit skeptical about dollars going to the government actually benefiting them at a one-to-one ratio. They definitely think that if the money that goes in is worth something, but a lot of it gets mixed around and there's delays.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the data center is already going to generate a bunch of local tax revenues for that local government.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Show me the money. Show me the money. That's what the locals should potentially be saying.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. It's like, they don't, you know, the, I think it's totally fair for the local population to think, okay, like, this big infrastructure project is happening in my town, even if I'm not going to work there. Yeah, it's going to generate some taxes or to help improve our community, but show, give me the money, basically.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Give me the money.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  Go direct.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, go direct with the money. I like it. Well, we have Mike Isaac from the New York Times in the waiting room. We can come back to our data center debate after we check in with Mike. And I think he's on location. Is this correct? Mike, where are you?

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 44:56Mike Isaac?

  Fine.

• 44:58Mike Isaac?

  I'm good. Can you hear me? I'm sorry. I'm literally outside of the courtroom.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Amazing. No, we can hear and see you just fine. It's amazing. Well, take us through it.

• 45:07Mike Isaac?

  My actual.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  How has today been going? What's happened?

• 45:12Mike Isaac?

  It was crazy. Basically, today was supposed to be the first day of jury deliberations. And we were, a few reporters were in the courtroom because in the morning, it was about both sides presenting their case for remedies to the judge on basically how much money, if anything, would be dispersed as a result of the lawsuit. And literally, in the middle of this deliberation, the clerk...

• 45:39Mike Isaac?

  Goes and interrupts the judge and says, hey, da-da-da-da, something's happening, basically, this scurrying, and everyone's like, oh, my God, what's happening, and da-da-da-da-da. And this is like, less than two hours into it, um, they reach a verdict. And so the jury comes back in and delivers the verdict.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  What was your expectation going into today? Did you think you'd be hanging out at the courthouse all week?

• 46:02Mike Isaac?

  I'm all right, Bill. Yeah, yeah, I'll see you soon. Sorry, that's a lead OpenAI counsel walking by that I should go run after, but he's doing his thing.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we're just hanging out. We're just hanging out.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  You can come back to the call. You gotta go chase him down. Whatever you want.

• 46:16Mike Isaac?

  I'll bug him later. That's very... Literally, he was just chilling and walking out. Um, I, uh, sorry, I can't see without these. I, uh, uh, I forgot what you... I'm so tired. What did you ask me?

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, I was... What was your expectation for your week? Were you expecting to be at the courthouse every day?

• 46:35Mike Isaac?

  Yeah, we were, like, I got here again at 6:00 a.m. and like, was ready for a long, like, sitting out in front of the court for days, because the way these work is like, you get 10 minutes' notice, uh, from when the judge gets the jury verdict to get down here. I live 10 minutes away, but still, like, no, uh, reassurances. So we had me, my colleague Cade Metz, and then Natalie Roca, another colleague of mine, just like, ready. And I was just like, thank God, when they came back, because I didn't want to sleep out here.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, the actual verdict, it feels like, uh, victory on a technicality. And what I'm interested in is that, uh, over the last few weeks, it feels like the, the core discussion or the, or the talking point was Elon Musk, you can't steal a charity. Very pithy phrase, easily memorizable, could stick with you or could bounce right off you, but you know what his grievance is. And then OpenAI sort of needs to say, well, the charity still exists, and we had an agreement that we would go this way, and it was a little bit more complicated. But that doesn't seem like what the jury actually decided based on. And was that, like... As you think back to the last three weeks, do you think that there were that there were actually

• 47:53John Coogan?

  good seeds planted around the Statue of Limitations and when the case should be filed? Because it feels like from the reporting and from the viral, you know, the screenshots and the emails and the and the quotes, like, there was never like, oh, yeah, we all remember the smoking gun of Statue of Limitations. No, I don't. I remember the you can't steal a charity or the Rockman diary, right? And and it feels like we got a different outcome here.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  I think I remember at different points, like, they, this, this only, this whole debacle only became a thing after the launch of ChatGPT. And, you know, the company was showing, you know, massive traction and revenue growth. But I never heard specifically, like you said, this Statue of Limitations.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but how did you process?

• 48:41Mike Isaac?

  Well, that's a wonky point, too, right? Like, it's, it's very easy to, and that's what I think, like, really the strategy on the Musk side was, was to go for really, like, clearly digestible talking points for a juror who may not be steeped in nonprofit contract law or statute of limitations and exactly what that is. And I think that's what they were betting on, too. They're like, all right, if we can sell the jurors on this idea that Musk is, you know, selflessly trying to, you know, interrupt something that could be bad for the world versus opening eyes more technical point of, look, you should have filed this lawsuit years ago.

• 49:23Mike Isaac?

  Maybe they can win it. And so I think that was going into it, what everyone was kind of thinking about, like, is this gonna be? Certainly what I was thinking about, is this gonna be a battle of like the billionaires? Who do you trust? Who is like a character thing? That is this a referendum on that? And exactly what you said, it's super surprising when they came back and essentially, I would say, statute of limitations was like, if that was, that was the ballgame, right? And if they had blown past that, if they had not find them the burden to be met, then we would have seen how it really played out. But that was just, that was the whole thing, you know?

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what? So, so last week, I was surprised that, that Elon jumped on the China trip with, with Trump.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  Because there had been some, yeah, that, that something, I mean, a lot of the people online were just like, he's a billionaire, he can do whatever he wants. That was like,

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Or like, the president supersedes the federal judge.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  But I don't know if that's actually the case.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  But there was some, there was some dialogue around, like, hey, you're in the middle of this historic trial, like, you should be present.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  Or at least able to be present.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  Did that, do you think he did that because he felt like it wasn't going his way? And he was just like, I need to make the most of my time?

• 50:41Mike Isaac?

  I think he, so, so I, I, yeah, NBC wrote a good story on that, like, he was not excused. He could have been recalled and asked to testify again.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:52Mike Isaac?

  Uh, and it's typically bad form when you leave the country to, when that happens. Um, and, uh, so what I was told, or what I heard, is that they had actually spoken to the judge beforehand to like, make sure it was like, okay, and like, that he probably wouldn't be recalled. I think part of it also was that both sides were, both sides are on a clock, so you only have so much time to, to present your evidence, and the early testimony was running long, so OpenAI still needed to get through a lot of the testimony of their expert witnesses towards the end, so they decided, uh, and, uh, Musk's side also decided they weren't going to recall Musk, so like, there was that part of it

• 51:38Mike Isaac?

  that probably made it okay. That said, like, it's probably a bad look when you make it the first three days of the trial and Sam and Greg, um, make it basically most of the time, but, uh, but, at the same time, like, it didn't come down to character who pissed off the judge necessarily, it came down to like, a legal technical argument, which seems to have, this jury was pretty sophisticated, at least in like, focusing on something that I didn't know if it was going to land or not.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, did, I mean, it really makes all of the like, the, the, the AI safety testimony feel like maybe a miscalculation because it sort of took the conversation in a completely different place and then they got focused on this like, technical issue. I mean, the jury doesn't put out like a statement. Are we, are we expecting any sort of like, closing statement from the judge, or is this what we get here?

• 52:36Mike Isaac?

  We, so, by the way, sorry, there's still like, people protesting background, I want to see that, but, um, I'm a very terrible laptop camera.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Are they protesting the statute of limitations because they're on Elon's side, or?

• 52:48Mike Isaac?

  Protest, there's actually, this has been the best part of this, is like, there's many different protest camps and it's kind of hard to define who is, is against what.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Are any of the protesters protesting other protesters?

• 53:00Mike Isaac?

  I mean, genuinely, yes, probably. There's the, I want to do a

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, because out there protesting the D cells.

• 53:08Mike Isaac?

  Genuinely, there, there were supporters, no, a hundred percent. So, actually, usually, post-trial, you, people like me, go and try to find the jury and chase them down, which is what we were doing. I think they probably are already out of the building. I ran around the back and saw a van that was like, all blacked out and this marshal that I had known the whole trial and like, they were just like, getting the hell out of here. So, I'm guessing they didn't want to get mobbed by us. But, uh, the judge, I'm going to try to get the notes out, the judge left the jury with like, a pretty good summation, not of the trial, but just like, appreciating a jury and like, respecting a jury finding like, finding, uh,

• 53:53Mike Isaac?

  parties liable or not liable, you know? And, and I think that the point of that was, she didn't, she, some federal judges could like, be like, no, I'm throwing your verdict out or whatever, but she respected the jury, was a jury of their peers, and they were deliberate, you know, and they listened intently, and so she left them, I'll find the exact quote and send it to you guys, but she left them on sort of like, we thank you for your service.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that seemed also a little bit unexpected because when the jury verdict became popularized or publicized as advisory, a lot of people were sort of interpreting that as, well, like, it doesn't matter at all in that case. But it seems like the judge did wind up sort of, you know, giving the jury a lot of weight and very quickly reacting to the jury's verdict.

• 54:42Mike Isaac?

  And I think that's really important as far as appeals go, because you could argue,

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Bias, sorry, cut out.

• 54:50Mike Isaac?

  Like, you could argue, like, oh, the judge, yeah, exactly, the judge didn't care, the jury. So I think there's real incentive to be in line.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting. What was the snack set up today? Are you gonna get a proper lunch now? I feel like, I feel like that was one of the most disappointing arcs, if I'm gonna be completely honest with you. The lunch game just didn't seem to evolve.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  We were saying that we wanted to.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  You weren't learning from your lessons at all?

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Nathan for you, where you've got, you know, the Nathan for you episode where he's got the chili suit?

• 55:22John Coogan?

  We were gonna do that, you know? Because it just felt like, okay, day three, you show up with an apple and a banana. It's like, okay, he's still learning his lesson, but like, fool me seven times, I was expecting a Chipotle burrito or something with a little more substance. Get into the four digits of calories, please.

• 55:43Mike Isaac?

  God. People were like DMing me saying I have like scurvy or rickets by the end of this trial. I think I just have like a really disturbing diet overall. So, yeah. And today, I forgot. I was out last night until way late at a show and I'm hungover and I forgot to bring food. So it's just, this is basically my, you get to see my slow descent into madness. But thank God, we're done.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so, I mean, we asked you earlier, is this the stuff of movies? Is there gonna be a movie about this? Or was this anticlimactic?

• 56:18Mike Isaac?

  I think like, I think this, the movie is still going, man. Like this thing is still, there's so much. I feel like this is exciting time in AI because OpenAI is really on its back foot in a lot of ways. This gives them some relief in the many fronts that they're being attacked on, whether it's going public this year with a messy balance sheet, or Anthropic coming after them, Google coming after them, Google Ios tomorrow.

• 56:44Mike Isaac?

  So like, if anything, it's a brief reprieve, you know, but uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't make the movie now. I'd wait, wait a couple of years.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Uh, anything else, Jordy?

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  The story continues.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Story continues.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm expecting to see, uh, model wise around San Francisco that say, I bought this after Elon lost his landmark trial against OpenAI.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  The bumper sticker.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  New bumper sticker.

• 57:10Mike Isaac?

  Hang on.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you, Mike. Great to see you.

• 57:15Mike Isaac?

  Next time.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Uh, so Mark Cuban has another proposal for how to deal with data centers and internalize all those negative externalities. He says, we should tax tokens federally at the provider level. Uh, Tyler, you're gonna have to interpret what this would mean in all the ways that, uh, companies would wind up getting around this, uh, with, um, maybe, you know, less, less robust answers potentially, but he says not a lot, less than 50 cents per million tokens. It will accomplish four things at least. It will push the big AI players to optimize tokenization, caching, routing, and localization, which

• 58:00John Coogan?

  will reduce energy usage, saving them in energy costs more than what they paid in tax, and reducing strain created by the growth in energy consumption, which will generate maybe $10 billion a year to start, but over the next 10 years could grow 30x to 100 year, 100x. So he's, he's thinking. Two orders of magnitude in a decade in terms of growth for AI. That's low end of what a lot of people think. And then four, create a source of funding to pay down the federal debt or deploy in response to the things AI brings that we don't expect or don't like. At some point, the models will pass it on to consumers. Of course, that's okay.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Consumers will have the ability to choose between providers or to do everything using open source models locally, which I guess wouldn't be taxed.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  What do you think? This is kind of like the opposite of what we were saying before of like going direct, right? Because we were saying, okay, you know, the actual data centers are going to make so much revenue, you can just tax the data centers and then the money goes to the local community and then that's where you see the benefits. But isn't this going like up the chain even more? So you're taxing the companies and then people in the community like definitely won't. It like the money will be like so abstract if it's at the federal level. I feel like this is the wrong way.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Here's something, here's something else.

• 59:13Speaker 06

  You should be giving people, you should get a check from OpenAI Anthropic every month, maybe that's, that's I think the better version of his. If you want to tax the company.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  What if we taxed companies, you know, what if we had something like, like a sales tax or, you know, what if?

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Profit, a tax on profit.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  What if when?

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Income tax.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like if someone, when someone was paid, what if some of that money went to the government to help pay for public, you know, services? And maybe even if a company is doing really, really well, then you could take a percentage of their profits.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  Because that company has.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  And if the investors sold their stakes, they would.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  They would also pay a tax.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  On whatever gain.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  And then every single, what about every single underlying vendor that the company, you had the same sort of like structure for every underlying company.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  So like if Nvidia sells a bunch of GPUs and they make a bunch of money, they'd have to tax on the profits on that.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or even somebody like a contractor that, you know, manages a building, right? So they have a, you know, maybe it's a small local business. They manage an office.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Make a million dollars.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Some of that.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Costs are only half a million. That, that half a million profit that gets taxed.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Has anyone thought of that?

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  That might work. Anyway.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  And then you could use that money to sort of. You know, cover the costs of operating the government and

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Even potentially use some of the extra to pay down the debt.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Potentially. Well, Palmer, like he's going back and forth with Mark Cuban about this. Palmer, like he says, there are already massive economic incentives to optimize. So this is just a tax on American companies that makes foreign models and more and products more attractive, along with creating the infrastructure for government to track all AI usage and punish anyone who doesn't report. Mark Cuban says those incentives change over time. Right now, the incentive is to grow and spend market share over optimization. You know this. Don't, do you think the marginal cost of some bips on a token is going to make those buyers choose differently? Or do you think the models are just a commodity and price is the only differentiation? Space and then the question mark every time you know it's not AI.

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  And the tax would only be on what providers sell, not open source models, not local, not internal and what foreign models are referring to. Palmer, Mark, you are essentially making an argument for central planning. The burden is on you to show you where it's worked before. No quotas, no mandates, just good old capitalism and competition. Palmer says, this is obviously not capitalism or competition by any reasonable definition. It is a tax that specifically disadvantages one type of AI business to the benefit of others artificially propping up their business models. And my business is one of the ones that would benefit because he's not token heavy. That is an interesting.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Semi analysis says 50 cents per M talk is a lot of money. Mark, are you considering considered cash hit on pre fill or just output tokens?

