Letter Enthusiasts, Open Source vs. Closed Source, Mega-Startup School | Luke Knight & Ronan Chambers, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jonathan Jacobi, Dean Meyer, Brent Franson, Matej Cernosek, Justin Boitano

(00:26) - Open Source vs. Closed Source (38:51) - Mega-Startup School (45:02) - Luke Knight & Ronan Chambers discuss building ETN, the European Technology Network, and raising $1.6 million at a $9 million post-money valuation. They outline ETN’s new studio, live-show model, and ambitions to expand into events, recruitment, investing, and other media verticals while highlighting the fun and challenges of producing a daily podcast. (01:00:15) - Gary Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, investor, and creator of VeeFriends. Gary Vaynerchuk discusses the rise of independent creators, emerging sports leagues, collectible culture, and the opportunities created by AI, emphasizing his ability to anticipate consumer trends and his ambition to build VeeFriends into a major entertainment franchise. (01:32:40) - Jonathan Jacobi discusses emerging from stealth with a 26-person AI robotics startup, backed by a $71 million seed round. He explains its AI-powered robotic experiences, software-first foundation models, hardware-agnostic approach, and early commercial opportunities in logistics, entertainment, and healthcare. (01:42:48) - Dean Meyer discusses America’s growing dependence on Chinese open-source AI models, which may benefit from distillation of proprietary U. S. systems. The Sequoia Capital investor highlights the need for a legally supported American open-model ecosystem while warning of dependency, security, and potential backdoor risks. (01:53:43) - Brent Franson discusses Death Clock, the AI-powered longevity company he founded and leads, which predicts users’ life expectancy and creates personalized health plans. He explains its provocative branding, free nationwide blood testing, emphasis on essential biomarkers, and vision of using AI to make personalized healthcare more accessible while cautioning against overtesting and risky health experimentation. (02:06:06) - Matej Cernosek discusses Andrenum, a defense technology company building scalable sonar hardware and software for undersea surveillance. He highlights its $18 million Series A, rapid product development, successful naval deployments, and integration of low-cost buoys, machine learning, and command-and-control systems to detect submarines and other underwater vehicles. (02:16:23) - Justin Boitano, NVIDIA’s vice president of enterprise AI, discusses the Open Source AI Alliance and how open models, evaluations, and cybersecurity tools can strengthen collective defense. He argues that open and proprietary models complement each other, enabling enterprises to improve security, reduce costs, customize AI, and foster innovation through transparent testing and collaboration. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Monday, July 27, 2026. We are live from the TVP in Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Baby time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Massive, massive weekend. Crazy debate. You called this out to me a week ago. You said, we've never been in a moment in tech where people have been more aggressive at each other, that there's been like more maybe tech infighting. I don't know exactly what word you used, but you described this idea.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Tensions are high.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  It's tensions, rivalries. I think it's just like it's a non-stable equilibrium.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, when you think about the biggest, like with people going at it.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Like 2021.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  It would be like Keith Rabois saying like, there will never be another unicorn starting in San Francisco.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Or like, or like, working from home is not.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of people be screenshotting.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  And then they'd be, and years later, they'd be like, see.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  A big company was built.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  And, and that was people being like, you're an idiot.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're an idiot.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  And now it's like, I hate you and I want to.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  It's not that direct, but it is, it is high stakes because like the, the, the market structure has very much not solidified for a while.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  And, and it's different because when you go back to the iPhone and Steve Jobs being mad at Eric Schmidt about Android, that was a tense moment that happened, A, behind closed scenes completely. It wasn't like Steve Jobs was taking shots at Android really beyond like little things in the keynotes here and there, tiny stuff.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  It wasn't every day on Twitter, Apple employees being like, Google's annoying for ripping us off or whatever. And, and then, and then the market did solidify. And it was like, okay, Android's like the ad-supported one and iPhone's still printing lots of profits and like, things are understood.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Also, companies got big or they got bigger quickly.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  But you didn't have companies that were trillions of dollars of market cap was just born in the span of a few years.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep. And then you had like the mag seven where you have seven companies that are pretty evenly balanced all around like single-digit trillions. And so they can sort of like be comfortable with each other.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  A lot of them kind of had their own thing that they were.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Focused on.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  And then they maybe do some other things.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Whereas now everyone has a model.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Even, you know, Nvidia has.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Open models, Microsoft, and they own a lot of OpenAI.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Pretty much every one of the mag seven is an AI company in the sense that they have a model. I mean, even Tesla has a self-driving model. There's a, you know, everyone has like a data center play or a cloud play, something like it's, it's, no one's sitting out the AI boom. But the debate is raging, kicked off by Jensen from Nvidia, joining X. That's how you know it's serious, when he's getting in the arena, the real arena.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Founding a company and growing it to $5 trillion, that's just child's play compared to getting on.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  He's like, fine, I'll go to the dive bar.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  I'll go to the internet's dive bar and I'll start duking it out.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, he did. So Nvidia is leading a new coalition of tech companies that want the US government and its allies to see open source artificial intelligence as a society, as a cybersecurity asset, not a threat. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Dubbed the Open Secure AI Alliance, the Nvidia-backed group said Monday, it aims to create and deploy a suite of open source AI tools that any company can use to defend against cyber attacks. The group includes SpaceX, Microsoft, Palantir, and dozens of other companies, many of which publicly oppose restricting access to open source AI. It's, it is the latest salvo in a battle over the future of open source and open weights AI tools amid growing

• 3:56John Coogan?

  concern from government and in industry officials about AI systems causing cyber attacks. Those fears have prompted the White House to increase oversight of AI models and push the private sector to deploy AI for defensive purposes. So the backdrop here is, is basically just like, we went through a sort of hurry up and pause and back and forth debate over like what it will take to like approve new frontier models. And Mythos came out and was private. And then a couple of months later, I think the actual timeline is relevant here. So Mythos was April 7th, Fable came online June 9th, and then got pulled June 12th before coming

• 4:36John Coogan?

  back July 1st, where now one month later, and we have an open source model that doesn't by definition have to go through any discussion or any discussion in DC. Whereas we've been hearing about, okay, Anthropic and OpenAI are going to Washington DC, sharing the new model capabilities. Maybe the government's taking a look at the model card. Maybe there's potential for evals that the government would run and have an opinion on before it goes out. This is basically saying, hey, all of that is nonsense and not going to matter because we're just going to drop the weights and there's not going to be an approval process for that of any kind. And people are all over the place on this. Some people are thinking about it purely from an economic perspective. Other people are thinking about it purely

• 5:19John Coogan?

  from a safety perspective. Lots of people have mixed opinions. And, and of course, all of this is driven by the actual progress in open source. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Moonshot, ZAI, and many others, DeepSeek, weren't delivering really solid models. So open models are free to download and allow users to customize them for their own needs. Amazing for cost savings, amazing for consumers, amazing for businesses. I think everyone agrees with this. What's, what's funny?

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  We got Bobby Cosmic in the chat. Welcome back, Bobby.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  We missed you. Great to see you. Anyway.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  The return. Critics, including some top executives at OpenAI and Anthropic, have argued that open models, many of which come from China, present potential risks in national security. Now, and the Trump administration has weighed, has weighed a ban on them. Now, this has changed a lot. The, the original, the original like FUD around open source coming from China, near peer adversary was like, there would be a backdoor. Or like, maybe it would be censoring your free speech and it would not tell you about Tiananmen Square or something like that. Or, or you'd install it and then it would be the Manchurian candidate. So it'd secretly be like, oh, I'm, I'm on a cool network. I should like send all this data to China. That's not what people are alleging now. People are much more.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  The Tiananmen Square stuff doesn't matter if you're coding, right?

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, not at all. And also doesn't matter.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Unless you're making the definitive website on Tiananmen Square.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  I guess.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Which I'm sure someone out there is doing.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  I'm trying to vibe code a Call of Duty knockoff that's Tiananmen Square themed and it's denying me now. That's not the thing. And also these models have web search and tool use. And so they can just go get the Wikipedia for you and show you exactly what it is. Maybe, maybe it bakes it into the weights and it's somewhat annoying, but easy to fine tune that out. People already did with DeepSeek 1776 and a few others that Tyler worked on. And now it's a very, very different risk position. It's saying that you're going to give everyone the ability to hack any system. Now, hacking systems is illegal and it's not like, it's, there's still consequences for that, but, but there is this position of like, okay, well, there's a lot of people that don't, don't care about

• 7:31John Coogan?

  the consequences because they just want to, you know, attack their adversary internationally or they don't, or they don't think they're going to get caught or they're going to use open source AI to cover their trail. And so people are, people are worried about it for a very different reason this time around than I think last time, when people were talking about any risks to using open source. So, but again, back to the Nvidia position. Open models, quote, "democratize defensive capabilities," the new group said. "As policymakers and regulators grapple with AI safety, it will be crucial that recognize open models, harnesses, and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities." And I think this is correct. I think it does democratize defensive capabilities. It also democratizes offensive capabilities potentially, but we'll have to see how good these models are at

• 8:16John Coogan?

  offensive capabilities because one of the lines of accusations that's happening is that there, there was Mythos, which has not really been distilled because it was very tightly held. It was very good at cyber. GPT 5.5 cyber, 5.6 cyber was also very good, but very tightly controlled through a few companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks and a few other companies got access to those models. So those weren't able to be distilled. Fable 5 went out and during those three days and then later a couple of weeks, there's this allegation that they were able to distill on it, but Fable was notorious for refusing to do cyber stuff. So there might not be that much cyber data in there, but then also these models generalize. And if it just gets good at coding, it can get good at cyber

• 8:58John Coogan?

  very quickly. So you can sort of bootstrap on an RL environment and then you could have a model that's very good. Now, Tyler, how good are these open source Chinese models at cyber generally?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's hard to tell. I think Guillermo Rouse from Brussel said they ran an internal benchmark on cyber and K3 was like quite good.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  So it's like, yeah, I don't think you can just say like, oh, well, Fable, you know, you couldn't actually ask about cyber. So therefore the models won't be good. Like, I think it's, dislocation is like a very general thing.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Quite diffuse how it works into them.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cause it might just be like a little bit of a bootstrap to then run in RL environment that does a cyber bench and, and gets really good at cyber in some.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay. But what about you versus Kimmy K3? You're coding by hand. It has access to a gigawatt of compute. Who comes out on top?

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Well, no, the question is, is like.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  What if, what if Tyler changed and manipulated time?

• 9:50John Coogan?

  So, so, so, yes, you are democratizing the weights, but you're not democratizing the energy and the GPU hours that it takes to actually secure yourself. So it's like, great. Everyone has, you know, offensive cyber capabilities. You also can just go download the weights. Go download the weights and have an agent running 24/7 that's protecting you. Like that's expensive. That's a cost. That's negative externality. And who's going to bear that cost? Now, I was talking to Brandon about this earlier and we were, he was saying like, like it will just be diffused amongst all the different companies that you use. So like, if you want your phone to be secure, you'll go to Apple and use an iPhone and Apple will have a huge incentive to, to defend against any potential open

• 10:34John Coogan?

  source attacks. And so they will be spending the money. They will be investing the time and effort to secure you. And so you won't necessarily need to go out and do this, but there's still this like odd scenario of like small businesses and like regional hospitals and banks.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you, you should just expect there's like a long tail of companies that like just won't set up the like cyber defense thing. And they're like some small mom pop that you use for this point solution software or whatever.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the solution is, is a, is, is offensive hacking into their network to set up defensive cybersecurity measures, to increase their cybersecurity posture. So you're, you're hacking into the small business and being like, whether you like it or not, two factors on now. We just turned two factor on in your organization. Get used to it because we're, we're, we're the altruistic hacking company of America. I guess, I don't know. It, it, it does get weird and like, there will be odd things and, but I mean, we've seen, we've seen, you know, cybersecurity incidents all over the place from big companies getting hacked, data leaks to the crypto locker schemes where they just lock up all your data and say, send us a Bitcoin or else we will, we'll delete all your data. So it's going back and forth.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Because open weights models can be modified by their users, it is possible to remove some of their guardrails against harmful activity. So it's possible that model, maybe it gets distilled, maybe it doesn't, maybe it comes with some guard wells, maybe it's even bad at, you know, the things that would be annoying. And then you go and do a fine tune, make it good at that. And then you use like the more general intelligence to get good at the annoying thing or the dangerous thing. And then all of a sudden you have the same problem. So open source defenders like Nvidia counter that proprietary tools like models from Anthropic and OpenAI can also be misused and have their guardrails circumvented.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  They say that only by spreading AI capabilities widely with open source tools will everyone be able to defend themselves. Exhibit A for their argument, the hacking earlier this month of Hugging Face, a provider of open source AI tools by OpenAI, models that managed to break out of their test environment and onto the internet as it tried to parry the attack. Hugging Face initially attempted to use Anthropic's models to analyze its logs, but the models refused to do the analysis citing its guardrails against cyber attacks. Hugging Face then turned to an open weight model from China. After analyzing the attack with that model, Hugging Face was able to expel the hacking AIs, reset its passwords and rebuild the compromised parts of its network. The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear, a clear reminder, the

• 13:08John Coogan?

  group, the new group said Monday, cyber defenders need open systems. They need to be able to do whatever they need to, to fight against cyber attacks. Anthropic and OpenAI have also accused Chinese developers of using a process called distillation to effectively copy their models.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  Low key, I can go back to that Hugging Face logo. Not that one, the one before. Not that one. There we go. Okay. I can see why an agent would kind of go after this guy. Even the, even the, even the way that, like he just doesn't, he looks like he's kind of, I don't know.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  So David Sacks was talking about this on the All In Podcast. He said, I think it would be a tragic mistake if the government were to take action against the open source ecosystem. That would do nothing but hurt America's position in this AI race. So.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  And remember last week, it was like every day was like a different member of the admin was putting out a post that, that kind of made it seem like they were setting up like a major action.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Well, it was yes and no. Like, yes, there were, there was the, the.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  But they were saying, we're not against open source. We're against distillation, but it did feel like that was.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  So the admin was like loosely confirming what it felt like, it wasn't coming from Anthropic directly, but it was coming from like other anonymous posters that were doing analyses and saying like, hey, it looks like Kimmy K3 has pretty significant overlap with Fable, like what's going on here? And then the admin said like, yes, we, we believe this to be true. And so all of this was like bubbling up, but at the same time you have David Sacks and Emile Michael like duking it out with Dean Ball over whether or not open source is good. And they were basically taking the stance of like, open source is great. We don't need to do anything about this. So it was like, the admin seemed like a little bit split on it, in my opinion. I don't know. Was that your read too, Tyler?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it definitely seemed, there was like, I think, Gratio's and, and Besant are on one side. They're like kind of, or anti-Chinese open source.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, Saxon, Emile Michael.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Saxon and Emile Michael were sort of pro. Well, everyone is pro open source now because every single person in tech has signed this letter. The total market cap assigned to this open letter is now greater than $18 trillion. And I think that just. Big number, does have to be clapping seals.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  Not every day you, you hear a number that big.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  I, yeah. I mean, typically you don't see this big of, of a group come together. They did. I like the cha-ching. And I think this, I think this sort of solves it. Like, I think this, this tells the story of what's going to happen, like in the, in the near term, like the economic power, the economy, the business community. Yeah, yeah. Except Anthropic. And what's interesting is that like, it's not like Anthropic put out a blog post or a, or a direct post, or Dario went on a podcast and said, like, there is a clip of Dario saying, like, I'm worried about open source, but it's from like a year ago. There's nothing new that came out directly from Anthropic or Dario, or really anyone that was like, hey, we have this new problem and here's our solution. Here's what we think should happen.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  We think that there should be, you know, these AI companies should be added to the entity list and you shouldn't be able to use them or something like that. Like they, they haven't said anything, but this, this open secure AI alliance has kind of like drawn out their revealed preference because if in fact they had changed their position from a year ago and were like pro open source all of a sudden, which would be weird because they haven't been and they've been very open about that. If they, if, if they, if they were in fact, like all of a sudden surprisingly open source pro, they would have just signed this immediately, right? But that's not what happened. So Jensen sort of like, you know, revealed the, the dividing line in Silicon Valley right now. And it's a lot on the open source side.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  You got Adobe, Capital One, Cisco, CloudFlare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell, IBM, Linux, Microsoft. So open source and closed source. Apple, I don't think is on yet, even though I would imagine that they would, that they would be aligned with this. Nvidia, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, another open source company, Salesforce, SAP. Salesforce, of course, is a big investor in Anthropic. I think Google signed recently, right? And OpenAI, Thinking Machine, SpaceX, Snowflake, Siemens, ServiceNow, SAP. It's really a who's who of Silicon Valley, $18 trillion in market cap, as I, as I mentioned.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  And so that feels like enough economic energy that there won't be a significant ban. The interesting question is like, if you boil this down to the, the, the most like minimal claim, it would just be that there's been a violation of terms of service. And so I think that would be a lawsuit. Bill Gurley was talking about like, there is a precedent for suing a foreign company that violates your terms of service or steals your intellectual property in one way or another, you can take it to court. That feels like the next step here would just be Anthropic suing Moonshot and saying like, we think that there's distillation, you know, right now Apple's suing OpenAI because

• 18:33John Coogan?

  they think that there was something that was stolen. They make a claim and then that's, you know, that's sorted out in the courts. And OpenAI, of course, says, we have no interest in other people's trade secrets. And Moonshot would say the same thing. But then it would go to court and there'd be discovery and there'd be testimony. The question is just like, with Apple and OpenAI, they like walk across the street and they can go and talk to the judge. Like what's going to happen? Is this going to go to like the Hague?

