SaaSpocalypse Revisited, Singer x Louis Vuitton, Aman vs Ryan Walker | Igor Babuschkin, Brannin McBee, Garret Langley, Sonya Huang, Sean Cole

(00:37) - SaaSpocalypse Revisited (13:46) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (25:13) - Singer x Louis Vuitton (33:33) - North Korea Infiltrates U. S Jobs (39:06) - Aman vs Ryan Walker (50:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:49) - Igor Babuschkin discusses his journey from physicist to AI researcher at DeepMind and OpenAI, co-founder of xAI, and founder of River AI. He outlines River AI’s vision for personalized, user-owned models while exploring video games as AI benchmarks, real-world reinforcement learning, specialized models, GPU demand, and custom inference chips. (01:11:33) - Brannin McBee discusses CoreWeave’s strong second-quarter performance and his role as the AI infrastructure company’s co-founder. He highlights financing, data-center capacity, hardware longevity, global expansion, and CoreWeave’s ability to meet rapidly growing demand for AI computing. (01:26:34) - Garrett Langley discusses Flock Safety’s new privacy and accountability measures, including mandatory audit-log reviews and shorter data-retention recommendations. The founder and CEO addresses surveillance concerns, police misuse, regulatory challenges, and the need to balance public safety with privacy and community trust. (01:45:08) - Sonya Huang, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, discusses the unprecedented growth of AI companies and the democratization of model development across startups. She argues that application companies should increasingly own and customize their AI intelligence, while emphasizing that small internal teams can use maturing post-training tools and specialized partners to build competitive models. (01:58:01) - Sean Cole discusses Parasma’s work training lab-grown human neurons for computing tasks, including basic token prediction. He highlights biological computing’s potential advantages in energy efficiency, rapid learning, and continual adaptation, while outlining plans to automate the company’s lab and generate near-term revenue through applications such as drug testing. (02:06:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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?

  Today is Thursday, August 13th, 2026. We are live at the TVP on the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Sign up for ramp.com and you will be king in the castle, king in the castle. It just might happen.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  It just might happen.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Uh, we gotta take a victory lap. You want to start taking a lap, Jordy? You want to take a lap while I tell everyone about our SaaS apocalypse victory lap?

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so, uh, I was just appreciating some various software as a service companies.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  There's some real.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Charts yesterday, a bunch of companies up like crazy.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  And I was thinking, I texted John, I was like, when did we cancel the SaaS apocalypse?

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you pulled up.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Our original Substack that we sent back in February. We just decided at that time.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  It's not happening.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  It's not happening. Uh, we canceled it and, uh,

• 1:09John Coogan?

  There was a lot.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Maybe too early to take a victory lap, but in hindsight.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  But there was, there were some good arguments. There were some interesting arguments and there was a lot of fear, but there were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SaaS bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe coded. Uh, and while that thesis might play out over a few years, it was a little bit too soon. It seemed a little bit too aggressive. And so, uh, we wanted to revisit the SaaS apocalypse and the cancellation of the SaaS apocalypse, see where things are now. So just to set the stage, the SaaS apocalypse is a rough, rough go. $2 trillion of market cap lost across, uh, the, the, the SaaS apocalypse, the major sell off of technology, software companies broadly, uh, two, $2 trillion wiped out, gone.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Over.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Moment of silence, but a lot of it's come back. Uh, the iShares ETF that tracks tech and software is up 30% just over the last six months.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Did we want to do a moment of silence?

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Brought to you by CrowdStrike.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Absolute tear. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  This moment of silence is brought to you by CrowdStrike.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, no, CrowdStrike's been on a tear. Um, so yeah, it appeared only logical at the time that every company would be vibe coding their own CRM. Uh, and this would happen imminently and that any company built on a big pile of code would go to zero. Of course, the core thesis still holds over the long term, but it's a lot messier in reality. So yes, having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago. That's for sure. Competition is increasing, especially for point solutions, but many of those SaaS companies that were so beaten up in the SaaS apocalypse were revealed

• 2:59John Coogan?

  to have sources of strength that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket. So babies were thrown out.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  1,000 business development representatives.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Sources of strength.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  That's big. Also just, uh, what it, another thing that's very valuable is what percent of revenue are you claiming from your customers? So if you are going to a customer and you're saying, I'm taking 30% cut, you're probably at more risk than someone who's saying, I'm an IT solution and you're going to spend one 10th of 1%.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Shopify is the best example, right?

• 3:39John Coogan?

  I talked a lot.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  A lot of, yeah, a lot of, a lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs ask them like, what's your biggest expense?

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  None of them will say Shopify.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Even, even a brand that is like Adele.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Shopify, uh, Shopify plus, uh, for a business that I know very intimately, uh, I think is around a thousand dollars a month in cost and the business is doing almost a hundred million a year.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  And you would need, and even, even with.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  1%.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Even with how good the models are today, you would need multiple people basically vibe coding around the clock.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  To have a product that was comparable.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  And that's not even to mention a lot of the applications that already tie into, to the product.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you could just put those tokens towards something else that moves the needle, uh, and increases revenue by 5% or 10%, right? Um, there's, there's so many other ways to move the needle. So, um, a lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water. Uh, the, the, the most ridiculous one was I think DoorDash, but there were lots of people coming for Spotify and a whole bunch of different platforms that should be very enduring because their source of strength is a network effect or something like that. So six months ago, we, we identified six companies that we wanted to use as case studies for the SaaS apocalypse. It was Google, Meta, your favorite company, uh, Spotify, Shopify, Roblox and Salesforce as evidence that large scaled.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  Do we have a minute to talk about Meta?

• 5:07John Coogan?

  The business is doing great. And it always should have been.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Don't get me started.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Never should have.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Don't get me started.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  It never should have been beat up. Uh, same with, same with Google. Uh, and then Spotify and Shopify were the interesting ones. Spotify, of course, uh, there is a world where you're listening to AI music, but there's also a world where you're listening to AI music on Spotify. If you looked at Phoenix Flexon's rubbers, the song of the summer in many ways, uh, probably AI generated. I think it's almost confirmed at this point that it's an AI generated song. It has hundreds of thousands of downloads on, on Spotify specifically because that's where he chose to distribute it. Because if you had just left it on the internet somewhere, he's not going to get any royalties from it and he's not going to get any distribution. So that's where the audience is and having, being an aggregator is extremely valuable. Ben Thompson was writing about this a bunch of the,

• 5:55John Coogan?

  at the time. Uh, same thing for Roblox. Yes, you'll be able to vibe code, uh, a game, but having all the Roblox network, infrastructure, distribution, that, that should be valuable in the, in the future. So, um, uh, there, there were a few different things that might make you resistant to the coming age of agentic coding tools, uh, marketplace dynamics, network effects, strong go to market organizations. Jordy put it really cleanly after Shopify's last earnings and when Shopify's stock popped 20%, he said, Shopify isn't a victim of AI. AI is a victim of Shopify. And that really, it really made me think.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was certainly some money flowing out of semis.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Well, that's actually true. I didn't put it that way.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Shopify.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  I guess you're right. I guess you're right.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  It's got to come from somewhere.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  I don't know. Victim is right. But yes, clearly, uh, you know, now you have a long list of unslopable AI, uh, unslopable SaaS companies, companies that can't just be immediately spun up and replaced by an AI app. Uh, there are AI winners now and it's a lot of who you'd expect. Uh, cybersecurity is more important than ever. You mentioned CrowdStrike, but Palo Alto Networks is also on a tear. Uh, Palo Alto Networks over the past year is up 121%. It's a $320 billion company. CrowdStrike's a $230 billion company, up 107% this year over the past 12 months. Uh, pretty remarkable. Nikesh Aurora taking a little victory lap as well. So, uh, five months,

• 7:25John Coogan?

  uh, Palo Alto CEO bought the dip five months later. He must've been reading us because a month after we canceled the SaaS apocalypse, he was like, I, I think I like this Palo Alto network stock. No, he of course is the CEO of Palo Alto Networks. So, but he put $10 million of his own money into the company. It's now worth $26 million. Nikesh Aurora invested as investors questioned whether AI could disrupt cybersecurity. Palo Alto has reached an all time.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  We gotta give him, gotta give him, uh, some trouble next time we see him. Why only 10?

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  10. Does that really move the needle?

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, he should have been 10x levered.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  If you really believed, come on. But you know, he has 16 million of basically play money now. I mean, it's boy math, you know, you make, you make 16 million trading your own stock when you're the CEO. You gotta spend that on something fun. And as we know, Nikesh Aurora was recently pictured on the golf course. So I was wondering, what does 16 million get you?

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Probably buy a golf course.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  You might be able to buy a golf course, but, uh, what does $16 million get you if you're a golfer in the Bay area? Uh, you can join, you can pay for the initiation fees of 10 elite clubs. You can become members of SFGC, Cal Club, Olympic, Sharon Heights, Menlo, Burlingame, Pemetto Club, Lake Merced, Palo Alto Hills, and one or two Southeast Bay clubs for when you get out there. Uh, for six to nine million, you can pay 30 years of dues at those clubs and then guest fees, caddies, carts, food tournaments. That's going to run you one to two million. And, uh, so the 30 year lifetime total puts you around nine to 12. Depends on what your tax rate is. I don't know.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  The residency status, but for 16 million, you could plausibly fund a lifetime of belonging to essentially every major Bay area private club that would admit you with plenty left for golf expenses.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  I think, I, I think.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Do it Nikesh. Do it Nikesh.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  I want to see him out there every single day. Um, anyway, um, there were, I mean, there are, there are SaaS apocalypse victims that have not come back, are probably not coming back, need to completely reinvent the business because they have been, uh, made obsolete by just base level LLM capabilities, the classic.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  The R says with 16 million, you could buy 640,000 pounds of ribeye.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  That's another good usage of it. I think that might be up there. Skip the golf course and start bulking season. Chegg is the canonical example of SaaS apocalypse victim that has not made a comeback. The stock is down 99% over the past five years. It was hot during COVID. And of course, when it comes to looking up answers to homework, the basic free edition of ChatGPT gets you there, Gemini, whatever you want to use is going to answer those questions and hold your hand alongside your homework while you're doing it.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they had 376 million of revenue in 2025, but that was a 39% decrease year over year from 617 in 2024.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  It's now roughly an 80 or $90 million market cap.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, so very shrinking business, very difficult. You have to continue cutting every year to make any money, pull any profit out of that business will be very difficult. The more, the newer company that is more in the headlines these days is the information is reporting that Canva is slipping into a similar situation because a lot of Canva designs can be one-shot by image models like ChatGPT images, Banana Banana Pro, Grok Imagine. I saw the new Grok image examples and a few of them were infographics. They clearly figured out over there how to do high fidelity text that doesn't have misspellings or anything like that. So you wind up with a product that if you're designing a, you know, birthday

• 11:17John Coogan?

  card invite, that's something that you'd probably go to Canva before. Now you can just go directly to the models. And so there are, there are, there are SaaS companies that have to grapple with their product being more in the direct path of the models. But there are, there are so many other SaaS companies that are buoying the index because they are either in the token path, like if you're a database or an analytics company or an infrastructure product that the labs are consuming and every AI company is using because they're like, well, we're generating a lot more data. We need a lot more data dog or, or, you know, any other data company. Then those companies are doing really well on the back of that. And then

• 12:00John Coogan?

  there's also tools companies like Twilio is doing incredibly well. I don't know if you've been tracking this. It's up 150% over the past year. Another story where huge boom during COVID.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Sell off.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  $38 billion company.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  I, if you asked me what Twilio was worth before I just checked this, I would have said, I don't know, five, six billion.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  And, and that's where it was a couple of years ago. But it's done really, really well. And I think a lot of that is that it is difficult to go and vibe code all of the interactions that you need to actually send text messages across the network.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  It's agentic infrastructure, John. If you historically were a SaaS company, pivot to just be calling yourself agentic infrastructure.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  It's, it's more like, yeah, I mean, it's funny. It's more like it's, it's infrastructure that will be pulled off the shelf by the agent. And so, I mean, we use Twilio for our app where we want to be able to interface with an application via text message. And we use Twilio for that, even though we could go and vibe code that, all of a sudden you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks and are they going to flag you as spam? And Twilio has all the huge decades of relationships built out and a real network there that even though it's just a tool and it's just consumption software at the end of the day, it has this moat. And so it's been doing really, really well.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Sebastian in the YouTube chat says, not a fan of these earphone wires. What earphone wires?