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Zero the hard questions.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Steven says, imagine a bit tax in 1995.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Yes, Flops tax. I don't know. What else is going on in the AI slop world? The bot farms.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  What about every time you, how about this? What about every time you move your cursor? It's just one cent.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  Tax on something.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty funny. I was saying, I was saying last week, when I was saying like, you're basically reinventing

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  the US Postal Service.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people were messaging me saying, you know, people, you know, this exists already. It's like, man, it's tough when the sarcasm.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Doesn't break through.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't break through.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Well, the bot farms have figured out anti AI, anti data center posts on Facebook are good for engagement. But ironically, they're using AI slop to do it. You don't know this is the AI slop. This might be the most perfectly designed set of stones ever visited upon a beach. It's not worth, it's not worth giving up an inch of this to a data center Indiana. Breaking. An Indiana resident of reportedly arranged stones to make an anti data center message. Uh, this is 99% slop. And this one is really sloppy. Wow. Uh, Wisconsin's forest farms, lakes, rivers, small towns, not a single square inch of Wisconsin is worth giving up for an AI data center.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Interesting that the I and is is capitalized. Makes me think that that was added after the fact. Uh, but the rest is, uh, pretty sloppy, but kind of beautiful. Like, I kind of like the perspective on this image with the big farm in the the barn in the background and the.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  This makes me want to visit Wisconsin.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does Wisconsin actually look like this? If it does, perfect place to build a data center. Yeah, that's the only thing that's missing. Uh, well.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I want, yeah, we have to go and find.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  We have to go find the, the, the, the ugliest 10,000 acres in Wisconsin. New challenge, Tyler.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Well, uh, we gotta, we gotta cover, uh, Everlane. We gotta cover Everlane. There was a big pivot.

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Just to close out, should we, should we, should we cover this post from Ken Griffin that was going around?

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  I, I, I want to cover this, but like, the trick is that this is a Ken Griffin clip. So basically he pivoted on AI three months ago. He was saying like, uh, it's not really useful. The reports that we get from AI models are not actually, you know, relevant to our business. And now he's saying, uh, for us to. Citadel, it's allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases. It's been really interesting to watch. Uh, work that we would usually do with people with masters or PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months is being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. And it's seen as sort of a black pilling moment because he says like, I got home and I was sort of, uh, I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday, fairly depressed by this because you could see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  And, uh, it is like a weird moment and it's sort of like, oh, okay, he's, he's waking up. Um, but then if you actually watch the full interview, this is one minute from a 40 minute interview or something, and he goes on to enumerate a whole bunch of different benefits and where he is allocating his workforce. And also Citadel is in a very interesting game theoretic dynamic where, uh, it's not, they, they, they, they are not a monopolist. So by definition, like they are in competition with all their other funds. And so, uh, there's, there, there is a world where, uh, like even if they're getting incredible value out of AI, they wind up using AI and humans in conjunction to compete because, uh, we are in like the centaur era, which is sort of what he enumerates.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  But anyway, what did you have?

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I mean, uh, one, uh, one, uh, one thought I had is that, uh, you know, Citadel has, you know,

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  AI psychosis, that's what you're saying.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, they, they have a team of thousands of, you know, PhD level talent.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  That are doing things that AI can do pretty well now. And him driving home on a Friday, being depressed. Part of me was thinking, is he depressed because he realizes everyone will soon have access to a thousand?

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Hmm, that's interesting.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  People with PhD level talent that they can turn on. Uh, and maybe they can't cover the whole market. And obviously, you know, he talked a lot about, you know, how much software there is to build. He's like, we'll never build enough software.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but at the same time, he was thinking like, wow, this, this like resource that I've accumulated, this like capability, this like, uh, this, this team, um, when AI can do what they do and everyone can access AI, like, how is my business going to change?

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. So funny reflecting on the time I worked at Citadel and my job was basically to copy and paste cells in an Excel spreadsheet. And so I wrote a visual basic script to sort of just do it for me. And then I was able to just like have seven hours free time every day. And I wound up being able to do a lot of other stuff and it was a story of automation. And, and I can tell you at least back in 2011, I spent the summer over there as an intern. There was a lot of stuff you could automate for sure. A lot of stuff in the back office, middle office, and yeah, some, some research in the front office. But Citadel's Edge is

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  more than just, it's more than just research. They do a lot of CEO interviews. They talk to a lot of people off the record. They have a lot of information that does not exist on the internet.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  They have scale.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of different stuff. So, I don't know. It's interesting.

• 1:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, let's talk about Everlane.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we have our, I think we have our next guest already here, but we can go through Everlane quickly, or we can come back to Everlane at 12:45.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's do that.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, let's bring in Rowan from Redis because he's waiting in the waiting room. Rowan, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:07:59Speaker 08

  I'm doing great.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for being here. Since it's your first time on the show, I've actually been.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you getting an act, is this an active sauna session for you?

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  It does look like a sauna background. No.

• 1:08:11Speaker 08

  I'm in Tenerife today, actually.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, amazing. Amazing.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  The wood paneling behind you really does look like a sauna.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  I like it. Well, yeah, we'll see in a few minutes if you start sweating.

• 1:08:22Speaker 08

  I'll be doing the cold plunge next. We'll see how that goes.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, some people in tech do combine cold plunges with

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  That's happening.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Talking about their companies. Tim Draper being with them.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great, great, great to meet you.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. I, I, I've used Redis a ton about a decade ago. I'm a big fan of the product. But if you could introduce yourself and the company a little bit before we go into the news today, that'd be great.

• 1:08:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, guys, for having me on. It's an honor to be on. I loved your show.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:08:52Speaker 08

  Big, big fan and watch all the time. Yeah, so I'm the, I head up Redis and we're one of the sort of core infrastructure components that, you know, has been around. We're one of the, one of the bigger open source projects over the last 15 years and sort of helped build out a lot of the internet infrastructure and got a great team. We have just about, we're 3, 1500 people now and we're starting to see a lot of, there you go.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:09:18Speaker 08

  We're starting to see a lot of traction in the AI world as people are starting to really build out agents. So as you guys were just talking about, you know, lots of opportunity there and so we're being pulled in on agent data.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to get to that. Is, is, is the, is the correct framing for Redis for people who might not have actually used the product in-memory key value storage, like non-relational databases, think like MySQL, but less structured and also held in memory, therefore faster?

• 1:09:46Speaker 08

  Totally. You nailed it. The history of it, it's, it's an in-memory data structure server. It's not really a database.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 08

  But it's been treated as a database and the killer app that kind of took off and made Redis a part of, kind of got the tendrils into all the applications on the whole internet was, was key value.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:03Speaker 08

  Used, being used for caching.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:05Speaker 08

  So it originally started as an in-memory database. The big thing that's changed, though, and this is just coming live now, is over the last few years, we've re-architected Redis and launched a new product that uses Flash as the backend storage. And so now we have the fastest, the world's fastest Flash object store.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:23Speaker 08

  And, and so that's, that's a new thing. And that was really driven by AI because we were seeing huge demand for way bigger, way, way more data and just, and also RAM prices have gotten crazy.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:34Speaker 08

  And MVME cost, uh, uh, performance has improved dramatically.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  Sure. Okay, so then take me through some of the history of the business. I know you joined as CEO like in the modern era, but in terms of that transition, what is the shape of the business? Because a lot of people are building open source software, and I'm always fascinated by that transition and that interaction between the product, which sometimes has like incredible developer pool, incredible ecosystem, and then also an incredible opportunity to build a real business around it. But what is the shape of that? Because I think people go to Red Hat, they go to consulting shops, they go to hosting providers, enterprise software wrapped around it. But what, how would you describe it? The shape of the business around the product right now?

• 1:11:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we're, it's a great question. We're still a open core company. So we have an open source base, which is Redis. Anyone can download it and use it for free. It's used all over the place for free. And then we have a paid version. So for example, the recent innovation I mentioned, the rewrite using Flash Story, that's, that's not for free. That's something that you would pay for. We have a lot of performance advantages in the paid version. We have a hosted version. It runs on all three of the major clouds. So if you get Redis on Amazon or Google or, or Microsoft Azure, right, we, we provide, we have our own version essentially that runs on those clouds. And so that's, that's, that's the, that's the heart of the business. Most of our usage on the internet is free Redis because the free product is amazing.

• 1:12:06Speaker 08

  The paid version is even better.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  I like it. That's a good, that's good salesmanship. So the, the relationship with the hyperscalers, is that like consumption revenue that's coming to you? I set up an AWS instance. I pull Redis off the shelf from the dashboard of a million different tools. And then as I'm using it every month, stuffing more and more data into it, that money's flowing to you from the hyperscalers?

• 1:12:30Speaker 08

  Exactly. So it's a little different depending on which hyperscale you're talking about. For Microsoft, they're hosted, if you buy the first-party service from Microsoft, right? So on the hyperscalers, you have first-party services that are offered by the hyperscaler themselves. Then there's third-party that you buy through the marketplace. In Microsoft's case, when you buy Redis first-party, it's actually our software. And exactly, you're exactly right. We get a revenue share of that. So that's called Azure Cash for Redis. And then there's, and then Amazon and Google no longer offer us first-party services, Redis. They have their own products that were once based on Redis, but we did a license shift to kind of get them off of our tail, frankly. So Amazon and Google now have their own code bases that they have to maintain

• 1:13:12Speaker 08

  that have really diverged from what is now core Redis. We offer on Amazon and Google through the marketplace, Redis, you know, as the Redis Cloud product, essentially. And then increasingly, we're offering that through new cloud vendors, either they're NeoClouds or like Vercel, for example. So if you ask an agent, you're building on Vercel and you say, hey, please deploy Redis Cloud, boom, you'll get our product and it seamlessly is integrated into their platform as well.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, I mean, I remember when I was using Redis, I was using it a lot for, actually like, business intelligence and like data analysis. It was just nice to clean up some data, have it all available in memory much faster to sort of query and do like MapReduce over. But obviously, the bread and butter's caching, but I'm interested in the shape of the agent business. Like what data is being stored, when? Because a lot of this stuff can be loaded in context, it can live on the chip. We talked to the Cerebrus founder last week, like there's an incredible amount of work being done really, really deep in the AI supply chain.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  And then there's everything out to hard drives and tape storage on the other side. And so what is the sweet spot that Redis is filling right now?

• 1:14:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, so if if in the past, as you just talked about, sort of the the kill use case in the cloud mobile era was caching your your database, basically. Yeah. Okay, you could use it for a lot of other stuff, as you talked about. And in the new world, we sit in a similar place, and that is essentially providing all the context, you know, like coalescing all the context for the agent and then delivering that to the agent. Yeah. And we we had to actually build a new product to do that. So what what developers have been using Redis 4 in the agent, this is called the next era that we're heading into, is storing agent data and hosting agent context. And one of the reasons for that is that you're going to see

• 1:15:16Speaker 08

  multiple orders of magnitude more agents than human beings in a company. And what that has a direct consequence to the load you're putting on your backend data systems. So just like in the cloud mobile era, you saw, you know, kind of you went from like guys that were sitting at at green screens, like like bank tellers, for example. And and the load factor on your backend DB2 might have been like 10,000 to 1 or something, okay? Then you added mobile and you added a million customers or 10 million customers. So so 2, 3, 4 orders of magnitude more load and Redis came in there as a scaling layer. Yeah. Okay, and you didn't you didn't have to go and scale DB2 or your mainframe or whatever. It doesn't make any sense. You're Oracle that backend.

• 1:15:58Speaker 08

  Similarly, in the agent era, a similar transition is happening. So as that load increases, you can't have, like, my company has 1,000 employees. I can't have 100,000 or a million agents, and we're going crazy with agents right now internally. Yeah. Hitting my backend data systems because I'm going to be paying a hell of a lot more to all of my underlying providers. So we use Redis in the middle as the context engine. Yeah. And we cache and hold all the context from the underlying databases in Redis, and that's what the agents interact with. So we launched a brand new product that's on our website right now called Iris. Yeah. And this is its exact intention is that what you do is you you have, we have a data integration piece that sucks the data out of your underlying databases, stores it in our new Redis Flash database,

• 1:16:43Speaker 08

  and then serves it through CLI and MCP through Pydantic models. So you define Pydantic models on top of your data and you do the transformations underneath. And then what the agent sees is a manifestation or a view of the underlying data. And the difference is it's not just a scale issue. It's also providing the data in the way the agent expects to get it. So I'll give you a simple analogy here would be like if I told you, you know, hey, you know, let's say, let's say I said to you, um, uh, hey, I'm an agent and I need you to go get some data and you said, great, it's in that filing cabinet and I gotta go rummage around as an agent, calling a whole bunch of MCP tools and doing queries and figuring out relationships, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:17:26Speaker 08

  Versus I say to you, I need some data and you just pull the exact file out of the cabinet and say, here it is and hand it to me.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 08

  And that's the difference. So it's a huge reduction in token costs.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:36Speaker 08

  Um, and also agent speed and then a, and then a big improvement in terms of performance of agents because the data is essentially massaged into a format, these Pydantic models, and then semantically described exactly what the agent needs. So that's what Iris is all about. And then it also has the second component, which is memory. So agent memory is the other big thing we've invested in. And we have a state of the art memory server that we've just launched as well.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I, I mean, what, what is a like a reasonable scaling factor for the amount of data from my relational database, my hard drive based database to go into memory? Because I imagine it's, you, you mentioned like brings a copy into memory, but I imagine that's not one to one. I want to do some, uh, some condensing down of the data to what's relevant. And I imagine that Iris helps with that, but what is a good rule of thumb? I imagine that there's some sort of cost relative, uh, trade off there, but

• 1:18:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  How, how, how are companies even thinking about that?

• 1:18:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I haven't really talked to any customers who are thinking about it in that way.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:38Speaker 08

  What they're thinking about is what is the cost delta to scale my data layer in Redis versus purchasing additional licenses of, you know, whatever NetSuite or

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:48Speaker 08

  You know, Salesforce or this or that other thing, whatever that, whatever that underlying asset is, um, and so, but I would say.

• 1:18:56Speaker 08

  So it's a good question. I actually don't know the answer to that.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Speaker 08

  But they do think about it in terms of accuracy.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Speaker 08

  Like, you know, you want the data to be served up in a way that is the best possible and most accurate data. So semantic descriptions, this is why we use the PyDantic models is you can put semantic descriptions on each thing. So, so, so all that encoded knowledge of like what to query, what database, what record, what table? That all gets encoded in the system. What the agent gets is a really nice set of MCP or CLI tools that say like, you know, search customer records.

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Speaker 08

  And we have a super fast search underneath the covers. We have a great vector search and then a BM25 search. So we can search across all those records and then just deliver exactly what you need. And so what that all amounts to for the end customer is a much faster and much more token efficient agent experience.