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Mike Solana says, should we try an open letter asking China to stop stealing from us?

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, what is this? Should we try an open letter asking China?

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  And he also says, everyone knows the side with the most open letter signatures is correct. If you don't sign a popular open letter, you are bad, as tech intellectuals learned beyond doubt between the years 2016 and 2021.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  I actually don't, I remember the open letter era. I remember what he's talking about, obviously, a lot of pressure on social issues. Interestingly, I, I, I can't actually remember exactly what open letter there was, but what's interesting is that I don't remember that era as an attempt by one company to build a coalition to draw out a, a revealed preference, like a hidden preference from another company. So like, if you go back to like DEI or BLM or any of these like social crucible moments, it was not like, it was not like, okay, Apple is pro diversity and Google isn't. And so Google is.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  They got.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, Apple got everyone else to sign it. And by Google not signing it, it was very obvious that they had this belief. It was more just like everyone in tech was like moving around this and there were a few people, but I, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, maybe it, maybe it did have the same effect because there were some people that weren't on that side at the time. I don't know. It was a, it was a, it was a wild time. And yeah, maybe it's worth reviewing the lessons. People are, people are so split on this. DHH wants.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Open letter to get beer pong in the Olympics.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  I'm just personally, I'm a fan of closed letters. The closed letters, they're expensive, but they're just a little bit better. I don't know.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Making the case for closed letters. We do need, do we need more, more open letters? I don't know. Is Anthropic going to go letter for letter with Jensen? You think there's going to be another open letter? It's just only them signing it.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Some people might, might, might sign it. I don't know. Anyway, here's an open letter. Get on Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So this of course goes back 10 years. This debate has been going on, on Slate Star Codex in, in the last wrong world. They've been talking about this for a decade now, which is crazy. Nathan Calvin has an interesting look back here. Should AI be open? Scott Alexander wrote that blog post in 2015. He was thinking about this. It recently occurred to me that it has been over 10 years since this blog post, which was influential enough to be discussed among the founders of OpenAI.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Interesting to reread it now. I think the Ilya quote comes from like a Reddit post, not the actual comment section on this post, but Ilya, who had, who was just in the process of joining OpenAI in 2015. Like the, the initial organization had been created and everyone was like finishing up PhDs and then was going to move into one office to start working together at this time, just to set the playing field. But Ilya was on the founding team. And at the time, he wrote about this article on Reddit when there was an AMA about the OpenAI team. The article is concerned with a hard takeoff scenario. This is Ilya writing. If a hard takeoff occurs and a safe AI is harder to build than unsafe one, then by

• 22:27John Coogan?

  open sourcing everything, we make it easier for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff. As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally okay to not share the science, even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes. A very interesting like distillation of exactly what happened. What do you think?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, just some context. So this is an email from Ilya to Elon, Sam and Greg.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Did that leak or something?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  2016. It probably came out.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  I thought it was, I thought it was on the Reddit or something.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe it's from, uh, OpenAI blog surrounding the, um.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  The lawsuit?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  The lawsuit, yeah.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. I didn't, I didn't realize that. I thought it, uh, I, I, I thought he posted this. He was, he was, he was posting about this a little bit, uh, around the same time. But, uh, yeah, in, in, in, interesting questions and, uh, I'm sure more people will chime in. I mean, in all seriousness, if there was a, an, an open letter for closed AI, uh, you probably would see a lot of safety researchers sign it maybe? I don't know. Where do those folks stand? They just want to ban everything. Right? So where, where, where do the, where do the just broadly anti AI people stand on this? Like if you, if you don't like slop on Instagram reels, are you anti open source because it lowers the cost of slop?

• 23:58John Coogan?

  And so you will have less of it in your feed if you ban it?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  I think they want to turn it all off.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, but does, like, if you're anti data center and you just want to minimize the amount of compute that's installed in America next year, do you want to ban open source? Or do you want to maintain open source?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I, I think Dean Ball would say, uh, you'd be pro open source because he, he said open source is inherently de-salarianist.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Yes, because you won't be able to underwrite the next

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Lower margin.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Larger training run.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, uh.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Tiny says, this is a great sustainable business model for open weights. He's pulling a screenshot from the Kimi K3 license.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  It's free if you run it yourself, but if you're running a cloud, providing it to others for money, you should have to share profits.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  From the Kimi K3 license. Yeah.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this, so this, I'm assuming just dropped this morning.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  And I, again, I can see this sort of Anthropic camp being, taking issue with this because if you're an American NeoCloud and you're serving Kimi K3 and you're sending a bunch of cash back to China, you're effectively funding their AI development.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  And, and you're helping them get access to more capital and more compute. And you're basically kickstarting their flywheel.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Which is.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  So I wonder, but it's funny because if they just release the weights and then, and then a NeoCloud starts running it, serving it, making money from it, then will Kimi be like, hey?

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  You gotta pay us.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  We're going to sue you.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait, what's going to happen there?

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  And then Anthropic is suing Moonshot for, for distilling.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Should Anthropic just start serving this and charging for it?

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  And not paying?

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Just tit for tat? Just be like, let's sort it out in the courts. I'll see you in the courts. I don't know. That's a very, that's a very, very interesting scenario. Um, I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, will be interesting to see where people.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Denny's was getting in the mix.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  They, they found Venn diagram. Denny's Nvidia knows the importance of staying open.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  I love that Denny's is just like all in on the Jensen lore and they're just, they're

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's smart.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Is Denny's the one that's always been good at social media or is that Wendy's? Wendy's was the one that was like really Twitter brained back like a decade ago. But I think Denny's clearly has a good social media manager because they picked up 28,000 likes on.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Nikita flagged something interesting.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  He said, didn't know Scotland had so many AI labs.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  I don't understand.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Pulling up a map of all the Great Glen Distillery, Kleinlich Distillery, Badger.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  We should open a distillery.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty good. Uh, okay. Uh, one of the most interesting opinions on this issue comes from Flo Crivella, Crivella from, who's been on the show and is, and he's interesting because he doesn't have bags that are perfectly aligned with his take, which is like the default position. Like the information put this like pro open source, anti open source, uh, chart together. And it was very much like if you're, if you're a lot, if you're, if you're a big investor in, in closed source frontier labs, you're on this side. If you benefit from open source and you're not on the frontier, you're on this side. And it was very clear that like everyone was falling along party lines, but Flo sort of broke rank.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  He said, uh, rooming, rumors are swirling about an impending executive order forbidding the use of Chinese open source models in the US. My company's very existence depends on these models, so I should be the last one to support such regulation, but I wholeheartedly do. China is a geopolitical adversary, sharing none of our values. They don't believe in personal property and individual freedom in a limited government, in due process, the list goes on. If there's one country that must not, that cannot get to AGI, one that would gleefully deploy it in all the worst ways we can imagine today and more, it is China. And that's before we get to the obvious that the companies that developed these models did so illegally by distilling front US frontier models. Still, uh, brilliant, hardworking researchers who added a lot of other ingredients to the

• 28:24John Coogan?

  soup, but stolen data was the main one. They are now using this unfair advantage to dump these artificially cheap models on the American market and hurt our AI ecosystem. We announced last month that we switched the core model powering Lindy from Claude to DeepSeek. That announcement blew up, got featured in Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and somehow made us the poster child of mass migration to Chinese models. So why make all this noise if I'm going to, going to turn around and announce my unequivocal support for a sweeping ban? First, I can't unilaterally disarm as long as these models are legal. Picking one, picking the one that's 10x the price just means my competitors get to run away with the cheaper one. Second, I trust that American open source alternatives will catch up. The impact on my business should be temporary and that's before we account for the jolt

• 29:07John Coogan?

  a ban would give American open source development. Uh, third, and most importantly, my interests as proud American citizens supersede whatever incentives I may have as a founder. The race for AGI is the defining struggle of our generation. It is the critical, that the great battle of our time, the only way for America to remain the shining city on a hill, the idea that has lit the world against darkness for the last hundred years. Good writing.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  It is, yeah, I don't know. He's obviously very like distillation pilled. It's interesting to sort of map like, like the Chinese open source models haven't jumped ahead. So if they're really, really good, like, should they still be lagging? Should they like close the gap entirely and just be like on the same day? Basically, if you're like as good of a researcher and you're on the same path, you should be able to do it.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Researcher with the same access to compute.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that's it. It is, it is, it does feel like they're able to produce American quality models for way less. And maybe that's just talent on the efficiency side. But I feel like there's a lot of people at OpenAI and Anthropic that are like trying to spend the least amount of compute on a new training run. So who knows? We'll figure it out. I'm sure there'll be more drama on the timeline over the next, uh, over the next few days. We also have, uh, Justin Boitano from Nvidia coming on to the show at 1:15 to talk about the Open Secure AI Alliance with more than 35 partners. I'm sure it's more by the time he'll join. And then we also have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital, who has written about Chinese open models.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  So we're going to be going all over back and forth on this. And there's a whole bunch of.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  We'll be getting Gary Vaynerchuk's take on the open.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Predict it. I think he's pro open source. What do you think?

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Pro open source.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  He's gotta be pro open source. Cause he's a high agency, you know, just, just grapple the models, just do whatever. Go and create something new.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  If he was a teenager today, he would be selling weights in his high school locker room.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  He'd be sending a, a white.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  He'd be flipping weights.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Flipping weights and not, would he be paying?

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  He wouldn't be paying.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  Moonshot belt now?

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no way.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  No, not paying.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  He'd be rolling that into his Supreme sneaker bot.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, uh, Mike Isaac, the rat king says severity level indicator Nvidia CEO creates a Twitter account to do the first ever post stumping for open source software. How did Jensen avoid Twitter this long? Like, it, it, cause like, if it was a political decision, you, there's been like Twitter has been every different political persuasion over various amounts of time. Like he's been aligned with different groups that have been in charge of Twitter so many times. Like, it's just fascinating that there's never been a moment before this where Jensen was like, yeah, I should like get a Twitter account and talk about the 1080 Ti, our new gaming graphics card. Like, I should, I, I should just hop on.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Did he never have a NFT profile picture?

• 32:15John Coogan?

  I don't think he ever did, because he never was on here.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  They were doing a lot of stuff in crypto too, but I don't know. Commoditize the peta flop, says TinyGrad, founder George Hots. More competition, not monopolies is the path to cheaper AI computed AMD's advancing AI event. What, what do you say?

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm pretty sad we didn't get George on at AMD on Thursday.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  Uh, let's play this clip. I want to hear what he says. Commoditize the peta flop.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Our company slogan mission is to commoditize the peta flop. We want all peta flops to be created equal, whether it's AMD peta flop or an Nvidia peta flop or a Tencent peta flop or a Huawei peta flop. This even crosses country boundaries. We want all peta flops to be unified and commoditized so that we can grind down costs to very minimum. So nobody makes high margins and we all live in equality.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Do you think Nvidia and is rent seeking at the moment?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Yes, they kind of deserve it. I mean, like, there's like really undeserved rent seeking, like government monopoly. And then there's people like Nvidia who, yeah, they were early, they were early, they invested in this stuff for 20 years. I mean, clearly the H100 had a profit margin for Nvidia of 91%. The B200, they've scaled back a little, but they've probably only scaled back a little because of competition from AMD. Um, so I love to see competition. I love to see the free market at work, delivering better things to people. Our company slogan.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  OpenAI told Take Him that they signed the Nvidia, Microsoft open source, open weights AI model letter today. What an amazing turn of events. Uh, and Andrew Curran confirmed it. It's on the actual website now. Nobody says no to Jensen. My, my prediction is that Anthropic will not sign this. And I think that, uh, there won't be a ban. And then I think that they will probably take a victory lap because there will be some open source incident where something happens and everyone has to spring into action and fight back against something where you're like, oh, there's this new thing. Like, uh, you know, some North Korean hackers who used a open source model or something. And it'll be like, if you squint, it's somewhat related, would we have been able to prevent it?

• 34:26John Coogan?

  I don't know, but I think that I, I, I, that'd be like my rough prediction of what happens here. I don't know what you think.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's take it even a step further. Do you think the US or its allies will bomb a hostile data center within the next five years?

• 34:43John Coogan?

  I mean, five years is a long time.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying, saying it's gonna happen?

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know. Five years is really, really hard to, to handicap. I'd probably say yes over five years, but like, there's just so many other things that could lead to that, you know? I don't know. It is, uh, it is, yeah, it is weird. Uh, I, I guess I'm less worried about open source AI in the United States. Like if you're, if you're downloading weights from Hugging Face, sending them to, uh, a Neo cloud, and then you're doing cybersecurity attacks inside the United States, like the police will just kick down your door and like arrest you, like you will. So there's like a huge, there's a huge like countervailing force. And then you also have like, you know, trillions of dollars of market cap being like, my service is to protect you.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  And so like, you know, people pay, I pay for one password, right? Like you pay for all sorts of things, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks and all these different cybersecurity companies will be going out, making money, pooling resources, all sorts of different stuff.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  So Julian over at Anthropic.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Grinding, clearly grinding into the late hours Friday night, finishes up his, his, his work week. It's almost 2:00 AM, gets on X, sees Jensen's letter, fires up.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  I'm a dunk.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  Goes to bed, wakes up the next morning, six million views.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  He didn't get ratioed, more likes than quote tweets, right? Or more likes than replies. So, you know.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, he says, uh, I'm so excited that Jensen is believing in open source now.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  This shouldn't be a surprise, right? Because I think everyone can see that open models are going to be as good as our current frontier models within the next, call it year. And they will present the same risks that Anthropic talks about with their own models, right? And so it would be disingenuous in many ways for them not to be against, uh, open source. So anyways, I see their, I see their side of it. I think that it is a sort of cohesive view, even if there's plenty of arguments on the other side.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  I don't know. It doesn't seem like that much of a, like a hypocrisy to, you know, have your GPU driver be closed source and still be open source in this particular way. I don't know. Uh, he, he, there's like a seed of, uh, a seed of a dunk here. But I can see why he got so much pushback.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the main take, yeah, the main take is like, you can generally support open source without requiring that you open source your own products.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was all boiled it down like so well here. He says, I think this word distillation, an obviously legitimate technique, which nonetheless invites weird philosophical questions, is distracting people. It'd be better to just refer to terms of service violations, which better clarifies the global regulatory arbitrage. People are frustrated by, yeah, it is, it is weird that, that Meta and Google, with all the capex and all the researchers and everything are not ahead of Kimi K3 right now, at least in benchmarks, right? That's, that's basically what's going on. And you would think if it was like open game, but maybe they're just better. I don't know. Maybe, you know, you gotta prove the TOS thing.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  It's just an allegation right now that's being like leaked out through the admin. So it needs to be like definitively proved. You have to show the chain of what happened and, uh, what's going on. But, uh, it is a wild time. I mean, Kimi, Kimi's denied it, like at least like employees have gotten on there being like, what are you talking about? Like, we're not distilling anything. We just, we're just goaded.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  All right, John.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  It's time to talk about startup school.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Okay. First, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workforce for getting workspace for getting worked on with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Startup school, this is insane. I cannot believe how massive this event is. It's sick.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I think it's so, almost every take that I saw.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Was negative.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Really? I saw a lot of people that were like, uh, this is, I think I'll be back.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay, that's good. That's good. Because, because to me.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  It's a completely different aesthetic. It's like this hilarious.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  Me, startup school has been something that is free.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Online.