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Mine? Mine? Mine's, yeah.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  They're going crazy. They're going crazy. Thanks for the call out.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Good call out.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  We have to talk about Jiahu Yu.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Traded.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  He is, this was, took us back in time as well. Let's try to pull up the original traded card that kicked it all off, August of last year.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  I said.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  Jiahu Yu went from OpenAI to MSL was one of the first high profile exits in that whole saga. And one year later, he just announced this morning, he said, I'm leaving Meta to start a new company, building the TBD lab alongside Mark and Alex has been deeply inspiring and fulfilling. I'm proud of what our multimodal team accomplished across Muse Spark, Voice Mode, Muse Image and Muse Video, and even prouder of the team that made it possible. Over time, I felt increasingly drawn.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  He's calling out his laurels, but he's not resting on them.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Over time.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And I felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future, yet remains largely underexplored. It now has my full attention.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  More to share as the work takes place, takes shape. So anyways, I wanted to take a quick, quick little victory lap because I believe it was Monday or Tuesday.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Victory lap.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  No, Monday.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, Monday.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Are you, are you, given the situation that you're in right now, are you more of a victory lap guy or a pat on the back guy?

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  I like victory lap.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  You don't like patting yourself on the back?

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I've always found it awkward.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is sort of awkward to pat yourself on the back. A victory lap gets the blood flowing. It's healthy.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  More ergonomic.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  It's more ergonomic.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  More ergonomic.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  So take your victory lap.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  I forget what day it was. Maybe it was Monday or Tuesday when I was feeling a little spicy, but I was just saying that MSL is, is basically operating up against the clock, which is that they did this massive talent rate across all these companies about a year ago.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  And when you're paying these people nine figures, 10 figures, many of those people are going to basically spend a year and hit a point where they're like, okay, I have $100 million in the bank.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  And I'm kind of good now.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  25% of a huge pile of gold is still a huge pile of gold sometimes.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of those people are just going to basically see the number in their bank account and be like, am I happy doing what I'm doing? Is this filling? Or do I want to go build a company? Maybe they've always wanted to build a company. And so in the case of Jiahu Yu, whatever package he had, clearly, clearly he, he's down to go take a risk.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  You could argue, how risky is it for him to actually, you know, really start a company? I'm sure they'll raise a massive round out the gates. I'm sure he could always get Aqua hired in somewhere else too, even if the company doesn't work. So it's not like he's taking on, I would say that much risk by going to start a company right now. But that being said, I don't think this will be the last of the exits that we see out of MSL over the next even one or two months.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  What if he starts a social network? That would be risky. What if he's like, I'm coming for it all?

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he says, I've felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future. So maybe he's figured out how to make aligned social media.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Better reels.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Social media safety.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  I like that. Yeah. Well, we should let Tyler pat himself on the back for this card.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  Reels that make you go like this.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  But first, let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Tyler, take a, pat yourself on the back because this card was the first TBP on trading card and Tyler whipped it up by himself and it doesn't even have our brand on it. And it also has a literal baseball field in the background. But this video or this, this image went so viral, the original post got 30,000 likes on X was.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  It did around 100K on Instagram.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Random account that again wasn't ours.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  It was crazy. It actually broke containment.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, for not watermarking it.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  And it was the, it was the first, it was the first moment where we had been talking about a story that really broke through to the mainstream. Because of this trading card, we wound up covering.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  On French television.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  French television. That's where I was going. That's where I was going. So, but because of this trading card, we talked about this, a whole, a whole, this whole, this story over a course of weeks. It was very interesting and dramatic. There were a whole bunch of scoops that came out around Mark Zuckerberg making people soup and stuff. It was, it was a lot of really entertaining stuff. We were featured in the New York Times Daily podcast, I think once or twice for talking about it. They clipped us and included our coverage in their telling of the story for their broader audience. And then French television sent out a bunch of reporters and cameras to come and interview us, which was very funny because they kept asking us like, exactly how much money does, does, did, did this guy make? And we're like, look, we don't know exactly how much he makes. And even if we did, we probably wouldn't want to share that. But it was a very.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  We did tell them there's, there's no salary caps.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  That's true. There are no salary caps. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Instagram branded.

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Pograb says, it's over.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Instagram. Uh, the head of Instagram, Adam Masary, just posted a new word mark after 10 years. I'm keeping it unchanged. Adam says, the word mark at the top of the app hasn't changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh, cleaner and more modern with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that's always made it Instagram. Uh, so yeah, people, people don't like it. I don't, I don't have necessarily super strong opinions on it personally immediately. I do think, I do think the, the, the original Instagram word mark here on the left had started to feel extremely dated.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  But it's still iconic and um, I felt like, I feel like we're headed back to this sort of maximalism and branding, right? Like however, I don't know how many years ago it was, like five years ago, all the big fashion houses started going from their like historical word marks, updating them and making them like much more simple and.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Balenciaga.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And there, there's like 10, 10 different examples.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  And so this, this move almost feels a little bit like lagging in some ways where I actually like that Instagram logo was like, it, it, it did feel dated, but it was so distinct.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, all that being said, uh, people see the Instagram word marks so much that this is going to be normalized probably within days and people will just forget about it.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  So I sent a different treatment that I thought they should go with.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Declined. We can pull this up. It's right, right.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's not too late.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  They could.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  This is their first time updating it, but I could see them updating it again tomorrow.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  They like your version, so.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  I think that would speak to me personally a little bit better. Uh, but you know, their, their, their treatment, it's a choice. It's clean. Uh, no, I, I think this is, uh.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Trey says, look, I'm not a fan of change. This is a war on history.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  He's just blanking.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Hating change.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's actually, that's such a funny, perfect take because that's people's reactions to almost every logo change. It's like, look, I understand that you want a new logo, but personally I'm just against change.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  I'm just against change. That's hilarious. Uh, yeah. Uh, this seems like a pretty, a pretty minor, uh, minor iteration. So congrats to them. I'm sure, I, I, I think this will be well, well received. Uh, I wonder if there's going to be more brand, uh, unpacking around this. Is this, is there a message like, will this, will this new logo ultimately be tied to like Mark Zuckerberg's vision for AI? Is there more, uh, is there more discourse that will come from like what the future of Instagram means, what the mission and values of the company are in this era? Is there something deeper here?

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The interesting thing is like, they really just, they just tried to combine like a new logo and the old logo.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  It's very readable. I, I, I think it's fine. It, it has a little bit of articulation, a little bit of special.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  I, I, yeah, I disagree on the, on the readability part, like the, the, the S, which they're taking from the historical word mark is way less readable in the new version.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  But I, again, it's such an iconic. A lot of people are saying the R looks like a Z.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. When I see the, when I see the, the S, I see the Tor logo for some reason. I see an onion.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  An image of this.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I do too.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  A little bit like an onion sitting there.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Onion mode.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  What are they trying to message us with? That's supplemental messaging, right?

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Instagzam says, uh, E Z E. Yeah, readable. Tone says, that R is so, so bad.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  I'm getting, I'm getting dragged.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Instagzam.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Instagwam says, Michelle. Uh, it's got layers for sure.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  You know what company has a great logo? Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure with the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Cisco has.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Matthew says, lol, Jordy just never learned cursive. Uh, the original logo is cursive. Hmm. I'm saying that that is a, to me, more readable than this, this, uh, Frankenstein. But it'll be fine.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Did Louis Vuitton ever do the, uh, the clean rebrand? It looks like they might have. Um, is this the actual Louis Vuitton logo? I mean, they still have the classic LV, but I think they did.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  But the word mark is.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  I think they were a participant in the new word mark. Um, in like the, the, the clean sans serif font. Um, I think it's time to move away from that. And I, and I think, you know, they're, they're taking risks here. Uh, I'll, I'll defend it and I think it will grow on me. Uh, it's also not the, like Instagram's been through a number of, of rebrandings and iterations. So we'll see. But speaking of Louis Vuitton, Louis Vuitton collaborated with Singer and created this insane Singer x Louis Vuitton collaboration for a nine 11 that looks like a handbag.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it, they're calling it the most tacky car.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  I was, I didn't know where you were going to go. I knew, I saw this all over the, all over the feed. I knew we were going to be talking about it, but I didn't know where you'd sit.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Why is it tacky? It looks pretty.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, let's play this video.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  This isn't that tacky. I like the color. You don't like the color? The blue wheels are tacky? That, this part looks nice.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, okay.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  The bag.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  The interior is just brutal.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  The stick is pretty cool.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  The hood with the straps.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  This part's sort of crazy. Yeah, this part's.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Helmets? I, I don't hate the helmet.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's two, there's, there's multiple cars.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's another version that doesn't have blue wheels. It's a little more subdued, but.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  It is, um, so to me, part of the reason why it looks like, you know, a monstrosity is that it feels like they just, it, it feels like AI slop IRL.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. I was.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and to me, it's not, it's not actually.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Wouldn't surf with that surfboard, Jordy?

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  But the problem is like, the problem is like, I, I, I think that if Porsche had collabed with LV, may, there would have been, like, it, it would have been toned down like a lot and probably be.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  They did, right? Didn't, didn't Porsche do a collab recently? Uh, and we asked, uh, we, we, we talked about this.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  You're talking about the Toy Story collab?

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Oh, that one was really good. I like that one. But I, I'm going back further.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just saying like,

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  this, this is not, this is not sanctioned by, this is like, to me, like a tacky unauthorized collab.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  And, uh,

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  I know exactly the kind of person that would, would buy this.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  They, they.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  And I'm happy for them or sorry this happened.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Uh, this, when I saw this car, I, I was thinking that it, it feels less like something that you would drive and more like an art piece that you would put in a, in a house that has glass that you look through.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Vladimir says that the singer looks like BDSM plus Hampton's inheritance minus taste.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Oh, because of all the leather straps. Wow. That is wild. Um.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe they just don't believe that taste is the new moat.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  And they're just like fading that whole take.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Uh, this, this is the one I was thinking of. The, the.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Amy says buckles on the hood. LOL. Perfect for a pilgrim.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Uh, it was the Amy Leon Door, ALD Porsche 993 Turbo that, uh, we, we discussed and uh, I think you were skeptical about as well. Not big on these collabs.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I think, I think the main thing is they just went like 300% too hard.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  They did. Yeah. It is.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Like it's not subtle.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  It is very aggressive.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  How do I add this?

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Avery says the shift boot is pretty bad. Not gonna lie.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Let me see. Yeah, the ALD was was much more subdued now that I'm looking at it. We can pull up these images.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are saying next level gluttony. Aspirated slop.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  People do not like it. Well, it's not for everyone. It feels more like an art piece that you put in a in a luxury apartment that has glass between a seating area, like a poker room and a garage.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Like in Dubai.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  In Dubai. Yes, bro. It's it. Oh, it's Chubai. That's what you're referring.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  This is Chubai.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Okay, I understand now. But yeah, pull up the pictures of the the ALD Porsche that was on the official Porsche YouTube channel, so must be real.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Someone else says that's the ugliest display of good craftsmanship I've seen in years. Yeah, what what they've accomplished clearly was incredibly difficult. And they executed their plan seemingly very well. It's just that the plan was was was way too much.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Okay, pull up the ALD Porsche 993 Turbo collab video. Because I want you to see, I want you, I want your review. You gotta pick one. You're either driving driving Louis Vuitton or ALD. Which one you going with, Jordy?

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this was an actual collab between ALD and Porsche. And it was much, much, much more subtle.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  It was more subtle.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  And very well done, and the creative is well done.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  I thought this was.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't own anything from from ALD to my knowledge. I've never

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  been a part of been a part of that brand, but I I liked this collab a lot.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Okay, within this video, so you're going ALD over Louis Vuitton, over LV, correct? You're going ALD over LV. If you had to pick between those two?

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Hundred percent.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Within this video, are you going ALD 911 or are you going flock of sheep? Which one would you take if there if you're offered, you can either have the flock of sheep or the Porsche?

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  How many sheep?

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Look at how many sheep there are. There's at least 20. Look at those.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  I think you gotta go. I think you gotta go with the sheep.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  You gotta go with the sheep. Okay. I don't know. I don't know how much.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, I'm hoping that I'm hoping that the flock is quite a bit bigger. But if you threw if you throw in the sheepdogs and and with the sheep. I think you gotta go with the sheep.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Okay, how?

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Shell says sheeps are useless. Trey says those are nice sheep. I agree. They look like fantastic sheep.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Okay, we're gonna find out how much a flock of sheep costs.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Ben says that was a very wolf answer.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Okay, about 50 ordinary sheep in California, you're gonna spend about $20,000. That's for 40, 48 breeding ewes and two rams.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you're saying I should take the ALD.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  911.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  911. Put it on, bring a trailer.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  And then you can buy 500 sheep.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  A billion sheep.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Not a billion sheep.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  No, but I would I would lever up.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  I would lever up on the flock.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  You're leveraging up.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Okay, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or sorry. Or automating business workflows. Codex.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Satyrus Robotics, which is the company that makes the

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  what do we call it? The Centaur is in the YouTube chat, and they say I pay around $300 a sheep.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Icelandic Saint.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  Cross. So they don't need share shearing. Good to know. We got sheep alpha in the chat.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  We got some other.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, they're they're saying the sheep don't depreciate at the same rate.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Well.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  But honestly, that.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  They reproduce. So with your 500 sheep, if you have the right, if you have the right mix of ewes and ewes and rams, male and female sheep, you could potentially grow your flock into the billions, correct?