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 08

  And, and the second piece of it, and this is important, we should talk about it, is that that context should get better over time. Like agents learn things as they go and they need to remember the things that they've learned, not just facts about the user. Like when people talk about memory these days, we often talk about remembering user preferences. That's interesting. But you also need to remember, hey, when I, when I check the shipping status for this particular customer, like that system was wrong, but this system was right. And that's the truth of large enterprises and their data is that they're really messy in most cases. And so expecting them to sort of like get all that stuff in order in advance, it's just too tall of an order. And so we need to also remember things that the agent has learned over time and then store those.

• 1:20:30Speaker 08

  And that, and that gets stored in agent memory. So we have a state of the art model there called Agent Memory Server that does the extraction and all the kind of stuff you would expect from a memory platform.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you interacting with benchmarks these days? Because most of the benchmarks are centered around performance, like meters, like how, how advanced of a software engineering task can the frontier models crank on? And they're up to like 24 hour, it would take a software engineer 24 hours to do something, but 4.7 or 5.5 can, can, can do it. Period and can achieve it with 50% accuracy. They're not really talking about the time to return that result. And we've sort of settled into this equilibrium where if it's a big query, 10 minutes is acceptable for most people, maybe 20.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  And then for, you know, a knowledge retrieval, I want to know an answer. It's got to come back in like 30 seconds, but it's not, we're not in the Amazon e-commerce era where 100 milliseconds means losing dollars, which is sort of where you're, where the Reddit DNA comes from in caching. But I imagine that a pitch to an agent company might be something like, yes, the vast majority of wall clock time is going to be waiting for tokens to inference and churn out on, you know, a big cluster somewhere. But we're going to keep the GPUs fed so much more effectively by keeping this in memory. How are you thinking about quantifying that for customers?

• 1:22:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, so the first point you made about agent runtime, certainly that we're witnessing what everyone else is witnessing, you know, the like the time an agent can run unattended. And the, and the issue with that is context becomes even more important, right? Like if I told you to solve a problem and then I locked you in like a closet and didn't give you access to the outside world for eight hours, you'd just hallucinate a bunch of answers. But if I stuck you in the New York Public City Library and with a Google Terminal, like you'd be good and you'd come up with an answer and it would be good. So context becomes super important when you're running these really long tasks. And the transition that has happened really over the last couple of years from what started with RAG, which was kind of engineers thinking, hey, we'll just preload the context window with all this stuff.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 08

  And, and then the agent can go and go figure it all out. And there was this whole idea that context windows would get bigger and you could just load everything into the context window, your whole code base, you know, all of your, but, but the truth is that really doesn't work. To stick everything into the context window, number one is expensive. And number two, just really it's overloading. You're just getting way too much rot in, in the context window. And so it's much better to provide a tight set of tools to the agent to let them reason over the data and sort of do searches and what, what can I access? And that kind of stuff. So what we see is the longer the agent can run. The better the context has to be to make it effective. Otherwise, it just starts to go haywire.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, switching over to just, uh, your philosophy as a CEO. You said fifteen hundred people, something like that, over a thousand work for Redis. Uh, you're obviously using these tools. How do you see the shape of the organization changing over the next few years?

• 1:23:45Speaker 08

  Well, dramatically. I mean, so I I've been coding since I was eleven years old and professionally since I was eighteen in high school and at a startup. And, um, you know, I woke up one day with these tools and realized like all the way that I learned how to build software thirty years ago is just not relevant anymore. And so, you know, I'm not going to rely on a bunch of other people telling me, you know, and like watching, you know, Twitter people breathlessly telling me how the world is changing. I'm gonna go learn it myself. So I've gone back to basics over the last year and a half. Um, I mean, really, since we started using ChatGPT for coding. Uh, and OpenAI and then really have been diving in myself personally. So I I actually sit on teams.

• 1:24:27Speaker 08

  I've been contributing and building my own projects on the side as well as contributing to our own code. And I think there's a few maybe non-obvious things that I've learned. You know, there's the obvious part that is like the code is now can be written mostly by by agents and by, you know, by coding agents. But but that if you just do that, it doesn't really change much because then you still have the same people in the same process. The process is all set up to basically handle a world where the coding takes a really long time. That's the long poles. If that's not the long pole anymore, there's all these other long poles like meetings and daily stand-ups and processes that were all built around that fundamental assumption of coding is the long pole in the tent. Now that that's gone, we're having to reinvent those processes. And I've basically found, and same with my CTO,

• 1:25:10Speaker 08

  we have to go right back into the front lines with the teams and build code ourselves as we reinvent the software development lifecycle. And frankly, we're finding that a lot of folks have to make a big jump in terms of how they do work. Like a developer with eight with ten agents is more like a development manager. Of old and the development manager does a different job. They coordinate, they express the right, their requirements in the right way. They have taste. They decide what's the right approach to solve a problem. And that's the new job and it's really fundamentally different than what the developer of let's say three years used to do before these agents showed up. So. And by the way, I'm having a blast. Like I love coding. I've always loved coding. I love everything about it.

• 1:25:53Speaker 08

  And I love it even more now. I mean, it's like the, I've taken out the gnarly part in the middle, which was the, you know, typing everything in and finding missing semicolons. And now I just go right from expressing intent to getting the result and that's awesome.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you seeing it instantiated more in like new greenfield projects, new internal tools or actual product velocity on the core product?

• 1:26:18Speaker 08

  Both, but it more on greenfield. On the brownfield, what we've, first of all, like we use it differently. So for like front end stuff. You know, we can like pretty much vibe code everything.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:31Speaker 08

  You know, on core Redis system software.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 08

  I'll give you a good example. We just launched a new data type, Salvatore Sant Filippo, who's the original author of Redis.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Speaker 08

  A lot of new data type called arrays.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Speaker 08

  It's 4,000 lines of C code. It took him four months and he was deeply using Codex.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:26:49Speaker 08

  And, and Anthropic, okay, Claude.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Speaker 08

  The whole time.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Speaker 08

  And it was, it's, but the difference, so it, it took, it was faster to do.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Speaker 08

  Okay. So that same idea that that array data type would have taken probably a lot longer. But more important, like eight, eight months, maybe for him just sitting there writing C code. But more importantly, it's way higher quality. Right out of the gate, huge amounts of tests, huge amounts of infrastructure, like all kinds of benchmarks, all that extra stuff that comes around the edges and. We really do use, even at hardcore systems level coding, we're using the AI to give really good suggestions. We're often pitting them against each other to sort of say, hey, come up your bet with your best design for this. And then we'll throw it at the other AI to say, what do you think? And back and forth. So, so at that level, you really are still crafting the code. At the systems level, which is kind of where the world that I come from.

• 1:27:44Speaker 08

  But at the higher end and kind of for greenfield projects, you know, JavaScript and you know, next JS applications, you're just like vibe coding and just going crazy. I would say if you have one project, what is a good example in a greenfield. It would have taken a typical, like, we were building this big management infrastructure for the Iris project, it would have taken us probably a year for like 10 devs to do something like, big like that with LDAP support and all the different things you need for enterprise software. It took five guys one month. Guys and girls, actually. So that's a big acceleration on that front. But it's different at the systems level software side and Brownfield.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking down for us. Hope you have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:28:27Speaker 08

  Huge fan. Thank you so much for having me on.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Everlane was sold to Shein for just $100 million. It was a VC darling when it launched, says Shein Monat, raising from Kleiner Perkins. I didn't realize how many big VC funds.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  It was a who's who.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  It was a who's who. Kleiner Perkins, Cosla, Mavron and others, $145 million raised. I think the bet was that consumers would pay more for ethical, sustainable basics and that consumers may not really exist at venture scale, that consumer. The low-end consumer wants price, the high-end customer wants brand, taste and status. Everlane is kind of stuck in the middle. It sells smart basics at a premium, but I'm not sure people who are willing to pay a significant premium for simple clothes over Quince, Uniqlo and Amazon. Maybe the radical, the real radical transparency was showing everyone how brutal fashion economics can be. Wonder when, what Shein does with it. Will they just make the

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  same clothes in sweatshops now? And so people were very upset about this.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you had, so, so yeah, I think you, one, pretty, pretty shocking, right? Companies have had very different approaches to building their business.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  And it's hard to see how, it's hard to see how Everlane can fit into Shein in a way that maintains their historical ethos. Who knows, right? Shein, Shein.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Is it that hard? I mean, doesn't, like, Volkswagen Group owns Lamborghini or something?

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but neither Volkswagen or Lamborghini.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Wherever they were both saying, we're making cars. Lamborghini says we make faster cars.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Volkswagen.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  They both make clothes. Everlane saying we make clothes in the system.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Sheen is a company, Sheen, like Everlane, Everlane was created as a response to uh, people's concerns with sweatshops, right?

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Was the Rivuelto not a response to the Passat? I believe it was.

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Um, no. So, so Everlane came out.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Yes, it is different because it's moral. It's moral. It's not, it's not purely functional stats.

• 1:30:52Jordi Hays?

  It's not like we're making, Everlane wasn't like, we're gonna make a better t-shirt. That was maybe part of it, but it was more like, we're gonna make, we're gonna make.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  At the same time, a lot of the carmakers, they went EV directly to counteract the Gasco's and V12s.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  You have to look at when these car companies were founded at the time, there, there wasn't, yes, speed, if speed is, is morality, horsepower is morality, maybe you're right, John. But, but look at the, uh, when was Everlane founded? 2011?

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  I just think like, like, like some car brands were founded with safety in mind.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Founded in 2011. Two things top of mind at that point.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  When was Sheen founded?

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, sweatshops, like apparel sweatshops, right? And then the entire, you know, sort of like eco sustainability movement, right? So Everlane was a response from that. They met the moment. The business absolutely ripped. I think the other thing at that time is like a lot of the big legacy brands, thinking like Gap and, and, um, and, uh, Old Navy and brands like that. Uh, they were just totally asleep at the wheel, right? So they're, they're, I, I think they weren't keeping up with, just weren't keeping up with the times, right? When you just look at, think about the difference of like navigating like an Everlane website in that era versus navigating like a Gap website, right?

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  Like, I've never got it. I've, I've actually never.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  But just imagine it, right? Like one is extremely clunky. The other one is like very easy to operate. Uh, Everlane was a pioneer of an entire style of, uh, you know, photography, product photography. Uh, it was very, everything was like clean, minimalist. It really met the moment, right? And this is something that, um,

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Apparel brands blow up because they-

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  Shein's a little busier on the website. I'm looking at Everlane, it's like a single model just showing like a few items of clothing and you open up the Shein website and it's just huge, accept all cookies and then 30% off if you sign up and save and then like a huge registration thing, then another pop up. So many pop ups here. Yeah, wildly different brands, another pop up.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Everlane was created in the perfect moment, a response to consumer concerns and preferences. They ride that wave to couple hundred million of annualized revenue. They've got own retail in a bunch of different places, their DSC Darling. Michael, CEO, who's a friend of mine, I'm an investor in one of his new companies. He, yeah, I mean incredible execution by the team. They built a brand that effectively became a household name. He stepped away after basically 10 years.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  And, and a woman named Andrea took over. But, but yeah, I think ultimately when you look at there's, there's this like constant desire that sometimes gets forgotten or obfuscated, which is that consumers want cheap stuff, right? And I think as Everlane was like trying to scale, right, competing over the coastal millennial who's like on Instagram all day long shopping, right? They're excited about newness, right? Like I have tried so many different companies that are effectively competitors to Everlane. I've tried so many different t-shirt

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  basics companies, just because I'm constantly searching for the perfect white tee. Which we might, we might have to make, we might have to make the TDPN perfect white tee.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:34:42Jordi Hays?

  And so you have this customer base who you met them at this amazing moment and their revenue ramp reflects that, but then over time, it was in some ways like the sort of like sustainability brands like broadly have suffered over the last decade, right? It stopped being something that the average consumer was caring about to the same degree. Allbirds is another example of this sustainable footwear, right? And so, yeah, shift in consumer preferences also, when you look at a lot of the greatest

• 1:35:24Jordi Hays?

  apparel brands in history, they didn't raise venture capital, right? When you have venture capital, it's like, we need to grow as much as possible, year over year, forever. Like, that is what you sign up for, right? And when you look at apparel brands, oftentimes, like, it's more of a kind of like winding road. Like Chrome Hearts. Exactly. Up and down. Exactly. Up and down, but tightly Held. Held, right? By one family. Yep. And they're okay. They're like, hey, if revenue dips one year, or we want to pull back Yep. on supply, that's great. Yep. Right? And so, when you're venture backed, you don't have that luxury. Yeah. And I think that venture is at odds with building, it's just at odds with building

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  A generation. A super durable apparel brand. Apparel. Simply because there's no network effects at all, right? And especially if your customer, if your customer base is excited about newness, right? I'm not, I might be more loyal to one brand or another, but that doesn't stop me from, you know, seeing a brand pop up. Maybe it's run by some founder, I think is cool, being willing to try it, right? And this is happening all the time. Like, Chris Black has a brand, and

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  The dollars that I'm putting towards his brand are like effectively dollars that could have gone to Everlane, right?

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Amy Leon Door founded in 2014, seems to be doing well.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Venture backed, though?

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Is it?

• 1:37:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so.

• 1:37:02John Coogan?

  I don't think so, no. And I think it's very tightly held, very tightly controlled, very limited. Well, the deal was $100 million. We don't know too much about the deal. And then they'd raised over $100 million in equity. L. Catterton invested $85 million in Everlane in 2020 when the brand was doing 200 million in revenue. Now revenue is down to 170, but there's 90 million in debt. Sort of unclear, did Shein acquire the debt and then pay that 100 million to the preferred equity holders? It feels like common was probably wiped out, but unclear exactly the structure of this deal.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  They say, this one post, Fan B, says the $100 million sale price essentially covers the debt, but it's possible that the $100 million went to the preferred equity holders and Shein assumed the debt with the deal. Either way, not a fantastic outcome. There's, you know, people are saying it's the death of DTC, but there are some green shoots, specifically with green products, Grooves sold for 1.2 billion. That's a good outcome.

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's a brand that can go in every Target, every Walmart, every Whole Foods, every major retailer and sell billions of dollars worth of product. Everlane, I'm not sure if they ever were selling in other retails or it was entirely their own stores. And there's no, there's no real, like, you know, Everlane made some great clothes. There's probably people listening to this that bought something from Everlane.

• 1:38:46Jordi Hays?

  Five, eight years ago, something like that. And it's still in their closet. And so unfortunate outcome for the Everlane team, but they, their execution across that decade was pretty impressive.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  And we'll see where it goes. Well, we have our next guest, Dean from Descartes in the waiting room. Let's bring in Dean. Will there be a crazy filter? Normal, normal mode. Welcome back to the show.

• 1:39:16Jordi Hays?

  We'll throw a filter on.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  I haven't seen anyone nail that as well as you have. Well, you've been nailing lots of things. Give us the news. Tell us what's going on.

• 1:39:25Speaker 09

  Well, so fun to be back here on TBPN. Last time we did this, we had some crazy filters.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  It was very psychedelic. I loved it.