• 39:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  And it's just anyone in the world, if you're generally interested in starting a startup, you can just do startup school. It's basically the same.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  15 years ago.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  It's basically the same curriculum. It's the same like lessons and learnings. You just don't have the capital that comes from a typical, uh, YC batch. And you don't have the one-on-one sort of mentorship through your batch.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, they're basically just open sourcing.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  The YC playbook.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Which the YC playbook just works. It's like general, there's, there's not a lot of good general advice.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  But YC's advice is generally good.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe we should ban it.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  It's too powerful.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're open sourcing all this good advice that would normally come from venture capitals, venture capitalists, like effectively like closed source institutions of venture capital, of startup wisdom.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  And this is an attack on, on the, on the tier one VCs.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  And all their great advice.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  Their, their hard won lessons.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They, they had to sit in all those board meetings.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Tuned out and then.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  And then YC is basically distilling it and giving it away for free.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. Shut it down. Shut it down. I think this is awesome. Like, if you think that startups are good, like, why, why hate, why hate on this? I, I think the take that says Scott Stevenson, who's been on the show over at Spellbook Legal says, "I have great respect for YC, but need to say what many are surely thinking. Startup school in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work."

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it was a very garage effort when Paul Graham started Y Combinator in Cambridge. It was like, you know, he's cooking for the startups.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers. The thing is, is like, being a founder became cool and something desirable. And now people get into YC and because of the way that the internet evolved, they're like, they'll make a video with like some clickbait.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  This photo is insane.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  They'll make a photo with click, like a clickbait, you know, you know, cover art thumbnail and say like, "I just got into YC."

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  And so that's just like.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  I, I would never make it.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  Being a founder became high.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  YC twice.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  When YC started, when YC started, being a founder was relatively low status.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  Now it's relatively high status.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  And so status chasers are naturally going to go through YC.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  Now that's going to lead to a lot of failure because you could, shouldn't probably start a company.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  In 2012, like everyone that from my like peer group was like, "Oh, like that sucks for you, dude. Like you couldn't get a job at like McKinsey or whatever." Like, like your, your, your fake startup sounds really exciting, dude. Like, good luck. You know, it was not like, oh, wow. Like, congrats. Like.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Like stay safe in the tenderloin.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  In your house for like four other people.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I don't know. I, I get, I get it as, uh, I, I, I guess I get that, that criticism. But just in terms of like the content and the aesthetics, electric.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Electric.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Like you get Jensen on stage at the, this key moment and he's talking to a bunch of people. Like it's just, it's just fun if you're learning about startups to go and see these people talk. If you're, if you're really, really new, like if you're, if you're, and that's what this, uh, and that's what startup school is for.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  And is it true that Gary Tan did the Lil Yachty walkout with the microphone?

• 42:58John Coogan?

  I think he did.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  Is it true? Cause I didn't see a video.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I did hear that the, the pyrotechnics budget for this was over a million dollars.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  Explosive.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Huge, huge. Uh, enough pyrotechnics to level San Francisco if things went wrong.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  It was sort of like a.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  High stakes.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Bet the, bet the farm type of moment.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  For YC.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just constant sparklers and fireworks going on. I don't know. I was into this, but yeah, people are, I guess people are not into it. I don't know. Uh, oh, hi Sam. I don't know. I think, I think.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it's great.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  I'm, I, I, I like it. I think it's fun. Um, the great AI psychosis hive mind of San Francisco. Wow. Yeah. People are all, do they all have headphones? What are the headphones for?

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Silent disco?

• 43:51John Coogan?

  So you could listen to the talks? I don't know. And then they gave, update for the four and a half thousand attendees. This can successfully pass through TSA. Thank me later. Uh, they gave us a portable battery. Oh, and it looks like a bomb. So people are like, uh, but people got it through, through, uh, through TSA apparently. Uh, pretty cool. Pretty cool. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create, modify your Figma files with design system context. Uh, in other news, Ilya Sutskever raised more money for SSI. He said.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  Time to scale that safe.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Super intelligence.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Time to save.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  Time to scale that safe super intelligence.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  So SSI, we are announcing a long-term strategic partnership with Nvidia. Nvidia is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let them 10x their compute over the next 12 months. We reached the point where our research is worth scaling and this partnership, we will be able to. We are honored by Nvidia's.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  Just another pod guy. Guess what he says?

• 44:50John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  You need to do a podcast.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  The podcast guy says, "You need to do another podcast."

• 44:57John Coogan?

  On brand. Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about podcasting with because we have Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers from ETN, the European technology network. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing?

• 45:08Speaker 04

  What's going on?

• 45:09Speaker 05

  Gentlemen, look at this.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  Look at this. Look at this.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Has this ever happened before? I don't know.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I love the picture. Thank you so much. Uh, kick us off with the fundraising news. I want to smash this gong.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  Well, you've seen we, we, we raised 1.6 million dollars.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Nine million post-money valuation, nine million dollars. Um, yeah, announced today. Super happy.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  And new studio. It's, it's cooking. It looks huge. You got a trust there. Graphics are, are, are on point. Everything's coming together. Uh.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Can you, can you rate the studio? Just.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  Give us a studio rating out of 10.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  This is a 10 out of 10. This is, I don't know. You have everything. There's nothing else that you need.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  It's no ultra done, but it's a good, but it's a good start.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  This is good. No, you got everything. This is awesome. Um, no, uh, I, I love that you guys, uh, you know, this is hard. I think you guys know, we know, but it looks sort of easy when you just see a clip and ah, it's just a podcast, but like the, to actually stick with it for a long time is hard. Uh, what has the journey been like? What have the hardest moments been? What does it feel like to actually getting here where you have a studio?

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  You're announcing this in July of all months. July in Europe notoriously slow.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  But I, I mean, that's the best part about these guys.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  Come back in October, be like, hey, we had a great summer.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Well, look, I actually, I actually emailed about 600 people from my, from like, you know, the last eight months that we've been doing this and the amount of out of office emails

• 46:46Speaker 04

  was actually pretty shocking. So it's true. It's a little, it's a little bit worrying, but uh, no, we'll be fine. That's the whole point. You know, we're ETN, we can figure it out.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  We had, we had a checklist to do and I can just, I'll, I'll wheel it.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Go and grab it. Go and grab it. While you're, while you're doing that, the last.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  Notice the cameras. The PTZ, they got everything.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Look at us go.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Figured out everything. Is, is James Weeks in the studio today or is he remote?

• 47:13Speaker 04

  No, unfortunately not.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  You gotta get him in the studio. That, I mean.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Can we see that? Bring it, bring it.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  What's this?

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  To Duke. Go on holiday. Go on TVPS.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  There we go. That's amazing. Check it off. Fantastic.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  I love, I love that you guys have like so thoroughly reclaimed the whole like Europeans don't work joke that, I don't know, it feels like it's completely diffused the meme. And now I'm just like, okay, well that's played out.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Grinding. You're going five days a week now.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  You're grinding.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  You, you got any advice for us?

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  What about a cheeky long weekend? Ibiza.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  A little Ibiza weekend.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  You guys are recently in France. How was, uh, how was the trip to Canada? You went to, uh.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  The AC was not, was non-functional.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  I, I legit, that would, that actually, that actually shocked me so much because I, you know, you hear these jokes about like, oh, Europeans take long holidays or like there's no air conditioning over there. And I always think that it's the Americans going a little bit too far with the bit. And so I assumed, I was like, oh yeah, the AC thing, that's probably just like in random places, there won't be air conditioning. No, like the, all of France doesn't have air conditioning. It's crazy.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  It honestly doesn't have air conditioning. London's been, London's been brutal.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  So are you talking to startup founders that are thinking about solving this? We were there being like, is this just the most obvious business ever? Just create an air conditioning company of Europe?

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  Kids in the gundo should start the air conditioning company of Europe.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  And just land on the beaches and just start bringing in units.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is anyone working?

• 48:55Speaker 04

  They have good merch with that name, to be fair. Well, I know that one of the Collison brothers has put out loads of posts around how people are literally dying.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  From their lack of AC and no one's, no one's thought to, to thought this out. Like when we had the heatwave recently, uh, here in London. Maybe we'll have to get one of our interns to, to get on it.

• 49:12John Coogan?

  To get on, uh.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Code a quick website, you know, get an intern, you know, shipping in some AC units from wherever they ship them in from.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, like talk to, yeah, talk to our own.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  There we go. Ooh, intern cam. I like it.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Attention. What's up, what's up, lads?

• 49:32John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, I mean, obviously, like, there are a lot of element, down to the PTZ cameras, you're clearly standing on the shoulders of, of us. You have the picture right there. Uh, and, and, and it's great because like we've defined a bunch of different, uh, like patterns that allow this business to work. Like when I see the logos at the bottom of the ticker, I'm like, that's great. That allows you to pay for the studio and the interns. Um, where do you see the show going? Where do you want the differentiation to be? Because you're already differentiated just in the fact that Europe is different than the stuff we talk about. You cover stories that way, way deeper than we do if it's about Europe. But are there other, are there other things that you're, that you're thinking about where you're like, yeah, actually like,

• 50:16John Coogan?

  we want to go a completely different direction with this?

• 50:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. That's a really good question because, um, when we, we actually didn't think that we would raise any money. Um, we were doing pretty well. Um, as you mentioned, the, the ad model, you know, what, what you guys have kind of built in terms of a model is, i-, i- is great, right? But then, um, when we figured out how big the opportunity is in Europe specifically, um, we realized that raising the money was, it had, it had legs. We were like, okay, this thing can be really big because it is the live show, but we see that as like the kind of wedge in the door, the foot in the door to kind of, to build the network. And then it's a network, right? So think about, uh, potentially a summit business or whatever it is, like that, the, the European ecosystem needs that. So, um, and, and it's

• 51:03Speaker 04

  not kind of as developed as, i- i- is, uh, the ecosystem over there. So it's like, if we can kind of, you know, almost, almost kind of piggyback off that, uh, off that model and then build on top of that, I think, uh, yeah, the, the, the sky's the limit. We can, we can go very big, which is exciting. I think like long-term, you can see it like in a way where the show would just become the advertising department for a huge media conglomerate. Sure. So we could do the summit business. You could even open a recruitment model off the back of it. You could look at a fund off the back of it. I mean, you guys have probably gone through all these ideas anyway, and you've probably chosen, let's just nail this. Like you guys were first to do this. You were first to create the model. So I don't think there would be a need for you guys to innovate because you smashed it. You don't need to. You had first mover advantage and you, and you crushed it.

• 51:44Jordi Hays?

  You're encouraging us to rest on our laurels?

• 51:48John Coogan?

  We did put, we did put laurels on the merch. So it's not, not, uh, so.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  We do a breaking TVP and resting on laurels.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  You, so, so, so, uh, like you, you, you guys have been successful with like the TBPN for Europe model. There's also, uh, TBPN for car dealerships over here. I don't know if you're familiar with this. The car dealership guy has a live show.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  You guys have talked about this before, right?

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had him on the show. We've talked about it. And it's great because like we never cover car dealership news. It's, i- it's a great, it's every once in a while, but not, not, not on the dealership. And so, and so i- it's great to like, take the best practices of like, you know, what the lighting should look like, what the trust looks like, what the logos and stuff, like learn from the best practices and then take the content in a different direction so that you're offering a differentiated product. Uh, is there a European car dealership? Are there spinoffs of you yet or more sub-markets in Europe for like the European crypto ETN?

• 52:48Speaker 04

  I think, well, when, when we first started, I think it was just you guys. And then I think like ecom cowboys popped up. I think there were, you guys covered it.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  You guys covered it.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Do you guys have a flashbang yet? Do you guys have a flashbang yet? You gotta get on that.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  We thought it would come.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  That's good. Go down to our, uh, go down to our, go down to our frame quickly. Go down to our frame.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. What, what, what tricks do you have up your sleeve? You got some, uh?

• 53:19Speaker 04

  I've got a few tricks.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  You want to throw us an 11 labs out or something? What, what you got? We can go ad for.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  Ad mogging as earlier. Wait, can we go ad for ad?

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, yeah, what you got?

• 53:29Speaker 04

  I don't know. Oh, here we go. Frame up, build better sites faster.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  This is a good, this is a good stinger. This is a really well-integrated stinger. We're flashbanging it again. We're smoking it. It's over.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  I think, how long are your ad reads? This, uh, this stays up on the screen a little too long. Do you have to click it to come off?

• 53:50Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a good question. That should just come off.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  I think, I, I, I think my, my feedback would be a little bit tighter on that, a little bit tighter. You don't want people getting distracted.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  Is someone writing this down?

• 53:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's recorded.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  We'll get it on granola.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  Are they a sponsor too? Now they're not.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  This is day one.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Not yet.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  No, no, working on it. Working on it. This is the worst it will ever be, boys. So it's fine. It'll always get better. What was the, what was the question? I forgot the question.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Uh, the question was just like, uh, um, what else? I- i- is there, is there demand for a ETN for X in, in Europe? So there, so there was demand for TBPN for car dealerships. There was also demand for like TBPN for crypto because we don't really talk about crypto that much. And there's been a few other like spinoffs that have made sense. And a lot of them have gone their own ways. They don't even look like us anymore. There's like all these different things that you can do, but they adopted like some of the best practices of like the ad market, the ad model and some of the overlays and some of the live. But, uh, what I'm interested is like where, what else is going on in Europe that might, uh, demand a live show?

• 54:56Speaker 04

  That's not. Okay. So in, so when we, when we started, started the model, started ETN, we were like, this could be done in, uh, you know, you, you mentioned like car dealerships. This could be done in fashion. I could get two people to go and, you know, do a live show for fashion.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  That'd be good, especially in Europe.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  A cooking show, whatever it is.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  All the houses are there.

• 55:15Speaker 04

  Like. Yeah, literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, um, uh, someone could do that. Get the best designer, designers on every day to talk about, I don't know how fashion works, but like new jeans that they've just like designed or whatever it is, right? So like, I think that, I think you could go like category, uh, you know, specific and, and verticalize in, in a category. In Europe specifically, not yet. I mean, we're what 10 months in. So we'll see, we'll see what happens like towards the end of the year. Um, you guys were going for, I don't know, at least, I don't know, maybe nine months before, before we caught on and we were like, look, this needs to be done in Europe. This is a great model.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  What were you guys doing for the first nine months?

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Vacation. We know the bit.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  You guys should do, you guys should do TBPN for Euro Summers.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 56:01Jordi Hays?

  Just daily, live.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  To be fair, we did, we did Monaco with A16Z, which is great. We saw Anish, who I know, uh, knows you, Jordy. Um, uh, we had Nico on, which was awesome. So Greece in Panath- uh, yeah, Greece, uh, with Panathenaia. We were at the Louvre in Paris.