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  You could become a a full time sheep farmer.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  Sheep billion.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Scale it up. Yeah. The new like shrimp farming hustle is is sheep farming for sure. The last one here is, I guess, the Supreme 911, which that seems not authentic.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Nick in the team chat says I'm a sheep the same way Odysseus is a sheep.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  What does that mean?

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  People think he's a sheep, but he's really an absolute dog.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  What in the slop is this?

• 33:27John Coogan?

  I can't even.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Get that out of here.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway. Let's do, let's do some other stories. New bombshell reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that North Korea has built a secret workforce inside American companies using stolen identities, AI, and accomplices in the United States to cheat its way into remote jobs and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars back to Kim Jong Un's regime. It's a fascinating story. The Wall Street Journal article is posted. It's a 30 minute documentary. They spent over a year investigating this. The FBI says that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers applying for jobs, applying for jobs across America.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  After a year long investigation, the Journal obtained a trove of leaked browser histories, emails, calendars, and screen recordings from one cell of workers, providing a remarkable look at how the operation actually works. The North Koreans apply for jobs at enormous scale. One cell tracked by the Journal applied to more than 1,000 companies over just three months, using AI in nearly every step. And in the documentary, they show a product that is basically clearly, they will leave a voice agent running while they're being interviewed in a technical interview. Give the answer when asked about a particular technology, if they are proficient, they will simply have AI look up the answer. Give the answer to the interviewer, get the get the job. And in some cases, they're using

• 34:58John Coogan?

  real Americans as frontmen. Basically, they will do the interview. And then they will ship a remote laptop to say, hey, you're a new, you're our new remote worker. You are qualified to work on our software engineering team at this small company. We'll send you a laptop and then you just collect a check, send half of it to the North Koreans, and you don't have to do any work. So it's like passive income, free money for you, the Americans.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  So you said they're real Americans, but they're not patriots.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm here.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Well, I the the documentary is pretty gut wrenching, like the the the individual who they talked to, who who was participating in this obviously is probably going to see some some legal consequences for this, but it did seem like he had a very, very tough go and got into a very rough situation to be in that situation. It was certainly not his first choice.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Ryan in the chat has a hot take. Kim Jong Un is such a lovable rascal. It's hard to stay mad at him.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  The operation also relies on help from inside the United States. North Korean IT workers pay American facilitators, they're called facilitators, to host company laptops in the United States, allowing the actual workers overseas to remotely connect to them while appearing to be employees working domestically. Also, the North Korean workers, they go to non extradition countries, so they'll go to China and Russia and a few other countries. And then from there, they will be remoting into an American laptop. So it just looks like, okay, they're like the web traffic is coming from. It's not coming from North Korea, but it's coming from a country where if the FBI says, hey, can you send us this person, they're a criminal. That country says, no way, we're not, we're not sending them to you.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  So for one job paying $75,000 a year, he said he and the North Koreans split split the salary 50 50. The workers also use stolen American identities to pass employment screenings, often juggling multiple identities simultaneously and holding down several jobs under each name. This all boomed during COVID and the remote work boom. And the scale of the operation is enormous. Some North Korean IT workers earn as much as $300,000 a year. The Treasury Department says North Korean says the North Korean government can seize as much as 90% of the wages earned by its overseas IT workers. And recently estimated that these operations generated nearly $800 million in 2024 alone.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty big. So, the Journal's 30-minute documentary titled "Infiltrated: North Korea's Secret U.S. Workforce" follows the operation in detail. It's a fascinating watch, and I highly recommend that you check it out. So, go take a look.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it's important to ask, like, are they doing a good job? Like, because presumably, they're not just, like, hacking.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Wow, really? You're gonna steel man this? Okay. I see where your loyalties lie.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  No, it's like, there's like the skit where it's like, oh, we're gonna rob the bank, and we're gonna get a job there, and over 30 years, they're gonna deposit the money straight into our bank account every two weeks.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  And what happens at the end?

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  We walk out the front door.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like, oh, they're like hacking, and they're stealing American dollars by working at the companies.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Yes. So, there are sanctions, and because of those sanctions, America is not allowed to do business with North Korea in any capacity, including this one. So, this is sanctioned.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  But like, seemingly, it could be much worse, right? They could just be like hacking the company.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. But they could also be doing both. Because once you let a North Korean IT worker in your systems, they could be planting all sorts of spyware. A very dangerous situation to be in. But, yeah, a wild, wild, wild story. So, everyone, if you're running a small business with some remote headcount, make sure to ask everyone to post something negative about Kim Jong-un every day to prove their loyalty, I guess, or something. But there is, it opens with a very, very funny clip of someone doing a remote Zoom interview and asking someone to say something negative about Kim Jong-un, and the guy's like, "Oh, I can't hear you. I can't, I can't hear you. I can't possibly say that." Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change

• 39:02John Coogan?

  the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. A new luxury hotel canceled a YouTuber's $4,663 stay. Then came the viral feud, reports The Wall Street Journal. A dispute between Aman, which we've talked about a lot on the show, and content creator Ryan Walker illustrates the growing tension between commercial enterprises and influencers. It's a fascinating story, and somebody's gotta stand up for the Aman. Somebody has to do it.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm ready. Honestly, honestly, I don't, I don't think the Aman actually needs that much standing up for.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  No. The Wall Street Journal broke it down in great detail, and it was bad for this guy. Anyway, let's go through it. So...

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Should we, should we, should we pull up a little of Ryan's video?

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. The social media video is titled...

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  He probably should have deleted it by now, because it is extremely misleading.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  It is crazy. It's still up. It's in the timeline.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  And overly dramatic, and not representative of what a normal guest experience would be like.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is, it is odd. Let me, let me drop it a few different places. See if we can get this in here. Boom. So, The Wall Street Journal reports that it was supposed to be the hottest hotel opening of the year. Let's play a little bit of his video.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  You don't know me. I am a luxury hotel reviewer here on YouTube. I specialize in very honest reviews of the world's best properties. I'm not gonna give away too much as to what happened. I want you to watch the footage.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  And this is a cool thesis. Like, he pays for the hotels himself. He doesn't get paid by the hotel for the review. The hotel doesn't pay for his stay, and consequently, he can be more independent. This was the Doug DiMiro strategy. For years, Doug DiMiro said, "I'm not taking press cars. I'm not going to your press event. I'm going to borrow the car from just someone who owns it, and I'm gonna be able to drive it how I wanna drive it, review it how I wanna review it, and if you're Lamborghini or Ferrari or any other company, you're not gonna be able to have any, any thumb on the scale of my review." Very good in concept, but the execution goes a little bit off the rails in this particular

• 41:20John Coogan?

  video. So, you can see him pulling up to a guardhouse that looks woefully unfinished. It looks very, very rough.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Do you remember Ryan Walker?

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yes, I know you. Allow me to verify your information, okay?

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay, thank you. What's going on?

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Drama.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  This is such a strange area. It's kind of like... They say cannot enter? Apparently, our driver's saying in Spanish that they are saying he cannot enter or pass.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Could be Mr. Walker. We don't have your reservation.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Do you need the number?

• 41:59Speaker 03

  No, we don't have your reservation.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  All right, we can pause. Let's, let's get into, let's get into the Journal's piece. Long story short, that video sparked a bunch of, you know, there's, there's, there's thousands of comments on there. People trashing the properties, you know, basically fully taking his side, but he did not...

• 42:21John Coogan?

  And his side is basically that he showed up, he had a reservation, they didn't let him in, the place didn't seem together. He had a bad experience, and he shares that with his YouTube audience, gets a lot of views for it. But the Journal dug in and provided a whole bunch more interesting perspectives. So, let's go through it. The travel world was abuzz over the coming August 1st launch of Aman Vare, the first Mexican resort from Aman, the multi-billion dollar ultra-luxury hospitality group, whose mythos is built on seamless service, total tranquility, and fierce guest confidentiality. The new location is set within Baja California's, Baja California Sewers, private Costa Palmas community, and

• 43:05John Coogan?

  the resort promised 18 beachfront casitas. So, only 18 keys, a very small hotel, but very luxurious. So, less than a week after its debut, the hotel was the center of a viral controversy in that YouTube video. He said he tried to check in for a one-night stay, and he was turned away. So, an Aman spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal, they went on record, and they really clarified a lot. They said, "The deceptively edited video created by someone unauthorized to be on our property does not reflect the circumstances of the, of the incident accurately. Their dueling accounts reflect a new reality where cameras are always rolling, virality can outpace truth, and public perception is shaped

• 43:46John Coogan?

  less by what happened than who posts first." So, on July 7th, Walker booked a stay at Aman Vare. The YouTuber, with more than 150,000 followers, pretty solid giant channel, has built a brand around paying full price for hotel rooms to guarantee honest reviews standing out amid influencers accepting free trips in exchange for positive content. He says, "I'm honest and transparent. I'll tell you exactly what to expect and why." He had previously paid $26,000 for a Four Seasons yacht trip that he panned in May.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  And sorry for the spoiler. He's not honest or transparent.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  You're so upset. The same month, Walker posted a positive review of Aman Tokyo. Then, he traveled to Aman Vare on August 3rd. To hear Walker tell it in the video he showed the next day, he was a victim of a hospitality nightmare.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  And, and one thing that's, I think, very funny right away is, so, so, you're gonna review this hotel by a one-night stay, which, which means, like, you know, maybe you check in, it doesn't look like he wasn't gonna get an early check-in either way. Let's say you check in at 4:00. You gotta be out of your room by 11:00?

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's not...

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  You got a five-hour window where you don't even know, you, how could you, how could you accurately review the property?

• 44:59John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  When you're missing that incredible window from 11:00 to 4:00, right?

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  You just, you just don't have any context, right? How can I trust your review? So, I'm already, my guard is up.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  My guard is up. So, his video, which rapidly surged to more than 750,000 views, shows his vehicle approaching an unfinished wooden guard hut with stud walls still visible on the outside. In the interactions that follow, which appear to take place between two different gates, staff recognize him, inform him that he has no reservation, and according to Walker, eventually call the police to escort him away. Sounds terrible. As Walker drives off, he finds an email he says he missed, sent the day before. It apologizes for canceling his stay due to scaled-back capacity during opening week. Not looking closely at the timestamp, he tells viewers the email arrived late the previous night. When later pressed by the Journal, Walker revised his timeline, saying it arrived the

• 45:54John Coogan?

  previous morning. Walker did not amend the timeline in his video or in a subsequent livestream. The internet quickly took Walker's side. Viewers of his YouTube channel, including people who identified as Aman loyalists and travel industry professionals, expressed disbelief. "Will never book another Aman property again," read one of the more, more than 5,000 comments, many of which expressed similar sentiments. Aman spokesperson said the company does not comment on bookings. "Inspect the footage closely, though," and questions surface, notably around an absence of the police invoked in the video's title. Aman said it didn't call police and showed the Journal an incident report that made no mention of law enforcement. In the video, at one point in the encounter, a staff member says, "I need to call the

• 46:39John Coogan?

  police now." Walker sees her on the phone, says off-camera, "Yep, she's calling the police right now, but that might not have been related to him whatsoever." So, that's like a very confusing situation. Later, he told the Journal he did not see police arrive on site. When the Journal told Walker that Aman said it had not called the police, he said he hoped that was true and that the information would make him reconsider how the result, the resort had handled the situation. There is also the arrival gate that does not look like a typical five-star welcome. And we can pull up a picture of the actual welcome gate, because it does look pretty ramshackle. The Aman spokesperson said Walker bypassed the main entrance and...

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  He was looking for trouble. My theory is he knows exactly what he was doing. And the other thing is, it also came out that he, they had reached out, they had called him, they had WhatsApped him, they had made numerous efforts to make contact, and I just think he wanted, he wanted the drama.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  Wyatt in the chat says, I want to have my hotels call the police on YouTubers.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  So the Aman spokesperson said Walker bypassed the main entrance, ending up at staff access points instead. Ambient audio in Walker's footage captures someone saying, quote, "This is the employee entrance." Walker told the Journal, he had never heard the remark and that his driver followed GPS directions. So the first entrance showed in the video. You can see it there. So, internal documents provided by Walker show the resort emailed him five days before his visit, telling him it was unable to allow stays involving content coverage until a month-long media blackout, and suggested he postpone his travel. Walker replied that the staff should consider him a standard guest. The property replied that it was prepared to welcome him, noting that he could post content after the media exclusivity

• 48:35John Coogan?

  window. So I'm sure they're doing a whole bunch of different press.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  So he comes during the first week, books one night, knows that he shouldn't be filming, still decides to film.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  And is effectively looking for trouble the entire time. And the crowd over on the Wall Street Journal loves it. The top-rated comment, "Aman, here I come. Any hotel that bans influencers is doing regular guests a great service."

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a big thing is that people go to certain places to not have cameras all over the place. And it's getting rarer and rarer. And if.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  It's so, it's so actually fascinating to look at the difference. YouTube comments are like, wow, I'm never gonna go to the Aman. And then Wall Street Journal is like,

• 49:18John Coogan?