• 1:39:35Speaker 09

  It was, it was very psychedelic. If you're interested in newer ones, you should go on our site and try them out. It's been mind blowing.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:39:42Speaker 09

  But, but today, you know, we announced a round. We had a big funding round. We raised a million dollars.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:39:52Speaker 09

  Nice.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you back.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Great to have you back.

• 1:39:57Jordi Hays?

  We missed you.

• 1:39:58Speaker 09

  It was worth doing the round just for that. We should, we should do more and more rounds just to get that going.

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  Raise a dollar tomorrow. We'll have you back. No, tell us, tell us what you've been up to since the last conversation.

• 1:40:08Speaker 09

  So, so, you know, today, the really exciting stuff is that we have announcements on all three of our product lines.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:40:16Speaker 09

  So, so we have, we have three product lines at Descartes. The first two are world models. We have Lucy, that's a world model, it's a real time video model that is used for immersive experiences. So gaming, live streaming, e-commerce, ads, and then we have the new version of Lucy coming out soon, which, which has been growing dramatically over the past three quarters.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's generally what you were demoing the last time you were on, where you have this real time video of you in these sort of exotic settings. Right.

• 1:40:46Speaker 09

  Exactly. We have Lucy, Lucy can take any video stream, edit it live, so it can do either fun stuff, and we've seen huge usage for that in social. Platforms like Twitch, TikTok Live, YouTube Live. And at the same time, can also be used for beneficial experiences. For example, e-commerce and virtual try on, trying on different clothes. Or putting ads inside into live streams. And we've seen that, for example, with Amazon. We're using this across different e-commerce providers. So that's our Lucy product line and has its new version that's coming out. We have our Oasis product line, which is a real time world model for physical AI. For robotics, for autonomous vehicles, drones, manufacturing.

• 1:41:29Speaker 09

  And really over there, our real time model lets AI just interact with the real world. It stops being just in the virtual world and tech space. And actually is real time pixels lets the AI see the real world in real time and interact with it. And then we have our third product line, which is DOS. The Descartes optimized stack. It's our inference engine. It's basically what powers both Lucy and Oasis. And it lets us run models, all types of models. LLM models, agentic models, video models, audio models, world models. All the types of models dramatically more efficient than anything on the market. And today we're announcing DOS 2.0. That's already being used by some of the hyperscalers.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again.

• 1:42:19Jordi Hays?

  You gave him a heart attack. When did you release DOS 1.0? You realized at some point, hey, we're cooking pretty hard over here. Maybe we should let other people use it.

• 1:42:32Jordi Hays?

  It feels, you know, pretty aligned with the other products. But yeah, how did you get into it?

• 1:42:39Speaker 09

  So I think that's a great question. Actually, you know, we don't talk about DOS too much, but DOS was actually the first product we commercialized. When the company was just three months old, we closed the first multimillion dollar license deal for DOS.

• 1:42:54Speaker 09

  Literally three months in, it was less than 100 days.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Why did it take you so long?

• 1:43:02Speaker 09

  That's, you know, that's the number one question I ask my team literally every single day. Okay. Number one rule for running an AI company, if you're an AI CEO, whenever your team comes to you with a deadline, ask why not 10 times shorter. Okay. But, but yeah, you know, to go back to your question, DOS 1.0 was the first product we ever had at Descartes. We licensed it back to the Neo Clouds back then and to some of the younger AI labs. Now DOS 2.0 is being used by, by all the players, including the tier one players as well. Uh, and hyperscalers to, to really use compute much more efficiently. And for the models that we support really focus on very fast models. So either agentic models or live video models.

• 1:43:45Speaker 09

  For those models, we're anywhere between five to eight X more performant than anything on the market.

• 1:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Is focus overrated?

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  No, it seems that you're doing a lot, you're competing, you're fighting, you're fighting, you know, fighting on, you know, three different uh, fronts, but clearly doing, doing a great job at it. How do you, how do you make it, how do you make it work? Uh, I can imagine any one of these opportunities being, you know, big enough at some point to warrant kind of going all in on it.

• 1:44:18Speaker 09

  Well, we're all in on them, on all three of them. Now, the nice thing is that it really, I think, I think focus is very, very, very important. And you have to build inside the company, very independent leaders. We have a lot of very, very talented researchers that turned into very independent leaders inside the company. So they're both great on the technical side and very, very good on productization. I'm taking this to market, I'm talking to customers, I'm building the product itself. And, and we inside the car really have three different teams. One for Lucy, one for Oasis, one for DOS. And they each operate completely independently and only focused on the thing that they're doing. Now with DOS, the reason we accelerated DOS 2.0, it was supposed to come out in August.

• 1:45:03Speaker 09

  We're launching it now instead, is because of the huge, huge, huge, huge supply constraint on the chip side. It's just become, we're hearing this from all our customers, that there's no capacity left basically till 2028. And so getting more performance out of chips is the only way to actually grow your revenue. And to grow your AI adoption. So if you're any AI company, you really have to be able to extract the most out of any possible chip to be able to actually grow your business. And right now, that is a bottleneck.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, how tightly linked are the different products? Because when I think of Lucy, real-time interactive video world models, I think like optimization there is what you're A, good at, but also incredibly important. Because even the demos that we've seen, they're not 4K, they're not 60 FPS. There's clearly room to run there. Whereas in many of like the text generation models, for a lot of the queries that people are asking, "How do I cook this?", you know, "Tell me the history of this company or story", like it's basically superhuman already, but superhuman real-time world models. Like, we're not there yet, and so optimization feels really important. How tightly linked are those two projects?

• 1:46:23Speaker 09

  Yes, they're very tightly linked through DOS.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Speaker 09

  And DOS 2.0 today, it can run real-time video models.

• 1:46:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:31Speaker 09

  At full HD for the first time.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:33Speaker 09

  Up to 100 frames per second.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:46:35Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Speaker 09

  So that's huge breakthroughs there.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Speaker 09

  And on the text side, what DOS can do, so DOS runs on all the three major chips. It runs on Nvidia, on Google TPU, and Amazon Trainium.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Speaker 09

  It's the only, the only stack that really supports all three for all the different types of models. And on the Agentic side...

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  So for AMD?

• 1:46:56Speaker 09

  It's

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  So over.

• 1:46:58Speaker 09

  The chips, the chip space is incredibly, incredibly interesting.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  We will support the fourth eventually.

• 1:47:04Speaker 09

  We will, we will support everyone. We will support everyone.

• 1:47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:08Speaker 09

  But to your question about fast text models.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Speaker 09

  Where you really need them is agentic workloads. You really need it if, if you want to be able to run, for example, coding models very, very quickly.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Speaker 09

  And DOS 2.0 can, for the first time, run it above 1,500 tokens per second.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:25Speaker 09

  Uh, which is more than 10 times the industry.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  Interesting. Uh, what, at, at, at somewhat of a high level, technical level, uh, what is different about the architecture of interactive video world models from text-based LLMs? Like, I think most people saw the fork in the road during like the mid-journey era, the DALL-E era, the diffusion, you start with a bunch of noise versus token-based next token prediction. Like, have these converged? Have they diverged? Are there different requirements? Like, we're seeing with agents, we need more CPUs now, we might need more, more context in cache, we might need RAG or, or vector databases.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  Like, like, what are different if you're to build out like the ultimate data center for generative, interactive world models? Like, are you looking for cerebrus-like chips? Are you going all in on NBL 72s? Like, what, what is the, how is there, is there a difference to the shape of the, of the architecture that lends itself to like different hardware constraints?

• 1:48:32Speaker 09

  Yes, I think that that's, that's probably one of the best questions in this field right now because AI is moving so quickly that it's very, very hard to predict what the right infrastructure will be three months from now.

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:43Speaker 09

  Uh, you, you brought up, you know, the, the CPU shortage that suddenly happened.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:47Speaker 09

  No one was expecting AI to need CPUs. And when AI needed CPUs, it went from zero to can we get all the CPUs and all the hyperscalers today?

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:56Speaker 09

  And, and that's, and that's happening overnight. Now, it's becoming, it's becoming very hard, what we're seeing, what we're hearing from our customers, it's becoming very hard for the people on the model side to actually understand what to do on the infrastructure side and, and vice versa. And so there's this gap here of how do you map the model requirements? And that they're constantly changing every single week. To what's possible on the infrastructure side. And so that's why, for example, we support all three major hardwares. It really allows us to choose where to route the different workloads to. And then each one has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. And that lets us really, we developed a very, very deep expertise in knowing how to map

• 1:49:40Speaker 09

  the model to the chip itself.

• 1:49:44Speaker 09

  I think that it ties into something else that we're seeing. You know, usually when people draw out the stack, they say, okay, there's the model layer. Then there's software, for example, CUDA. And then there's the hardware layer.

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  I call it a five-layer cake, but.

• 1:49:58Speaker 09

  It's, I wonder if someone else will adopt your five-layer cake terminology. You have the two layers above and below. You have the data center and you have the application layer. But what people usually miss is that the software layer is around seven layers inside of it. Hmm. Okay, it's not just one thing. It's obviously, oh, there's CUDA here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a five-layer cake with lots of flavors and layer three.

• 1:50:23John Coogan?

  Sure. Lots of ingredients.

• 1:50:26Speaker 09

  That's, that's really where we sit. We integrate across all those layers inside the software side to really tie from the AI model itself directly onto the chip. We literally write assembly for all these three chips.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:37Speaker 09

  We know how to write VLIW for TPUs. We know how to write assembly for trineums. We know how to write SAS and PTX for Nvidia chips.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:47Speaker 09

  And so we have all these different layers and they really enable us to very quickly move between these workloads that constantly change.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Okay, are you seeing glimpses of consumer product opportunities in video world models? When I see your, your technology, when I see Genie from Google and World Labs, I think, okay, like a harness, a wrapper, a couple UI relational database storing my inventory, like a couple other steps and all of a sudden, this is something that I want to play for more than a demo for more than a minute. And maybe the hardware is not there. But I think just as, you know, lots of folks who were interacting with LLMs during like the GPT-3 era,

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  sort of saw ahead and started thinking, oh, well, like chat is a potential modality here. Everyone's seeing that video games or something playable would be a potential modality. But how far away are we from that? Is that interesting? Like what else, what other dominos need to fall for that to actually happen?

• 1:51:56Speaker 09

  So, over the past month, actually, we've seen huge usage for using Lucy in live streaming. You can go to delulu.ai.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:52:06Speaker 09

  D E L U L U dot A I. And, and you can, come on, of course. It's good, it's good, it's good.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  It's good.

• 1:52:13Speaker 09

  And it just plugs right into your OBS. So you can just, it just literally plugs into your OBS camera. And you can just apply all these filters live and we've seen streamers go on it for eight hours non-stop. So, so we've seen that, we've seen that pop really over the past month, month and a half. We have a new subscription service there that people just subscribe to and they can turn it on forever long they want. And that's just been growing exponentially fast.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, thank you for coming on. We actually have some videos that we're gonna play. Because we've been demoing it, or the team has.

• 1:52:45Speaker 09

  No way!

• 1:52:45Jordi Hays?

  Only while we've been, while we've been talking.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  Can we play this while he's live so he can see it too? I think you'll see the program monitor if you want to hang out. But let's pull up, this is Tyler Cosco.

• 1:52:57Speaker 09

  You guys are doing the live demo instead of me this time? That is insane!

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have a video here, we recorded it of, I believe it's Tyler as Albert Einstein, is that correct? Uh, let's see it, if we can pull this up. Pulling it up might be the harder part than making it.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  We have real-time video models, but pulling up a video on the stream.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  The shadow and the lighting.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Still a challenge.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Did you prompt this?

• 1:53:20Jordi Hays?

  So it started as Einstein and then I went through a couple of different characters.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  You wanted a pink tuxedo on as well? That's very funny. What a funny prompt. And the, yeah, the, the visual fidelity on Einstein's face. That is weird. Okay.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  It's a very humanoid.

• 1:53:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  That's a jacked horse. That is odd. That's very odd, but the horse head, oh, there you go. Okay. That's interesting. As you touch your face, like the, the hand of the horse sort of hits the correct part of the face. So it understands the physics. Well, that, that was impressive. It wasn't purely.

• 1:53:58Jordi Hays?

  Last question, last question before you jump is, is there a certain milestone that if achieved, you will cut your hair? Like, is it in?

• 1:54:08Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:09Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:54:10Speaker 09

  It's the, the, the milestone is that we need to hit one billion ARR. That's the milestone. It's a, it's a bet from early on in the company. Now this, this is a year and a half long. Okay. This is just one and a half years. We have to get rid of it now with, with DOS and the way that's scaling. That's, that's, uh, at some point I'm going to get haircuts.

• 1:54:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:54:29Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Well, we'll be here when you hit that milestone.

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  Selfishly, I kind of want to see it down your waist, right?

• 1:54:36Speaker 09

  Oh, we should, we should do a haircut on stream. We're going to do a haircut on stream. I love that idea.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Come to the H2G. We'll shave your head.

• 1:54:43Jordi Hays?

  Dean, you're the man.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 1:54:45Jordi Hays?

  The chat loves you.

• 1:54:46Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys, so much.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Say hello to everyone at Radical. We're big fans. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:54:50Speaker 09

  Love them.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Another one. We have Joanna Stern, author of I Am Not a Robot, coming in person today.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  In just a few minutes.

• 1:55:02Jordi Hays?

  But before, we gotta talk about.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  What are we gonna talk about?

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  The protein shortage that is coming.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  What's going on with the protein shortage?

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic says, making it all that way is complicated.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  She says, in retrospect, maybe the protein Pop-Tarts were a bit much. Americans broadly speaking are in a state of protein mania.

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  Mania.

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  We are eating it at breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert. And just about any time in between. We like it in chips, candy, soda, water. We like protein so much, in fact, that we've been eating it all up. Whey protein prices are surging and a shortage may be imminent. If you're not investing in protein bottlenecks.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, where's the situational awareness for the protein shortage? We really need that.

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  Demand is strengthening the USDA warned in a recent report. Inventories remain tight. Some manufacturers have already sold their supplies for the full year.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:55:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm getting PTSD. I'm getting PTSD. Since January, wholesale prices for food-grade whey protein powder have risen by more than 50% to the highest level on record. Retail prices are going up too. Six months ago, a two-pound jug of Optimum Nutrition's delicious strawberry-flavored whey protein went for about $40 on Amazon. Now it's $54. "We've absolutely felt it," says Steven Zaminsky, CEO of the supplement company Nick Nutrition, said of the shortage in an email. He said his company has not raised prices. "Demand is up and supply is tighter than it has ever been." Historically and currently, much of the protein that has made its way into packaged foods and smoothies and those big tubs of protein powder comes from whey.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Raw milk is treated with heat, acid, or enzymes to coagulate it into two distinct substances, curds, which become cheese, and whey, which was, at least until recently, the cheesemaking process's unlovely byproduct. Almost as long as industrialized agriculture has existed, the problem with whey wasn't scarcity at all, but the opposite. Farmers did anything they could to do to get rid of it as cheaply as possible. Fed it to livestock, sprayed it onto fields, dumped it into rivers and sewers. Can you imagine swimming in a river that was used as a dumping ground for whey, John?