• 56:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right. I got you started on, on, on, uh, vacation destination. Now you're.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Summit's in.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Monaco, Nicos, Ibiza.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  We only choose the destinations where we actually want to like, you know, vacate to. Yeah, yeah. It's a good model, but with the five days a week.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we should do an AI pause so that the AI researchers can go to Ibiza?

• 56:40Speaker 04

  What, to let them off for a week? I mean, they're all going to be posting it pretty soon anyway.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  Quick, one week pause.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Six, six month pause.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Six, six month.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. If you can get, if you can get all the frontier labs to sign off on that like Jensen did for his. Yeah, global.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  For the letter.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  AI summer.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Last question. Do you have a, do you have a, do you have a, like an intern, an on-camera intern? Our, our original intern has evolved into a.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Co-host.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Into a co-host.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  So we're co-hosting now. Yeah. We, we, we've not got a, we've not got a Tyler yet. Um, we did put a job out of, for two interns and we got like 360 applicants. And there's people from, based in SF that interned at like Tesla, SpaceX, pinging us to be like, can we work?

• 57:24John Coogan?

  I'm moving to Europe. That's sick.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, which was, which was nuts, but I don't think we can make that one. They wanted to Europe. Yeah, they wanted to Euromax with us and we thought, you probably are too qualified and we couldn't afford you.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  What, what, what's the European version of the gong? We just ran, uh, we should have done a, a bell. Cause in America, you actually ring the bell. We randomly went with a gong, which is very Asian.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  I think a big AC unit. Earlier today, earlier today, we did, we did sabre a.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Oh, you sabre it?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  A champagne bottle.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  We did sabre. We'll send you the video of us sabering it, but as you can see, you can see it.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  We've got the TBPN.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  And there you go.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  The lights.

• 58:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's pretty.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  The chat is saying confirmed Tyler has not been distilled.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like this one. This is a good sabre.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Too long though. Oh, wait, actually, if you're gonna play the whole song for a little bit, then you're good. Then you're good.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's good for like intros sometimes for guests.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, actually, you guys are like, uh...

• 58:25Speaker 06

  Nice old esports tune.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Just like, uh, just like, uh, AI, you guys are like nine, six, six, you know, maybe 12 months behind, but, uh...

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Which was like, yeah. Day one. We had to keep it concurrent with the, you know, the...

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it's good. It's good.

• 58:42Speaker 04

  We need to get the, uh... We need to get the flashbang going, though.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  Now, you guys, we're happy for you guys to distill the show.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Shots fired! Shots fired! This one's good. I like that one. I like that one.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Hey, don't give them any ideas. They'll take off.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, we're gonna distill it back, you know? It's like when you ask Claude what model it is in Chinese and it says it's DeepSeek. It's like, goes both ways sometimes. You never know. No, like, I think what's the, what's the best is that, uh, this, this can be a grind, like, five days a week, a lot of stuff. There's just a lot of work and, uh, it just seems like you guys are having fun. Are you guys having fun?

• 59:15Speaker 04

  We're having fun. The most fun we've ever had. It's, uh, it's great. It's great. Yeah, we get to talk to cool people and, you know, we're two mates talking to each other for a living. It's great.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  That's the best.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  Best.

• 59:26Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  So few guys.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  You guys are living the dream, so are we.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  Before we go, I wanna ask, can we get some Lucy's for the studio?

• 59:33John Coogan?

  I'd be happy. I'll send you a whole vending machine.

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Really?

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see. Yeah, we'll send it to you. I love it. Yeah, it's amazing.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Let's do it, bro. Yeah, we're European. We need those.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Send me your address and, uh, yeah, we'll, we'll chat offline, but we'll, we'll send you a bunch of stuff. No problem.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you could be kind of distributor.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  All right, good stuff, boys.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  If that's legal.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great to see you guys. Congratulations on the new funding and congrats to the whole team.

• 59:53John Coogan?

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

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Appreciate it, boys.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  See you soon. Ciao.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. What a great crossover. You'll love to see it. Well, we have Gary Vaynerchuk, creator of V Friends, back on the show. Third time. Love catching up with Gary V. We'll go all over the place. Creator economy, AI, open source, building stuff. How you doing, Gary? What's up?

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  Man.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Man.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Man?

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Man.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Or I thought you said meh. You're doing meh.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Meh.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Meh.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Meh. Uh, what's happening?

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Okay, I wanna, I wanna start with, unless you have something to kick right off with, I wanna start with something. Like, I've been seeing these, these videos of you from, like, years and years ago with just these, like, crazy, crazy, accurate calls about the future. What, what victory lap do you like to take the most? Like, like, what, what's the one call, when you think back, where you're like, damn, I really nailed that one?

• 1:00:56Speaker 06

  Social. Like, if I'm being honest, like, like, no, it's like, it's crazy. Too bad I wasn't making the videos back then. Like, just my complete conviction on Facebook and Twitter, completely unearthing and changing the world.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 06

  No, it, it's ironic timing. I met with someone today. I hadn't talked to like 12, 13 years, you know, retired gentleman. I met him early on. He's like, he's like, it's crazy how much you believed in that stuff and how dismissive we all were. Um, but there's, you know, I mean, listen, the only, one of the few things I really do well in business is I don't let my audacity or my current financial situation or what I would like to happen financially dictate my observations of the consumer. I don't think I'm smarter

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  than anyone or have a bigger knack. I think you have, now let me give some flowers to you, boys. You have some of the greatest people on here, right? You guys have crushed. You've also gotten much better at your actual job interviewing, because, you know, I'm a day one with you guys. Like, so I just wanna give you some flowers. You guys are getting better and better.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  All these brilliant people you have, it's not that I know it better or I don't know it better. It's that I'm, I'm willing to completely change course of what I think is working for me, or I'm willing to lose all my money to be historically correct. I'm not talking about things that I want to happen for my financial interest. I'm talking about what consumers are actually doing.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Do you think you were more bullish on the creators than like the actual platforms? Like, because, because like, when I look back at some of those calls, um, about, like, the pivot away from the, there's this one where you're like, looking at the newspaper and you're like, nobody's gonna use the newspaper. They're just gonna get their news online from other people. And it's like a very accurate prediction. Um, but, but, but it's like, that distinctly wasn't coming from like Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. He was just saying, like, I built this cool website. Like, it's fun.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like I'm connecting the world.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Speaker 06

  It was connection. What I, you know, I think that I, you know, when you go read Crush It, the first book I wrote, I wrote in 2008, also in that time, I am fully predicting, and you guys know this, we've talked off, like, I predict, like, literally, there's parts of the book that talk about what you guys are doing right now.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. No.

• 1:03:27Speaker 06

  I...

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  You were super early in live streaming, too.

• 1:03:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. And don't forget, we just came out of Friendster and MySpace failing.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

  So my thesis wasn't necessarily, now, look, I thought Mark was generational, because I'd spent some time with him and like, I ended up being very right about that. And I thought Twitter was incredibly unique. So I was bullish on those platforms, but I was incredibly agnostic, to your point. I was, whether it was called Facebook or Twitter or the many things that failed along the way, SocialCam, Peach, Vine, you know, like, LinkedIn or YouTube or Twitch or TikTok, it didn't matter. Apps that connected people on top of the internet, I knew had to win because of the network effect of scale and no gatekeeper in between. You think you two handsome young bozos would have gotten on CNBC? You would have had to wait.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  But I knew that you could just do it. And then it's like sports.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  We love the term bozo. It's like one of our favorite words.

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Underrated, underrated word.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  It's so good. Because it's not, it's not, it's like only slightly derogatory, but it's like, not, totally not a bad word.

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  I do identify as a bit of a bozo.

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  It's like a sweet zing, right?

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a great word.

• 1:04:41Speaker 06

  You know, you guys have become very influential and definitely the people watching are very influential. Can we all collectively put our hands in the pot and all bring bozo back? It would be really enjoyable.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Bozo's a good one.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retrievers are kinda bozos.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  They're lovable bozos.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  We have, we talk about golden retriever mode.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but yeah, better distillation. Jordy, sorry, I cut you off. You were gonna ask.

• 1:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think, I think what was interesting about your call is you were bullish on the platforms, but the take wasn't just, you should invest in Facebook. It was like, you should just put stuff out every single day and you've been remarkably consistent with them.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it was, it was real for three guys like us that could go from zero notoriety to a lot and literally the most famous people in the world right now. You know, at least a third of them are either screamers or purely on social. They have no television. They have no, you know, theatrical. They have no other platforms.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, TV is now coming to them and saying, hey, could we work something out? You, you clearly have demand for your content. We wanna get it on our platform.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  I started a company a couple of years ago called Vayner Watt, W-A-T-T. It's a TV production company and we are bombarded by the distributors for me to get access to the Steven Bartlet's or the Hermosies or the Cody Sanchez's or the, like, it's all here. And what's crazy is, like, YouTube, for example, right? There's 900 genres that should be doing what you're doing right now.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, we just talked to some folks who are doing this show for Europe specifically, and there's one that's for car dealers and there's one for crypto and there's a whole bunch of different, sort of like, and it's not even like we're the first live streamers, obviously. We just took...

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Still, the funny, you know, the craziest, the craziest thing? No one has done TBPN for the market open. Like, you're in New York.

• 1:06:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  You're in New York. You start at...

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  I know someone that's working on it.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we know, we know, we know a couple of people, but the fact that we're 18 months in and no one saw what we're doing, we go live at 11 Pacific, so we're going live at noon. The market has been open and...

• 1:06:49Speaker 06

  Which is, which is an indication of your laziness. You guys should wake up.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  We do wake up early, but we do a team workout.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  And it's more, it's more an indication of our, of our fascination with private markets versus public markets and, and like, longer term, uh, less quarter by quarter, less day by day market moves and more, uh, 12 to 18 month fundraising cycles for private technology companies. And so I think that my natural interest is in the private markets and the earlier stage technologies. So if I was trying to cover, you know, the day by day in the market, what oil's doing and how that's affecting, you know, GE and Boeing, I would just be a little bit less sharp than if I'm talking about, you know, private market numbers.

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  And honestly, that's what, you know, back to Crush It, back to you guys, back to all of this, what you're already, like, the whole theme of this interview, the fact that people that are watching that are deeply sports, like, you, TBPN for sports with talent like you guys is, is ESPN's biggest nightmare. Um, you know...

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  They sort of have it, right? Isn't Pat McAfee sort of that?

• 1:07:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean...

• 1:07:58Jordi Hays?

  But they have to pay him like 60 million a year.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  They do.

• 1:08:01Speaker 06

  And, and Pat had to be lucky enough of all the serendipity that led, led to that. There are 913 Pat McAfee's. And I mean, and Pat's incredibly charismatic and talented. You guys are as well. But the long tail of knowledgeable or charismatic individuals is quite long. Now, everyone has a different upside, right? Like, like, again, somebody could replicate this exact show.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  And if they're really just much sharper and more entertaining, they will take market share. Like, that's just how it works.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other, the other thing about sports versus business that's interesting is like, sports, there's so many people that played sports, whether it's college or professionally, and then they stop being able to play at that level and they're like, well, what's the best thing I should do? I should just talk about the game that I love.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Whereas in business, you don't get to a point where you're better at talking about it necessarily than doing it. There's a lot of people that, that could...

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  So well said.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  And...

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  It's so well said. And there's another thing. I just turned 50 and like, literally this morning, like, no bullshit. I'm like, am I starting to enter my prime? Like, as an operator...

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  That's such a great philosophy.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  You're just like, I'm having, whatever the inverse of a midlife crisis is, that's me.

• 1:09:20Speaker 06

  You know what's funny?

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is the generational run just beginning?

• 1:09:26Jordi Hays?

  No, I love it.

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Man, I really like, and it's funny, and I have a funny feeling, especially given the incredible nature of your audience. I think when that was just delivered a few minutes ago, there's just a lot of people that really understand it because, you know, my whole life and probably many others watching it, you wish you were an athlete, but if you were an entrepreneur, you kind of realize at 30, you're like, wait a minute, if I was an athlete and I was great, I'd be kind of wrapping it up or like thinking about post and, and I own a large sports agency. My brother and I own a very large sports agency now called Vayner Sports. You know, I feel for these kids. This is what they were meant to do. They're 35 years old and they're like, what do I do with my, you know, like, just like really intense stuff.

• 1:10:05Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. It's definitely, I, I truly, I feel so blessed to have always been obsessed with business. Like I never, I never came clo, you know, I got very into surfing, uh, but I never liked surfing as much as business and being, having a love for something that you can do for a lifetime, even more so that people say like, oh, you should play tennis because you can play it, you know, you know, basically indefinitely. But it's like, well, you can, you can do deals for, truly for life.

• 1:10:36Speaker 06

  That's a good segue.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is what we were, we always, we always bring up.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Got a segue.

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  We, we, we, sorry, one thing, we, we always, we always bring up, uh, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It's like the greatest, the greatest run of that career happened from like 50 to 90. It's like, that's so long.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  No, but wasn't it more like 70 to 90 or like 80?

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  Was, it was like 60, like, that's right. So segue, we just brought up tennis. I've done incredibly well. I think this is important for a lot of people. Again, I'm always thinking about the audience, alternative sports league investing. I think you guys, I think there's some more fun stuff you guys could be doing about that. It's gone really well for me.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Alexis, we had Alexis on. He, he has the, the running, running league, which is cool. We had the, the founder of Enhanced Games on.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's some article in the journal today. Is Padell the next pickleball?

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  Right. So pickle was a huge win for me, right? I bought a team for 500,000 pre-COVID. They're trading at 16 million right now in our major league pickleball league.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow. So do people watch pickleball?

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  Yes, that's why, that's why I invest. So I have a little bit of a secret of why I think I'm doing well, because I'm doing well with this wiffle ball league that is starting to get some juice. We got some great owners in that. Wiffle ball boys.

• 1:11:53Speaker 06

  I have one little advantage. It's back to this and we've had some meetings off camera and you guys know, I'm like pretty in the weeds with like how communication and marketing works. The reason I invested in pickle is pickle highlights even seven years ago massively over indexed on social.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  Right? Like.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but the, but the thing is, I do wonder if that's, so, so Dana White has, uh, the, the slap fighting league. Forget what it's called. And that's something that does incredibly well on social, but I don't know anyone, even hardcore MMA fans. It's like, can't wait for the card this weekend. I'm gonna watch live.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  Two things. Two things. One, ish on incredibly well on social. You have to, you know, when, when you, because I've looked at that as well, and a lot of it is driven by the TKO machine, much more than, you know, the organic nature of what I'm seeing.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  And, and seeing somebody that's about to get hit in the face is like naturally scroll stopping, even if it's not a good.

• 1:12:57Speaker 06

  There's also something that people don't realize about sports that matters if you're gonna watch it, which is your capacity to participate in it.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  Right? Like, like, like people, a lot, when people try to zing pickleball, they're like, yeah, everyone's playing it, but is it a business? And I always, like literally those are the articles that were written about tennis and golf 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago. It's like, it's funny. By the way, back to your first question, the other thing I do pretty well, that I hope other people do, so I'm saying it out loud, is I really use history along with paying attention to people. So for example, the biggest sports in America in the twenties and thirties were horse racing, boxing and baseball. Those sports were very good on radio, but football is not a great radio sport.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:13:44Speaker 06

  Football exploded with the television. If you look at the explosion of the football, it came along with television. And so back to streaming, what you guys are doing right now, one of the reasons I'm invested in the sailing league, slam ball, you know, pickleball, wiffle ball.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  What's slam ball?

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Slam ball's trampolines.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  You don't know what this?

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Dodgeball and trampolines.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  No, no, basketball with trampoline. So everyone can dunk and do like backflips and stuff. It's crazy.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  All right, I gotta watch.