  I'm booking now.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  "Walker is a complete tool," says Ray.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Edward says, "Seems Mr. Walker struggles with the truth."

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Second most highly rated comment.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  So Walker says he didn't.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  And then someone else says, "It takes a special sort of Jack, star, star, star, to make me side with the ultra-luxury resort with holistic wellness temples."

• 49:42John Coogan?

  Yep. But that's the case we're in. A spokesperson for Aman said the resort also sent him a message on WhatsApp.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  The Aman spokesperson said the resort refunded Walker's booking in full, pledged to cover additional travel and cancellation costs and help him rebook his stay. Walker said he received the refund but didn't take Aman up on the other reimbursements. He just showed up anyway. The dispute highlights growing tension between commercial enterprises and content creators looking to record on property. Jack Ezon, CEO of Luxury Travel Advisory Embark Beyond noted that hotels maintain the right to cancel reservations or deny access. He added that properties immediately after opening should be approached cautiously. You don't need to be the guinea pig. Give it six to eight months to grow, minimum. In this case, nearly every claim has a competing account. Did Aman Vary overreact to a content creator's opening week visit to prevent an honest review? Or did Walker turn a misunderstanding

• 50:36John Coogan?

  at the gate into a viral story? The luxury world may still value discretion. The internet values whoever speaks.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Ian in the X chat says, "Imagine staying on a 20-room property and having a YouTuber there. I would be seated." It's so true. I wouldn't be surprised if they update their policies. We got to talk about McDonald's before our first guest joins. In Wired, Reece Rogers says, "McDonald's built a 515-page dossier on me. It says I'll never stop eating there." He requested a copy of my data from the McDonald's loyalty program and received an extensive personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  This is amazing. Pulling up the.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  The actual article?

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  The actual article.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  "McDonald's secret sauce is really commercial surveillance," says Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy, a group that advocates for consumer protections. Privacy experts I spoke with said this level of detail may feel invasive, but it's fairly standard for how large companies in the US run their loyalty programs. The report contains specific pieces of personal information about you that were identified by searching McDonald's systems, which contain information about our customers. Tyler, you had the, the conclusion. What does McDonald's actually know about you? What does McDonald's know about an individual?

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  That they like hamburgers?

• 52:12John Coogan?

  That's basically the takeaway, right? Like, the takeaway is like, the number one most likely product is a large Diet Coke, then the spicy snack rack, then the Grinch McShaker fry large.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  We should figure out other companies that, that have these types of, that have this type of data and, and request.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Full reports?

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need our own reports. I would love to read.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  You want your 10,000-page report on what you like from Arowan?

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  You're really gonna go there?

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Because I couldn't possibly know by looking at previous orders.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  Glass-bottled water.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic is apparently in talks to buy Descartes for $6 billion.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Get image generation.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  We've had a bunch of awesome conversations with, with Dean over at Descartes. He's always, he's, very, very early, he was willing to do live demos of their product, like, in interviews, completely on, you know, we didn't even test with him before the show. He was just ripping them live. So always had a ton of confidence in the product. And they've been just cooking.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  They were valued at $4 billion a quarter ago. Himanshu has some extra context here, says, "Descartes could be one of the first AI labs focused on world video models to be acquired by a frontier AI lab. I think this also could mark an initial phase where frontier labs start treating world models as a major strategic capability alongside inference optimization as a major offering from Descartes." Yeah, interesting to imagine how this actually links to the core thesis of, you know, B2B and enterprise and, and coding. But certainly, certainly an amazing technology that feels like on the verge of, of a breakout. The demos

• 54:07John Coogan?

  are amazing, but we haven't had the, like, Ghibli moment for world models yet. Like, it's very much a prototype, demo, video, go and see what it's, looks like. But we've talked to a lot of people, Oliver Cameron and Fei-Fei Li, about world models. There's a lot of optimism about how this all plugs into the AGI pursuits of the frontier labs. Well, we have our next guest already in the waiting room, so let's bring in Igor Pavushkin. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent platform provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web servers, databases, and more. Well, Railway automatically takes care, takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And we'll bring

• 54:51John Coogan?

  in our next guest.

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Hey, guys. Nice to have me.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on the show. Welcome. Congratulations on the fundraiser. But maybe let's go back in time. Tell us a little bit about your history and journey to starting River AI. And Jordi already has the gong ready, so just tell us the fundraising announcement, I guess.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, we just managed to raise $1.1 billion for River AI.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  They broke the gong.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  He broke the mallet. He broke the mallet. The chosen one. You are the chosen one.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  See if it, if it works out. So, thank you, guys. I started my career as a physicist. I was really interested in understanding the universe.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  But then realized that there was something really big happening, which was AI.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Started to happen. And I think AlphaGo was really the moment when I started to feel like, wow, I gotta switch, gotta switch and learn how to do AI. So managed to join DeepMind. It was almost 10 years ago.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 55:57Speaker 04

  I worked there on WaveNet. We trained a StarCraft agent that was really strong. So got into reinforcement learning there and then switched to OpenAI at one point. Was really interested in reasoning, coding with RLMs, which turns out to be something that works, which is pretty crazy to see. And then ended up co-founding XAI together with Elon. So I thought it was time for, for another frontier lab. I'm always in favor of more diversity in AI, more, more companies doing different kinds of things. So I was happy to, to support him building up, building up XAI. And now with River AI, we're kind of taking that to the extreme. So I feel like the way we've been building AI is maybe not the way of the future. A few large corporations building these super powerful models, everybody

• 56:40Speaker 04

  has to pay them by the token. We want to figure out how we can distribute AI to everybody in a way, in a way where you own it, you're able to shape your own AI systems. Maybe you have the inference running in your home or in your office. That would be the, the best achievements, if you can figure out how to do that efficiently. And we're running a few different bets on how to help people build up their own AI. So we're helping companies build AI with the River API. That product's already out. So if you go on river.ai/api, you can log in and you can start training models based on open weights. So we support all kinds of very powerful open weight models. And then we're also using that platform to build out personal AI agents that are increasingly personalized to you. So as you're using them, they understand you better and better. And it should really feel like you're, you're

• 57:25Speaker 04

  building the AI, you're, you're creating it.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Can we go back to your time at DeepMind, working on video games? I'm so interested as, in video games as a benchmark. I saw someone using Codex to play Slay the Spire. And I've played a lot of Slay the Spire. It's, it's pretty difficult. Now, it's a, it's not a fast twitch game, but I'm wondering if you, like, how would you, how would you think about the value of video games as a benchmark? There was another story about the FAA hiring traffic, flight traffic controllers who had previously played video games. So there's some sort of transfer where if you're good at video games and maybe SimCity, you might be good as a flight traffic controller. And you could imagine a situation where AI

• 58:13John Coogan?

  gets really good at playing video games and then becomes more useful in a whole bunch of different, you know, work, work-related tasks. But it feels like the gaming benchmarks are still toys. They're fun. There are people just doing them off on the side. But how do you think about the role of, of solving video games or, or testing models on video games in the modern era?

• 58:37Speaker 04

  I think it's a great idea, but I might be biased. I used to play a lot of video games growing up. I still do some gaming from time to time. I think it's awesome. And I think the idea here is you want to test your AI on system on problems that it hasn't necessarily been trained on directly.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  So you want to have some level of generalization and games are amazing because they have all kinds of complex things. You might have to do all kinds of problem solving. You might have to develop on the fly and it's kind of measurable. How much progress you're making. So if you're getting to the end of the game, you're doing well. You're making progress from one level to the next. You know, that's, you know, that's measurable. So and they have many, many properties that make them pretty ideal for measuring AI capabilities. And the craziest thing today is we have these powerful agents that have been trained mostly on coding tasks.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  And I give them some code base and they ask them to, to fix a bug or develop a new feature and they go out and they do all this tool calling to figure out how to do it and rewrite your files. But then you can also hook them up to a game.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  And give them an API like here's how you control the units in the game or here's how you manage your resources or here's how you move around in Pokemon and other games like that. And I think it's crazy that these models are so capable at playing games and just shows you how much we've how far we've come in terms of generality and. Yeah.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where are the shortcomings though? Because, you know, I can think of one, which is like with a game, like you can, you basically run an agent, have the agent play a game, infinite, effectively infinite amount of times. It can fail a lot. It can learn, things like that. One of the challenges is in the real world, like let's say someone was making a sales agent, like an agent that wants to help you get customers. You can't necessarily just let the sales agent run wild in the real world as a business at least, because you know, it's going to mess up a lot. A bunch of customers are going to have a bad experience and you could make, maybe the agent gets slightly better from that experience, but you could have lost like a bunch of potential customers or pissed a bunch of people off or things like that. And so how do you think about making the jump from

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  agents that are very effective at playing these games in a generalized way to agents that can be effective at long-running tasks in the real world that involve effectively complex groups that are third parties?

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question because most of the training today is done with synthetic environments. So it's you're you're building up these RL environments inside of your AI team and you're training the models with reinforcement learning. And so they kind of go for simulation. You could say, and they're not really interacting with the real world when you're training them. And I think one of the big frontiers right now, one of the big developments you might see is the training moving into an online setting where the models are directly interacting with the users, with the companies that are using them. And as they're solving tasks, as they're figuring out what to do, we update the weights of the model. They get better and better. And it's a big research problem right now. So nobody knows how to pull this off in general and the best agents, they're all, all been trained in simulation so far.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  But it's one of the things that we're working on at River AI. So if any of the viewers are interested in doing some research on this, reach out.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like we're not that far, at least in the gaming sense, to you know, in the, in the training step, just create an environment that's just like, here's a Steam account and a credit card. Go buy every game and try and, you know, get the platinum trophy or like, or complete the game and, and feed that in. But the, the gaming thing is sort of a pure benchmark at this point because it feels like the labs haven't identified it as something that really they want to focus on. Can you talk about the trade-off between like bench hacking for good and bench hacking for bad? Because there's the game that the labs are playing, but then there's also like, if you show up with a product and, and, and it does the task and it

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  classifies all of my taxes, I don't care if you bench hacked on that as long as it gets the job done, right? And so there's this push and pull between those. How are you thinking about communicating that with your customers, your, the, the companies you work with who might be fine with a model that's only good at their specific tasks?

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I think that's a big opportunity for any company out there today because you own your own data that is affected from your customers or from the work that you're doing. And if you eval the systems on that data, this is like the perfect eval for you. If you're able to improve your models based on that, you might be able, you might end up owning the best model in the world for your particular task. So I think that's actually huge for companies. They should be building these specialized evals and they should be trying to build their own models. And the River API makes it easy to fine tune your own model, given your eval, given your own training environments. But in, in general, when it comes to AGI and improving the intelligence of these models, I think we want to hit them with some surprising benchmarks.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  If you want to measure generality, then throw in a game that it hasn't been trained on, that it's never seen before. I think that's a very, very interesting measure to see like how, how far out of distribution can they go? Can they do interesting things?

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  We haven't trained them for.

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  Huge, huge fundraising round. AMP is in. We've talked to Ajnay a bunch. And he has a very interesting thesis around actually going much deeper in the stack, acquiring compute. How are you thinking about the, the uses of those funds? Because I could see coming to you as a company and, and knowing that you have the capital to go and really optimize all the way down to the stack and become a NeoCloud, build a, build a data center for me or help me with the more expensive CapEx piece of the puzzle. At the same time, like I don't really have a rule, like a, a, a solid frame of if I come to you and I say, I want to fund, I want to fine tune a near frontier, open source model.

• 1:04:24John Coogan?

  Is that actually that expensive? And wouldn't you just ask me to pay for that upfront? So that doesn't seem like a huge capital cost to you, but what is the shape of the, of the cost that you are planning on incurring over the next couple of years?

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  Yes. So we're charging the customers, we buy the token. So if you have a fine tuning run you want to do, if you have an RL run, you only pay for what you do. Or if you burst up, choose some kind of model, training run size that you, that's perfect for your task. Some customers, they end up training a really, really small, really fast efficient model because they've got the best data for the task and they end up beating the largest and most expensive models. Yeah. Other customers want something more general or they want to utilize these larger open weight models like KIMI K3.