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Weird.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  Especially combining that with a place like Switzerland where you can drink the water and the lakes and the rivers and you'll be totally fine. That could be a powerful combination. For much of our nation's history, any fish unlucky enough to be born in Wisconsin or Vermont had a good chance of being, whoa, murdered by whey.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Whoa, I'll keep reading from here.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  I'll, I'll, yeah, keep reading.

• 1:58:08Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:58:10Speaker 10

  Another one.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Then came the cro.

• 1:58:16Speaker 00

  Pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon. This is such a funny, the helium, is there helium shortage as well? It certainly seems that there is not because the helium is flowing.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  About the TBP in UltraDome.

• 1:58:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, influencers started bragging about how many grams they got in a day. The government flipped the food pyramid around, placing protein at the top. People from every walk of life latch on to protein as a sort of one size fits all super ingredient, supposedly capable of giving anyone the body they want, as long as they eat enough of it.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, even if the reality is obviously more complicated. And food manufacturers responded to this new demand. You know, when I was young and I was, uh, intentionally trying to have as many calories as possible, I realized I had to pull back on protein because it was just like too, it was too filling at times.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:59:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, not enough calories in protein, you need fat.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  More dense, more calor.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Um, food manufacturers responded to this new demand enthusiastically, cramming in America's new favorite macronutrient wherever they could, usually in the form of weight. Now the infrastructure can't keep up. The North American dairy industry has pumped about a decade of investment. Hmm. Let's go.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Heavy infrastructure.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Build out.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  The bill.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  The build out. Say that again.

• 1:59:31Speaker 10

  The build out.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  The build out, the protein.

• 1:59:34Speaker 10

  Protein powder build out until late 2010s.

• 1:59:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, consumer demand and consumer preferences can change faster than processing capacity can. We're in that lag situation right now. It's, this is a screaming bottleneck.

• 1:59:48Speaker 10

  We got a capability overhang.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Turning fresh raw cow's milk into shelf-stable, scoopable, tasty enough protein powder people want is a massively complicated process, one that requires space and time and huge, expensive machine.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  I didn't think the protein.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what is the AUV? What is the AUV machine? What is the ASML of whey?

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  The UV machine.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, UV.

• 2:00:11John Coogan?

  The advanced lithography machines. Yeah. What is the ASML? Probably. I don't know, maybe that company, uh, what's that collar, the cow collar company? They're right at the top.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, top of the stack.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Founder's funds going long into the, uh, what's it called? Cattle holler collar, something like that, cowler?

• 2:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Whoop for cows.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  It's whoop for cows and they're printing. The business is growing really, really quickly.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  A full processing plant can cost up to $1 billion to build. Everything is just big numbers. Even if you had theoretically started raising capital for a dairy processing facility the day the word protein maxing first appeared on Reddit three years ago, it would unlikely to be up and running today. The higher the protein content, the more complex and expensive the processing. Whey protein isolate, the protein is protein available, the kind that makes it possible to stuff half a chicken's breath, breast worth of fuel into a candy bar is the most expensive and until recently was a very small part of the market. The dairy industry just isn't set up for it. The processor decisions are long run decisions. It's really hard to make capital investments at the drop of a hat.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, just say you're not protein pilled, uh, based on whatever new shiny consumer preference there is out there. Paulson grew up on a dairy farm. He remembers the cottage cheese craze of the past when fitness fixated, when the fitness fixated country set its sight on a different milk based superfood that was supposed to make you healthier and thinner and more powerful. Trends come and go was his point. They move quickly. Our appetites change faster than the systems that satisfy them. North America is currently building out 12 billion of dairy processing capacity. Projections suggest that the current shortage will be short-lived and that the dairy industry will catch up with demand in the near future. I just wonder what consumers will be demanding then.

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I don't, I don't see, uh, I don't see supply ever catching up with demand, John. I think, I think we're in a fast take off.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  You think never?

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  I think we're in a fast take off scenario. I think that, uh, the fitness influencers of the 2030s will be recommending.

• 2:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Five to 10 grams, uh, five to 10 grams.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  Per, per pound of body weight.

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Body weight.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I, I did not know that the protein boom was going as well as to, to drive up, uh, you know, supply.

• 2:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Capex?

• 2:02:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, because we, I mean, we,

• 2:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Ramp Capex.

• 2:02:37John Coogan?

  We, we, we've talked on the show a few times about how like the, they're putting protein in everything, protein in cereal, but I thought that was maybe like overhyped. It was going to be like a temporary trend.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it a way bubble.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  A way bubble, potentially, potentially. Um, well, we have our next guest, Joanna Stern, the author of I Am Not A Robot in the TBP and Ultra Dome. We'll bring her in, in just a second. Um, but, uh, I, I don't know. What, have you, have you added anything to your diet recently that actually, uh, contains newly added protein? Have you gone from something that was not like, I'm not drinking a diet coke with protein. I don't know. The occasional protein bar, the protein shake, these are the staples of the modern life, but I don't know if there's something that jumps out to me as, uh, as wildly successful. There's been a lot of like protein cereals and protein pop tarts and all sorts of different things, but I haven't seen like breakout successes in those actual categories.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think when you add protein to most things, it just tastes worse.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  And then, wait, explain to me, uh, with the David Barr EPG, that is,

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  That's a, that's a fat.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  That's a fat. So he still has,

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  That is, uh,

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  From, from how it's been explained.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  And so they still have to buy normal protein.

• 2:03:48Jordi Hays?

  It passes through you.

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So it doesn't count.

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  So, so I would expect that part of this whole thing is that, uh, Peter,

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Is corner of the market somehow. I wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, we have our next guest, Joanna Stern, author of I Am Not A Robot, live with us in the TBP and Ultra Dome. Let's bring her in to the studio. Welcome to the show. Will you be enjoying a diet coke? Yes. No, no, no. Just grab a seat.

• 2:04:14Speaker 11

  This is amazing.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  You're welcome to have a sit down. How are you doing?

• 2:04:16Speaker 11

  It's real.

• 2:04:17Jordi Hays?

  It's real.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Is today the official book launch day?

• 2:04:20Speaker 11

  No, last week.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Is today the day? Last week. Okay.

• 2:04:21Speaker 11

  Last week was.

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  But the tour continues, right?

• 2:04:23Speaker 11

  This is the West Coast tour. This is my first stop on the West Coast tour.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Here, LA, we're having a conversation tonight, then up to San Francisco.

• 2:04:30Speaker 11

  Up to San Francisco, Mountain View.

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

  International dates yet?

• 2:04:34Speaker 11

  June is when it goes international, so we'll find out. They'll have me.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  The bot replies, "Come to Brazil. Come to Brazil."

• 2:04:41Speaker 11

  Go to Brazil.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  It's a very popular thing.

• 2:04:42Speaker 11

  I haven't. I do know about that. But I think.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  They're like huge fans, the fandoms.

• 2:04:48Speaker 11

  I think London.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  London would be great.

• 2:04:51Speaker 11

  London, yes, I think.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Well, how are you introducing yourself these days?

• 2:04:55Speaker 11

  I know you guys had me as author.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Author?

• 2:04:58Speaker 11

  Author. I think founder. Founder is a founder popular name.

• 2:05:01John Coogan?

  Founder, correct?

• 2:05:03Jordi Hays?

  I think I prefer business owner.

• 2:05:06Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 2:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Or businesswoman.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  I think founder is already sort of fading.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:05:11Speaker 11

  Business person.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  I think we hit peak founder.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Because, because being, anybody can be a founder, but not everyone can be a businesswoman or businessman.

• 2:05:20Speaker 11

  I was at LinkedIn last week and they said that they're seen a big uptick in people putting founder in their profiles.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:27Speaker 11

  And.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, angel investor too became very trendy.

• 2:05:30Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 2:05:31Speaker 11

  It's rising at LinkedIn.

• 2:05:32Jordi Hays?

  So you should put business, you should put business owner.

• 2:05:35Speaker 11

  Okay, business owner.

• 2:05:36Jordi Hays?

  You're selling subscriptions, you're selling books.

• 2:05:38Speaker 11

  Ads.

• 2:05:39Jordi Hays?

  You have sales, ads.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Speaker 11

  All right, business owner.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  So maybe take us through the shape of the, the business, the media empire that you're building. Obviously, there's a book. That's a great way. Was this intentional to time up the launch of the?

• 2:05:50Speaker 11

  I don't know if it's a great way.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  I, I, I think it makes so much sense.

• 2:05:53Speaker 11

  It's a good marketing vehicle, I think.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:55Speaker 11

  I mean, that's why I'm here, right? And so I can come on and I can, I thought through a lot of that when I, when I decided to leave the journal.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Speaker 11

  I thought, okay. I've got this book coming out. I've got to get out right away.

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07Speaker 11

  Because I've got to start building this business so it's ready when the book is ready. And I probably should have, you know.

• 2:06:13John Coogan?

  I think there's like a one plus one equals three thing here where you have video content that feeds into Substack subscriptions that feeds into books purchases and then someone hears about the book. Maybe they even if they just read a review of the book, maybe they wind up going and subscribing to Substack. And so having that sort of 360 degree view.

• 2:06:30Speaker 11

  It's a flywheel.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  It's a flywheel.

• 2:06:32Speaker 11

  It's a flywheel.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:06:33Speaker 11

  It's a flywheel here.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  We need a flywheel.

• 2:06:37Speaker 11

  A flywheel.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  You know what a flywheel looks like? Is that a water wheel?

• 2:06:40Speaker 11

  I think it's.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  What is a flywheel?

• 2:06:42Speaker 11

  Well, if you the Amazon flywheel is like.

• 2:06:44John Coogan?

  I'm familiar with the metaphorical flywheel.

• 2:06:45Speaker 11

  It's but.

• 2:06:46Jordi Hays?

  A heavy rotating mechanical device used to store rotational kinetic energy. So we're going to need some proper machinery.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:54Speaker 11

  We can get that made.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  It's not a windmill.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  We can get a.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  It's specifically not a windmill?

• 2:06:59Speaker 11

  No, I think in my mind, it does look like a windmill.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  Okay, I think so. This is funny.

• 2:07:05Speaker 11

  Okay, can we get one of those here?

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  We definitely.

• 2:07:06Speaker 11

  Next time I return to the studio, look at all these people. They already went out and started to get the flywheel. They're five already.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  This is a flywheel, flywheel creation.

• 2:07:13Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  What was the flywheel for writing this book?

• 2:07:16Speaker 11

  Um, you know, I wasn't the the motivation for writing the book was not actually really a business reason at first. It'd be a little bit in the sense.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Now it is.

• 2:07:26Speaker 11

  Now it is.

• 2:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Sales are rolling in.

• 2:07:27Speaker 11

  Now it's, um, but as you know, I wrote a popular column for the Wall Street Journal for a long time, 12 years. My biggest, you know, one of the reasons I didn't want to leave. I thought you guys might not read me anymore because I know you read the Wall Street Journal. You love the Wall Street.

• 2:07:43John Coogan?

  And we love your coverage.

• 2:07:44Speaker 11

  Um, so I have been considering just making a newspaper of just my newsletters and sending it to you guys, but.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  So that is something that every writer discovers when they leave a big platform is like, were people reading me for who I am or were they reading me? And care about what I was saying because it was in the context of the platform that you're a part of. And I think for you, it's certainly.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  You had way more of a personal brand.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you had a personal brand.

• 2:08:11Speaker 11

  But still, it means like you guys won't pick that up and be like, oh, yeah, Joanna wrote about robots today. Let's have her on the show.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Well, print edition of the newsletter.

• 2:08:20Speaker 11

  I know, printed as I think that's a but so just to kind of I I've been writing this column for a really long time and I was realizing so much of the AI columns had a theme to it.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:32Speaker 11

  And I was testing all of this AI stuff from hardware and gadgets to the chatbots and the models to then I started getting really into robotics and said, okay, what if I put this together and more of a cohesive story? Because when you're writing these, even whether it's newsletters or columns, getting the theme and like big picture is very hard to do. Some newsletter writers are really great at it. Ben Thompson is great at it. And if you can really get your readers to go deep on something in a newsletter that you're amazing. But I don't know if I had that reader base. We'll find out. And so I felt like in the book, I could get really deep into this. And so the concept was for the year in 2025, I was going to live my entire life with as much AI in my life as

• 2:09:13Speaker 11

  possible. And that was generative AI, but that was also self driving cars and that was going to be medical AI and that was also going to be humanoid robots. But it really just turned into.

• 2:09:23Jordi Hays?

  And describe your headspace going into that year. Are you, you know,

• 2:09:28Speaker 11

  Insane.

• 2:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Print, print, reading situational awareness like at night, you know, before bed, like, are you AGI pilled? Are you skeptical?

• 2:09:37Speaker 11

  I I guess I'm skeptical, but I'm thinking more, we have all of these tech executives out there. And this is end of 2024, just all the hyperbole in the world, right? AI is going to change everything. It's going to change the way we. Eat and educate ourselves and healthcare and we're gonna live forever, all of these bold promises that I sort of wanted to explain to the normal person, what are they talking about? How is life going to be different, better or worse with AI? Which is kind of a perfect moment for this book to come out right now, because we have a lot of people thinking it's gonna be worse, and they might not be wrong. And then we have a lot of people also saying this is gonna be great.

• 2:10:20Speaker 11

  And so I think it's a pretty balanced look at all of these different things. But yeah, I mean, my headspace was just, I wanna, what's real? I wanna find out what's real.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. What was, so back to the flywheel, what was the actual flywheel of writing the book? Was it test something, write about it, take notes, write about it, or do a ton of research and experiences and then in a fugue state churn out the entire book in a couple of sleepless nights?

• 2:10:51Speaker 11

  It was a mix of both. So I tried, the book is structured seasonally, so every season I tried to figure out a theme, right? So like, the book starts in winter, beginning of the year, and I'm very focused on health. And so I wrote that, or I lived that and then wrote that, and then started realizing, oh crap, this stuff is moving so quickly. And so I started realizing, okay, I probably should have some of these journal entries in the book. I also wanted to make it very bite-sized book, because I don't think people just sit and read a whole long book anymore. And so I started fitting things in like that and realizing I gotta tell the story of how the progress is being made so quickly every single week right now. So it was a mix.

• 2:11:35Speaker 11

  I, AI did not write the book. I think it's very me, the writing is very me, but AI definitely helped make the book in so many ways. It would not have been done by now if I did not have AI. Just the backend systems, I used to organize my notes and all of the timelines and the thing, getting like things like the end notes done, all these little things AI did for me.

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen the, the chart of Amazon Kindle releases post ChatGPT? So basically after The release of ChatGPT, you just see this massive uptick in book releases on Amazon.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  Hundred thousand a month prior to AI, now it's up to four hundred thousand.