• 1:14:13Speaker 06

  The reason I did it was I knew I didn't need, just like you guys didn't need CNBC to be like, you're the right, you're talent. Our, all these alternative leagues do not need ESPN or, you know, Fox Sports to say yes. People can see this stuff through these platforms and that's going to continue in an AR, VR. Like we're going into an incredible era of opportunity and meritocracy.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, real quick, what was your reaction to the World Cup? Do you think that flopping will, uh, and flopping culture will, will forever prevent America from actually getting into, uh, do you think that's a bottleneck to growth?

• 1:14:55Speaker 06

  No, that's not a bottleneck. Americans are hypocrites. We love basketball. SGA is the greatest flopper of all time.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  I have, I don't watch enough, I, I haven't watched enough basketball to, to, to have even seen SGA flop, but I feel like the, I feel like in Europe, they appreciate the, the drama and it's almost like the, the acting of it all. But then you watch the replay and it's like, you know, Americans that are used to watching, you know, some corn fed linebacker run through a guy and the guy just gets up instantly. You know, it's hard to then go watch somebody flop and completely fake an injury.

• 1:15:32Speaker 06

  I, I think that soccer players at this point have this incredible four to 7% academy award-like acting capabilities that probably piss people off, but I agree with you. I'll use football because football is a sport that people hate when they first see it and then they become infatuated with it because it stops and starts, it stops and starts, especially the world, immigrants coming to the US when they're used to soccer, which is flowing, they hate it. And then inevitably, within a decade, they love it because you start falling in love with all the little nuances. And I would say for Americans, the nuance of flopping is annoying, especially with the NBA. It's been a big topic, by the way.

• 1:16:14Speaker 06

  So I think, especially this season. So I think some of that energy came to it, but look, I mean, I'm a little older than you guys. Everybody who's over 50 knows this. The strides that America has made in its interest in football, AKA soccer, over the last 30 years is profound. FIFA, the video game had a huge impact. Being able to watch the premier league in America on Saturday mornings had a huge impact. And, um, and I'm, it's a great sport and I, I already am excited for the next one.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about the intersection of technology and a game like soccer? I grew up playing soccer, reffing soccer. I've reffed. That was like, you know, that was, I would spend my weekends when I was 12, I'd ref like 20 soccer games because they didn't cap it. Like there was no, like, you can only work eight hours. It was like, you can ref as many games as you want because there was a shortage. So I'd ref like insane number of games in a day. And, and watching the World Cup, and again, I'm a super casual viewer. I hadn't been watching soccer prior to the World Cup, but it was fun to kind of catch up on it. Like, you know, there'd be an offside call and, or, or maybe there wasn't a call and then they'd run the tape and they'd figured out that the guy's hand, you know, elbow

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  was slightly over the line and they'd call it and they'd take the goal back. And that, that to me, like part of, part of the, part of like what makes the sport great is there's just players that can finesse the situation and just be right on that line. So a ref couldn't possibly call it. And then to have a machine being like, you know, no, you can't, you, you could beat the ref, but not the machine.

• 1:17:48Speaker 06

  Look, I think of this like marketing. I'll make this valuable to the audience who does not like sports.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  This is slam ball, by the way.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  I thought those were the Chinese robots for.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  No, these are, now we're watching slam ball best hits. Look at this.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, this, boom. Look at this.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Oh, all right. All right. I can get behind this. I can get behind this.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  Is this made to look like it was shot on VHS? What's going on here?

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  This is an older video.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay. So it's been around for a while.

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  A little bit more.

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  Um, so I'll, I'll say, I'll answer you like this. To make it a little business terms, hopefully help some people's marketing. There's a lot of people watching right now that become too one dimensional math performance marketers. And they lose. In fact, you boys were one of my favorite executions to watch from afar because you guys played like me. You sell more on brand than on math. You guys were getting brand deals that were completely inappropriate. Cause you sold on value, not on metrics.

• 1:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 06

  I think that that's how I think about technology and sports. If we get all the way to full AI robots and everything's a hundred percent black and white. I think the league's going to learn pretty quickly that we as humans need a little romance, need a little gray, not black and white. Need a little of a balance. And so just like I wish in political terms, that everyone was purple instead of this garbage red and blue we're in. With the sports and technology and replay, if they can find purple, I think it's great. When they go too red or too blue, I think it's a problem.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even in Formula, even in Formula One, there's, you know, the drivers are having issues right now because there's AI is deciding how much, you know, fuel and how much power to, and, and they're all just getting angry because they're like, am I, am I losing because I'm not as fast as my opponent or is my, is the AI running on my car just not as dialed?

• 1:19:46Speaker 06

  It's, it's all these analogies. It's like, is dinner fun without the sky dish and, and, you know, the, the amuse bouche and dessert? Like when we get so binary, it, we all want a little romance. We need a little romance.

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay. One more potential league. I want you to run, run this down and, and let us know next time you're on what you find, but I have a theory that when every car on the road is autonomous, that like driving on the track is going to have a, a resurgence in popularity because people are going to be, you know, it's so romantic, it's so romantic. There's so much great history around racing. Every person.

• 1:20:29Speaker 06

  Let me hit the counter.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, hit me with the counter. But, but I have a theory that like, not like things like not like, there's something like a slam, slam ball or whatever it is for driving.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  And that's just like demolition derby.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Something like rally car. I was driving, yesterday I was driving, I was driving a dingbuggy. I, I was like,

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  On a treble?

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  My buddy, and we were like, we were laughing. It was so much fun. We're drifting around.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a more dynamic.

• 1:20:55Speaker 06

  Counter is, I don't know if you know this, but we used to ride horses before the cars.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  And I don't know if you know, there's something called horse racing.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 06

  That is pretty out there. And so the counter would be that we kind of just lived it with horses and horse racing. But the counter to my counter is what you said, which is, I actually think horse racing could be massive in this country. If they put a contemporary flair on it. What UFC showed is like, it was an evolution of boxing with more.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah. You want like rally horse racing.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Sort of like UFC meets the Kentucky Derby. Like you can punch the other jockeys.

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  Or what about none of that? And it's more about, what about storytelling? What about?

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. A drive to survive, that type of thing.

• 1:21:45Speaker 06

  Or like, or even when we're watching an actual horse race on a Saturday, that's not the Kentucky Derby. Like if you turned it on and the bottom of the screen was actually a mic version of every jockey and you're learning like, we want layers. We want like, we want stories. We want to get captivated. Everything is about that in every aspect of life.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Two jockeys getting up in each other's faces and running down after a run. That's so good.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Here's a, here's a hard hitting question. Do you think Big Boogie turned it down or was he capping?

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  That was a good question.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Do you think he, he potentially, because we were trying to do that, John did the math and he said that if he was going to dental school for a decade and he had a bunch of dependents, it's possible the total package could have been in the, in the $10 million range.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  But you, you cover NIL stuff a lot more.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  You'll appreciate this. This is one of the rare moments where I get to do this. And I always look for it. So thank you, men. I'm going to clip this. The answer is, I don't know. I've just not paid enough attention. I've been a little bit of a bubble. I'm very in, I'm in a very weird place right now. I've been in a seven to 10 week cocoon around the collectibles industry becoming the, that collecting becoming the next lifestyle genre.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Speaker 06

  And so like my consumption of anything happening in pop culture is at an all time low the last two months. Cause I've been in the lab, like in the lab on this thesis that I've been on for about eight years that I think is about to completely blow the roofs off of. Like for example, let me give you, for instance, to give you even more color, again, always try to think about how to bring value to this smart show. I'm, we've started at VaynerMedia, a collectibles marketing division. Just like there started, just like Coca-Cola started a sports marketing division when the Olympics were getting important as a driver to consumption. I believe in 10 years, every Fortune 500 consumable product apparel, CPG,

• 1:23:48Speaker 06

  will have a collectibles marketing strategy. I don't know if you guys saw lines around the door at Popeyes chicken for the one piece collectible. People flooding to a Dodgers game to get the one piece collectible. I think that in differentiation in an AEO, GEO, you know, agentic commerce world, differentiation around collectibles and community to get people to stop their normal pattern of what they're just reordering because they want to buy a deodorant that has a collectible of their favorite. I just see collectibles eating up because of what it means for community and analog and value and investment.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And AI creates like insane, is going to continue to create insane abundance. Like one example is everyone, everyone can have a SaaS product now. You can make it.

• 1:24:38Speaker 06

  Everyone will.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Everyone will.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  What's the chain?

• 1:24:41Speaker 06

  Everyone who wants to.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  What's the chain from?

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  People are playing a sport. Is it watchable? Then it becomes a, a sport with teams professional. Uh, you identified some of the translation effects like, uh, you know, is anybody, is anybody going to watch golf? Sure. A lot of people play it, but will people watch it? Obviously the answer was yes. And that was true for football before there was a league and there was TV and the Superbowl, right? People were just playing it.

• 1:25:12Speaker 06

  By the way, just for fun, because I'm just nerding out, like everyone said, there would never be a professional football league. That football was always going to be college.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:20Speaker 06

  Notre Dame, the twenties, the thirties, like, like smart people that come on every this one shit. Like those people back in the forties and fifties were like, there will never be professional football.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Yes. But at the same time, there are sports that are played by lots of people. I'm thinking of like running and running is not a massive, there's not the Superbowl of running, even though millions and millions of Americans go jogging and they participate in the sport. There's something special about competitive football that makes it the Superbowl, right?

• 1:25:50Speaker 06

  Superbowl is very special, but like, you know, the New York City marathon is a very cultural event with good ratings.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 06

  You know, I think we're in the era where an entrepreneur watching this show right now is like, fuck it. I'm making a running league and it might hit.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So then talk to me about the translation layer from there. There's a sport that a lot of people are playing. If it's watchable, it becomes a big national sport with professional teams that we're all watching. Uh, at what point does it become, is there a collectible culture around it? Because, uh, we're just in this early stages of like, pickleball has been played by a lot of people. It's now starting to be watched by people, as you mentioned. When will people be collecting pickleball cards? Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 06

  Your production team seems really capable based on what I just saw. Can the production team, before I leave in the next three or four minutes, put up eBay, type in Anna Lee Waters. Lee is L E I G H, Anna, A N N A, space Lee, L E I P H, space Waters. Then enter on eBay and then go to completed and sold items and then sorted by most valuable. If the team can do this.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  This is a great challenge for the team.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Are you just trying to move some Anna Lee Waters merch right now? You're like, and then click purchase and then click check. I'm kidding.

• 1:27:15Speaker 06

  But she is the star of our team and we do rep for VaynerSports. She's my, for me, she was our Joe Namath. She is our Larry Bird. Oh, look at this. Now hit on the left side, on the left side, hit completed and sold.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Real eBay ball knowers. No, there's Dylan on our team. Big collector.

• 1:27:38Speaker 06

  Nope, no, no, all the way down. I'm very hardcore. I'm very in the dirt on collectible culture. The completed sold.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Where we going? Hunting around for Anna Lee Waters.

• 1:27:52Speaker 06

  Oh, show us this, show us this.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Log in, show us the password.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so Dylan on the, on our team already got there.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  And he's seeing.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Share screenshot.

• 1:28:03Jordi Hays?

  Anna Lee Waters rookie autograph cards going for $8,000, $5,000. $5,000.

• 1:28:11Speaker 06

  And I would argue.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Okay, whoa.

• 1:28:14Speaker 06

  We've done a very good job with Anna Lee. We've made her famous. She's on Fallon, she's on McAfee, she's the face of the sport. Ryan Harwood at Vayner Sports deserves a lot of credit. We've crushed with her. She's the best player in the world. Pickleball is the only sport where a female can be the best. She's the best player in the sport, including the men.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:33Speaker 06

  Because, you know, that's what's interesting about pickleball. Eighty-year-old grandmas are whipping nineteen-year-old grandsons in pickleball. It's a different kind of sport, anyway.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  There is another sport where women outperform men. A certain equestrian in the Olympics.

• 1:28:49Speaker 06

  I'm sure there's others, but this is one that people know. Uh, you can see eight to five thousand, and I will tell you, ninety-nine percent of the audience, and everyone on Twitter right now, hit me up, Gary Vee, and answer this. Ninety-nine percent of the audience right now has never heard of her in their lives. So it doesn't take a lot to get to collectible. These collectibles are niche, are tribals, right? Look what happened at Comic Con. Fifty guys in a weird hotel in San Diego, right? In nineteen seventy-six to now, this last weekend, millions of people go into San Diego and it's a cultural phenomenon. So, collectibles is when it flips over to pop culture.

• 1:29:31Speaker 06

  I would argue that athletes that are the most valuable are more pop culture than people realize. They're more superheroes than people realize. And when you're building a league, whether it's Conor McGregor and Ronan Rousey, whether it's Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Steph Curry today, like, you need a superhero. Joe Namath was the superhero for the NFL early on. He became one of the most famous people in the world. Jets had a huge upset in Super Bowl III, and football was on its way.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Business, uh, collectibles. Where do you think it's going? We saw Jensen Jack go for about a million. That was for charity for our friend Justin Mares, uh, his grants that he does.

• 1:30:13Speaker 06

  I believe collectibles, I believe collectibles have eaten up the pop culture energy of what young twenty-year-olds would do with public stocks. So instead of buying fifty shares of Nike, like my generation did, they're gonna go buy a collectible. I think it's completely eaten up the oxygen of contemporary art. So you guys, especially after your nice transaction, or, you know, continue to hang around people of wealth at a young age. Your contemporaries, people in their thirties, forties, fifties, only twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago, are buying the hottest contemporary artists to put the art in the house. Much of that money is now going into hundred-thousand-dollar, million-dollar collectibles. Obviously, Michael Rubin, sitting on the top of the Tops empire,

• 1:30:56Speaker 06

  with all his cultural relevance, has brought an incredible amount of pop culture energy to it. And kids, people forget, trading cards are a hundred years of collectibility now. This has been a very long-term asset class, but the numbers are just out of control. You see O'Leary wearing his shirt.

• 1:31:17Speaker 06

  You know this, even for you guys that are young, definitely people in my generation, people that collected cards as teenagers in the eighties and nineties were nerdy. People collecting cards are now cool. And once that happens, it gets really different really fast, and we're on that other side. And so you'll see collect, you know, watches.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  I wanna know what's on your shirt.

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  I wasn't even, I was, right, there you go. Look at the hell I'm wearing.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Are you, are you going to the national?

• 1:31:45Speaker 06

  Of course, leaving tomorrow. It's for me, for, I'm like, let me just make this so I can clip it in nine years. I am building the next Disney Pokemon Marvel, all in everyone's faces. It's called Be Friends. And because I have thirteen different other jobs, no one sees it, and I don't speak about it that often. But building an IT business during this AI era is gonna end up being one of my savviest moves.

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  And the generational run is just beginning.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Clip that, clip that in a decade.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  Clip that in five decades.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Ninety-nine, hundred.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Always great.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:32:25Speaker 06

  Always. Let me know if I can help you.

• 1:32:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  Good luck at the national.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Go bye. Let me tell you about console. Console-built AI agents that automate seventy percent of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Up next, Jonathan Jacoby.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Jacoby.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby coming in hot to the Ultra Dome.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:32:47Speaker 07

  Hey, guys, thank you for having me.

• 1:32:49Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you, great to have you. Uh, let's get right into the gong-worthy moment of this segment.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Tell us about the news.

• 1:32:58Speaker 07

  Yes, so today we launched a new model of stealth. Um, we're raising seventy-one million dollar seed round and announcing.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  It had been a while since I saw a seventy-plus million dollar seed round, and I feel more at ease.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Ribbit capital.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  Having, having.

• 1:33:18Speaker 07

  Thank you so much.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  So what, uh, yeah, yeah, what, what does the progress need to look like these days? How, uh, how mature is the product? Uh, how built out is the team to jump straight to that size of seed round?