• 1:05:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  And others are coming out. So that's a, that's a more expensive training run. But yeah, we obviously need a lot of access to GPUs to make that happen. The funding helps with that. But even if you have the funding today, you still need to get access to, to GPUs and GPU prices are increasing steadily. So I think what we're going to see is more and more investors collaborating with their portfolio companies around compute. Bringing up GPU capacity, distributing it among the portfolio companies. You know, some, maybe some of them need a little bit more in one month than others and so on and so forth. And it's a new kind of strategy that we're seeing, I think, to to deal with the fact that compute prices are, are going up with this much scarcity.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Would you say that's like one of the, one of the biggest sort of challenges for, for River at this point is just compute planning? I mean, we've seen it, we've seen the full spectrum now. We've seen SAM last year, you know, getting really, really, really aggressive. And then we saw, you know, earlier this year, Anthropic just sort of being caught off guard by the growth and it feels like that is as, as a CEO, you know, you're, you know.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  It's a completely new skill set for.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like a new, it's a.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  There was never a moment where Mark Benioff was like, I don't have enough servers for Salesforce, I imagine. Like they were way different problem set, but now it's, yeah, demand planning is like a key, key, key skill set for a CEO.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's a totally new skill set that's super important. And it's so difficult because as a startup, by definition, you have this variance for the future. You don't know if you're going to grow by 10x or if you're going to go by 3x

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  over the next 12 months, right? So you have to play this really, really difficult poker game to figure out. I know what is the right allocation for me or maybe create some deals that are more flexible. So you can actually scale up dynamically as the, as the demand is, is growing. So I think we're going to see more and more of that, of that happening. And yeah, so, so we're bringing up quite a bit of GPU capacity and it's pretty important both for research and also to power the API. So as more people are starting to tune their own models, it's becoming very, very popular now. A lot of companies are reaching out about wanting to build their own custom models that they own and kind of turn on their own data or using their own evals. So demand is going to keep going up, expect.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  How do you think about custom silicon over the next few years? YouTube, I believe, has a custom silicon chip for encoding video very efficiently. Because you upload one video, they need it in 360p, 480, 720, 4K HD. And then we saw Talos bake the weights of Llama, I believe, into their chip and proved that that was you know, exciting enough that AMD acquired the company. And I'm wondering if you imagine a future where a company comes to you, like, you know, you can imagine like the Visa network is like, we want to run a transformer-based model on every transaction. And it's going to be like trillions of prompts effectively or more. And so

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  custom silicon might actually make sense, but then the models jump forward and you can do batches and there's, there's so many different trade-offs. How, how do you think custom silicon will play in the diffusion story of AI?

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we'll see more and more custom silicon, obviously, coming like Nvidia and AMD are also going to do extremely well, especially on the training side. It's really unmatched what they're able to do. On the inference side, there is some room for optimization because we believe that with personal AI agents coming up, so this is kind of the next evolution of agents after coding agents, which have been super successful. We expect that the demand for tokens will go up even further. So to the point where we don't even know how we're going to serve all these tokens for everyone, given limited data center capacity, given all the bottlenecks in the data center supply chain. So I think we've got to be smart and start to develop some custom silicon specifically

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  for inference of these personal AI agents. I can imagine being much more power efficient with these kinds of chips. Can we maybe bake some of the transformer architecture into the chip to kind of exploit the fact that we know what kinds of models we're going to run. So that will make it more specialized. You might not be able to run any kind of model anymore. So Talos takes us to the extreme, so you can actually bake in the model weights. But today, you're not able to fit weights of very large models on a single chip that way. So that's the big bottleneck. So you're only able to do maybe eight billion parameters or something like that, whereas the best models have trillions of grams. So hopefully, we're going to see some chips that are able to run those top of the line models very, very efficiently.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Do we need more Neo Labs?

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Or, you know, basically, like, is there enough idea space that, you know, more people should be spinning up entirely new labs? I imagine a lot of the people that would be candidates to spin up labs themselves, you're probably trying to recruit. But are we past peak Neo Lab? Or are we just getting started?

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Hopefully, we're just getting started because this idea of building powerful coding agents, having APIs and so on, we all had this a few years ago at OpenAI and other places, that that would be the future. But now that it's actually arrived, I think all of us are feeling like this can be the end of the line. There has to be a different way to own and build AI systems. And so that means there are opportunities for research, there are opportunities for new kinds of business models. Totally new talents can move in. You know, somebody who doesn't have a big name in AI can do something really amazing today because they have to kind of have to think out of the box, come up with something that the AI expert that's been doing it for 10 years, they might not come up with it because it's such a wild idea. Right?

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  So that's, I think we're going to see a phase of innovation, totally new approaches to how AI systems are built, how you make use of them, and some really cool AI products as well for consumers. So that's what I'm looking forward the most.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What an exciting time. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, excited for the next one.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:11:18Speaker 04

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. 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. Our next guest is the founder of CoreWeave. We have Brandon McBee coming back on the show after an insane Q2. Congratulations. Give us the headline numbers. How'd you do in Q2?

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  Q2 was phenomenal for us, right? That couldn't have come in better. We're extremely excited with the performance of the business and balance of the year is just going to keep on improving from here.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  What's the biggest bottleneck now for you? Is anything changing based on all the data that you've collected over the first half of the year?

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  No, like, bottleneck remains supply chain, right? Like, that is the hardest part of this business and it's also what we're best at, right? We have 51 data centers in operation today. We know how to navigate this supply chain. We know how to get this stuff online to deliver declines, do so on time. It's immensely challenging, right? Like, this is the most important commodity on the planet right now and CoreWeave is singular in its ability to deliver the best performing infrastructure out there.

• 1:12:35Jordi Hays?

  You guys are spending a lot of time doing demand planning. Demand is obviously off the charts. What are you, we just had Igor on from River. We were talking with him about this sort of like new skill set that technology founders need to have around demand planning, right? You have a, let's say you have a Neo Lab, you're developing products. It's very hard to gauge how much demand you're going to have for them. The right strategy over the last couple of years was just to assume that demand was near infinite and sort of plan against that. But for smaller companies that, you know, have smaller balance sheets, it really feels like that is going to make or break a lot of these companies, especially, you know,

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Neo Labs, that, yeah, that, you know, their margin profiles and all these other factors are going to come down to how well they can predict their own, their own demand for their products.

• 1:13:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I completely aligned with that scenario, but I'll probably take it a step further. Like, what happens after that demand is planned for us? How do you finance it, right? And for us, that's been just an absolutely critical skill set that we've assembled team-wise over the last six years. And the latest financing that we did, DDTL 5, was a term one B offering. That was a fantastic example of that ability to work with demand planning and get the right financing in place for that demand. That was the first facility that we've done where the contract duration is actually shorter than the amortization period, right?

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  In other words, it asks the investors in that facility to take on renewal risk on compute versus all of our prior facilities. Investors were fully covered by the original contract value, right? If it was a $5 billion loan, there was $7 billion worth of revenue sitting behind it, right? Now it's opposite, like, it flipped. And what that enables us to do is to spend more time in the shorter duration contract market because we just proved that it's financeable. And for us, that type of client is predominantly enterprise, right? The AI lab cohort, the hyperscale cloud cohort, they like to sit in the five to six

• 1:14:53Speaker 05

  year range because they know that they need that compute, they need it scaled, they need it for that long duration. Enterprise is at the shorter end of that curve. And as you guys know, historically, we've been really focused on the longer duration contracts. But having this proof point in the market now that we can go finance these shorter duration contracts is really important to us. So that, I think that goes hand in hand with the demand planning aspect.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  There's a ton of hyperscalers, I mean, that have been building data centers for a long time. There's a ton of Neo Clouds. How are you positioning differentiation? I imagine that demand is so strong that it's not the biggest thorn in your side by any means explaining the value, but it feels like it always has to be in the back of your mind as if demand ever softens, we want to be differentiated. We want to be differentiated even in a market that's tight on demand. So how are you positioning CoreWeave specifically?

• 1:15:49Speaker 05

  Look, I think it's widely recognized by our clients, by third-party analysts, by our suppliers even, that we are the best representation of this technology on the planet. So that demonstration of value will continue to be through our technology product. It'll be through our timeliness in deliveries, our ability to scale across all different types of workloads, whether it's training, fine tuning, inference. It'll be in delivering the best performance adjusted plots and tokens out there.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Jensen was on CNBC recently talking about a $500 billion deal with a lot of big banks. What was your interpretation of what that deal means for the industry overall, where that project is going and how CoreWeave fits into that story?

• 1:16:43Speaker 05

  I think it's wonderful for the space, right? It just continues to show the amount of capital that's willing to underwrite the build out of intelligence. As you guys know, we've been at the forefront of financing this market for years. I think having more capital in here is just great for the sector.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  How have you been coaching people through, there's some folks that are like, oh, I'm worried this is like dot com. There's other people that I'm worried about this being like the mortgage, you know, boom. What pieces are different this time? What pieces are, okay, we are actually borrowing from this particular build out. A lot of people go to railroads. There was, you know, a huge amount of value created. There were booms and busts in various times. What, how are you dealing with the various critics of the build out?

• 1:17:33Speaker 05

  So one of those points, I feel like we talked about this last time I was on, I believe, was depreciation or useful life of compute.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:41Speaker 05

  And, you know, the, the variable that we were able to introduce and highlight in our earnings is the A100 SKU.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  Right. This is a 2020 SKU.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  And we still have clients coming in asking specifically for that SKU, right? It's not like they're asking for Hopper and like, oh, we only have Ampere or they're asking for Blackwell, we only have Ampere, right? Like they're saying, no, we want Ampere for workloads because that is the most performance platform for their workload. And we signed a contract in the quarter that goes out through 2029, right? That, that is now an implicit.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  So be a nine-year-old chip by the end.

• 1:18:19Speaker 05

  Nine-year, nine-year chip, right? And this is a take or pay fixed turn, uh, fixed price contract and pricing on A100s for us have held, uh, solid since early 2025.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  Right. It's like, I, I, I think one of those big criticisms was, well, this is two or three year compute and it's useless after that. We've been very consistent that six-year depreciation life is accurate for this infrastructure. And I, I think that there is really strong opportunity for it to have material useful life beyond that. And we, we see it every day, right? And it, it's, it's just in the way that AI workloads are being optimized across different SKUs. And it's this concept like there isn't one AI model to rule them all, or there isn't one GPU to rule them all. It's just this matrix of different sizes of workloads relative to different sizes of GPUs where it's filling in across.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. My thesis has been that there, there are AI workloads that get, that get built out, maybe a recommender system, a basic text transformation system, a translation system. And then those will stay in place for a really long time and those will be used by more intelligent models. Um, but then there is the question of just, will the chips burn out? Has any thought changed there or is that pretty well understood?

• 1:19:37Speaker 05

  Right? Like this stuff is meant to run the data center. Um, it's meant to run for a long duration. We're not seeing any acceleration or burnout or like unexpected rates of errors. Uh, the, the infrastructure is doing great.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what is going on, on the, on the power side? I imagine there's a lot of people over the last year that have realized that, uh, how, how important power is to this, to this whole build out and are trying to front run, you know, players like yourself and get access to that power in hopes that they can resell it. I imagine the utilities are like somewhat sophisticated and at, at, at this point and then hopefully for a while will just, uh, call around and try to go directly to the operators. But like, what is actually, what can you share about like the current dynamics around that, that hunt for power?

• 1:20:32Speaker 05

  I would say the power market is very competitive, but there is power out there, right? And the bottleneck is less electrons. For us, it's more of powered shell, right? Or like delivered data center capacity. And that goes all the way down to the components that are in the data center, right? Like think of the backup battery supplies, transformers, et cetera. But it's also the people, right? Like electricians, uh, is a skilled trade that is a significant bottleneck for the industry, has been for some time, will continue to be for some time because that's a trade that takes years to develop the skill sets necessary to be able to work in a data center site. So I believe that that is going to remain more the bottleneck than power is right now. You're, look, absolutely correct.

• 1:21:17Speaker 05

  I, I can't count the number of emails I get a day from people I've never met before trying to offer us powered land and all across the US. Uh, but I, that is less of the bottleneck and it's more on delivered, uh, powered shell capacity.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Are you hiring electricians directly or does this go through subcontractors for specific projects?

• 1:21:43Speaker 05

  This predominantly goes through subcontractors.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:44Speaker 05

  Subcontractors.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  What are?

• 1:21:46Speaker 05

  We have a little bit of self-build.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 05

  Ourselves where like we're going out and sourcing GCs, contractors, et cetera. But for the most part, we lease capacity.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:56Speaker 05

  Um, and that, that's been the way that we've scaled the business.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  I imagine that there's a lot of folks in the organization that are technologists, they understand the technology and the hardware and the software and have everything pieces together. What are the other areas that you're hiring if somebody wants to join the, the CoreWeave organization that draws from a different pool of human capital or talent?

• 1:22:19Speaker 05

  Uh, going back to the point originally, financing, right? It's deeply important to the business. Um, you know, we've, we've done a fantastic job assembling a team up in New York. We've raised, uh, I think it's north of $40 billion in debt and equity over the last 24 months.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Yes. And are you pulling people from Wall Street, investment banking, hedge funds, consulting?

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Private equity, like all of the above?

• 1:22:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I'd say predominantly private equity, private credit.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:45Speaker 05

  Investment banking, guys with like deep financial backgrounds.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Speaker 05

  Uh, but look, we're, we're hiring across the business.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:52Speaker 05

  Right? It's engineering, it's physical deployment teams. Um, I think we're, it, it is, our HR organization's doing a great job. Let's put it that way.

• 1:23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Busy.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Uh, how, how domestic is the footprint? Um, there's a lot of nervousness about the build out in America and my default interpretation would be if there's a lot of pushback in America, like people don't want, mind waiting 500 milliseconds for LLM responses. So yeah, you can put them in space, but you can also put them in, you know, another country. Uh, how are you thinking about the international opportunity?