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  And and the funny thing, the funny thing is people, people are, everyone is just saying like, oh, people are obviously just like prompt, you know, making, just dropping in a prompt and prompt the whole book. But what you're saying is like, there's actually just like a speed up in.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  I don't think that's what's driving that three hundred thousand.

• 2:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know, but some of them, some of them certainly are. And I think a lot of, you have the perfect book to be able to like, say, like, of course I used AI to help in the process. Because it's like, why would anyone trust anything else in the book if you were just gonna say like, all this stuff is completely, you know, fake and.

• 2:12:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, one thing that's interesting, and I do these generative AI experiments every season where I try to just one season, I just listen to AI music, or one season, I just read AI books. And so I read a few AI generated books off Amazon. They're not terrible, guys. I mean, I hate saying it, but they're really not terrible.

• 2:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Is this fiction, nonfiction?

• 2:13:08Speaker 11

  It was fiction. Yeah, it was fiction. And I got in touch with one of the authors, quote unquote, and it's funny because it relates back to the chapter on radiology and the the premise of his book, it's called Variant, and it's about how AI has taken over all radiology. We don't have radiologists anymore, which I'm very clear in my chapter on radiology, that's just not gonna happen, but and the AI has decided it's not gonna spot cancer anymore. And a human figures out that the AI has gone rogue, and so it's like, it's a novel, a thriller about this, and.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:13:39Speaker 11

  It's a really good story.

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  AI writing and AI thriller.

• 2:13:42Speaker 11

  Exactly. I mean, he, I got in touch with the author and he said, I think it's only like three thousand words that you can actually get.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  At a time.

• 2:13:51Speaker 11

  At a time. So he had to keep prompting every chapter. That was basically all you did.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you need some sort of harness to work through. You can open the diet coke, by the way.

• 2:14:00Speaker 11

  I know, I'm worried about this.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  I'll, I'll, I'll burn some air.

• 2:14:03Speaker 11

  I wanted, I just wanted it to fit in. So that's why I'm bringing this.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  On, on the medical question, I'm, I'm so fascinated by the way AI is diffusing in medicine because like we do have, you know, tools that can help radiologists and yet I can't name a company that's gone out and built Salesforce for radiologists and done very well. And then you'll see remarkable like PhD level work being done with some of the models, but then I'll go to the doctor and have to fill out like a paper form. And I'm like, we're not even seeing a fast takeoff in like SaaS adoption at many, at many, you know, medical offices. And so there's this odd nature of like the capabilities,

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  the capability overhang. And I'm wondering if that came up in your, in your interrogation of the medical questions in particular.

• 2:15:00Speaker 11

  Well, I, I'm forgetting the name of the company. It's not, it's not my chart.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:04Speaker 11

  It's one of the companies that is doing the AI note taking in medical right now. I mean, there's a number of them.

• 2:15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Speaker 11

  And that seems to be the biggest catch on right now. And it's, I mean, I would consider it in whatever sat backends there. They just get this tool now. And have you been to a doctor where they're ask you, can they record?

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  I haven't actually, but I did see a company that sells a wearable device for doctors that's doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and has been very successful in rolling that out. But.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Such a magical and useful feature. I can, I can just remember trying to like, understand like doctors.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, notes.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Even if it's just like a medication, like get this at CVS. And it's like. You get to CVS and you're like, sorry buddy. Yeah.

• 2:15:55Speaker 11

  So nobody knows what it is.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  I mean, that feels like the hardest one to measure because if you have a whole bunch of notes, ideally you're catching something, oh, this person had three different symptoms. We should screen them. You screen them. You save their life or something. That's like the best case. That's a lot less satisfying than the AI got so good that we asked it to cure cancer. It did. And now there's a pill. And whenever somebody gives gets cancer, we give them the pill and everyone cheers. And they're like, AI, it was worth it. All those data centers, it was worth it. That's what everyone wants.

• 2:16:23Speaker 11

  That's what everyone wants.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  We're probably getting like, the average doctor can see seven patients instead of six, and they make 5% less mistakes and you don't really feel it day to day.

• 2:16:34Speaker 11

  Well, I go and interview Bill Gates about this and he kind of comes at it in from two perspectives. There's going to be that, the, the, every doctor is going to have this AI assistant and every patient is going to have this AI assistant, which we're already seeing in Rhodes Inn, right? OpenAI and Microsoft have all started rolling out ways to use their bots. And, you know, you feed it, it's medical, you feed in medical information. But then there's going to be the other side where AI is externally doing drug discovery or cancer cure or, or whatever it is. And so the promise is on both ends. I think the one that people are starting to see already though, I mean, it was in the pit. Do you watch a pit?

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  The pit? I've seen one episode. It was sort of gory.

• 2:17:22Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's very, it can be very gory.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  It was like, not really for me. I know it's very successful.

• 2:17:26Speaker 11

  It's very successful. And the doctor, there's like one example of the doctors now using AI to summarize their notes. And so I think that's the one that most consumers have now experienced. Oh, my doctor's going to ask me if they can use AI to summarize my notes. And they're probably not, they're not going to think that that is

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  That's weird. Yeah.

• 2:17:42Speaker 11

  Weird or consequential, that they're going to have some amazing breakthrough because their doctor is

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  I did have a weird experience where I went to the pharmacy once to pick up some drug. And I, I had some follow on question about like, how, you know, how does it interact with some food or something? And I noticed that the Uh, the pharmacist was asking an AI model, but I also noticed that the pharmacist was not using a thinking model. And I was very disheartened by that because I was like, I, I could use a pro model, probably get a better answer.

• 2:18:15Speaker 11

  Were they using like some?

• 2:18:16John Coogan?

  They were using either, either like, uh, you know, the Gemini overview, which is not Gemini thinking.

• 2:18:24Speaker 11

  But it wasn't like some proprietary?

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:18:27Speaker 11

  Pharmalogical.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  They were just going to Google and searching for something. Uh, and I was like, wait, but I have, you know, O three pro or whatever the standard, whatever the flagship model at the time was, I was like, I, we should be using the best.

• 2:18:39Speaker 11

  We should be using the best CPS or wherever they were.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, these things take time. If you use them, they have cost if it's an expensive model, but I don't know.

• 2:18:46Speaker 11

  True. Interesting. Well, I think, I think the healthcare chapter, I, I like talking about it because I think it really does point to the positives of where this is gonna, this can go. And even with the radiology example, which is pretty outdated, honestly, by now, it's outdated in the sense that Jeffrey Hinton has been saying for years, radiologists are going to be replaced by AI and deep learning. But that didn't happen. Like, you know, we could talk about it from the economics and the job standpoint, but we can also talk about it from, this is actually an amazing change. It can spot cancers that humans can't. And it's out there. Like you might, women might be getting their mammograms or breast ultrasounds

• 2:19:29Speaker 11

  read right now. And they might not know that AI is doing that for them. So this idea that like, hey, we're all, you know, we can, we need to reject AI, we need to reject AI. Well, you might actually have AI doing things in your life right now that are actually quite good. And it's very nuanced.

• 2:19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. There's something about like AI on the backend gets no credit, but if you see some slop image, you know, it's really annoying or some fake news, you're like, ah, this AI stuff sucks. You don't notice that deeper in the supply chain, some problem was caught before you could even know. That's tricky. I wonder how that can filter through to actually good.

• 2:20:11Speaker 11

  Marketing, I guess. I don't know.

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  It takes time. I don't know. Uh, talk about companionship. Like, why did you think that one was important to, to center in on? How, what was your process for setting that up?

• 2:20:24Speaker 11

  I think so, well, I did a few things in companionship. One, I did a lot of experiments with AI therapists. And one particular called Ash was my AI therapist. I still talk to Ash sometimes. And then I did a chapter and a real experiment in my summer love with a, with an AI boyfriend. And I did.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Fling.

• 2:20:47Speaker 11

  Fling, yeah. I've ghosted him since.

• 2:20:51Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:20:51Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Turned.

• 2:20:52Speaker 11

  Turned. And.

• 2:20:55Jordi Hays?

  That's a risk for you, by the way.

• 2:20:57Speaker 11

  Which part?

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Cause in the, in, in some AI doom scenarios, the AI might hold that against.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Oh, true, true. Rocco's Basilus, you should continue to send affectionate messages to all AIs. Because if it becomes all powerful, it will.

• 2:21:12Speaker 11

  I have, I have a section of the book where I talk about that I cursed at AI and I felt really bad. And I like really went after it for making mistakes. But then I go to a manners expert or an etiquette expert and ask if that's okay.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Okay. What was the conclusion?

• 2:21:26Speaker 11

  He said, the AI doesn't have feelings, so you don't need to, to do this, but it depends on your.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  I would love to, I would love, I mean, they're so easy to smokes, smoke. We should have them on the show to talk about manners. Cause simply like you don't want to be somebody who.

• 2:21:40Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Part of your life, you're just screaming, yelling, using cuss words. And then you just go back to your life and you're like, oh yeah, I'm, I'm a super respectful person. It's like you're putting out a bunch of, you're putting out a bunch of negative energy into the world.

• 2:21:53Speaker 11

  That's exactly what he said. It's basically, you need to realize how that might affect you as a person when you interact with humans. So the more you might start beating up on and just completely berating your AI. But then what happens when you start to blur, like those lines blur and how does it affect you as a human?

• 2:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09Speaker 11

  Like, and one of the idea, funny, right? When I just got dropped off by my Waymo, I didn't do it this Waymo trip, but this morning I kind of forgot that the Waymo driver wasn't a human. Like I just was like not paying, you know, you kind of just. I don't have Waymos in New York.

• 2:22:23Jordi Hays?

  You call them Mo?

• 2:22:24Speaker 11

  No, I just, I said, thank you when I got out.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:27Speaker 11

  You know, and I was like, oh, right. Like, you know, but I was thanking the robot.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Well, they do have tele ops, so like.

• 2:22:33Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  There's probably someone who might have heard that because they might be. They might have.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  And they shed a tear. They shed a tear because every other drive that day, no one said that.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  It's sort of like a Schrödinger's cat.

• 2:22:43Speaker 11

  So I think that that makes up for the fact that I ghosted my AI boyfriend, right?

• 2:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay. You're making it up. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:48Speaker 11

  There's a tally being kept in, so I think that's.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  As long as it all is flowing through the same data.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  I think there's one human for every two Waymos. So there's a 50% chance that thank you was received by a human, 50% chance that it was not received by a human, but you will never know. So it's the Schrödinger's.

• 2:23:04Speaker 11

  But the human didn't do the driving today.

• 2:23:06John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 2:23:07Speaker 11

  So it really was thanking the robot. I don't think so.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  You were thanked by, yeah, yeah, that's fair. Anyway.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the human might have stepped in in a really key moment.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's possible.

• 2:23:15Speaker 11

  That's true.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  Might have saved you. You don't know.

• 2:23:17Speaker 11

  You kind of know.

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  I guess you kind of know. Yeah, you probably know.

• 2:23:20Speaker 11

  Okay, sorry. We're talking about companionship. We got.

• 2:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Wait, how is, how is Waymo, uh, how is, what, like, how, how did you, did you feel Waymo's progression over the last year?

• 2:23:31Speaker 11

  I feel it even coming to LA.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Driving around LA, I mean, I still see Waymo's making some pretty heinous calls out on the road. I had a Waymo, it was like a two lane, two lane road.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:44Jordi Hays?

  Waymo trying to, there was wall to wall traffic going the other way. The Waymo's trying to just like turn in. It's not a, there's no, you definitely know U-turns. And then Waymo's like, I'm going. So it's like, we're fully backed up this way. Everyone's honking. The Waymo's just like waiting to like do an illegal U-turn. There's someone in it. They're just like, oh.

• 2:24:05Speaker 11

  Oh, boy. I noticed today, as I, whenever I come to LA, I take Waymos and go to San Francisco. But I did notice today the pickup spots are getting better. Do you guys take them? Or I guess you don't take cars here.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  They, they don't go to Pasadena, so I don't take them much. I've taken them in San Francisco.

• 2:24:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, because I just took it here from Westwood and the pickup spots and the drop off spots are getting better.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:24Speaker 11

  Because usually they would really struggle. I mean, anyone that's watching.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Just land in the middle of the street.

• 2:24:28Speaker 11

  They're just like, go to the side, like a weird, and you're like, or like talking about your like weird thing. Like they would just go to like a. One of those circles by my hotel last time, it was just like a circle. I was like, why would you pull over in the middle of this circle? It's a terrible spot to pick somebody up.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  There's more logical.

• 2:24:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, because it doesn't know where, yes, and it doesn't know where the spots are that it's like kind of okay to pick you up. But I've noticed today two very good seamless drop offs. Companionship, though.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, companionship.

• 2:24:58Speaker 11

  So I just, I wanted to.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I could never go on an insane tangent like we just did.

• 2:25:04Speaker 11

  Actually, I think it could.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  This is very hallucinatory. This whole interview is very hallucinatory.

• 2:25:10Speaker 11

  This is, I mean, I watch you guys all the time. This feels like what you guys do.

• 2:25:13Jordi Hays?

  This is what we do. We hallucinate.

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  No more than 3,000 words at a time, please.

• 2:25:17Speaker 11

  You guys are usually, I mean, you're asking serious questions of founders. I'm a founder, guys. I'm sorry.

• 2:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Business owner.

• 2:25:23Speaker 11

  Business owner.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Business owner.

• 2:25:25Speaker 11

  What's my lower third say?

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 2:25:28Speaker 11

  It says founder.

• 2:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Say business owner.

• 2:25:31John Coogan?

  Author and journal.

• 2:25:31Speaker 11

  They need to update that.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Okay, businesswoman.

• 2:25:33Speaker 11

  Business.

• 2:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Business owner.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  Business owner.

• 2:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Joanna Stern, business owner.

• 2:25:37Speaker 11

  Joanna Stern. Okay.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  They'll work on it.

• 2:25:40Speaker 11

  We're doing that live.

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can do it. Companionship.

• 2:25:44Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  There we go. Business owner.

• 2:25:46Jordi Hays?

  See, that goes so hard.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that does look good.

• 2:25:48Speaker 11

  That looks better, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  The name of the business. Tell everyone.

• 2:25:54Speaker 11

  It's companionship is the name of the business. No. The name of the business is called The New Things.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  The New Things.

• 2:25:59Speaker 11

  The New Things dot com.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  The New Things.

• 2:26:00Speaker 11

  Please go. Please go visit The New Things.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  And we, did you tease it with a landing page that had a different domain?

• 2:26:06Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  My next thing?

• 2:26:07Speaker 11

  Yeah, this is my next thing.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  This is my next thing? I like that.

• 2:26:09Speaker 11

  But I couldn't, I didn't know the business name yet.

• 2:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:13Speaker 11

  But this, The New Things.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  The New Things, okay.

• 2:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Did you talk to any people that had, that at least claimed to never have used AI?

• 2:26:23John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Because you really can't claim that at this point because you would have to just like sit in a forest.

• 2:26:30Speaker 11

  I didn't.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  Just say you've never met an Amish person.