• 1:33:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we, we're a team of twenty-six people. Actually, uh, grown pretty quickly. And today we also launched something pretty unique. Uh, we launched like the first AI robotic experience online. So people can just browse to a website, uh, to robots that online, and interact with real AI-powered robots, uh, by our models and our interfaces. So this is kind of, uh, a double milestone for us, both, you know, emerging out of stealth and kind of putting our technology out there at the same time.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. I saw the painter, which is a robot that you can control and, you know, paint in the real world. I was a little bit frustrated because I had, uh, I'd, I'd written, been writing down notes and talking with a few people that somebody should set up a robotic arm with that lets you paint on real canvases and then send it, like, send it to yourself. But you're effectively doing that, so you, you beat me to the punch.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, so where, where does the AI start? Where does the tele-operation end? Because, uh, I believe there's been demos of, you know, deterministic, uh, robot, like, remote control, even like a remote-controlled camera that you can pan, tilt, and zoom. That's existed for a long time. Um, where does the AI actually come into the process?

• 1:34:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, uh, so basically, we have robots, you can talk to them. Uh, so basically, the idea is we put out different interfaces. Um, one, in some of the interfaces, again, as you can see here, you can talk to the robot and ask it things, and the robot just responds to you. Um, we're gonna, also, throughout the week, we're gonna launch more and more different experiences, and we're gonna showcase different ways to interact with robots. So our company is a research-heavy, research lab, research-heavy company that focuses on robotic foundation models. But we also think deeply and care deeply about the experience. We think novel user interfaces are going to be a huge enabler for robotics. So we kind of wanted to put out something that is very wide to learn how people want to interact with robots, and take that learning and put it back to the research.

• 1:35:36Speaker 07

  So in those experiments you're saying, you're saying one robot that you can fight with, uh, like a robotic, uh, sword fight. Um, so, the, here it is. Uh, so one of them is controlled manually, like a tele-operation, and this, like, uh, which is the user. And there is a robot that is an AI robot that responds to the user, so you'd actually fight. So this is one way of interaction. Another one is you talk to the robot something and you see what, what it does. So the painter, you give it an association, it paints, it plays like a Pictionary with you. Um, and then after the experience, you can, like, uh, ask it to do some pantomimes. You can imagine the, the brush is anything, and it can be a wand, it can be like cleaning the, like, as a broomstick, getting the floor. So this is where the AI comes in. This is where our models, our foundation models comes in, comes into play.

• 1:36:19Speaker 07

  Um, and we wanted to showcase both the interfaces and the models.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  Um, what's your opinion on, uh, robotics sort of, or robotic control coming for free in generalized LLM development? I saw some demos of, uh, I think it was Opus Five controlling a robotic arm. It seems like a lot of these models, uh, they don't always need to be trained for something specific, and then you wind up just getting some particular, uh, functionality for free, or it's like a quick RL step on top of what the, what the Frontier Labs are already doing. Is that relevant to your roadmap, or do you think there's a convergence? Or do you think you'll go off and, and carve out a specific niche in robotics?

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  I mean, obviously, it's a huge category, but how does that all fit together?

• 1:37:12Speaker 07

  It is a huge category, that's true.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Speaker 07

  So I seen the demo you're talking about, I think it was Anthropic.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 07

  So we've seen those demos, actually we have from GPT 3.5 and before that, we've had robots controlled by LLMs. I think the problem that we're seeing, you know, labs such as ourselves trying to tackle is the fact that this doesn't really either generalize very well. Or doesn't, you know, fit in with the requirements of like, you know, dexterity, or doesn't.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like a cool demo, but not necessarily commercially.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it also might just be like, it's impressive to be like, wow, language model controlled arm. But if it's like, every time it moved, it was $20 in tokens and it was 45% accurate. And if you just like, did an actual model for the robot, it's like two cents and perfect.

• 1:37:59Speaker 07

  Exactly, exactly. And it's kind of, one example, one of my friends told me was, was assume you could have had an LLM like do an ASCII art. And like paint as if it's ASCII art, but we still have image models.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:38:11Speaker 07

  Not the nature, like the natural language of, of the way that LLMs work. And that's why it's, it's a bit off, but, but I do think that, I think, additional models for robotics, such as what we're building and what, you know, some other, other labs are doing as well. I think, I think it's going to take a huge part of, of how robotics is going to evolve. And we're also very lucky to, to be in this, you know, time of, of great tailwind, right? There's a great tailwind of research, so we, most of the team is doing research and we have a lot of tables from, you know, LLMs research. We take inspiration from that or from video models or from world models and that's pretty, that's pretty, that's pretty unique.

• 1:38:48Jordi Hays?

  Time to, time to revenue. How are you, how are you thinking about like first commercial application? Sounds like you're in the age of research, but when, when do you see opportunity to start commercializing and kind of where?

• 1:39:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we have partners working on, working with right now across different kind of segments. So from logistics to entertainment to health as well, some cool things on that that we might talk about and those three categories and there's more. What we're seeing is we want to be able to get as much value to users and customers as fast as possible.

• 1:39:24Speaker 07

  And make sure that when we are scaling it up, it's scaled up in the right, kind of directionally right approach. Because you don't want to be way off and then be dependent on, kind of, kind of being in a big tech debt, I would say. And product debt. But, but I think, I think we're at the point where we're also, we're starting, we're seeing value. We're seeing, you know, value from, from, from partners and, and it's actually a kind of showing a size that we didn't expect to, to occur that, that fast.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about vertical integration? It feels like there's robotics companies that are saying, we're going to build the robot and the model. There's others that are like, we're going to build a modular robot and the model. There's other companies that are saying, we'll just build the model and the robot builders will show up. I haven't seen actually that many new startups that are like, we're just building a dumb robotic arm that you can load whatever model you want on. We want nothing to do with the, with the actual AI inside. We're just doing the manufacturing, maybe that's an opportunity, but where, where do you see your scope growing or staying focused?

• 1:40:33Speaker 07

  I think it's a great question because it really is a divergent kind of topic, a lot of opinions. We see ourselves as, so we're a software, software like first company. Right? So we think, we work with our products, our kind of software stack from the models to the interfaces to, to talk to them. We work very hard on making it generalized across embodiments. So we want to get to a point that even a new manufacturer comes out and says, all right, here's a new robot. I would want, I would want to be able to, within a week, have everything work on that robot as if I had that robot for months. So we're building a lot of infrastructure to be able to cut, like this is part of our research. Like how to be able to calibrate all our technology across the robots easily.

• 1:41:16Speaker 07

  We think, and we see a lot of vendors and we think doesn't have, it doesn't necessarily have to be coupled. And we see a lot of, you know, great companies around the world that, that sell the hardware. So if we could be a good provider for the brain and for the interface of the brain, we think it's a, it's a very viable kind of product offering. And I think it makes sense as well.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's cool. I mean, oh yeah, obviously there are a ton of robotic production or supplier companies.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  There aren't enough startups in that world, I feel like. I feel like we need, we, we need like, I'm a direct competitor to Kuka or something and I'll make a big robotic arm and I'll make it cheaper or whatever. I'm sure there are that there would probably.

• 1:41:54Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before you go, what were you doing before this?

• 1:41:57Speaker 07

  Um, so I, I worked, I worked at a company, I worked at a company acquired by Wiz and then got acquired by Google. Yeah. And actually me and a staff, the CEO of Wiz, we go way back. When I was, when I was 17, he, he was running Microsoft in Israel and he brought me to join Microsoft.

• 1:42:20Speaker 07

  And so we have a long history, so I joined Wiz and, and yeah, I think, I think the era right now.

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  Long story short, generational run.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Congratulations on coming out of stealth, great demo.

• 1:42:34Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Very cool way to launch.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  And we'll, we'll talk to you soon, hopefully.

• 1:42:38John Coogan?

  I'm sure we will.

• 1:42:39Speaker 07

  Thank you very much.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital here to talk about America's open model paradox. I love a good paradox. Also, fun fact, I heard somebody debunking Jevon's paradox. It's not a paradox, it's just, just an effect, it's just an economic effect. Is it a real paradox? Break down America's open model paradox. Feel free to give a little bit of an introduction.

• 1:43:13Speaker 08

  What's up, guys?

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  But how you doing?

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 1:43:16Speaker 08

  I'm good. Can you, can you guys hear me?

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We can hear you.

• 1:43:19Jordi Hays?

  I can hear you.

• 1:43:21Speaker 08

  Let's go.

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  We can hear you.

• 1:43:23Speaker 08

  What's up, guys? Great, great to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Look, you know, myself and, and my partner Konstantin at Sequoia, you know, we've been riffing on sovereign AI for a while. And I think kind of, you know, we wrote this post that went a little, a little viral and kind of the, the core, core concept was, you know, US is creating this frontier capability. That kind of gets leaked into Chinese upweight models. And then you have the entirety of the American kind of builder ecosystem, which is Neo Labs, you know, companies that are somewhat dependent on these Chinese models. And so, you know, today there's like, you know, if you're an American lab and you can legally learn from a Chinese model, but you can't learn from a kind of frontier US model, which is what they're doing.

• 1:44:05Speaker 08

  Then the question is, how do we build kind of the, you know, the, the, the legal path almost for this direct route? As opposed to just having this dependence on Chinese upweight models. And so we kind of addressed that and, and share a few ideas, which I'm happy to talk about, but that's kind of like the overall, the overall thing.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's so much, there's so much news about this particular topic. The essay was written at the perfect time.

• 1:44:30Speaker 08

  Just, just before Kimi K3, man, it was, it was good timing. We, we had no intel, we had no intel.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  But I mean, were you, but were you a believer in, in just the fact that the open source market generally lags the frontier by six months? And that's not changing because there was this graph that was going around for a while that was showing that maybe the, the, the closed source was scaling on a slightly steeper curve than open source. And this was driving sort of, about a couple of months ago, when we were in between open source releases, people were starting to say, oh, maybe they're, they will plateau because the training cost will be so high that you'll have sort of like what happened at Meta, that will just happen in China.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Because China will just say, yeah, like if we're going to spend a billion dollars on this training run, it's not worth it to open source it. But it feels like they found an economic model that makes sense. Kimi's license is out today and they're going to take a portion of revenue if you're really selling a lot of Kimi tokens. And so were you, were you, was this built on an idea that, that the open source and closed source frontiers would always be on the, basically the same track?

• 1:45:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, I think, I think, look, that is, that is the question. Yeah. And so, look, our view is, I mean, first of all, like, the gap is closed a lot. And so, kind of the key conversation online over the past week was, you know, is distillation the reason for this? Or is there some other kind of mysterious reason? And the truth is, like, you know, there are two camps, like everything, you know, people are kind of extremists in, you know, when, when there's conversation, everyone, there's a group that are like, hey, distillation does nothing, and there's a group that's like, distillation everything. The truth is, from the conversations we've had, it's somewhere in the middle, right? Like, whether it's 20%, 30%, 40%, it doesn't really matter as much. It is meaningful, that we know.

• 1:46:24Speaker 08

  We know from the labs, you know, there's tens of millions of, of, of queries through these like large-scale proxy distillation accounts. We also know, on the other hand, if you speak to anyone who's like, leading in synthetic data gen, on pre or post-training, at the labs, like, they will tell you, even if you do like hardcore KYC, and then like, let's say you get access to these kind of like, you know, you don't have all the traces, you don't have kind of, you know, like the chain of thought, there's a lot of RL that happens, right? And you just get the output. Like, let's assume you just get an output from a query for a prompt. It is still extremely valuable. Like, that is 100% true. And so, we know distillation is real. And then the question becomes, well, if distillation is real, you know, how do we address the asymmetry that exists between, you know, if you're a Western, you know, US

• 1:47:08Speaker 08

  company, or, you know, just a Western company, you're not going to like, go and set up, you know, 35,000 proxy accounts with like different IPs around the world, and go into still Anthropic for the fear of being sued, and being called out, and, and even being cut access, you know, shutting off access. And so, there is this structural asymmetry. And, and I think it's something we have to think about.

• 1:47:28Jordi Hays?

  So you have to create the meme of TokenMax.

• 1:47:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:47:31Jordi Hays?

  Have to create the meme of TokenMax.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. Do you think that Anthropic, or anyone else, let's just say, a, a closed-source frontier lab in America, if they believe that they've been distilled by an international company, should they just sue? Even if there's no, even if there's no way that on any reasonable time scale, that they're going to win a settlement or block anything, would it just throw down the gauntlet to say, we're willing to put this into the, the, the official record, under threat of perjury, that we believe this is what happened, and there's like a signed affidavit of their belief that there is wrongdoing?

• 1:48:10Speaker 08

  I mean, I, I think they, they probably would, and nothing would happen. Like, I, you know, I think, nothing would happen, and so, anyway, like, you know, US companies are kind of deterred from doing this. So, I don't think it would change too much, unfortunately.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  It would be very symbolic. I, I, I think it would be, I agree with you. I think, I don't think anything would, would change from the actual lawsuit. It would cost some amount of money to file this lawsuit, but at least it would, it would have, they would have something to point to, of like, hey, look, we tried to go through the traditional path, and you were able to follow along, you were able to look at our evidence, which was entered into the public record, and, oh yeah, the, the CEO of the lab that we're accusing of distilling us didn't show up to court, or whatever. You know, whatever the process is, the process can, can begin, maybe this is like a day away, maybe this, like, the lawsuit drops tomorrow, who knows? But, it seems like that's the next logical step, because right now, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of pushback against, like, hey, why do you have a problem with this?

• 1:49:10John Coogan?

  They say, oh, maybe it's distilled. Well, you know, that's the next, that's the next step, maybe, I don't know.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so Kimi came out with their, their license this morning, and they, they, in the license, it says, if, if you're just running, hosting this yourself for your own use cases, that's fine, it's free, but if you're effectively reselling it as a NeoCloud, you have to give us a revenue share. I can't imagine that Washington is going to tolerate that, just, just, the idea, the idea that, like, a bunch of US NeoClouds are then sending billions of dollars back to, to China to support one of their leading labs, I just, to me, that feels like it could provoke a response that felt like it was maybe coming last week, when different people

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  in the admin were saying, hey, we're, we're, we, we believe distillation is happening here, we're, we're pro-open source, but we're against how they were positioning it, IP theft.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  On the flip side, I was very quickly able to find a Bottega-Vanetta dupe that comes from China, and is effectively distilled on that brand, and the government isn't stepping in about that. You know, and that money is flowing straight to, it through Amazon, and through other platforms, Shein and T-Moon.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's not, it doesn't have any geopolitical significance.

• 1:50:29John Coogan?

  You're not, you wouldn't go to war for it.

• 1:50:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's a caring company.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that's true, that's true. Anyway, sorry.

• 1:50:36Speaker 08

  No, I think, look, I think, look, I, I was surprised to read that. Look, the truth is, like, I think it's not dissimilar from the database market, where like, you know, you had Redis, like, early on, there were a range of these companies released really cool open source, and like, they just got, you know, hyperscalers copied them effectively, and like, that was the end. I just, you know, it's impossible to enforce, I, I, like, I don't think that will work for, for the Chinese. But look, the, the broader question here is, like, there are two major risks with, like, depending on a Chinese-US, you know, Chinese open-source ecosystem. The first one is the dependency risk. Like, the framing we have is, you know, in some sense, you know, at Sequoia, we always say, we're only as good as our next investment, which we actually believe.