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  I think that's right, but I would, I'll qualify more in like on the county level, right? Like we're getting pushback, the whole industry is getting pushback at the county level in some places.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Speaker 05

  But that ultimately doesn't change the fact that the demand is there.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:38Speaker 05

  Right? Getting county level pushback, state level pushback.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  It just means that it's going to be built elsewhere, uh, because the demand for AI is the strongest it has ever been. The ROI on AI is the strongest that it ever has been as well. I mean, inference, um, is, is absolutely profitable for our client base, uh, which means there's going to keep coming back to CoreWeave products. Uh, we're in Canada, we're in Europe, uh, we recently announced an expansion into APAC as well. I, I expect for us to keep, keep moving globally, um, but keep a focus on, uh, domestic deployments.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  How strong is the correlation between, uh, social media pushback and county level, um, pushback at like a city council meeting? Because I feel like there's sometimes a big disconnect where something can go viral, maybe it has some misinformation, gets 100,000 likes, but then the actual county and the residents are fine with what's going on. And it's sort of this like getting mad on behalf of someone. But do you see a correlation between a story or a news article that happens in this particular area and then there is actual movement on the ground at the local politics level?

• 1:24:48Speaker 05

  Uh, look, I, I'd say it's very specific to the sites.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:52Speaker 05

  Right? Like we, we are engaged in conversations, um, where, wherever the local communities would like to understand the, the value that we're bringing to that region.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, that makes sense. Uh, Jordy, anything else?

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Not for now.

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Big one.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  Thanks guys.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that goes with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  It's very interesting. It feels like one of CoreWeave's, uh, and, and some of the other NeoCloud's advantages is to just be able to be completely out of the, the politics and like the drama of AI, right?

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Like all of the, the labs and the hyperscalers and all these companies, like they have financial relationships, they have personal relationships, some of them, some of them hate each other and want each other dead.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, CoreWeave can kind of sit there like Switzerland and be like, anyone need tokens?

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. Uh, when a niche, when a niche hit tweet fails to bang, Jer, James Heel shares a quote from, uh, Peter J. Uh, when a sub editor, when a sub editor complained that his, that his, the Times columns were too complex, Peter J. famously replied, I only write this for three people. The editor of the Times, the chancellor of the Exchequer, and the governor of the Bank of England. True, uh, not quite audience of one, but audience of three mentality. I think it's a good way to stay sane if you're posting online. You probably don't want to be too sucked into the algorithm, although this went mega viral. I don't know.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have our next guest, Garrett Langley from Flock Safety. He's the founder and CEO. He's been on the show before and we're very excited to talk to him about the latest news. Garrett, how are you doing?

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  Good. How are you guys? We're good. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for joining. Um, I saw.

• 1:26:48Jordi Hays?

  Anything been happening since the last time you came on the show?

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  I saw. Nah, pretty chill.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Pretty chill.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Imagine.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Pretty chill.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Imagine. Uh, well, let's kick it off with the, with the, with the report in the Journal. Flock adds privacy guardrails after surveillance backlash. What happened? What are you actually implementing? What is the story?

• 1:27:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, there's two big buckets, right? You've kind of got privacy and then accountability. And I can start with accountability because I think that's the bigger topic. Or I think it's the bigger topic, which is, lo and behold, law enforcement abuses their power at times. And that's horrible, right? I mean, it's really bad. And we built a tool about four months ago as a test to kind of scan the audit logs that we've always had to look for abnormal behavior. You know, we solved a million crimes last year. We know what good investigations look like. We built this tool and the headlines of the last few weeks show you that we're pretty good at finding abuse. And I thought this was maybe just an isolated to us.

• 1:27:51Speaker 06

  But what I found out is like when law enforcement searches DMV, they search criminal records. There's no audit logs there. There's no accountability. So we launched that. And I think you're going to see over the coming weeks, you know, more headlines of officers being arrested for abusing their position of power. So that's the

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, where does that actual, where's the Oversight Board live? Is this a separate product that's sold to like a district attorney effectively? Or like, because if the person's like, yeah, I checked the audit logs. I was behaving poorly. That doesn't really do anything to stop the process, right?

• 1:28:25Speaker 06

  No, no, yeah. So it's a free product that all of our customers are now required to use.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:32Speaker 06

  Which we're the only company that I'm aware of in this industry that requires their customers to actually hold themselves accountable.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:38Speaker 06

  For most of our cities we work with, there's a police administrator and then a city manager that is reviewing the audit log. So in the hopefully unlikely event that the police chief himself is the one committing a crime, the city manager is still there as the double check.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the business has grown a ton and obviously Flock products are deployed all over the United States. I'm interested in the backlash that has grown. You see a lot of videos with a lot of social media attention, negative towards Flock. Is this actually showing up in your financials at this point? Like, because I imagine you have to replace any camera that is destroyed, but I can't tell if there's just one camera that's destroyed and then a million people view it and like it.

• 1:29:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, vandalism is real. It's always been real, though. Just like weather has been a problem. You know, we deploy these products in Florida and there's hurricanes. And in California, there's earthquakes. And so we're used to that. I mean, if you looked at the data, you'd be hard pressed to say, when did this TikTok trend blow up?

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:46Speaker 06

  You know, I'd say the sad part to me is you've got these influencers on TikTok and Instagram pushing this, and they're convincing these 16, 18, 20-year-old guys to go do it. And they're committing felonies.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:00Speaker 06

  And so I saw this guy that got arrested in New Mexico and he's going to face five to nine years in jail.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:30:05Speaker 06

  And I'm like, that's horrible. This guy's life is over. He's got a felony on his record.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 06

  He's going to jail to cut a camera down.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 06

  It just seems really crazy.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  So one thing that I've been identifying is it feels like there is a gap, particularly between liking a post on TikTok or engaging with anti-Flock or the D-Flock campaign and maybe even going out in the world and chopping one down versus at least trying to go to your city council meeting? Because I just have to imagine, I've been to social city council meetings. If there's 50 people there that are all taking the podium and saying, look, I am a citizen and I don't want Flock in my city, city council will usually respond to that. Is that disconnect real? Like, what is going on there?

• 1:30:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's surprising to me too because, you know, city councils are normally pretty boring meetings. And there's really only two topics that are being debated right now, which is data centers and Flock.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:31:10Speaker 06

  And you guys probably have better tools than I do. You can look at social media traffic and they're fully correlated. Which makes me wonder, like, why? Like, why? Because I've been asked this question, why now? And I'm like, I don't know. We've been in business for almost a decade. You know, we went to thousands of city council meetings every year, over like 10,000 last year. We're not hiding anything.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I think like when you, like, I think a large part of it is like, well, everyone's been talked to about AI safety one way or another, right? It might have been a viral clip of Sam Altman talking about AI in 2015 that gets resurfaced in like an Instagram reel today and people assume that it was said today or and the clip was out of context. And then, but you have to look at like, I think people are like very scared of the technology overall, which I think is fair because they've been told to be scared in a variety of different ways. And then they're using AI in their life or in their work and that's cool.

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  But like data centers present something that's like, you know, a data center in your backyard doesn't necessarily give you an immediate benefit. And it could have some real downsides, right? Like noise or potential, you know, like, there's all these sort of like possible negative externalities. And then Flock, it's like when you, when, you know, Dario has talked a lot earlier this year about AI getting so good at looking over sort of like vast quantities of data and maybe the law is not sort of like staying, you know, moving quickly enough to respond to that. And so like Flock is like a very, I can see exactly why people are fixated on that

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  because the product is clearly very, very good at fighting crime. But then also, also, if you are a bad actor, it's like the dream, like basically toolset, right? It's literally like in a video game like God mode, right? And so I think like, there's like very real, I can see why there's like a correlation, but I don't know if this is where you're going, but I don't necessarily think it's like some organized nefarious group that is like, we want to shut down, we want to shut down these two technologies. And so anyways.

• 1:33:40Speaker 06

  No, I think there's some true, I think the other thing that I think is true is as I was asking someone, aren't you like afraid of all the data brokers that buy your location data and sell it? And they're like, well, I can't see it. And I can see your camera. And I think it's like a valid point, which is you drive by Flock camera and you say, well, I see it. And I say, I feel a lot safer. And some people might say, oh, I feel like, you know, this is Big Brother. And I go, it's like, but Big Brother wouldn't have an audit log and wouldn't have transparency and wouldn't do these things. But I do think a lot of the feedback is fair, you know, which is like, how long should this be stored? And I think the thing we got wrong was expecting local government and state government to follow along fast enough.

• 1:34:24Speaker 06

  And I just, I don't think they are. And this accountability measure, like, no states require this. They all should. And like, we dropped our data retention recommendation from 30 days to seven days, which means the majority of our customers will just simply accept the default.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:39Speaker 06

  And state regulators have moved to 21 days. But like, we've done the analysis and we think we'll have a, you know, 10% reduction in efficacy with that reduction. But I think it's a fair trade off. And look, if the government wants to say, like in New Jersey, it's a mandate, five years of data retention, that's up to the state of New Jersey to decide. We'll push for what we think's right. But I might agree with Dario there in that case, like, regulation is a good thing for this type of technology and it needs to move faster, not slower.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like the speed of regulation is a huge issue here because the technology moves much faster. And I think folks on the left feel like they could be attacked by people on the right and vice versa. And so if there's a, if there's a new technology that rolls out like mid-cycle, all of a sudden you're grappling with it and your worst fears on the, on sort of like the extremes of the political spectrum are that they will be used by the opposing side aggressively against you, even if you are innocent. And I think that's where a lot of this is coming from. What do you think?

• 1:35:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I think that's true. And I think the other thing, and I don't know who gets credit for saying this, you know, as a technology industry, we still feel like we're this bubble, this like small part of the economy. And the reality, like, technology is the economy now. And I don't think as founders and CEOs, we've like fully grappled with what that means. And I think about someone like, you know, like Jamie Dimon. I'm like, he has so much influence over our fiscal systems. And I think he probably understands that responsibility because banking has always had this like, this kind of austere posture of their responsibility in the world. And I think as technologists, we're catching up. And I think I'm in that same boat of, you know, we helped a million crimes last year.

• 1:36:29Speaker 06

  Last month, we did 1,025 missing peoples. That's real human life.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 06

  There's a real responsibility with that impact. And I'm glad we're catching up. We're not done. Like, we still have a lot of work to do. But I think if I look around the table, my other peers, like in public safety, I think we all have a lot of work to do.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, yeah, the

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  There's been a very real positive impact to the product and I think like people have every reason to also be concerned because even with these guardrails in place and audits, you have, even if you assume like a very, even a half a percent of police officers in the US are corrupt in some way or not, shouldn't be in these organizations, that's still thousands of bad actors that are in the system. And so I think one of the challenges that I see is like, I feel like this is like too much of an, too big of an issue for just you and the Flock exec team to be, to be in charge of, right? Like, I think you're very smart.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  I think this company was started for all the right reasons. I think it is having a positive impact in many ways, like you said, but at the same time, like, this is a national issue right now. You know, you're not elected. It's not your job to decide, you know, Americans' like, privacy. And so I think like, my question is like, what is happening at the national level? Obviously, counties and cities and states are trying to figure this out, but I feel like this issue is like beyond, I don't feel like this issue should be decided by you. I think it should be decided by our lawmakers because it comes down to our fundamental rights as American citizens. So I actually, I want this, the issue is just blown up on

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  social media, but I think it's time to like, have a much more of a national kind of conversation about this. And then ultimately, probably new laws put into place to make sure, something that you can point to and just say like, look, like, we are abiding by the law in our country and our lawmakers who were elected.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  And the correct path to push back on Flock is through the democratic process.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Call your representative. That does feel like the correct outcome.

• 1:38:49Speaker 06

  That feels very self obvious. And it is interesting, you know, I was getting, saw someone push on X, like, you should require a warrant to use your product. And the response I wanted to make was, yes, when it is the law to need a warrant, we will happily follow the law. But 40 courts in the last few years have all deemed this isn't, you know, a violation of the Constitution. And this is tricky, though, because every state, every city has like a very different point of view on what safety looks like. I mean, you look at you guys, you know, hometown of San Francisco, San Francisco's own version of safety has also changed a lot in the last decade.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:39:30Speaker 06

  And I think it's a better version today than it was five years ago, but it's still changed and will probably change again. And so it is a pretty tricky situation from setting the right laws. Because I struggle to see how the federal government could establish a law that matches everyone's goals. And so my hope is like, states, we had nine state bills get passed this year. I'd love to see 20 or 30 next year, that we start to move this in the right direction. Because I do worry, like, any federal regulation will just make half the country mad and other half the country just as mad.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, in theory, like, city, even city by city, like, there is a, like, I think people might misunderstand that, like, Flock doesn't put up the cameras, they sell them to police departments. The cameras in those police departments have, you know, heads that are elected in many cases, right? There's like a sheriff that gets elected.