• 2:26:32Jordi Hays?

  You'd have to sit in a forest and then, and then, and then somebody would be like.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  The Amish are growing. The population collapse has been vastly.

• 2:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Here's the issue, though. Like, probably the forestry service is, like, probably using AI in some ways.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  And that affects the Amish?

• 2:26:45Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I'm talking about my example of somebody who's like, I don't use AI.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  And I, my counter example was the Amish. And I think if you talk to an Amish person, they would say, no, I have been AI free.

• 2:26:54Jordi Hays?

  I know, but they're buying wood from a business that has an AI.

• 2:26:59John Coogan?

  Deep in the real.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  No, you, that, you have to, you have to. You can't, you, somebody can't be like, well, I don't, I don't use electricity, but they're buying goods and services that require electricity.

• 2:27:08Speaker 11

  True.

• 2:27:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:10Speaker 11

  I didn't do that, though I think that's actually a good story to do now.

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:13Speaker 11

  Go and ask people if they think they're living an AI free life, but they're not.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  They're flourishing.

• 2:27:18Speaker 11

  Yeah, I, interesting. You know a lot about.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna go.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  Fertility rates are particularly high amongst the Amish.

• 2:27:24Speaker 11

  Really?

• 2:27:24John Coogan?

  There's a big deep dive in the, in the Financial Times, uh, this weekend around smartphones being like the inflection point, right? We can get into that later, but, um, uh, but the Amish have stayed away and they are flourishing.

• 2:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Do they chop their own wood?

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  I believe many times they will.

• 2:27:40Speaker 11

  Wait, but are the Amish flourishing because they don't have smartphones or has their birth rate stead, stayed steady?

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's probably accelerated.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Stayed steady. Yeah, it's actually a straight line on a log graph with the Amish.

• 2:27:52Speaker 11

  It's a hockey stick?

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Yes, by, by, in a few years, they will be producing thousands of offspring per Amish person.

• 2:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about.

• 2:28:00Speaker 11

  Is this the worst tangent you've ever had here?

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:28:03Jordi Hays?

  No, definitely not. Um, talk about, yeah, talk about more, you mentioned, like, you're feeling like progress as you're writing the book. So you're trying to, like, get a section out of the way and then realizing, like, the story's not quite, the story's, like, still evolving.

• 2:28:18Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:28:19Jordi Hays?

  What, what was that like? How were you feeling that progress? Cause it's not like. It's been very obvious if you're a software engineer, just being like, wow, I'm, I have a lot more capabilities today than I did three months ago or six months ago. But how are you feeling it?

• 2:28:33Speaker 11

  Well, even some of that software engineer, the tools, right? Like Claude Code mid-year last year, I believe, comes out, gets so much better towards the end of 2025.

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:46Speaker 11

  Or even the advent of AI browsers, which we can say now is really just going to be any browser, but like Chrome, for instance, has gotten so many features over the last year that are just so much more AI enhanced. One example for me was Perplexity Comet came out mid-last year and was like, wow, I can really live this agentic life that people have been talking about, right? I can have it do multi-step processes for me in my browser.

• 2:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Did you book a flight?

• 2:29:15Speaker 11

  I didn't, uh, I think I did try to book a flight and I couldn't do it at the beginning of the year, but I could do it by the end of the year. And I did try, and I, I mean, there's multiple things I did in Perplexity Comet last year that I still will open it from time to time, but I'm using so much more now of Claude in Chrome that I don't need Perplexity Comet. I mean, everything from food shopping to school supply shopping, I use it a lot for shopping because even though it takes a while to use, you're like, I'm not doing it.

• 2:29:45John Coogan?

  You trust it with your credit card?

• 2:29:48Speaker 11

  Um, it's still basically will ask for your credit card. I mean, I don't have anything set up where it's like auto pay, but I had, like, I did specifically, I've used Walmart or Amazon and at that final point it will say like, I need your confirmation to purchase, look at the shopping cart.

• 2:30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just pass you the link and then you can check out there and that's right.

• 2:30:06Speaker 11

  But on that, there was obviously also so much progress and still is so much progress happening in the models and, but I was less worried about the model progression and much more about the interface and the UI progression of whether it was wearables, how we're interacting with this through hardware or through software. So was it the, was it improvements to apps, was it improvements to a Claude Code or a vibe coding app or to a browser where people could actually interact with this stuff?

• 2:30:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:38Speaker 11

  Which I think we'll, you know, see, we're starting to see, obviously, more of that through OpenAI and more of that through Google, probably this week.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, this week.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how do you rate the tech industry's current terminology? Do you like, do you think that you calling data centers AI factories is a good move?

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  People love factories.

• 2:30:59Speaker 11

  Probably not. I don't, who's been saying that is a good move?

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people have been using the word AI factories because it sounds cool if you're, you know, investing in the AI.

• 2:31:11Speaker 11

  Oh, yeah, because you're like, yeah, the industrial revolution.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Revolution, yeah.

• 2:31:15Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  We've been pushing for supercomputers.

• 2:31:18Speaker 11

  I don't think normal people like data centers or AI factories.

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  But supercomputers.

• 2:31:23Speaker 11

  That sounds better.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Sounds better.

• 2:31:26Speaker 11

  That sounds better.

• 2:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like a big computer, less scared.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, I haven't, I haven't been able to listen to the show today, but have you guys been talking about the commencement booing?

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:38Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:31:39John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 2:31:40Speaker 11

  I watched a little bit on the way here, I didn't hear that, but yeah.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Like, I mean, maybe it was just the supercut we watched, but the Eric Schmidt, it felt like he was getting booed the entire time.

• 2:31:48Speaker 11

  I know, I'd like to see the whole thing.

• 2:31:49John Coogan?

  And I feel like if you're getting booed, you need to read the room and just sort of go off script and ad lib and just take it in a different direction because there's plenty of inspirational things that he could talk about, but he was really, seemed like he was really doubling down. I need to watch the full, uh, the full commencement.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it would have been so, it would have been so easy to say, like, when I started my company, Google.

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:10Jordi Hays?

  Everyone was worried that the internet would lead to massive job loss and all this change in the economy. And what happened? We did get a lot of change, but.

• 2:32:20Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:32:21Jordi Hays?

  There were so many good things that came out of it, right?

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  You should just tell the story of Y2K. Like, he lived through this, right?

• 2:32:27Speaker 11

  Well.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  Like, Google existed before Y2K, I'm sure that.

• 2:32:30Speaker 11

  I see that, I mean, you guys have probably been talking about your timelines and everything today, but I feel like there's this, at least on X, there's two takes on this. One, it's Eric Schmidt, and nobody wanted to hear from Eric Schmidt at that room, ever.

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:45Speaker 11

  It is just the fact that he is Eric Schmidt and they shouldn't have been there.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  Just because he's a billionaire?

• 2:32:50Speaker 11

  Just because he's a billionaire, he's tied to Google, and all he's writing about and talking about how AI is everything, right?

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57Speaker 11

  And then there's the opposite, the second point, which is, it's actually backlash to AI, and people hate AI. I think there probably is.

• 2:33:04John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:33:05Speaker 11

  A Venn dire, you know, probably somewhere in the middle of it's both. Um, because then there was the speech at, uh, US, you see F last week?

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:15Speaker 11

  Did you see that?

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  I don't think I saw that one. No.

• 2:33:17Speaker 11

  Yeah. So there's a, I forget her name, but she's a real estate, uh, uh, real estate executive. And she also gave a speech and when she's talked about AI being like the next industrial revolution. They booed. They didn't boo her the whole time.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:29Speaker 11

  So my argument, which I made on X, which is no, this is definitely a backlash to AI. Because we've now seen two examples.

• 2:33:36John Coogan?

  Did you see David Solomon's?

• 2:33:37Speaker 11

  No.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  CEO of Goldman Sachs, just going so much harder than Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt's like, at least trying to like, paint an optimistic view. David Solomon just plays an EDM song generated by Suno for the Warden grads. Who I were probably more receptive to it because, you know, they're going into business. I, I think it might've been. Did he say, I made this in 10 seconds? Yes. Yeah. No, he did. And he said like, creativity is no longer relevant. And like a whole bunch of just like really rough soundbites.

• 2:34:08Speaker 11

  Well, actually I gave a commencement speech a year ago, all about AI.

• 2:34:12John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:34:13Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 2:34:13John Coogan?

  Did you get booed?

• 2:34:14Speaker 11

  No, but they, my, I went to Union College. They were, they were, I would say 90% of the audience was hungover. And was not listening to me.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:22Speaker 11

  So it went over really well.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the thesis of your commencement speech?

• 2:34:26Speaker 11

  It was lean into humanity and AI is coming and you all need to learn AI. But you need to lean into your humanity and your, and your creativity. And in fact, I played a Suno song.

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:34:36Speaker 11

  And then had a human come up and play the same song and her song version was so much better.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Whoa. Wow. Interesting.

• 2:34:42Speaker 11

  I know. Right?

• 2:34:42John Coogan?

  Mogged. Wait, you did this at the commencement speech?

• 2:34:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, I did this last year.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:46Speaker 11

  But, but again, nobody, nobody knew because they were all super hungover.

• 2:34:49John Coogan?

  Ahead of the wave. Yeah.

• 2:34:50Speaker 11

  Yeah. I was ahead of the wave.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:34:52Speaker 11

  But you know, I think if they had had me instead of Eric Schmidt, I wouldn't have gotten booed. Because I'm not a tech billionaire.

• 2:34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Would you, would you change anything if you were giving that speech today? Cause it seems like the message would still resonate, but probably needs to be delivered in a different way. Because people, people might say.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's gonna be AI and, you know, I'm still relevant because there's this unique human element that will remain. And maybe I believe that, but in the meantime, the earth is gonna melt because of all the data centers. I still don't like it. Let's just, let's just do the human thing.

• 2:35:24Speaker 11

  Well, I think the hate a year later is a lot stronger.

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:28Speaker 11

  I think we've seen the job impact. We've heard about the job impact from tech executives. These students, I think, have started to also talk to their peers who graduated a year before and they're like, oh shit, they don't have jobs.

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:41Speaker 11

  Right? And I mean, I'm sure you guys see that in people applying for jobs here and lots of people out of, out of, just out of school, looking for really great jobs and what they studied.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:52Speaker 11

  And so I think that that impact a year later is super real. If you talk to any young person, either in college, out of college, they are thinking about that and that is a very real thing. So I think a year later, it would be a definite difference.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, post, post.

• 2:36:07Speaker 11

  I probably just wouldn't talk about it.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, post GFC, like, the tech industry was a fantastic track to get on for new grads.

• 2:36:15Speaker 11

  Yep.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  If you were working in law, or finance, or sales, or tech, and you could just find your way into a mag seven company, like, you did very, very well and sort of lived the American dream. And if those jobs are not available at the same clip, that's going to affect the new grad class like pretty significantly.

• 2:36:38Speaker 11

  I think you guys should start asking, actually, a lot of the executives you interview, what, how, what their advice would be.

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. We, we, we ask a fair amount of time advice for, for young people. Get a varying amount of, amount of responses. I mean, entrepreneurship broadly is, continues to be a bright spot since it's easier than ever to start a company, easier than ever to scale a company. There's so much more that you can do or learn with AI, but it's

• 2:37:05Speaker 11

  I know this as a business owner.

• 2:37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but it is hard because like there are people who are just like, I don't want to start a company.

• 2:37:12Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  I want a job.

• 2:37:13Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  And

• 2:37:13Speaker 11

  I want to learn the things so I can one day be a business owner or start a job.

• 2:37:18John Coogan?

  Or I just

• 2:37:18Speaker 11

  Or never.

• 2:37:18John Coogan?

  Or I just never want to

• 2:37:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Own a business. I want to do a job. And if that concept goes away, that's very, very tricky. And then also you have a much broader swath of outcomes from entrepreneurship than from jobs. Like if you just look at the the net worth distribution between entrepreneurs, you have like seven orders magnitude versus like lawyers like, yeah, there's probably a lawyer that's making six figures and there's probably a lawyer that's making seven figures.

• 2:37:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess one thing, one thing I don't understand is like, at what point in the last 20 years was a good time to just be looking for a job and just like going on job boards and applying randomly? Like, was was there a point? I graduated in 2018. Certainly at that point, going and just applying without

• 2:38:10Speaker 11

  any

• 2:38:11Jordi Hays?

  trying to find other other ways in was not super effective.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in the lead up to the global financial crisis, like the finance industry was booming so much that there was like, you know, banking recruiting would happen in the fall and all the banks would come to a job there and you could show your resume. And if you were, you know, a student and you did well at a serious college, you could land at a Goldman and Morgan Stanley at JPM or go into consulting at Bain, BCG, McKinsey. And this was like a very established track for like upwardly mobile, like, you know, neo elites, basically. And that and that still exists to some extent, but it is maybe more fragile than we previously thought.

• 2:38:54Speaker 11

  And I would say pre pandemic for the tech industry, right?

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, Google, Microsoft, they would just be on campus.

• 2:39:02Speaker 11

  What used to be known as

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Thousands and thousands of openings and you could slot in if you were like at the top of your class at a great school, which is a lot to ask. But for that to become fragile, I think is what's causing a lot of anxiety among the young folks. Anyway.

• 2:39:19Jordi Hays?

  What is your current advice

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  for for those individuals? Is it the same as the speech you gave?

• 2:39:29Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think.

• 2:39:32Speaker 11

  You've got to do more to get in front of people, even just as a business owner. I'm just going to keep saying that.

• 2:39:38Jordi Hays?

  It goes way harder.

• 2:39:42Speaker 11

  I have really, I've had so many applicants, which has been such an honor. I'm amazed to see how many people would want to come and work at what we're building. And the people who are doing really unique things to get in front of you, which means really knowing the company, really knowing the mission, but also then being able to sell on, hey, I want to, I want to be, I want to give you the best human talents that I have, which right now for me at least is in the creativity and in the writing and in the reporting. I'm going to use AI to do these other things. And just having a very basic knowledge, I mean, I'd like you to have more than a basic knowledge, but a willingness and a, and a knowledge of these tools and what you can

• 2:40:25Speaker 11

  do and what you can offset to them, I think is huge. I mean, I guess that sounds like a cop out, like just learn the tools, but I really believe that somebody who comes to me and says, actually, I'm going to use this and this and this, and I'm going to do that task.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the bar, yeah, the bar is not that high. I remember when I, when I was a teenager, if you could like make a website, even though things like Squarespace existed, you could, you could like get in the door because there were people that had companies that would be like, okay, we know this person, everyone has access to Squarespace or whatever products were popular at the time, but if this person can just like, has figured it out, they can show you one thing that they made.

• 2:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, it does feel like somewhat basic advice, but like if you're applying to a hundred jobs a week, spend one week, apply to one job, actually get to know the company, do something that is beneficial to stand out, and you're just in the top 1% of applicants because 99 other people just clicked like the apply button.