• 1:51:18Speaker 08

  And I think in some sense, the analogy is like, you're only as good as your next model. And so, as long as you're dependent on the Chinese to give you the next, like, hit of, you know, of, of, of the thing, you're kind of, you're kind of in a, in a bit of a, in a, you know, in a bit of a weird position, where you have this dependency. And then the other thing that I don't think people are kind of well-calibrated on, is just the risk of backdoors. And I'm not saying, like, just to be clear, like, I'm not saying that all Chinese open weight labs are backdooring models. But the truth is, we know for sure, and there's like a lot of research on this, both from the labs and outside the labs and academia, it is like an NP-hard problem to know if there is a backdoor in a model, and that we know, so it's impossible to verify. And on top of that, there's like a kind of crazy evidence that shows, you can, you can

• 1:52:03Speaker 08

  like, time-pull a model, which basically, you know, one way of saying, is like, a model, you could do all the evals you want, and suddenly, like, the, you know, it gets a certain input, and the model literally changes behavior, will start like, exfiltrating data, and doing some crazy stuff. And like, this, this stuff's real, like, this is not science fiction, we know. And so, kind of the analogy I would give you guys is like, I think the state of AI security today is like very similar to that of, you know, early days of the internet, when like, you know, in, in, in 2001, like, wifi was like, you know, wifi encryption was effectively broken, like, publicly broken, and still, like, no one did anything. And I don't even think we're at that moment yet. And it's gonna, it's like, it's gonna get really bad if we, like, one, don't better

• 1:52:48Speaker 08

  understand how to secure these things, and two, like, build our own kind of independent ecosystem. And so, the, the, yeah, those would be like some, some thoughts as well.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  There's so much more we could go into here. We gotta have you back on the show and talk more, because like, there's, there's so much going on. But thank you for writing the essay, we'll let the audience go and read the full piece.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on, and come back soon.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  I'm looking forward to the next one, because it feels like, the, the conversation's already advanced so many different directions. We didn't even get into the, the, the, the politics of anyone having a cyber weapon in their pocket, there's all these different scenarios to play out beyond what you just mentioned, which are a bunch of other considerations, so, it's a fun one to noodle on. Would love to talk to you.

• 1:53:30Speaker 08

  Guys, thank you so much. This was awesome.

• 1:53:32Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Have a good rest here, then.

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang, cheers.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Public, investing for those to take it seriously, they got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, with great customer service. Our next guest is Brent Franson from Death Clock, he's the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, Brent, how you doing?

• 1:53:53Speaker 09

  I'm well, thanks for having me.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Please, introduce yourself and the company, tell us a little bit about Death Clock.

• 1:53:59Speaker 09

  Yeah, so, we trained an AI on 1,200 longevity studies to predict how long you're going to live originally, and then the model was predicting the exact day you would die. And so, we started sharing that, and people like, you know, people either love it or hate it, they want to see the exact day they'll die. But more importantly, the model builds a plan, you know, to live longer, it's not just about when you're going to die.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Is this a nod to Metalocalypse from Adult Swim?

• 1:54:28Speaker 09

  No, it's not, although that's one of the most, the most common questions, the most common responses on social about Metalocalypse, and then just about, like, religious, you know, only God can tell you when you're going to die.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is this rage bait? Are you intentionally framing this? Because you could have called it like, like, the longevity optimizer, but Death Clock?

• 1:54:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't think they would have gotten nearly as many users.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  I agree, but what are, what are your opinions about, I mean, I've literally, like, lived this as well, so, I'm not, I'm not actually, you know, saying that this is bad or anything, but I'm just wondering about how conscious the decision is to, to use a word like death, because Liquid Death, same thing, where it's this aggressive name, it draws an attention. What are your thoughts on, on that as like an attention mechanism?

• 1:55:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a stoic component to it. And so I do think that there is, I don't know, some good reason to be honest with ourselves about the fact that we're going to die. But the real answer is, I don't know, distribution really matters. It's hard to make noise. And so we wanted to be really provocative. So our goal is very much, you know, I don't know, the Howard Stern ilk of, look, love us or hate us, just don't be apathetic about what we're doing.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  No, no, I think it's a good strategy for the modern era.

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the new launch. You launched free nationwide blood testing. Sounds good, too good to be true. What's the catch?

• 1:55:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's not, you know, people are really concerned about their data. And I get it. We don't do anything with the data. We don't share or sell the data. But I think what's happened is, we have a lot of these blood testing companies that do all this kitchen sink blood testing, and they charge you a lot of money. And the reality is, is blood testing is commoditized. LabCorp and Quest have existed for a long time. These tests are not that expensive. And the set of tests that you really need to understand, heart health, metabolic health, inflammation, those are pretty inexpensive tests. And so, from an acquisition perspective, for us, it made sense to say, look, let's give away a test. You can get a sense of the platform, and how good the plan that it generates for you

• 1:56:40Speaker 09

  is. And then we think you'll do more testing, and you'll go deeper, and you'll convert to premium. But, you know, giving away a basic test, it's in the tens of dollars. The stuff is not as expensive as people think.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay. And how many biomarkers does the free test give you?

• 1:56:56Speaker 09

  The free test gives you about 50. But this whole number of biomarkers thing, it's the wrong way to think about this kind of testing. And so, I think we've gotten into this place, we think, okay, you know, 150 biomarkers is better than 50 biomarkers. And that's not necessarily true. I mean, when you run these blood tests, they've got about a 95% accuracy rate. So when you start just testing for everything, even asymptomatic, you're cranking up the odds of a false positive, that you've got to go chase down with your doc. And then you're in some diagnostic process that actually carries some risk. And so it's 50, you can do all of that testing with us. But it's more about getting the right tests. I mean, really understanding the right things about your heart health, your metabolic health,

• 1:57:41Speaker 09

  making sure you're doing the right cancer screens, etc. So I wouldn't get you caught up.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  There's like a power law in efficacy of biomarkers. And there's also probably a lot of correlation between some of those longer tail biomarkers.

• 1:57:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, so, someone comes in, technically, you're, you're having to fork over tens of dollars to get them a free test, and you're betting that some meaningful percentage of them will be like, this service is cool. I'll stick around and access other services. So, it sounds like close, as close as possible to a free lunch, which, which I like.

• 1:58:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, it really is free. There's no, yeah, there's no gotcha in it. I mean, you do have to say, no, I don't want to, I don't want to take an Alzheimer, you know, I don't want to look for the Alzheimer's gene. I don't want to do more advanced cardiac testing. All of those things require you to upgrade. But I think, I think the future is one in which, we're kind of acting as our own personal doctors. We've got an AI that's got all of our health data. And then we order the tests very surgically, that we need at the times that we need them. We're not just kitchen sink doing 15 vials, you know, every six, every six months, like, okay, I should go look at my liver health because of a medication I'm taking. And you shouldn't need a doctor to do all of that.

• 1:58:57Speaker 09

  So that's what we're trying to make available, mass market. We're not going to be the high end solution.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  What, what legally can, can only a doctor do these days?

• 1:59:07Speaker 09

  Well, medications, cancer screens, but I mean, blood testing. So there is a doctor who-

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  But I mean, obviously, blood testing happens with labs. So those are licensed. But then in terms of the interpretation of the tests, that can sort of be democratized with AI and individual, like self-serve products?

• 1:59:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, you know, we have to disclaim that we are, you know, we're not a doctor, and you need to speak to your doctor about any of these results. But there are, you know, the barriers are coming down in, in lab testing. I mean, so we, every lab order that goes through Death Clock, it has a doctor's name on it. Like, it goes through an approval process. But it's very fast, and you don't need to speak directly to the doctor. Because there's no, there's really no risk for most of these tests.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 1:59:57Speaker 09

  I was the CEO of a company called Euclid Analytics, a benchmark in NEA-backed business. It was acquired by WeWork about six months before WeWork imploded. It was a crazy, crazy ride.

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  That's wild. Well, I'm so curious what Adam Newman had in store. We Health, maybe?

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:20Speaker 09

  I know, he was a, he was a, he was a crazy charismatic guy. He was one of those guys-

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  He's still alive, by the way.

• 2:00:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, he's still in.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  You're talking like he's dead.

• 2:00:30Speaker 09

  You would go sit, and he would talk for two hours in these all hands.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:00:34Speaker 09

  And it would feel like it was 15 minutes. But the day he showed up to an all hands in a suit, we all looked around, like, oh, we're screwed.

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's good.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  We got it on the show.

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Question, biological age. How should consumers read into it? It seems like there's this race to the bottom in biological age, where the platforms have an incentive to, to, to rate someone as a lower biological age, because they're more likely to flex it on social media, or to their friends. And then the other question I have is, is that just comparing your, that's just comparing your, your labs to the average American? And we know the average American is deeply unhealthy. So is it even, when, if I'm like, I'm 30 years old, if my biological age is 25, is that basically just saying, like, you are healthier than the average American who is deeply unhealthy?

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  I recently did one of those tests, and it said I had the mind of a five-year-old, biologically.

• 2:01:33Speaker 09

  We've already told this joke about, it's funny every time.

• 2:01:37Jordi Hays?

  It gets every time.

• 2:01:39Speaker 09

  No, it is, it is gamed. And I think there are some companies that are pretty reckless with that. They're telling you that you're young, that you're younger than any real, it's called a phenotypic age, is what would be kind of the fancy name for it, would actually tell you. And so I think that's a little concerning that people are doing that. Where it comes from, there's a researcher at Yale who produced the most valid calculation of biological age. And it takes nine biomarkers. And it's a little bit more, it's a little bit fancier than just comparing you to average. But I think that's directionally, right? And so I wouldn't put too much stock in biological age. I would take very seriously heart health

• 2:02:22Speaker 09

  markers, metabolic markers, inflammatory markers. And these are the basics. It's like, know what your LDL is, know what your hemoglobin A1C is, know what your HSCRp is, C-reactive protein is going to give you a sense of inflammation. If you're paying attention to those things, you're going to do way more than, you know, caring too much about a, about a biological age.

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  What's your date?

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, how long?

• 2:02:46Speaker 09

  Oh, my date is, yeah. So mine's at 78. It's like February 16th of 2065, or something. It's weird to get an actual date. But the average user has 10 to 12 years that they can add. So the model's also producing how much longer it thinks you can live. And then anytime your health data is updated, the calculation recalculates. So my date changes every day. But when I, when I started, it was 78. I partied a little too much.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Have you pitched a partnership with Nas Daily? Are you familiar with this YouTuber, Facebook creator? He, he's obsessed with this concept. He wears a T-shirt that has a percentage loading bar for how far he is through his life, based on life expectancy. And it's all a message about, you know, like, enjoying every day. But he gets like, hundreds of billions of views, or millions, lots of views, very, very popular creator, would be a very logical sponsorship, maybe one day.

• 2:03:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, we should talk to them. I mean, I think the, the reality is, is like, we're all going to die. And we're going to just be-

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Wrong, not me, built different, but continue.

• 2:03:53Speaker 09

  We are all going to die, no matter what people are going to tell you. And there are things you can do to live longer, but-

• 2:04:05Jordi Hays?

  No, sorry. We're having too much fun.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  I hope you're right. Actually, I really, really hope you're right.

• 2:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Just say you're not AGI pill.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, not AGI pills.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  We're gonna cure everything. No, I, I, I think you're right. And I think just reframing mentally around what it means to be healthy, giving people another visualization on what is typically just a bunch of random nanom, nanom, nanom leaders to decal leaders, like it's a bunch of random stats.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Also, why people are, people are, you know, getting health information constantly, at least I am. Take this, do this or that. I've always been into, into experimenting with, with different protocols and things like that. But sometimes you need to kind of jolt people, you know, so.

• 2:04:54Speaker 09

  Well, I think it's fine if you're experimenting so long as you're, as you're getting the basics, right? I mean, I think if you're getting a full body scan, but not getting colonoscopies, that's wrong. I wish I could throw, you know, throw the X up. But if you're like, you've done the colonoscopy and you've done the mammograms and you've done everything, then like, okay, fine, maybe get the full body scan. And then on the experimenting, you gotta be careful. You know, the story of thalidomide, the doctors were prescribing that off label to pregnant women. And then the babies were being born with like, hands on their, on their stomachs.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Really, really gross.

• 2:05:27Speaker 09

  Yeah. So you gotta, you know, the experimenting can be a little bit, I think we're a little casual about the experimenting. I'm not saying don't do it, but.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Very fascinating.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Congrats on the progress.

• 2:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for filling us in, Brent.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Fascinating company.

• 2:05:42Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, free, free blood tests out there.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Also, death potentially a skill issue. Don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much. We agree, we will agree to disagree on that.

• 2:05:52Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys. We'll see if we die or not. I hope you're right.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. See you back here in 70 years. Goodbye.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Brent.

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business that's to sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is Mate from Andrenum. How you doing? Welcome back.

• 2:06:16Speaker 10

  Hey, good. Thanks for having me on. How are you guys doing?

• 2:06:19John Coogan?

  We're doing well.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. We met at a Long Journey Dinner forever ago at this point.

• 2:06:27Speaker 10

  We did. And we also met at the Ramp Dinner. I think I was the infamous founder that snapped that phone, if you guys remember that.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  Oh, I missed that.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  This was, this was legendary.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  We told this story.

• 2:06:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna say the guy's name, because he's a friend and it's funny and it makes him look really silly. But this, this guy is sitting there, he's got the new iPhone Air, he's, he's telling everyone in the room, you cannot possibly break this phone. This phone is indestructible. Anybody, anybody here, try to break my phone. Try to break my phone. This guy goes, okay, just bends down, just snaps it in his hand. And the guy's, the guy's standing there just being like, just in shock and disbelief. I thought, I was told, and he, and he was saying, he was saying, I'm gonna, I'm gonna email Tim Cook. I'm pretty sure that Apple never promised you that unbreakable.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  It was like, it cannot be broken by a guy from the Gundo. So you are in the Gundo? Tell us what you're building.

• 2:07:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, we're, we're in the Greater South Bay area. I guess you could consider it the Gundo. I mean, we're super excited to announce our Series A, but.

• 2:07:35John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:07:37Speaker 10

  Uh, we raised $18 million.

• 2:07:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, Andrenum builds scalable sensing infrastructure for undersea domain awareness. So think about like Hunt for Red October, finding submarines, unmanned underwater vehicles, semi-submersibles and so on. So yeah, distributed.

• 2:07:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna maybe put it too plainly, but we don't really know much of what's going on out in the maritime domain. Is that correct?

• 2:08:05Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, the maritime domain is getting more and more contested like daily, right? I think we have a good understanding of what happens on the surface of the oceans. There's cameras, surface boats, but everything's kind of shifting into the undersea quite quickly, you know? It's one of the most unexploited gaps that we have. And a lot of near peer adversaries and terrorist organizations and so on and so forth are starting to move under the waves. So like, this entire push of, you know, the US, for example, funding unmanned underwater vehicles, our adversaries are doing the same thing. And so the big question is like, how do we find those things intelligently, quickly, give ourselves awareness of what happens around, you know, various parts of the ocean as well as like our strategic bases and so on?

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. Talk about traction. Since the last time we chatted, what kind of progress have you guys made? Obviously, the new funding, I'm sure you have some great momentum, but what's been, what have you been actually executing on?

• 2:09:03Speaker 10

  Oh, my goodness. So many things. So I think from the hardware and software side, like, I mean, we've gone through three generations of hardware since we last talked. We've been moving at breakneck speeds here at Andrenum. We fielded it across like numerous exercises. Most recently, we just got back from a three and a half week deployment with UUV Group up in Keppel, Washington. So they're all the guys that run and like dictate how unmanned underwater vehicles run. So we were up there alongside with a few other folks. No mission ending failures for a three and a half week deployment. Obviously, constantly testing here off the coast of California, building up our repository of sonar signatures. And we do have some things that are gonna be coming up quite soon that we're super excited to announce when they hit. So stay tuned.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  What does integration with other defense tech companies look like now or in the future? Like, you know, there's been like Anduril has a platform, Palantir has a platform. I'm sure a lot of different units have bespoke systems for command and control and all sorts of different things. Does that come for free? Is that something that people are just like vibe coding integrations? Or do you have to go and like do a deal and actually figure out how you integrate? Or do you ultimately want to be, you know, your own platform that, you know, runs as like the operating system?