• 1:40:23Speaker 06

  People who get to pick that they vote for.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  But at the same time, I'm sympathetic to someone that basically thinks you put them up because it is an opaque process. Many Americans cannot tell you the names of everyone on their city council and who the mayor is and all these things, or when the election is, and how solidified that particular mayor is, and whether or not they can actually apply pressure around this issue. It can take years to actually facilitate change in a community. And if you're in the minority, that might never happen for that particular community. But.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I was referencing earlier was like, more like friction. Like, we, there's historically been security cameras around in a lot of places. You could get access to the footage, but there was a lot of friction to doing that.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Sure. Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Which is good and bad, right?

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  It's good in that a bad actor is going to have a tougher time, like, putting together footage in order to understand someone's movement. But again.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Everyone's, everyone's comfortable with like, there was an assassination attempt on the president. We should look at all the CCTV cameras. But then all of a sudden, when it's like, okay, like, now there's going to be an AI agent that's watching you, Jordy, if you speed at any point during your commute, you're going to get, you know, a point on your license. It just feels like an annoying society that a lot of people don't want to live in. And then there's a whole continuum there. And, and, and, and we're grappling with the potential for way, way, a way higher level of enforcement and way less of a gray area around our, our rule set and our laws, which is something that the laws might need

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  to change or we might need to adapt to. I don't know.

• 1:42:04Speaker 06

  I agree. And I think, to your, to your point, like, the, I have a lot of sympathy for our elected officials at the local level, because they now need to become experts in AI, public safety, data centers, water. Like, it's, it's like, and these are, most of these times, these are part-time unpaid positions. They're normally lawyers, doctors, real estate agents in their communities. And so, I mean, they sign up for the job, but it is, it's not straightforward. And, you know, we're, we like the way the system works today, where every one of our contracts goes to city council for vote. That makes the job harder, but makes it transparent. Like, I saw the other day, you know, I was able to find the video

• 1:42:47Speaker 06

  from six years ago, when we did our first ever city council meeting, and how nervous we were. Because we'd never been to city council. Like, what would that be like? And I've never been to city council. And now it's kind of just a part of our regular day.

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  What's next? Because these updates are good, but I don't think they solve, I don't think, millions of Americans are still going to have, are basically probably not going to read the updates and are still going to have an issue. So what, what's on the roadmap? What more are you doing to try to find a solution to the, to the concerns and, and the issues?

• 1:43:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think we'll ever be done. Because I think this balance of privacy and safety is, is a bit of a moving target. Someone asked me the other day, you know, wouldn't it just be better just to turn off all the cameras? And I said, maybe 30 years ago, when every single police department was fully staffed, maybe even overstaffed in today's standards. But today, more than 80% of police departments are understaffed. So I don't, I don't think, you know, a draconian, no more technology is a viable solution. But I do think, as a technologist, we have an opportunity to make better products that deliver on that kind of combined goal. And so for us, like, we're excited to get this, these tools out there into the wild. You know, I anxiously await potential headlines

• 1:44:08Speaker 06

  of more arrests in the coming days. I think that'll happen. And that'll be tough, because I think a lot of trust in communities will be broken. And that trust was broken many years ago, and now the light's being shined on it. But I think for us, we're going to continue building tools that allow law enforcement to both do their job and build trust with the community at the same time. So we've got a lot of stuff coming up, a few more announcements coming up in the, in the coming months. And we'd love to come back and share those when they're ready.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  The entire meeting, every possible take is being enumerated. It's a, it's a very interesting.

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  You want to switch jobs?

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think any, anyone in technology envies, envies your job right now. But.

• 1:44:54Speaker 06

  The consequence of being consequential is what I tell the team. So.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's accurate. Well, have a great rest of your day.

• 1:45:02Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you, Gary.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for the update and explaining everything. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We've been keeping Sonia Wong from Sequoia Capital waiting too long. She's a general partner. She's been on the show before.

• 1:45:12Jordi Hays?

  It'd be great to just talk about, it'd be great to just talk about venture capital for a little bit.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  Well, now we get to, back to AI, back to VC. How's it going?

• 1:45:21Speaker 07

  Good to see you again. We haven't seen each other in a while. Congrats on everything. Congrats on the acquisition.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, temperature check. What's going on with this AI thing? Is there anything there?

• 1:45:35Speaker 07

  Temperature check. Oh, my gosh. There is absolutely something there. The numbers we're seeing from these companies, never seen anything like it before.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  But interestingly, it's less of a power, I mean, there's power law companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, there's a lot of companies that are doing really great. But then there's also this diffuse community of like, Neo Labs and Neo Clouds and so many different application layer stuff where you're seeing just really solid business fundamentals that previously would take a decade to build up, you're seeing it in two to three years.

• 1:46:03Speaker 07

  Totally. The Anthropic and OpenAI and XAI are growing at a pace that nobody has ever seen before. But even if you remove them, this next cohort of companies, Harvey, OpenEvidence, Scream, Factory, they're, they're growing at rates that we've just never seen before. One of the most interesting things that's happening right now is, we used to have this like separation in our heads of, there's the foundation model companies, and then there's the application companies. And I would say, like, one of the most interesting things that's happening now is that all the application companies are starting to build their own research capabilities, their own labs. And it's kind of like this concept of democratized intelligence. So I would say, it's not only revenue, that's not just accruing

• 1:46:47Speaker 07

  on only the first, at the top two players, it's, it's the production of intelligence itself. Seems like it's very much democratizing.

• 1:46:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were, I don't know when Dylan was on, maybe it was last week, but Dylan from Figma, we were talking to him. I was like, I want Figma to work on the problem of, like, yeah, basically Slop is like, has been this like, you know, it's been, Slop has been getting better and better. But, you know, it's basically like, you have a new breakthrough, and then for two months, it's like, wow, it's so good now. And then you realize that it can only do like, one style over and over and over. And I feel like, there's all these application layer companies that are in such a great position to work on some of these like fundamental problems that, for better or worse, like,

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  the labs are not able to focus enough on, right? Like, maybe it's like, only a billion dollar revenue opportunity, right? And so if you're a lab and you're adding billions of dollars of revenue a month with your core business, why would you work on a problem like that? And so I think there's so many examples of that from, from Figma to some of the other ones you mentioned.

• 1:47:56Speaker 07

  Totally. And I think if you look at it from the perspective of the startups, there's just this huge wave towards companies wanting to own their intelligence. And I think a smaller set of companies has been beating this drum for a long time. Like, I'm on the board of Fireworks. Their tagline is Own Your Intelligence. So they've been advertising this for a long time. Obviously, Cursor went on the journey two years ago of starting to train their own models. But what's happening now is like, both the giants in the ecosystem are starting to speak up, and then the startups are actually getting extremely good at building their own research. So in terms of the giants, you have people like Alex Karp, talking about sovereign intelligence. He has this phrase, Own the Means of Production, which I freaking love. Sonya, talking about your proprietary data. Jensen, championing open weights. So you have all these giants of the ecosystem speaking up of like,

• 1:48:41Speaker 07

  hey, guys, you should own your intelligence. And then if you look at it from the perspective of the little guys, the startups, who we are in the business of backing. A couple of years ago, they were primarily looking at, you know, moving some of their intelligence towards these open weight models, primarily as a cost rationalization exercise. The thing that's different now is like, it is an existential and strategic imperative for them. And so, there's this phrase, you guys probably remember this from the crypto days, not your keys, not your crypto. This idea of like, if somebody else is cussing your weights for you, I don't like cussing your keys for you, it's not yours. Because something could happen to that brokerage, something could happen there.

• 1:49:22Speaker 07

  And I think like, I think the AI version of this meme is not your weights, not your products. Because fundamentally, if you don't own the weights, if you're just making an API call, you don't have ownership, you don't have sterability, the data file doesn't accrue to you. And so like, people are kind of waking up to this. And so, if your use case is like, you want a coding agent, like, for that, I'd say, closed model, closed agents, that's fantastic.

• 1:49:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:47Speaker 07

  If it is like, your core product, I think companies are increasingly waking up to like, not my weight, not my product.

• 1:49:52John Coogan?

  If it's what you sell to your customers, it should be yours. That makes a lot of sense. Founder office hours, coach me through, you're on the board of my hypothetical company, software company, using AI, 500 million ARR, let's say. And I buy this thesis, and I come to you and I say-

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  Pretty confident example there, Joe.

• 1:50:12Speaker 07

  500, not bad.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  We're cooking, we're cooking. No, no, no. I mean, like, we have fully made it through. We're, you know, an AI winner, we're accelerating, growing, growth is great. But I come to you and I say, okay, I'm all in, we're going to own our intelligence stack. Is there a moment where we need to have a conversation about what the talent budget will be? I mean, we saw these crazy MSL deals. And for a lot of these companies, they might be unicorns, they might even be decacorns, but they're not going to be able to staff a team of AI researchers and build a full NeoLab doing like, next generation fundamental research. So what does the team build out actually look like? Is it enough to take your best software engineers and have them use coding agents

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  to fine tune models for your team? Or are you hiring entirely new disciplines? What is the correct shape of an internal AI lab at like, a successful scaled unicorn, decacorn, software company?

• 1:51:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. So typically, you're not going to be pre-training your own models. There are specific use cases where you actually need to pre-train models. That's a totally different thing. If what you are doing is trying to take off-the-shelf, open weight models, and then adapt them and make them really, really excellent for your domain, that's a much larger talent pool. And what we've seen is, there's actually two flavors of talent that are really good at this. One is people that have done post-training before. So the post-training teams at the labs are very, very large at this point.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:40Speaker 07

  There's plenty of these people floating around. And then the second profile is just actually interesting, is just like, engineer, or I guess, like, just generally smart person, smart people person.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Poker player.

• 1:51:51Speaker 07

  Because this stuff is actually not that hard. And like, part of the reason it's even possible for all these companies to have their own labs now is because the actual post-training stack has matured. So it used to be that only OpenAI and Anthropic had the infrastructure in-house to be able to do things like post-training, reinforcement learning especially. But now you have companies like Fireworks that gives you the post-training infrastructure. You have Langchain that gives you the evals. You have Trajectory that helps with the continual learning. You have Merkle that helps you with the data factory stuff. And so, like, all these components now exist. And so, if you, as a generally smart person, see the menu of opportunities, you can actually cobble together your own research stack in a way that wasn't possible a couple of years ago.

• 1:52:36Speaker 07

  And so, like, to give you a sense, very, very small teams can get very far. The Harvey team has put out, I think, pretty extraordinary research. They just found an entire RL environment last week. Their benchmark is state-of-the-art for legal. And their entire research team is seven people. So you can get very, very far. We're definitely not, you know, you're not competing with Meta or OpenAI for size of talent budget here.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  What about one click down? I don't want to invest in building the team owning the stack entirely. There are NeoLabs that will show up and fine tune a model for me. Is that the domain of growth-stage startups? Or is that product going to be more consumed by enterprises that maybe don't have the DNA to just move a bunch of amazing engineers over to do a post-training stack and spin up and roll their own? But the NeoLab offers, I'm thinking of like, a Thinking Machines tinker, like what happened with Ray Dalio's fund and how they were able to fine tune a model, get really good results.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  That feels like its own new market of like, post-training as a service, fine tuning as a service. But how does that piece in? Is there a world where you don't necessarily have a relationship with Merkle, but your third party does?

• 1:53:58Speaker 07

  Yep. Look, this is a huge ecosystem and a huge market. Because I think everyone sees the opportunity of, you know, you obviously, like, the closed model inference market will always be gigantic. But I think the open model inference market is becoming very large. And for companies to actually be able to make use of open weight models, there is a maturation process, there is a hand-holding process, there is an entire like, you know, come work with us, we will forward-deploy people onto your staff to help you go on that journey. And so, there's lots of options. Fireworks has a fantastic team for this. Merkle has a fantastic team for this. It kind of depends on the specific problem you have. So the specific problem you have is, hey, I really want to do reinforcement learning on my online data. Fireworks is fantastic for this.

• 1:54:42Speaker 07

  If you're like, hey, I can't train on my customer data, I need to get my model really, really good for this specific domain. Can we create a bunch of synthetic data around this opportunity? Merkle is fantastic for it. So it kind of depends on the use case. Generally, I think that it's like, really important, it's an and. Like, companies need to have extremely smart people in charge of this in-house. This can't be something you outsource, like your lunch menu outsourcing, right? This is so core. And so, you need to have smart people in charge, deciding on your strategy, deciding on your technical roadmap, and then making judgment calls of which parts of the stack you want to outsource to others, which parts of the stack you want to lean on others for. Harvey's actually done a really good job of this.

• 1:55:23Speaker 07

  They lean on pretty much all of the five or six new labs I just mentioned as their partners. But you need to intentionally own it. And over time, just like we saw Cursor go on this journey, I think a lot of application companies will go on the same journey that Cursor did. Over time, you become more and more competent in-house, and you bring more of that expertise in-house.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the current price war? You have sort of the lagging labs starting to compete more on price. You have leading labs trying to make sure that they have competitive, you know, models at every part of the curve. But yeah, anyways, what's your take and where does this go?

• 1:56:06Speaker 07

  Look, I think Jevon's paradox, not to be an annoying VC, but Jevon's paradox is a freaking wonderful thing. Because what's happening is like, I see the data from all this stuff, right? From, oh, there we go, fam. Look, our companies, we see the margins going, their gross margins going up. Because at the same time as like, AI usage is going way up, but their gross margins are also going up because they are the beneficiaries of intelligence getting cheaper and cheaper to meter. On the other hand, I see this from Fireworks, I see this from the model companies we're in business with, their cohorts are getting better and better and better. So it's not like they're facing price competition and their businesses are going into the gutter. They have phenomenal businesses where, because they're able to provide intelligence at increasingly cheap prices, their businesses actually get better and better. So I actually think this is an everybody wins situation.

• 1:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part of the challenge with, I feel like, X trying to process the price wars and how open source is fitting into all of this is that when you have Anthropic and OpenAI still as private companies, people just don't have the visibility and they don't realize that even with great open source models and even pricing, price cuts across different providers, you're still seeing that just massively accelerating revenue. And it's not like, it's not like the biggest customers aren't aware that open source exists and it's good. And they are using it in a bunch of different ways. So I think it'll be very-

• 1:57:29Speaker 07

  It's an and.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's an and, yeah. And I think it'll be very helpful when more of these players are public, just so that everybody has the same access to information.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:40Speaker 07

  Totally agree.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again soon.

• 1:57:44Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me on. Good to see you guys.

• 1:57:45Jordi Hays?

  Do it again soon. Great to see you.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more. With great customer service. You ready for this next one, Jordy? You're gonna love this company. They put a brain in the vat, basically.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. We have Sean Cole from Parasma. He's the founder. This is his first time on the show. Sean, how you doing?

• 1:58:12Speaker 08

  Hi, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Is Brain in the Vat appropriate? Or is that derogatory? Should I stay away from characterizing your company that way?

• 1:58:22Speaker 08

  I think it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Okay, take us through it. Introduce the company, introduce yourself.

• 1:58:29Speaker 08

  So I'm Sean. I'm the founder CEO of Parasma and we are training brain cells for compute. So previously, I think you guys might have seen, you know, we made brain cells play Doom. And we just launched, like literally just launched and we got these cells to do a token prediction. So kind of the basis for language modeling.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so how many cells do you need? Because many people have said that I have seemingly only a few brain cells. And so how many brain cells do you actually need in order to do next token prediction?

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  I can predict tokens all day with just a few brain cells. It's no problem. So it seems like an easy, easy job for you.

• 1:59:05Speaker 08

  Not that many, so we're renting some brain cells out. We're using about 200,000 brain cells to do token prediction and it's good enough.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Are these literally like donor brain cells from cadavers? Or are you growing them in a lab? Stem cells, like where are they coming from? Walk me through the full process. What's your supply chain?

• 1:59:26Speaker 08

  I think you got it exactly. So we're using sort of stem cells and we're taking these stem cells, differentiating them into different types of human neurons and putting those in a dish that we can stimulate and get responses from, basically.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Okay. And then you said you're able to do next token prediction. I imagine that you're not anywhere near the frontier. But how are you actually benchmarking? Like what is capable? Because this is probably all predicated on a very extreme exponential kicking in at some point. But where actually are we in terms of progress?

• 2:00:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think someone gave a pretty funny example, which is it's currently at this current stage. The token prediction is basically, you know, is this a hot dog or is this not a hot dog? Type of token prediction. It's pretty basic.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, can you say, say you're alive and then it says, I'm alive.

• 2:00:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, we could get it to do that.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  You could, okay.

• 2:00:23Speaker 08

  I think fundamentally what we've done is we've proved that these types of sequential context based architectures with electrical stimulation are a viable architecture on these biological substrates. We had a specific example where it was a nonlinear task. So let's say, you know, that you refer to context early in the sentence. And if we used a linear decoder, so traditional silicon, it could only maximally get 75% mathematically. But we got above that, so we got 78%. We beat silicon on this very constrained task. Because it was able to model these kind of nonlinear dynamics in context.

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  How long do the, do the cells actually last before you need to replenish them?

• 2:01:10Speaker 08

  So I think currently they last six months. But of course, I think human brain cells last far longer, you know, like 100 years, 80 years. So I think the goal obviously is to kind of extend them for as long as possible.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  My brain.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  You were kind of getting at this, but not, not fully. So why, why, why do this? I have some ideas of why you might, but it seems like kind of a hassle. So you gotta have a good reason. Is it, is it like?

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  What do you have against silicon, okay?

• 2:01:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming, I'm assuming like there's like, is it like energy efficiency?

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, play it out. If this goes the way you want it to go, is there actually a benefit over just a huge data center or something in space with a solar panel on it? It feels like the current chip stack, the AI stack is, is pretty efficient. We've squeezed out a lot of the inefficiencies of being a human potentially.

• 2:02:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that's where it's really interesting because, you know, regardless of how efficient we make silicon, like silicon we have right now is supremely efficient. But we still haven't solved the efficiency aspect of it in terms of power efficiency. I think human brains are extremely power efficient in comparison to silicon. I think there are things that we can harness there on top of other stuff like sample efficiency. Human brains learn very quickly compared to silicon, much fewer examples. And continual learning is free on biological substrates because they keep learning over time. But I think continual learning is something that has to be expanded on in the AI space. We're still figuring out what's the optimal approach to use. But yeah, massive, massive energy efficiency.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  How do you actually think about that energy efficiency though? Because I've seen, I mean, there was that, that news of like $5,000 worth of sole tokens, solved a bunch of math problems. When I think about like, not even the salary of a, of a mathematician, but I just think about the food that goes into generating the calories that generates the energy, that generates the theorems from a mathematician, you're way above 5K. So it feels like the models are actually pretty efficient, but what do I, what am I getting wrong?

• 2:03:11Speaker 08

  I think if you think about like the cells as growth, like as humans, you know, we are expensive. We have to feed ourselves and all that. I think with Doom previously, we showed that it's possible for us to inject information, essentially force these cells to learn much faster than a human would learn. So you don't have to learn the basics of language, ABCs. We can tell it's a predict, you know, this is a hot dog, this is not a hot dog, something like that, far quicker. So we can skip that kind of like prior human learning building phase that would be very expensive normally. So that's kind of the stuff that we are approaching it with.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Is it possible that golden retriever brain cells could be better at long running tasks like chasing a ball?

• 2:03:54Speaker 08

  Oh, I think that human brain cells for now empirically, they are the best.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  Oh, shots fired.

• 2:04:01Speaker 08

  Well, you know, we've tested it, but yeah.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  You put the golden retriever in the vat?

• 2:04:10Speaker 08

  We tested rat neurons, right? So they're rat neurons and then they're human brain cells.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Golden retriever and rat, these are not comparable animals. Let's, let's give it a try.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  What is the, what is like the business going to look like over the next decade? Because I imagine at the end of all of this, there's some sort of business model where like you're selling intelligence. But in the, in the short term, there's some venture capital that comes in through Y Combinator. Congratulations, by the way. But, but what's the middle step? Is it partnering with biotech companies? Is it NSF grants or government funding or something like that? Or partnering with a university? Like, how do you keep the lights on and keep the flywheel going? I imagine you can raise more money off of scientific breakthroughs, but I imagine that there'll also be an economic, a commercial flywheel here even before you're, you know, selling the work.

• 2:05:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think something that we're really looking at right now, which is great because, you know, we just started is with the kind of exponential increase in AI capabilities, we're going to start building our lab from scratch to be automated. We want to automate the stem cell research to differentiate them into neurons, the optimal compositions, the optimal kind of like spacing on the electrodes, let's say. So I think that the automation aspect of our lab can easily be branched out into different things like drug testing. And I think that could be significant revenue in the short term to push this all the way to make sure that we get brain cells to be the fundamental substrate for compute.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations. What a fascinating.

• 2:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating company.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Thanks for taking the time and have a great rest.

• 2:05:53Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta introduce Sean to the guy that we had on yesterday. What was?

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  Put them together, you got a whole human. He's got tissues. He's doing, he's doing.

• 2:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Vivedine.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  Vivedine.

• 2:06:05Jordi Hays?

  They are doing some interesting stuff.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day.

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Sean.

• 2:06:09Speaker 08

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Cool to have you. Cheers.

• 2:06:11John Coogan?

  Good one.

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Workday.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Do you mind shaving your head for me? Do you mind just, just?

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Don't tempt me.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Let me take a saw to the top of your head?

• 2:06:30Jordi Hays?

  You think I'm gonna put your brain in a vat?

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  You want to come up to the roof with me?

• 2:06:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to go on the roof, John.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  I like it's green now. The green's fun.

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  We should, we should, we should get buzz cuts sometime. I think next summer, summer buzz for both of us.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Well, it's gotta be a bet. It's gotta be, oh, you know, SARS apocalypse is over or something. What, what, some prediction that then we can take a victory lap on or shave our head in, in sadness. Marques Brownlee might have to shave his head, right? Because he made a bet or he said, if the cyber, if the cyber cab ships to Elon's schedule, I'll shave my head, something like that. And people were going back and forth and the Tesla fanboys were saying like, he's gonna have to shave his head. And he's like, not yet. Because of course, like, you know, all these, all these projects take a long.

• 2:07:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't even need much of a reason to shave my head. I actually have gotten a bunch of summer buzz cuts over the years.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  So you'll be like, if the stock market moves by more than 1% through the end of the year, I'll shave my head.

• 2:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Silver Lake is in talks to buy Workday, sources say.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  That's a big deal, right? Isn't Workday huge?

• 2:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Workday is, let's see, I'm sure it's popped.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  50 billion.

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Up 17%.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Wow, the take pride.

• 2:07:47Jordi Hays?

  And so now a $50 billion company was a $43 billion company, at least when this article was written.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  We'll see, I'm curious what, that is a bold, bold bet. And, but I can imagine there's a bunch of AI transformation that they feel like they'd be more easily able to do as a private company.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Are you a, are you a standard crying face emoji guy? A tilted crying face emoji guy? Or a tear streaming down your face emoji guy?

• 2:08:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm normally.

• 2:08:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I want to actually pull this up so I can see more closely.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Which one are you? Joe Weisenthal has recently transitioned to a tilted crying face emoji.

• 2:08:36Jordi Hays?

  I've actually, I don't, I don't dabble in the tilted. I do, I do the tears and the straight on.

• 2:08:42John Coogan?

  Do we, do you do the streaming down the face?

• 2:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Oh, I, I need to mix that one in. It's the most popular emoji of 2025.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I went through maybe a decade where I wouldn't, I wouldn't touch any of the crying.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Oh, any of the crying ones. You do a smiley?

• 2:08:58Jordi Hays?

  But I've been, I've been laughing a lot in the last couple of years, mainly because we're doing the show.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. You gotta throw a laughing emoji. I like that in iMessage you can do the ha ha, but then you can also throw the crying emoji. But I got to experiment with the tear streaming emoji.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever go with the cat versions?

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  No, I never larp as the cat.

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Never go, never go cat.

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  But expect a cat emoji from me soon, Tyler, in our group message, in our group chat, because uh, might be underrated. There might be some alpha there. I don't know. Anyway, there was clearly alpha at this auction, a JP Morgan hand signed mortgage bond from 1886 sold uh, at auction for just $847. Someone got a steal, says Dylan Abriscado. This is, this needs to go in the museum of business. There's a bunch of these good ones. I was looking at the uh,

• 2:09:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how did, why did Dylan find this after it had already, the auction had already closed?

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Get it together. Get it together, Dylan.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  There's another good one. Can I uh, how do I drop this in the timeline? Microsoft in 1995, 1996, published a wine guide. This is from the corporation, the hyperscaler, the mag seven company, Microsoft. They released a wine guide, the essential, click to the next image and then the next one. There we go. Okay. The wine guide came on CD, the essential reference from vine to glass. If you wanted to know about wine, this is where you had to go. You had to get the official wine guide from Microsoft, the software company. Um, fascinating. Know your audience moment.

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  A lot of, a lot of Microsoft fans, customers, 1996. If you're implementing Microsoft in 1996, probably enjoy a glass of wine every once in a while. So why not?

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  That's good. Uh, well, John, I'm going to read a Buco Capital bloke post that I think applies to this exact moment right now. He says, I think we're very close to the point where caring about AI or talking about it a lot is a bit embarrassing. Move on already. Who cares?

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  Move on already. I mean, there is a point where like, we don't talk about the internet anymore. We talk about what's happening on the internet. We talk about particular internet companies. Uh, this stuff does diffuse. If it diffuses fully, you stop talking about the, the underlying technology. But there's a horse race on Buco. There's a lot of money on the line. The entire global economy potentially.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right. He's just horsing around.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in to TVPN. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.