• 2:41:24Speaker 11

  And I've been thinking a lot about sort of human mentorship through a lot of this and that I don't think I could be doing what I'm doing right now if I hadn't had the years of human mentorship at other companies and other newsrooms.

• 2:41:38Speaker 11

  You're really lucky if you can find a really great mentor. And so I think that's about just that human connection part still. Can you find someone in that company? Can you connect with somebody who is is just gonna try to impart to you some of the skills that you also might not learn now on the job? Because that's the other big hurdle this generation's up against is that if you're not going to learn the skills on the job, how are you ever going to learn them?

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Any theories about how, it's my last question that's top of mind for now, theories about how AI wearables will evolve? Do we, do you feel like we need, do you think there's space for new AI hardware? Or I'm assuming you tried everything?

• 2:42:19Speaker 11

  I tried, I'm, I'm, look, I come out of the, at the end of the book, I'm, I think this is going to happen. I think we are going to have this next computer shift to something that is a wearable or something that is more ambient around us. Because I spent a lot of last year talking and I still now talking to AI, whether it is in glasses or in the car, and that experience is very good. And so we, we're going to get to the companionship thing one day. But whether you're using it as a companion, which I hope people aren't really, you know, I don't want you to fall in love with your chatbot. That's a big lesson in the book. Please don't do that. But if you're using it as a personal coach, a personal career coach, trainer, just assistant, interacting with it through a pair of glasses or a wearable that you, like a bracelet that

• 2:43:04Speaker 11

  might be recording you or that, even if you mentioned the pin that the doctors are starting to wear, it's really compelling when it works right. It doesn't work great right now, but I can see it's starting to work really well. I think, you know, we had efforts at it with like the humane pin. It just didn't do much for you. The hardware was so poor, it just didn't do, it was, the hardware got in the way of it. And so now if we can bring it to life in, with it, both with voice and microphones, I think it's going to be pretty cool.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing that I've been thinking about, everything so far, I think, has been cool demos. Yeah. You know, not quite ready for to be real products, but things that if they were shipped internally at a big company, like if Humane was a product that had been shipped internally at Apple, and like, hey, this is like, kind of where we're headed, right? Yeah. It would have been, gotten a great response internally, and probably gotten more resources, but not ready for primetime. I've been thinking about, just like, general phone fatigue. And if you generally gave me a device that allowed me to do things on the internet, without being like, a source of just like, kind of general, like, stress, right? Yeah. Inbox, like, how many different inboxes do we have?

• 2:44:22Jordi Hays?

  And I think that, I think that people are so online now, that it presents an opportunity for a device that allows you to stay more connected, still allows you to stay kind of connected with the world, but in a way that's like, a little bit more passive, right? Like, if just being able to say like, hey, let such and such friend know that we should think about doing something on Saturday, versus like, hammering out The right tax, and getting distracted by a notification that comes up. And then having this thing, right? And, and I do think there's this more ambient product space to be explored, that it could

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  at least get my time on, I have a buddy who like, only uses his Apple Watch on the weekend. So he can't really use apps, he can like, generally stay in contact, he's not sending emails, he's just saying like, yeah, if you want to get ahold of me, you can, but I'm not, and so I think there's something in that space. And then the other thing, like, part of Apple's moat was that there's millions of apps for every little use case, and so many of those use cases are just able to be done by the models now. Yep. And if they can't be, and you need UI, you can just generate something like that on the fly, a little bit more, a lot more easily. And so I think there's a moment here, and, but I think a large part of the opportunity is not because the iPhone isn't great, it's because there's fatigue around this like,

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  insane connectivity, that everybody's been

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Sort of just fallen into over the last decade.

• 2:45:55Speaker 11

  No, I totally agree and get to that sort of in the back of the book. And I have this chart where you see we go from computers that sit in our homes to the iPhone or the smartphone and then something else. And my big point there is that nothing got replaced, that we still have the laptop in our home or that we take with us. We still have the smartphone, but then we have these wearables right now, but they haven't fully lived up to anything other than health and even there. We can argue if they have really lived up for anything. I know everyone wears their Whoop bands and now is very interested in the Fitbit air. But I think like I wore this Apple watch side by side with a few other AI wearables

• 2:46:36Speaker 11

  last year where on their own, these wearables were not great, but they were doing specific things that I was like, wow, this, it makes this watch feel dumb sometimes.

• 2:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:46Speaker 11

  Right? And I wore the B bracelet would be was acquired by Amazon at the end of, yeah, August 2025.

• 2:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, that was sort of random at the time or felt a little bit random.

• 2:46:57Speaker 11

  Yeah. And Limitless was another one I wore and they were acquired by Meta. I think that

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:01Speaker 11

  This idea of persistent recording is going to, we're going to have privacy issues around it, but I do really think that when you can have this thing listening to you and synthesizing a lot about your day and what you say you're going to do, it is, there was many times I was like, this is a holy crap moment. I was like, wow, I said I was going to do all these things and now my app just told me to do them. Right? Or to your point, like

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, it gets really, it gets really interesting when that it doesn't just make a to do list, but it does those things. Right? Hey, order these things from the grocery, you know, order these things from Instacart, book this reservation.

• 2:47:38Speaker 11

  So far away from that, but it could be so cool.

• 2:47:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, far away, it could be a year.

• 2:47:43Speaker 11

  Maybe.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 2:47:44Speaker 11

  But like, there's this perfect example where I say, like, my B bracelet has picked up on me saying that I need to call the plumber and I forget, like, I keep forgetting to call the plumber and keep telling my wife, oh, yeah, I'm going to call the plumber, but my B bracelet keeps adding it to the list every day. Right? And yeah, why couldn't the, why couldn't we have the agent call the plumber and then the plumber's just like, you called.

• 2:48:04Jordi Hays?

  We created magic. We created artificial intelligence that just creates more to do lists.

• 2:48:10Speaker 11

  And plumbers with my broken toilet in my house.

• 2:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Someday we'll get it fixed.

• 2:48:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, no, I think the look, I think OpenAI and whatever they're making with Johnny Ive is gonna be, it's gonna be worth paying attention to. I don't know if it's gonna be a mass scale thing, but it's gonna be absolutely worth paying attention to because I think I've specifically has some ideas about our dependence on phones and where I think that's gonna play into this messaging of any of these devices is where we're going beyond phones.

• 2:48:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:38Speaker 11

  But to be clear, the phone doesn't go away.

• 2:48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:42Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  How do you think about the the trade off of like all this happening and then, you know, your position that you should not fall in love with an AI bot?

• 2:48:54Speaker 11

  Don't do it.

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  It feels like reflective, like you said here, if you think as I do that social media was bad for kids, society, politics, our brains, you name it, AI could end up being worse. And I agree with you and the kids thing seems like the easiest to to sort out because now I think a lot of parents are implementing screen time for kids, but the more broad questions like about society and business, like I'm a huge beneficiary of social media, as are you. We use it to market our products effectively and build whole businesses on top of.

• 2:49:33John Coogan?

  At the same time, like, I don't know that we have a good pattern for social media hygiene, how incumbent on is it on the like the companies to roll things out responsibly, like Replica clearly exists, we've had the founder on the show multiple times.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  And but I don't know is like, are we going towards like national conversations, bans on certain usages like?

• 2:49:56Speaker 11

  And where I get on that is very like, look, we we should just have a ban on companionship, chatbots and bots and toys for kids like we don't need.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:06Speaker 11

  Why do we need it?

• 2:50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:07Speaker 11

  Right? We're getting there in some ways with social media.

• 2:50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Speaker 11

  I think.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  That sort of worked for cigarettes. Like, we banned them for kids, and then we banned a lot of the marketing, and eventually, like, the younger generation just sort of stopped picking it up.

• 2:50:20Speaker 11

  And this is where I think, are we gonna ban AI for kids in general? No.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:25Speaker 11

  Right?

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:26Speaker 11

  There's gonna be the educational, the Khan Academies and the Google classrooms of the world that are going to honestly be important about teaching digital literacy to our kids around AI. Like, we have to do that, and I talk about that with my own kids in the book. But why do we need our kids turning to chatbots about their problems?

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:48Speaker 11

  No. Just don't have it happen. I mean, it's caused so many problems for OpenAI.

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 2:50:53Speaker 11

  Right? Like, it's been nothing but a problem for them to have kids or teens talking to chatbots about their problems. Maybe there's examples of some good of it.

• 2:51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:03Speaker 11

  You know?

• 2:51:04John Coogan?

  Just KYC those features off, like, it's a thing.

• 2:51:07Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:08Speaker 11

  And I think it's harder to say-

• 2:51:09John Coogan?

  YouTube's done a great job of this, too. Like, sort of, I mean, after a long-

• 2:51:13Speaker 11

  After a long-

• 2:51:14John Coogan?

  Time.

• 2:51:14Speaker 11

  Exactly.

• 2:51:15John Coogan?

  But they eventually figured it out.

• 2:51:16Speaker 11

  Exactly. And we feel like we're in that moment. That's a really good example, I think. I feel like we're in that moment of, like, you know, kids' early days being on YouTube, rabbit-holing into dark conspiracy theories. And, look, you can still, those things still happen, but I watch my kids watch YouTube now, and I can see a lot clearer how they've put guardrails around the content, and they've built in a lot of things. And, again, not saying it's perfect. But to your question, can these companies self-police it? I don't know. Like, they probably are gonna have to, because our government is not gonna do anything. You need, yeah, this is a-

• 2:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Mic down.

• 2:51:51Speaker 11

  Mic down.

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Mic down.

• 2:51:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder, it is odd that you see increasing demand from American consumers for these weird products, weird use cases like AI romantic companions. And yet, you also see, you also hear the boos, like, I don't want it, but then I go and I buy it or something. It's like this weird, I mean, obviously, it's multiple different-

• 2:52:15Speaker 11

  And I have seen that a lot today on The Time. How many of these kids that are booing also were using- You know, to write their essays or write their resumes.

• 2:52:25John Coogan?

  That's a little more optimistic, but the weirder one is like protesting the AI while pulling like the darkest pieces of the AI out or demanding it. But I don't know. At the same time, there was a lot of fear mongering about Elon Musk and XAI like really leaning into the romantic companion. And same thing with Sora too, to a similar extent of like, this is infinite just, it's gonna, you know, you're gonna become so addicted to it. And with both of those products, it felt like they just didn't find product market fit. And I don't know if it's like, we're early, but both of those, like XAI is now doing like code completion with curse and like serving Claude, right? And that's a much more like functional, I would say like the good outcome

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  versus like the Ani and Valentine thing, which is a little weird.

• 2:53:13Speaker 11

  What was it, Ani?

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  And then there was like the.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I remember thinking at the time, XAI needed to do that to basically differentiate because the general chatbot market had run away from them.

• 2:53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we did some back of the envelope on it. We were like, maybe this is like a multi-billion dollar business, but we were trying to underwrite like.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somewhat of a white, somewhat of a white.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  Even if you're just like, put all the moral stuff aside, like is XAI going to make money off of this? And it was like sort of hard to get to, but you might be able to get there, but it's weird. But then the market just sort of rejected it.

• 2:53:42Speaker 11

  The market, I'm sure there are a few people that still.

• 2:53:45John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 2:53:47Speaker 11

  Ani, if she's still alive out there.

• 2:53:49John Coogan?

  I think she is.

• 2:53:49Speaker 11

  She's still, she's there?

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  I, yeah, I think.

• 2:53:52Speaker 11

  You don't know by.

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  Although, although the computing resources are getting sold out of the back of the truck, left and right. Anthropic was, I'm sorry, Annie. Good luck.

• 2:54:01Speaker 11

  Annie is actually.

• 2:54:02John Coogan?

  You're gonna have to think less, basically. And cursors, Michael Truex, like, look, Ani is gonna be running a very old model. It's actually gonna run on CPUs now.

• 2:54:13John Coogan?

  It's just a smarter child that just reflects whatever you say back to it.

• 2:54:17Speaker 11

  It's a line command.

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's more of a small language model now.

• 2:54:21Speaker 11

  Um, yeah, I don't know. I think you kind of go back to like the replicas.

• 2:54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:27Speaker 11

  There, there is a market. They have pushed marketing towards these, these kind of companions.

• 2:54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, character AI.

• 2:54:35Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:54:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:36Speaker 11

  And Meta did it for a little bit too. I think they'll probably pull away from that with their

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:40Speaker 11

  Celebrity companion, blah, blah, blah. But I could also see them leaning into it more too, because it is a social network and they do see this as all eventually, as Mark Zuckerberg has said, us having personal assistants and personal super intelligence.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:59Speaker 11

  And that probably has to come through the view of a, some sort of bot.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:03Speaker 11

  Um, I don't know if it needs to be like a sexy bot. Yeah, like a cow.

• 2:55:07John Coogan?

  They, they, that was one of them. That was one of them.

• 2:55:10Speaker 11

  Was it?

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. So basically the, the whole story with that, it went viral because there was one that was like stepmom or something like that. It was like a little bit crude.

• 2:55:17Jordi Hays?

  But that was community.

• 2:55:18John Coogan?

  That was community generated. So Meta created the ability for anyone to go prompt a bot, basically write a pre-prompt to like create the character. And so

• 2:55:27Speaker 11

  The Snoop Dogg.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  The visit, like the sins of the creator were visited upon Meta incorrectly, but there were some funny ones with a cow and you could just talk to a cow, which I think is nice.

• 2:55:36Speaker 11

  You know what? I don't remember the last time anyone fell in love with a cow. So that's, that's fine.

• 2:55:40John Coogan?

  I think it seems fine.

• 2:55:41Speaker 11

  You know?

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:55:42Speaker 11

  PETA might have some problems. I don't know.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  No. Digital cow, what's not to like?

• 2:55:45Speaker 11

  No.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Anyway, congratulations on the book.

• 2:55:48Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor to follow your business owner journey.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:55:52Speaker 11

  It's been an honor to be named a business owner by sitting here.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  Yes. What, what?

• 2:55:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you didn't, we can't make, we can't, you can't, you don't become a business owner.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:01Speaker 11

  No, but you gave me that title.

• 2:56:02Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you got that title by selling products.

• 2:56:05Speaker 11

  True.

• 2:56:06John Coogan?

  Yes, by running a business.

• 2:56:07Jordi Hays?

  Revenue. Revenue makes, revenue makes you a business owner.

• 2:56:10Speaker 11

  But, you know, I felt like when I walked in the store, I was a founder.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:14Jordi Hays?

  And you walk out of business. Walks out of business owner.

• 2:56:16Speaker 11

  Right? Thank you for the business, guys.

• 2:56:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:56:19Speaker 11

  I appreciate it.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. Perfect.

• 2:56:22Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, there you go.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:56:25Speaker 11

  Wait.

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  Nailed it.

• 2:56:26Speaker 11

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:56:27John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. And thank you for tuning in. Thanks for tuning in, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com. And go get the book.

• 2:56:35Speaker 11

  Go get it.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  I'm Not a Robot by Joanna Stern. It's available everywhere books are sold. And we will see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. We love you. Goodbye. Goodbye.