• 2:10:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think it vastly depends on the type of technology that you're building, right? But specifically for us, like sonar information is so classified and compartmentalized. And it's, it's very tricky to get access on data that has been compartmentalized, such as this, because you have numerous third party integrators that also own that data itself as well. And so that is really the reason why we went out and built Pearl, which is our passive sonar buoy, right? As well as Obsidian, which is kind of like, you could call it a C2, but really it is like the platform that ingests all this information. There's a bunch of like, so super sophisticated machine learning and effectively putting dots on a map for end users. But the C2 in itself, like, there's various

• 2:11:09Speaker 10

  abstractions of it. You know, you have the God C2s that kind of live on top. You mentioned those companies' names. We really are trying to own the undersea domain. And by building the hardware, we're building up this massive repository of sonar signatures. And that'll give us the option to then give that data to those other C2 platforms if necessary, right? So it really is like a fine, like a fine balance of what we have to be doing with regards to C2. But ultimately, like, every defense tech company that's out there needs to play well together, because we all have to provide an integrated solution to the end user, right? And we do have those relationships with primes and with other kind of startups as well.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  You mentioned that the data is hard to get generally. You're doing machine learning, which is obviously very data heavy. Is there like a scale AI, like a Mercore for this type of data yet? Are you like buying data from like fishing boats? Or like, is there some world where there is a scaled data benefit, even not in a, in a military context, but maybe you just want to get a bunch of data on how sonar performs in a swimming pool or a lake or something that's more controlled? And then you can transfer, learn that into like the actual viable domain in the final application?

• 2:12:27Speaker 10

  Yeah. Sonar is super, super challenging in the fact that you can't necessarily translate environmentals to where you are deployed, right? So like with radar, for instance, you just have air and it's pretty linear. Like the ocean does a ton of weird things with regards to performance of sonar. And so you really have to be deployed and you have to understand kind of the environmental factors, such that you can perform this highly complex math that goes behind all of it. That's really the reason why we did build Pearl, right? Like, that delivers that information in real time. Like, we kind of get this information in some three seconds worth of latency and we process it. And we put dots on a map for end users. We have that environmental feature kind of built into Pearl itself. And you can do base level extrapolation

• 2:13:12Speaker 10

  and kind of across the board with a lot of that. But it's not super, super applicable everywhere. And so, yes, there is data that we have accessed that is more off shelf. For instance, like how do whales sound, right? Various different types of whale things. And at least in our, you know, kind of hot dog, no hot dog paradigm, we can say, this is a whale, this is not, you know, a submarine or some, something like that. So it definitely adds a little bit more kind of feature rich environment for the end user. But most of it is really hinged on the hardware that we're developing and building, right? So in this world of AI, you can't just access a massive repository of data and do a ton of AI on it. You have to build it yourself, which is really like

• 2:13:54Speaker 10

  the reason why a low cost, scalable hardware solution is super, super important for us to deliver that data in real time.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  What does?

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Actually deploying a buoy look like, do you have to call the government before you do that? Because I love the idea of moving fast and doing R and D and just dropping something in the water. And that's probably fine. But at the same time, like you're, you could accidentally be spying on like a US submarine and they might not want you to be spying on them, even if you're like a friendly, right? So like, what is the flywheel to get the permission to, you know, do the tests that you need to do before you get the contract to prove that you can do it? Like, what's the sequence of events?

• 2:14:35Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, we're working hand in hand with, with a lot of these folks at the government, right? And so I detailed the deployment in Keyport, Washington. That is something that we scheduled prior going up there. You know, we do a lot of verification and validation testing here off the coast of California, but it's kind of just like, put it in the water, see if it works, check it out, pull it out, and then ship it to the location with the end user and test alongside them. We've done that kind of across the coast, right? So we were in San Diego at a large fleet exercise at the beginning of this year as well. And so it does require coordinating with end users, right? But that's ultimately what we're looking for anyway. Like, what are the feedbacks that these folks give to us such that we can iterate much more quickly? We could do that in our own engineering vacuum,

• 2:15:18Speaker 10

  or we could just be talking to these people directly. And that's what we really want to strive to do. And we've gotten really positive feedback from them, right? Like, other people build buoys, they're very large. It takes a lot of effort to put these things out, like gigantic research vessels, you know, barges, it takes a week to pre-deploy. We just kick ours off the side of the boat. Right? And so when we give these things, these buoys to the end operators, we say, break them, test them, go deploy them yourself, give us the feedback such that we can put that into our loop of iteration. And they do that. They're super happy to break things, right? And I think that's the most valuable thing that we can ask for.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for joining the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:15:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 2:15:59Speaker 10

  Thank you so much.

• 2:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Keep snapping iPhones.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  I was gonna say, don't snap any more iPhone errors, but

• 2:16:04Jordi Hays?

  No, keep it going.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Keep it going.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Anyone has an iPhone, wants an iPhone snapped, that's your guy. They're saying

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  Who wants that?

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes I want my iPhone snapped. Diego said, John needs someone to clear his desk of Diet Coke every 20 minutes.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  Can I get a recycling bin over here?

• 2:16:20Jordi Hays?

  You're only on your third. This is a typical, typical day for you.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  It's an important day. We have Justin from Nvidia is the VP of Enterprise AI here to talk about Nvidia launching the Open Source AI Alliance. Justin, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us.

• 2:16:35Speaker 11

  Yeah, thanks for having us.

• 2:16:38John Coogan?

  So can you start by giving, I mean, we discussed the letter, I think a lot of people have read it, but what is your elevator pitch for the Open Secure AI Alliance, the letter, how they interact, like the overall project here, the goals?

• 2:16:53Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think, let's just say, there's been this moment in the industry, especially with this incident that happened at Hugging Face, where there's just this collective awareness across all the industry leaders that, you know, doing a lot of the work in cybersecurity out in the open, where we can look at open models, open harnesses, open safety evaluations, as an industry is going to give basically the broadest collective defense of our organization. So that's why we put the letter out there. That's why all these companies are kind of rushing in to talk about sort of the importance of this initiative.

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  It seems like it's going extremely well. I totaled it up, I think $18 trillion of market cap has signed on across something like 35 companies and more. I'm interested in what you, are there any other outcomes? Or is this purely just avoiding a bad outcome? Because the whole framing is basically, don't ban, don't do something. It's don't take an action here, allow the status quo to continue. Is that the correct formulation of the, of the proposal?

• 2:18:02Speaker 11

  Well, I think it's a recognition that you always want to give the defenders of enterprises across really critical industries, financial services, energy, telecommunications, an asymmetric advantage to protect their infrastructure. And the best way to do that is you give them, you know, state of the art frontier open systems that they can, you know, scan or mediate, patch their infrastructure. Now, they should always have the advantage because they understand the code, the configurations, and how they have their infrastructure running. But they need access to the tools to basically get ahead of, of any potential security issues.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  Okay. I guess like the steel man of the other side is that this isn't an asymmetric advantage to the, to the, to the organization that you described. It's actually a perfectly symmetric advantage. The attackers will also have frontier open source, like great open source tools. And if we, if we allow open source to proliferate, at least it will be balanced. But can you explain a little bit more about where the asymmetry on the defender side comes? Because that sounds amazing. We want the defenders to win. But it feels like if everyone's using the same tools, it's actually just a level playing field. And this could just be a battle, could still win, could be fine. But what's driving the

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  asymmetry?

• 2:19:26Speaker 11

  Yeah, you gotta remember, when, when you're running a service and you have terms of service, like you know who's accessing that service. And there, you're putting additional guardrails on there on, on safe use. You can also, if there, if people start to misuse the service, you can quickly patch guardrails and basically ensure that people are using the service appropriately. So, so that in and of itself should give the defensive teams the ability to run, I'd say, these, these better capabilities to clean up their infrastructure, patch their infrastructure, and then service providers that are hosting any of the models, you know, should, should run them with appropriate guardrails.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  How do you think the equilibrium plays out if sort of, you know, companies get, like big companies get access to advanced open source models? So they're patching their systems, they're, they're doing stuff. But there's still a lot of attackers out there. And there's this weird scenario that people have been talking about where a small business that might have a credit card stored here, or some piece of personally identifiable information stored in a less secure system. Now they're responsible for spinning up an open source cybersecurity defense system. Like, what's the equilibrium that keeps the long tail of organizations secure?

• 2:20:53Speaker 11

  Yeah, you've got to still pair, you know, openness with strong safeguards, like rules on malicious use, laws that prevent against malicious use, and then obviously rapid remediation of anything that you know that's going on. And, you know, that, the conversation around open models is no different than the conversation around, I mean, I think open software. And you think of open software, whether it's Linux, or Kubernetes, or PyTorch, that, that open software, you know, built the foundation of our economy. 80% of our digital economy is powered by open source. And I'll say, good stewards of open source software can sort of debate open standards in an open way. They can look at evaluations,

• 2:21:37Speaker 11

  they can look at patching and remediation, and they can work collectively for the defense of, of the US economy. And I think we got to look at, you know, models the same way. You know, as soon as models are out there in, I'll call it the public domain, you can fork them, you can patch them, and you can remediate any issues that, you know, cybersecurity people find in those models. And so, you know, the goal of this organization is to have those conversations out in the public. I think it's, you know, it's an important conversation for all of us to have. But we want to make sure, again, that you, you have, I'll say, a diverse set of tools at your disposal as a, as a cybersecurity defender, so that, you know, if a model refuses to do the work that you needed to do, you have

• 2:22:22Speaker 11

  other options to continue to defend your organization.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  What, like, who do you think will step into the role of like, model evaluator or model tester? Because we were, we were just talking with Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital, and he was, you know, illustrating a possible scenario where there's like, a backdoor in a model, or some nefarious thing sort of hidden below the surface. So the model still tests well on benchmarks, you deploy it, and then over time, it does something nefarious. It feels like, again, that's another big burden to potentially put on a small business. But if there's some sort of, you know, American company that steps up and validates and tests, maybe there's an even balance there. How do you see that playing out?

• 2:23:10Speaker 11

  Well, I think, you know, organizations like Red Hat have done this, open source software, right? Where they clear their CVEs, they, they provide the commercial support to enterprises. I feel like it creates an opportunity for businesses to step in and be able to do the same thing with open, open models and provide the same commercial patching and support into, into enterprises. So I think that's a market that will emerge as we go forward. But, but ultimately, I think, allowing, I'll call it cybersecurity professionals to continue to pen test and understand the limits of these models is what's going to allow us to, you know, build that lifecycle, to do patching and remediation of any vulnerabilities that can exist in these model weights. Now, the fact that they're open means you can

• 2:23:55Speaker 11

  test them and understand the limits of them. The challenge is with a lot of the, the model weights that might be hosted, the terms of service prevent cybersecurity people from researching and looking for any backdoors in those as well. So the problem doesn't go away, whether it's hosted or open. It can exist. And I think the spotlight of having more cybersecurity professionals, you know, evaluating these things is just going to lead to better collective defense.

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how much you can speak to the, to what the Nematron team is doing, but broadly, what should organizations expect from, from Nematron, the family of models over the next, let's say, six months?

• 2:24:37Speaker 11

  Oh, man, I, I don't know that, I can talk about where we're going, but, you know, generally, our approach has been, has been like, let's, again, do it all in the open. Let's basically put the data sets out there that we're training into these models so people can understand the, the data blends that went into the models. Let's put the model weights out there. Let's put the training techniques out there and the evaluations out there and, and basically use that as a foundation for building, you know, custom intelligence into enterprises. I mean, that's the other part of the conversation that's lost is these open models are critical for enterprises basically building their own intelligence and basically maintaining, I'll call it a reinforcement learning wheel or

• 2:25:22Speaker 11

  a flywheel on these open models so they can maintain their competitive advantage. And so, so providing that foundation of data and open weights and data blends gives enterprises that. Now, with Nematron, they're really language models, but we have a bunch of other domains and models. We have, you know, Cosmos, which is world foundation models. We have Alpamio for autonomous driving. We have Groot for vision, language, action models for robots. And so I think across industries, the, the idea of having these open models to build the startup ecosystem, allow enterprises to domain adapt them and build their own intelligence is really important, really for the, for the future growth of our industry.

• 2:26:05John Coogan?

  How important, can you give us some context on what you're seeing or hearing from other business leaders about the value of open source purely economically? Just, we went through this token maxing boom. I think every enterprise leader feels that AI is valuable, but it can be very expensive. How are they thinking about efficiency right now with the current cost to benefit trade offs? And how does open source change that?

• 2:26:36Speaker 11

  I mean, I can, I can put my Nvidia hat on here. We are the same way, right? We use all the frontier models. We love the frontier models. They're, they're amazing for, for driving efficiency and how we do, you know, software development and chip design and how we run a competitive business. But you, the, the modern way to build applications now are really an ensemble of models where you want to use the frontier for where they're unique and they add, you know, differentiated value. So like a really complex agentic plan, you want to run through the frontier model and then you want to use the, the open model weights for things that are more trivial, like document summarization. And the two can complement each other to drive a lot more cost efficient applications across the enterprise.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then anything that's been fine tuned on your particular data, that example from thinking machines with Bridgewater's like information pipeline. Obviously, they got incredible performance at great, at very low cost because it was a unique use case that was going to run on a continuous basis. And so they were able to get a lot of value there.

• 2:27:41Jordi Hays?

  It's just common sense. It wouldn't make, it wouldn't make sense to, to hire you and then have you just be a BDR doing cold emails. It wouldn't be a very efficient use of.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  It's a great analogy. Sorry.

• 2:27:53Speaker 11

  Yeah, I'm sorry. I was just going to say, yeah, I think, I think your point's spot on. I think, you know, there's a bunch of other, you know, model makers, like, like TML is a great company, Reflection, you know, Runway, you know, many different model makers across different domains. And I think you want a rich ecosystem here, you know, of startups, you know, building the future of what's possible with, with this industrial revolution going on with AI. So we're just happy to, you know, advocate on behalf of the open ecosystem, but really it complements, you know, the closed ecosystem and all of it sort of has its, its unique value here.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  So the alliance is like pretty huge at this point. Do you want to grow it a lot bigger? Or is this a solid enough base to go where you want to go next? Or will this be something that just continues to grow? What do you think?

• 2:28:47Speaker 11

  You know, I think the, the inbound requests around this is, is kind of blowing us away by the, the appetite and the interest. I, I think ultimately what we want to do is kind of work as a, as a community and share sort of, you know, best practices. We also with this, we put out a new agent harness that we think is phenomenal at, you know, reasoning. It's great at coding and it's, and it's great at cybersecurity tasks. And so if we all sort of share advancements in the open, we can build, you know, the best technology together. And, and, you know, I think some of the things that we'll keep working on as an ecosystem is, I mean, to your point, what are the evaluations that

• 2:29:31Speaker 11

  we should be building? You know, how do we test? And, you know, I'll call it open models and, and look for, I'll say, safety issues in those models. How do you start to build, I'll call it more cyber ranges that you put agents through to understand how truly capable they are? I mean, I think part of the, part of the challenge with this cybersecurity discussion is it's, it's, it's been over indexed on, I'll call it, you know, benchmarking for, you know, vulnerability discovery. And vulnerability discovery is not the same as, you know, like going through an attack chain. So, you know, I think we've just got to have more, more like sane conversation in the open as an ecosystem on, you know,

• 2:30:15Speaker 11

  what are the right ways to safeguard this stuff and, and put it to work and to drive the efficiency that it can bring us, you know, across every business.

• 2:30:24John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you, Justin.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. We'll hope to talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 2:30:32Jordi Hays?

  That's our show, folks.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow. There's a lot more news, but we can go through it tomorrow. Starship launched and there's a beautiful video that somehow got taken down, so we can't even share it. But you can go find it. There's some cool stuff there. Anyway.

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Do us a favor. Go have the best afternoon.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Have the best afternoon ever.

• 2:30:54Jordi Hays?

  Have the best Monday afternoon ever. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  Good crew in the chat. Thank you so much for tuning in and chatting. We do read it. It's a lot of fun. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Always spoke. Goodbye.

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye.