Meta Connect Reactions, Zuck's Beer Pong Controversy, New Bentley EV | Shalev Lifshitz & Romi Lifshitz, Leif Abraham, Diogo Almeida, Hooman Reza Nezhad, Jordan Nanos, Erika Alden DeBenedictis

(01:13) - Meta Connect Reactions (45:04) - Australia vs. AI Agents (47:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (49:26) - New Bentley EV (52:37) - Shalev Lifshitz discusses his background in AI research and the launch of an AI security company with his sister, Romy Lifshitz. He highlights threats to rapidly expanding AI infrastructure—including model sabotage, escape, and theft—and introduces their *Secure Acceleration* report outlining ways to protect AI systems as they advance. (59:38) - Leif Abraham discusses Public.com’s launch of AI agents for prediction markets focused on market-moving events rather than sports or entertainment. The co-founder and co-CEO explains how sophisticated investors use these agents to automate portfolio strategies, including trading, risk management, options income, and tax-loss harvesting. (01:09:33) - Diogo Almeida discusses founding and leading TypeSafe AI, whose viral launch has driven overwhelming demand for its developer-focused AI model. He explains that the technology enables reliable automation through fast, structured, calibrated judgments rather than text generation or complex reasoning, making routine workflows easier to integrate into software. (01:18:54) - Hooman Reza Nazad, co-founder and CEO of Silco Industries, discusses the company’s $75 million raise to build a Nevada rare-earth metallization plant. He explains Silco’s shift from recycling to mined materials, the West’s rare-earth processing bottleneck, and its plans to supply cost-competitive metals to automotive and defense customers. (01:27:34) - Jordan Nanos discusses SemiAnalysis’s ClusterMAX 3 rankings, explaining how hands-on testing evaluates AI neoclouds by performance, network design, software support, and failure recovery. He highlights CoreWeave and Nebius as leading providers while predicting expansion from inference platforms, chip startups, crypto miners, and legacy cloud operators. (01:45:03) - Erica Alden Davenedictus discusses her work as co-founder and CEO of Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit engineering biological systems to support human life on Mars. She explains the company’s development of microbes that convert Martian resources into bioplastics, its plans for additional organisms, potential mission timelines, and the legal and ecological concerns surrounding the introduction of Earth life to Mars. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today is Thursday, September 24th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra Dome, 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. Very happy to be sponsored by ramp. Thank you to the whole ramp team. Also, thank you to Chris Kringle because he's coming by in just 91 days. The TVP on Road to Christmas is continuing day by day. We're 91 days away. So that's right. Get ready, get excited. Christmas is coming. It's around the corner.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Great weekend to pick up a tree.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  If you can find one. And struggle to keep it alive for three months. Yeah, maybe.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, some, some operators I know are actually cycling through multiple trees on the road to Christmas.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Some operators. Yeah. It's like that Chinese proverb, the best day to plant a tree 10 years ago, the best day to, the second best day is today, you know, to get started. The best day to get a Christmas tree was 10 years ago, the second best day today, no matter when it is, only 91 days away. So get ready. Anyway, Meta Connect yesterday, late, Zuck likes going late. He 4pm Pacific, 7pm Eastern for the keynote.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, because he wanted to roll straight from the keynote into some beer pong.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Oh, that's true. We will get into that big, hot debate on the timeline over his beer pong strategy, but really, really tight keynote, very well organized, very clear, didn't overstay its welcome, did three live demos. Last year, there was a hiccup with a live demo wifi and I believe Boz triggered everyone's agents by using the wake word. So this time he deliberately stayed away from using that wake word and used like the name of his agent. So he didn't cause a lot of chaos in the, in the dome or in the, in the studio, wherever they were. But bunch of great announcements, really good pacing, really tight one hour keynote.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  And it was, it was fun watching Zuck like sort of do the live demos and be like one down. Like this is high stakes. Like it was clearly high stakes for him, but he got through it all. No mistakes.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He had a funny line. He was like, and we love live demos here.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's funny because like he totally could just not do live demos, but he like wants to.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  So I think you, I think you need to.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Do you?

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  I think you absolutely need to. People have bought so many random hardware devices that haven't met expectation.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I guess there was that.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Hardware, if you want people to buy it, you have to do a live demo.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. There was a, there was a demo of a Gemini model running like two years ago that was like sped up in post and, and that faced a lot of criticism. And so I think, yeah, just demoing things as they are available in the real world is, is very valuable. And I think in general, like the thesis for the products was like, meet people where they are delivering tomorrow's technology with today's constraints. And that's just what I kept seeing as a theme was like, what do people want? And of course, the best, it basically created a huge dichotomy between like the, the crazy super intelligence, RSI,

• 3:23John Coogan?

  ASI, P Doom, X Risk crew, and then just like Muse, it's a helpful agent. Niraj Agarwal summed it up well. Anthropic marketing, we, we built a god only, we built a god only we can control and gave it a wet lab. Muse marketing, hey girl, I know you have dozens of unpaid parking tickets. Let's get that cleaned up. And it's, it's funny because it's, it's actually working. I think that if you went back to a couple of months ago, the, the consensus was like popularity of AI is turning, it's deeply unpopular. You need to just be quiet or not lean in or just like apologize, like what a lot of the lab leaders are doing, just

• 4:08John Coogan?

  being like, yeah, it is bad. I'm sorry. But Meta has taken a very different approach. They're not fear mongering. They're just like, it's cute. It's lovable. And, and they actually are successful. I mean, the New York Times, yesterday Jensen and Ezra duking it out over like X Risk and, and acceleration. Do we need to slow down? Meanwhile, the New York Times published like a really positive review of Muse. They like, they love it and like they're a tough cookie to like win over basically. So success there. And it's interesting because it's been, there's been a few strikes for Meta over the past two years. The vertical AI slop app vibes quickly disappeared. I don't even know if it's available anymore.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  It might've been quietly shuttered or tucked behind a couple of different tabs. The core Meta chat app that was sort of just like a Gemini, a Chachi T clone. I don't think that ever really took off.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  Over, over the last year, you have massive spending, clearly massive focus for Meta, but the strategy was at most times completely incoherent.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  It was scattered.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  It was not legible to the markets. It was not legible to.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  It was do everything.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You had, you had Muse, you know, Muse code. You had them buying and then having to undo the Manus acquisition. You had the meta vibe, the first thing, and again, this, this was an unforced error. The first thing that they did post the whole talent raid was release like the short form slop video app, which wasn't even.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  It was mid journey.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It was basically a mid journey wrapper. And we're, and everyone was like, okay, like this doesn't align to the, to what you're putting out, which is this like personal super intelligence. And so really yesterday, like everything felt like it came together really nicely, right? Tying in all, all of the hardware investments, tying in personal, making personal super intelligence feel a bit more real, right?

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  AI that, that hustles for you. I think, I think that's smart positioning, but it really felt like things came together for the first time. And I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to give them full credit as, like if you're really going to give them full credit for like, this was the master plan all along, then there's a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't have done unless you were just trying to confuse the market.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  If you're trying to just confuse people, are we doing coding?

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Are, are we doing, you know, a knowledge work harness? Are we doing short form slop? Right? And, and so I think it was really like.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  You're not giving them the benefit of the 4D chess.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  But go with Occam's razor.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Total credit, total.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Occam's 4D razor.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Total credit to them for like figuring out how all the pieces connect together.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  And then putting that in a one hour presentation that actually like makes sense.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  So what are the pieces that come together? Why does it make sense for Meta's business? Why are they seeing success here when the models haven't jumped to the frontier? The benchmarks have always been a little, there's been a lot of confusion on are they going to sell compute, sell, sell tokens, sell, you know, go after the coding market, desktop agents, all these different things that they were testing. This seems to be working. And I think there's sort of four key points that come together to make this make sense. So first is like, they have scaled and secured systems for years. WhatsApp encryption is a great example. They have a lot of compute and so they can offer a VM for millions of people that is secure and also well resourced. And they won't be losing sleep over costs

• 7:47John Coogan?

  because they already have a lot of the compute built out. And the question was like, when will the demand come? Are those, are those GPUs sitting idle? Are those, is that infrastructure getting used efficiently? They're building a lot more of it. Do they need to? Well, they got to find a product to actually distribute all that through. And it seems like they have. Two was they have the distribution to continually educate people about features and benefits of Muse through big ad placements across the family of apps. I think that there is the, there is the world where they've been able to funnel, what, like half a billion people over to threads. It's not a particularly differentiated app. Obviously it's a different, different community and it's, and it's done well, but.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  It's a different challenge because with with threads, you can just show someone a text post. People know what that looks like. It's more content. They go over there. Job's finished. Once you show someone, all you need to show is that their community exists over there. They're scrolling Instagram, watching basketball highlights, and you say, hey, there's some basketball commentary going on in threads. You hop over there. With all the AI agent products, the capabilities change so rapidly that you have to re-educate the consumer on what it's capable of. Like, can it actually deal with parking tickets? Like, if it can, you need to confidently tell someone that. And that capability might change. It might not work one week, and then the model updates, and then all of a sudden, you can do that

• 9:10John Coogan?

  the next week. And so, uh, ChatGPT came out, and it was like, it can answer Google searches. It can do your homework. Then it was like, it can write some code. And there's this constant, like, re-education of the community. Obviously, the early adopters, the enterprise, the business, the startup community tests everything, but consumers don't. Consumers just, they need to be told, the new iPhone has an ultra-wide camera, the new iPhone has Memoji. Even though Memoji was not a wildly popular feature, Apple told everyone what it was. We know what it is. Everyone sort of knows, uh, that that concept because they ran billboard campaigns. And Meta has the ability to actually go and tell everyone

• 9:51John Coogan?

  what Muse is capable of and run an ad campaign across the whole platform to get people back up to speed on the latest and greatest feature. Um, the third is that, uh, no one needs their

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Winston says, "Deal, quote, deal with parking tickets. Hack me out of it, then we are done."

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Well, no, no. So the, so the thing is, is that they are behind on the frontier. They're, they're, they're not dominating all the benchmarks, but it actually doesn't matter because no one needs their personal AI agent to solve a Millennium Prize math problem or secure their enterprise infrastructure from cyber attacks. Like, that's not a requirement. The model is definitely good enough for a lot of this. They obviously will increase the model and the capabilities, but it's not, it's not what consumers worry about. Consumers don't care about benchmarks. They don't understand them. The benchmarks are often hacked or, or not indicative of the feel of using a model. And so, uh, it leans into the capabilities. They have near fear, near frontier intelligence. They have good enough intelligence. And so,

• 10:53John Coogan?

  if it's good enough to do this, you just roll out the capability, and the harness is what matters. The integration, the distribution, that's what matters. So, they, they, they actually didn't launch Watermelon. They've been teasing that for a while. There's been some leaks. It totally could have happened here, but they made the decision to either not rush it because maybe it does just need more time. But also, even if it was ready, I don't think they should have launched it here because Meta Connect's not for that audience. They, they don't care. Yeah.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Watermelon might scare people.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You probably don't want it to be too powerful. Um, and then fourth, they, of course, already have a business model that's heavily aligned with this type of use case advertising. We've talked about this idea that, uh, brands would love to sponsor agentic workflows. You open up a personal AI agent, and it says, hey, you know, uh, the new Nathan Fielder movie is coming out in a couple of months. I saw that you were scrolling reels. You seem to be a fan of this. You shared the movie trailer with your friend. Do you want me to get tickets, text some of your friends, share it on WhatsApp, share it in your Instagram DMs, and actually make that happen? Send a calendar invite?

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Do everything necessary to take care of that. And I think movie studios are just one example of a business that would happily pay for placement, for extra attention around that particular workflow that they can monetize through the traditional pathway. Uh, and then, of course, like, small businesses will buy pixels anywhere. So, you know, if you open it up and there's a full-bleed ad, uh, like, that's fine. People will pay for that. So.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other kind of examples, I get pretty crazy, is your personal agent, for example, knows that you have, uh, home insurance that's set to renew in three months. And it's like, do you want me to go get three competing bids before we renew? And it's like, yes, right? And that, that's like a, uh, opportunity for, for some type of paid placement as well.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  For sure. So, the vibes, not the app, but the actual vibes at Meta internally. How are the employees feeling? I feel like this is a turning point. I feel like if you're at Meta, you're like, okay, finally, there's a thing to align around. We have a strategy. As long as I do something that's in, in, in support of Muse and what's going on with the personal superintelligence mission that the CEO and founder has laid out, I'm good. Even if I'm on Facebook Marketplace team, and I feel like I'm gonna get steamrolled because of the Nikita Beer take that everyone's gonna be negotiating and lowballing on Facebook Marketplace. Well, the Facebook Marketplace team, they can say, okay, well, now we're gonna build tools for sellers to make that not annoying. And so, there's more work to

• 13:31John Coogan?

  be done, and it's more aligned with the overall mission. The vibes should be good. At the same time, The Verge ran a story that said the verbs, the vibes are internally way off still at Meta, that people are upset about the scattershot nature of the approach, that they're, they're still reeling from like, the Metaverse misadventures. But I, I feel like that was, that was like the last hit piece you could write about Meta, and I think things would turn around.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to be feeling that bad when the stock's up 38% in the last month.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, and so, I think, I think it's pretty, pretty easy to align all the efforts across, uh, what's happening, personal superintelligence. And even if you were on like, the Glasses team, there's a whole narrative of like, well, you were trying to build VR. You came, you were in the division that was building the cool Oculus stuff. It's evolved, and now it's kind of just a GoPro on your face. There's been some negative, oh, these are just for, you know, people to spy on each other, blah, blah, blah. But now, they even have a version without cameras, and it's very aligned to what the users want. And so, the, the, the, the top-line hero initiative, even if you're like, just on the Glasses team, and you're like, oh, like, they're building the data center, and that's not really anything to do with me, or they're working on a coding model, and like, that's

• 14:42John Coogan?

  not really relevant to like, getting more people to wear the, the, the Oakleys or, or the Meta Ray-Bans. Uh, well, now, now you are aligned. Now you are on the same team. You're, you're rowing in the same direction. And so, I would expect the vibes to, uh, to get better, I, I, I think. Um, and, uh, yeah, this is all good news, super reflected in the timeline. Uh, but I'm even more excited about the VR glasses. That was the highlight for me. It was the one more thing. Uh, I was hoping that we'd get a new VR headset last year. We didn't. And no one was speculating that this would drop this year, but it did.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  And it's very, very cool. So, the headline is, uh, 1,300 bucks VR glasses. It's 100 grams, which is the, the weight of a pack of deck of cards. Um, and, uh, if you go back, John Carmack was the C-CTO of Oculus, uh, working with Palmer Lucky. He came into Meta through the acquisition. He's the creator of Doom, legendary computer scientist, now running Keen, working on AI. He wound up leaving. Uh, very, very disappointing to not have him realize his, his vision there at the company. Um, and he had been pounding the table at Meta, uh, and actually, I, I, there were some leaks, and there was like, oh, this is like a source of frustration because his, his goal and his mission was to get to 100

• 16:06John Coogan?

  grams for the headset, very light, at $100. He said, it needs to be cheap and light, and then it can go everywhere. Then you can see mass adoption, and then you'll get the developer ecosystem, et cetera. Uh, obviously, $1,300 is not $100. There's been a lot of inflation, but not that much inflation. Um, but it is half the price of the Apple Vision Pro, basically. You're in a more accessible territory.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Half the price of specs.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. It's half the price of specs. And it's, uh, I think it's less than 1% the price of a Ferrari Luce. So, there's that. If you're, if you're in the market, you can just put that on and imagine that you're driving a electric Ferrari. Um, but, uh,

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  The glasses and the car sound the same.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. They're both very quiet. Um, but he, but he pitched it as three key things. It's a cinema, it's a workstation, and it's a gaming console. You can play VR head, VR games on it.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  I almost felt like they were listening or just like, same, uh, line of thought as, um, Ben Thompson because they're rolling out a bunch of like 100 experiences. It sounds like a year where you're going to be able to get some entertainment, live entertainment value from your headset.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  And specifically sports.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Sports.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Sports.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Sit anywhere in the stadium.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes. Yes. And you can pick your seat and I don't think they will be doing the crazy frenetic editing or the cut downs. They have a great deal with UFC. Obviously Dana White's on the board, but it seems like they also rolled out partnerships with so many other leagues to get that there. They also put the, the, the compute and the battery pack on a, on a, on a puck that you wear on your belt. I love that design. It was very controversial, very un-Apple when Apple Vision Pro did it and everyone was like, Steve Jobs never would have stood for this. Well, like that's the reality of the technology. It doesn't make sense to put a battery on your face and so put it on, put it in your pocket. I've never had a problem with the way the Apple Vision Pro works with the tether and they did a

• 18:05John Coogan?

  good job in the, in the promotional videos of like hiding the puck, like you can't even see it there. So they're clearly aware that you want to forget about it. And I think in the best case you actually can. So very good there.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  The other, other dynamic tabletop typing. So if you have a flat surface in front of you.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Bad.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Bad?

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Bad. No one wants to do that.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  German says it's insane.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  I don't think, I don't think it'll.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  I trust him with my life.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. Maybe. I, I, I think people will either connect this to, to a computer and just be using their computer or they'll just be using voice. I, I think that that's like a half measure, like the writing. And I think, I think it won't be, it'll be 99% of the way there. So in a demo, you'll be like, ah, this is pretty good. But if you're thinking about actually wearing this for work hours a day, you'll be like, yeah, let me get a $20 keyboard. It has tactile feedback. Like you can actually feel the keys, the keys move. I don't know. It's good that they did it. Like it, it's clearly cool. It's possible. And especially if you're in a situation where you can't bring a keyboard or a laptop,

• 19:15John Coogan?

  like that makes a lot of sense. That is a glimpse into the future. I would be surprised if that has, if that's the dominant input, the input, like way people input stuff. They'll either just talk to it because the voice models are good, or they'll be locked in at a computer with an actual keyboard.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  This is an awesome, this is an awesome step forward to, you know, humanity living inside a world owned and controlled and monitored by Mark Zuckerberg.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. The wireheading future. Yeah. No, no, no P doom around wireheading. That is one of the X risk things. Remember, don't forget about that. It's not just bioweapons. It's also, we all turn inward and lock into the VR worlds and then stop reproducing and that's the end of humanity.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  The better is only three hours though. So you can't even watch all of Lawrence Arabia. Like how, how can you be wireheading in?

• 20:03John Coogan?

  It's very easy because that puck, you plug it in, you plug it in. And that's what you do when you have the USB C. The USB C is also really important because Palmer Lucky was in the promotional video and he's, he's getting his mind blown. He's saying they, you can do display port over USB C. And what that means is that you'll be able to just take a USB C cable from your laptop into the, into the actual puck. It's charging your device and then also you're getting zero latency because the latency of having to go from screen sharing on your computer to your wifi router, back to your glasses in Apple Vision Pro. I was trying to game on it. I did all these crazy things to try and wire up a PlayStation into it. It was a huge hassle. It never really worked. There was

• 20:45John Coogan?

  always a ton of latency. This, this cures that. I'm not exactly sure how the, the game consoles support USB C, but I know all the Mac products do really, really easily display port over USB C. So it looks like a USB C cable, but it's basically an HDMI cable. So zero latency. And so you just get a huge screen with whatever you want on it. So it doesn't matter if the developers don't show up and they didn't bring GTA six to the Meta VR glasses, which are probably going to sell less than a million units in the short term. And it doesn't come out for six months, but will you be able to play GTA six on this thing? Absolutely. Right? Because it has display port. And so if you want that experience, it'll be available to you. It won't be a fully immersive VR experience, but if you're

• 21:27John Coogan?

  someone who only has $1,300 and can't afford a movie theater or can't, it doesn't even have space for a huge TV, you get this, you plug it into a laptop or a gaming console and you have a movie theater available to you. So very, very excited to try it. Very disappointed that it doesn't come in, that they have to wait until spring of 2027. That's a long way away. But the road to Meta VR glasses begins today. So start counting down 180 days or so. When, when is the end of spring? When would that be? I guess the end of spring is what? May? Right? Then summer starts. So, so we're up in like 230 days or something like that. But it'll be, it'll be fun to see what people actually do with

• 22:11John Coogan?

  it. It's still the dominant platform for developers in VR, even though everyone's pivoted.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  I think that's interesting to me in positioning of, of it being a computer.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  It's a small like tweak, right? I don't remember them ever calling previous VR devices. Like this is a computer, but it's easier for people to kind of imagine it as, hey, this is a device that I can do a bunch of stuff.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  And this is the thing with the iPhone. Like the iPhone was a phone, a, an iPod and an internet communicator, basically a web browser. And it was like, we know that at the very least, people like phones. So if we can be as good as a phone as what they have right now. And so it's like, if we can be as good as a home theater, then people will buy it. And so instead of trying to purely position it as like this entirely new thing, metaverse that you live in and VR and everything's immersive and full, full like immersion. Instead you're like, this can replace your triple monitor display. And you're like, yeah, you know what? I was in the market for a triple monitor display. It was going to be two grand across three monitors. Why don't I pick up this instead? And if

• 23:17John Coogan?

  they can deliver on that, I still think this might be V1 and, and it might be the second one that, that actually gets the breakout success and, and really broad adoption.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He did say, this is a glimpse of the future. Anytime you hear that, you're kind of thinking, okay, like I'm going to get some cool demos. It's not going to be daily again.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it'll take, it'll take a while for the ecosystem, but it was the same thing with the iPhone. Like the first iPhone didn't have an app store, didn't have 3G, but it kicked off the beginning of, of a big revolution. And this feels like it could be that. Also the, the pixel density, they haven't shared the exact specs. It feels like it might be 5K per eye, which is about 53%, about half as much as the Apple Vision Pro. So there's a, there's a world where in six months, we're talking about, ah, it's still not that high fidelity to actually do work on for a full day. A lot of people are running 5K for a single monitor. That's only, you know, in this much of your vision. You're talking about 5K spread over your full field of vision. Could be a little bit

• 24:22John Coogan?

  of a setback, but I think that that is something that definitely gets resolved on the next iteration because the display technology.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  What do we think about hologram calling?

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Let's discuss it after I tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. I think it's cool. They, they did legs in VR. It's very difficult to do legs in VR. BOSS took the victory lap on that. And I think it blew people away. I think it's cool. I think, I, I did an Apple Vision Pro call with someone who got one the same week. It didn't really, it never really took off because there was never a broad install base. It's all, it's all based on like, do they sell millions and millions of these things? It's always been hard for, for Facebook to develop like a new network that requires hardware distribution. It's

• 25:15John Coogan?

  much easier to, to go from a friend in real life to we're texting each other. We have each other's emails and then we're also sending Instagram reels to each other on DMs. Much harder to be like, oh, did you get the device? Oh, I know. I don't have it. Oh, I don't have it set up, you know? But of course you can, you can portal into someone with a, which is WhatsApp or, or, or anything else. So.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's one thing that is a hundred percent sure, which is that you will be buying these and I will not.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  And that is 100% true. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go through the timeline, react to some of the reactions. Mark German loves it. He says they're incredible. Half the price of the Vision Pro, one-sixth the weight, external pack. He's stoked on it. What else is going on? They launch in spring 2027. The interface is basically the same as the Vision Pro, but it has absolutely bonkers tabletop virtual keyboard that blows the Vision Pro keyboard out of the water. Yeah. Cause the Vision Pro keyboard like hovers there. You're not

• 26:27John Coogan?

  supposed to really use it. It's a terrible keyboard. But also I, I don't, the, the tough thing with the keyboard is like.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  The moments when I was using VR, I wanted to be on a couch. I wanted to be on a, on like a chair that didn't necessarily have like a flat surface in front of me. So it requires a little bit of a different workflow to, to go actually go to the coffee shop and sit down at the table and have a flat surface in front of you. So there were, with the Apple Vision Pro, there was never a moment where I was like, oh, I would love to be able to put this down onto a flat surface because I usually wouldn't use it on a flat surface. So we'll see, we'll see how that, we'll see how that goes out. What else is in here? I underestimated Zuck's game, Ryan says. It's a hearing aid. You can't tell me I can't wear my meta glasses anymore, or else you'll be going against ADA, the Americans Disability Act.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  I don't know that that's actually what's going on here, but that is sort of crazy that there's all this backlash to smart glasses. Maybe there will be a next wave of like restaurants and bars that say, no, you can't wear those there. But if you say, no, it's my hearing aid, you can't, that's some, that's some 4D chess. Are you giving, are you giving Mark Zuckerberg the benefit of Occam's 4D razor on this one?

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  No, I just think it's, I think it's cool.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  I think it's just cool and independent. I don't think it's actually.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Cool looking pair of, I was meeting, meeting with a, an older friend the other day and his hearing aid setup was like this, like, you know, seemed like kind of clunky and if you could just throw on it. He was wearing glasses. If he could have just thrown on a pair of glasses and be like, cool, I'm, I'm in business. That would have been awesome. So I think, again, what many people forget about glasses is that smart glasses are way more appealing if you have a need for them outside of just wanting smart glasses. So if you just want, you know, if you need help with your vision or you need help with your hearing, I think these are going to have much stronger product market fit.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. 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. Don't you think if you're wearing, if you're wearing camera glasses, VR or AR, you know, meta ray bands, and it has a camera there, it should be, it can see your hands, right? It can see your elbow. So if you're playing beer pong, it could tell you, hey, back up. You're gonna lose a point. It could go to your agent and, and kick off an agentic workflow to schedule you with a professional beer pong coach, have them come to your house and do hours and hours of drills so that you never make that mistake. So

• 29:11John Coogan?

  is this vaporware if it, if it didn't happen? Cause we saw Mark Zuckerberg get caught with his elbow over the line.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Way over the table.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Playing beer pong.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  I just don't understand why glasses, smart glasses CEOs go out in public without wearing the smart glasses.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  He's not wearing them.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's like Evan, Evan is doing interviews all the time without, you know, wearing, you know, speaking, you know, at places like Sun Valley, not wearing the glasses. Zuck is, you know, all the time out in public doing things, not using the glasses. I mean, they, they make clear versions of them, right? So if, if the glasses are, if the product's so good and everyone should buy them, shouldn't you have them on at least half the time that you're out socializing?

• 29:57John Coogan?

  I personally think if, if you see Jensen at a conference, he should be having an NVL 72 in a backpack. He should have a rack and he should be carrying it around. No, I did notice, so he was wearing a very special watch and everyone's obsessed with Mark Zuckerberg's watch collection. He always debuts a new, unique piece every time he's on stage. But I think the watch thing, it's getting a little old. I would like to see him get into cars a little more and I'd like to see him drive on to, on stage on like, you know, Gordon Murray T50.

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  And burn, and do a quick burnout.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Quick burnout. Yeah, exactly. Something to show that he's not, he's not one dimensional. He's not just into watches. He's also into very special cars. Pull up in a tourbillon, you know, you got the tourbillon on your wrist. Why not the Bugatti tourbillon? Drive into the, onto the stage, get out. No, my hot take about this beer pong elbow violation is I don't care about these. I think that people who play beer pong and worry about elbow violations are pedantic and annoying. And I think that it violates the spirit of the game. So I think that there's no problem with this at all. I think if you're the type of person that's like, oh, you, you put your elbow over

• 31:15John Coogan?

  your nerd and you're not having fun and you're ruining the fun for everyone. And it doesn't actually make that much of a difference whether you threw from two inches forward, two inches back. It's.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it does make a difference, John. It makes a massive difference, but.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  But, but.

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  The point is to just play.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Like the gentleman, the gentleman is not, you might address it if it's habitual.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  Shane is saying, Shane is bringing, Shane is bringing up the bunkie in the chat. I think Zuck is gonna have to get a proper setup, get down in the bunkie, spend two, three years in the bunkie.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Beer pong bunkie?

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Beer pong.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. No, I, I think the, I think, I think the gentleman's beer pong game cannot, it doesn't need to be policed on a shot by shot basis. If there's a habitual stepping of the line and, and, and it's actually creating a, an unfair advantage because one person is, is, is following that particular rule and the other person is clearly violating it for increased performance, then yes, it's worth calling out. But one minor shot, slightly over the line, I don't care about it.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  I think cheating is wrong.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. You, you hold the line. Law and order guy over here.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Look, you, you gotta respect the spirit of the game. You can't break the rules.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, but then you can wind up in this thing and be like, oh, you were two millimeters over. It turns it into.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is blatant. This is blatant.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  It's not that blatant. It's still a long table. It's fine. He's, he's not like really leaning over that far. He could be doing so much worse. His elbow is over, but he just, he just walked up to the table and threw the ball. And also, my man is down nine cups to one, okay? Give him a break. Do you see the score?

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  When you're down, just start cheating, I guess.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  And the other team has, has five. He is, he is losing so badly. Give him a little break. It's his event. He's throwing the party. He. Paid for the beer. Do something nice with the guy and let him, let him get an extra inch on the shot. It's not a big deal. See, you, you miss, you miss the, you miss the, the aesthetics and the, and the dignity that comes with somebody who's hosting. They're hosting. Let him, let him win a little bit. Are you doing the, are you doing the voices? I don't have the IEMs now. I can't hear what you're doing. Has the whole thing been chat or?

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Chad, Tyler's Chad voice. Yours is.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. I got you. Well, well played, well played, well played.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, there's a bunch of fun things. Alex Wang on stage dripped out. People are speculating that it's, that it's, you know, high fashion. In fact, he corrected the record. It's not, he's thrifting. He's not buying Gucci and Prada pants. He's just wearing Crocs, real tree Crocs. It is, it is a big reverse because Alex Wang was on the cover of Fortune or Forbes in Louboutins and had his feet up with the red bottoms there. And it was like a very, when I saw it, I was like, that's just a sick photo.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  It's the barbell.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, but I, it does seem like he like burned out on the high fashion. It's not like he's, so he, I was like, yeah, I'm just gonna dress like this. I have my own style, which I think is very cool. So good to see Alex Wang, you know, on a run and, and delivering, yeah, just like big announcements, big progress at, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world. Good stuff. 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.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Where should we go next? We gotta talk.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Charm. We gotta talk about the.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, the charm, the charm, the Tamagotchi.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  This was added at the last second. Mike Isaac says, Mark does a one more thing with a new hardware device, AI agent called Muse Charm. Voice activated and palm sized, out in time for the holidays. This feels super smart. People already think Muse is super cute. It's, it's a tech-enabled LaBubu, basically.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Which is extremely popular, like the most dominant consumer product of the last couple of years. And so it's, it's distinctly sort of like outside of the tech bubble. The, the quirky LaBubu is, is, is not like the refined edge of like a Cybertruck or even an Apple product, but Meta has been sort of not blinded by the, the, the, the clean aesthetics. And instead they're like, yeah, this is just a cute, fun thing. And so people will actually like this. They know what people like, so.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Avi Schiffman over at Friend responds, the market has spent billions trying to compete with me and I'm still winning.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  That is the right attitude. That being said, I don't see people really using the Muse Charm that much over, over time. Like I think it's like a fun, I think it's a fun kind of like toy gimmick thing, but I think it's the kind of thing that people get. It's funny. It's worth doing for Meta because it should be.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it'll still be on the front 90% of the time, but.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'll be, it'll be, it'll be viral and.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  You can talk to it. I like, yeah, let's, these like narrow one-off hardware devices for like one interaction. Also, it's just like, it's a, it is, it is a more wide open space for them to sort of try and come into devices. Start, like you have the glasses, then you get this and like, it's like slowly they're eating into more of the device footprint in people's lives, even if it's at the.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  And again, I, I would expect them to sell this just out of loss. It's like good marketing for the core product.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Do we have a price? I don't think we do yet.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  We don't have a price yet, but this feels like something that at most you price at like $99, but probably he tries, like, again, he's selling a lot of hardware at, at negative.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  People are gonna wear this as a watch potentially? Like you're gonna wind up with the, the AP Swatch thing, right? Where people wrap this.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  For your most swagless friend.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  Give this, give this as a gift with a watch strap to your most swagless homie this holiday season. It's only 91 days till Christmas, but the timing here is, is, is amazing. I'm, I'm so, I've, I've no real insight, but like clearly they were working on a personal agent for a long time. Unclear when, when this whole like, uh, personal agent meets La Boo Boo thing became part of the strategy, but it feels like, um, yeah, they're, they're, they're clearly like, they have the hardware team set up. They can move super quickly on this kind of thing. Um, and I think it's, I think it's fun.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  You mount them to glasses so you can look straight at it and then there's a brain rot on your face.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  Um, let's talk about, uh, some of the downstream.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplace, and now with agents. What do you want to talk about?

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  The chaos.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, coming, coming, yeah, well, coming away from this, uh, real challenge for instinct. Everyone, everyone building personal agents, right? Um, uh, we, we talked about this a bit, but Meta has their own models.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  That they can serve themselves at the cost of, of, you know, energy, right? And, and all this capex.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  They designed their own server racks. Like, that's how vertically integrated they are. And also, they, they've done a ton of stuff, talking about the data centers they're building, like benefiting communities. They have this whole story about all the teachers in a school district got like a pretty large cash bonus when the data center came to town. Like, they've done a lot.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they were, they were kind of born to navigate through this kind of era because of what they went through in the 2010s, right?

• 39:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  Like the most like veteran, like crisis comes, like, how do we navigate and question ourselves? They're already getting attacked by the social media addiction.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Can you imagine when a data center's coming to town and the Muse guy comes in, like the Michelin Man? And he's just like, don't worry about it. I don't like, I don't even like water. What are you talking about?

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Um, so, Instinct, wonderful product. It's growing like wildfire still, right? I'm still having, I'm getting texts from friends that are barely in tech being like, hey, I'm inviting you.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  I'm Steve's instinct. He asked me to text you.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, do you want to grab a beer?

• 40:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  Um, but anyways, uh, Instinct, very, very, very, very expensive to serve. Uh, and, uh, they're, they're not charging right now. So, uh, they're losing a lot of money on a per user basis. Uh, they probably will be for some time. Muse coming out and they can afford to lose money forever, basically. Um, and even for them, they're sort of like gating onboarding in some ways. Like you sign up for the product and, and you're not necessarily ready to like fully go live. And so even for Meta, Muse is going to be expensive to scale while they figure out these sort of monetization, uh, strategies. Of course, Meta's in a really

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  good position to figure out how to make money on this. Um, but, uh, very, very challenging for, for Instinct. I expect that Instinct's gonna need to find like a real dance partner of sorts, right? You could imagine.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Google.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazon.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Rufus.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Do you hear that? That's Rufus, Amazon Rufus.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  No, you could imagine, uh, you know, a, a Google being like, hey, uh, we can't build products that people like, but we have a lot of products that people use. Um, so maybe that's an option.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, you could see Amazon as well. Um, but for them to be competitive in this full onslaught by, uh, Meta, it's gonna be a lot. And same, same with OpenAI.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Comms advice for Noah. Should he be going toe to toe trying to ratio Alex Wang?

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Cause Alex is coming for it. He's like.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it was crazy because Alex has started to fight punching down. You know, there's punching up, there's punching, punching up is when you're a startup and you're like taking shots at, at the, at the hyperscaler.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  And punching down, we haven't really seen from a hyperscale in a long time, right? But, but Alex is out in the, on the timeline, just.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, he's, he's, he's, uh, you know, he's in a good spot. He's in the strong positions. Well, you know, let him know if you're gonna try and come for me, you better not miss. I'm the king of this.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  And then of course, uh, the other challenged, uh, competitor coming out of this is obviously Snap. Um, I think that, uh, I don't know how long the specs project can really continue, especially because I don't think that, I don't think these, these VR glasses are gonna be, I don't think they're gonna be like a mass market hit where you're just, all of your friends are using them, right? I think it's gonna be like a base hit, right? Another step in the right direction. Not as popular as the regular Meta, like smart glasses, right? But like, a cool entertainment product, they're gonna sell some units. Snap is gonna sell,

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  I would be surprised if they sold more than 10,000 units, right? And, um, the market is just gonna keep punishing Snap as long as they keep trying to force specs to work when, um, unless they have some version that, that we can't see that is already way better than Meta. Like, I just don't see how they can really stay in the game after this, especially because Apple is gonna try to come over the top with their own smart glasses as soon as possible.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  I mean, they should do Vision Air. I, I.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  No, but I'm not, I'm not expecting like Vision Air. I don't even think that's what it'll be called. I think it'll just be called Apple Glasses.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  I just think everyone, everyone is in consensus that Apple should basically wind down the Mac project and the iOS project and focus fully on VR. Like, probably that'd be like a good thing for them to do.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that, um.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  No, no, they're gonna do glasses. They're gonna look nice. I don't know.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  But the, the cool thing for Zuck is that he's beating them to the punch on like, it functions as a hearing aid, right?

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, uh, the AirPods.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  AirPods, AirPods already, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but in the, in the glasses format, right?

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Like coming, being, being first is, is, uh, that's the best chance he has.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  And they've been doing some good, good marketing around that with, uh, a number of, uh, users that are hearing impaired. And it's just a, it's, it's, it's such a minor technology, but it's huge for someone who's actually affected by hearing loss. And then they tell a human story and it's, oh, what is AI doing? It's just slop. Well, it's helping people that are, you know, suffering from hearing loss, uh, here. Like, that's magic. That's amazing. That's actually, it's a, it's a medical, I mean, it's FDA. It's, it's a medical innovation. So, very, very good stuff. Uh, 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 automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects

• 45:05John Coogan?

  forward from start to finish. Uh, what's going on with Australia and OpenAI? Tyler, you dug into this? So Jordy shared like the high level news, which is that, uh, as part of like the hugging face rogue AI agents going all over, looking for everything on the internet, that Australia had been hacked. But what actually happened here?

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the details are still not like fully revealed. Um, the Australian Prime Minister was like really up in arms, like, oh, they hacked and they didn't tell us for, for, you know, weeks on end.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Um, but it seems like the consensus now is that, well, like the, the hack was essentially that there were some like unlisted files, uh, that were still like publicly accessible.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Uh, but they're just like not listed anywhere.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  And then the agent like found those.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  And so they're saying like, oh, they hacked into us, but you know, there was no like real personal identity revealed at all. Um, and like these are, they're private in the sense that like you can't just like Google search for them.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  You can't navigate them. There's no link if you just click a button, but if you.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  But if you're scraping, if you're doing some kind of more sophisticated.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  I have a funny story about that. In 2012, uh, I had a buddy who was, uh, you know, I don't know, hacker, hacker-ish, software developer, uh, not, not actually like hacking into things, but just capable with, uh, with computers. And he, uh, he was scraping the, uh, I think it was maybe Boston Dynamics, but it might've just been like a humanoid robot company at the time. And there was a, there, there's a tool where you can go and get like a list of files and URLs on a server. Uh, you can just ask for it as a web crawler. You don't actually need to, uh, you know, click through all the links and look at the HTML. You can just see, what does the server actually have? Let me go browse it. And one of the images was like a artist's rendering of the humanoid, like with a gun, like full,

• 46:53John Coogan?

  like murder bot mode that never made it to the, to the like publication. It was never like, yeah, we're gonna do that. Cause it was like, we're still in friendly mode. And we were like, wow, like that's, uh, that's wild. So there's, I mean, this stuff has happened, you know, years ago. Um, and so not quite a hack, but certainly.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  GR is saying the hacking equivalent of elbows over the table.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Ooh, yeah. Yeah, I think that's accurate. Um, well, uh, Jordy, do you, did you have another, uh, one that you want to run through? Or should we go to the all-important new, uh, new car launch from none other than, uh, Bentley?

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's go over to this notification from HP Smart.

• 47:35John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yes. Says you're low on ink and then never run low on ink again.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  It does sound like a threat.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Tyler Wolf says, is this an ad or a warning?

• 47:45John Coogan?

  It sounds like a threat. Just never do it. 8,000 likes.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  F A F O. Very funny. Uh, Flock's safety is weighing whether to sell itself. Um, very interesting. I mean, obviously insane public backlash for that company. Uh, we've talked to Garrett about it. Uh, very interesting technology, but very, very controversial. And, um,

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Who, who would?

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Cities are kicking.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  What kind of acquire would, um, solve, uh, solve the problem?

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Um, I mean, a rebrand and then also like a, like a, a taser company or something, you know? So, uh, cause there are companies that compete with them directly. Um, like there, there are plenty of like,

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  Axon and?

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Axon, like military and, and police, you know, product companies. Uh, somebody was saying, yeah, uh, Zach Weinberg was saying, honestly, Flock should just rename itself to the license plate scan company, since that's actually what they do and the problem might just go away. I don't know.

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  It'll actually go away. I think people are pretty deeply embedded. They'll chase this around for a while, but.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's, that's the thing. I just feel like Flock is having the most insane comms crisis of any company that I can ever remember.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 49:01John Coogan?

  That's serious.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  And who wants to inherit that crisis and get that attention pointed to them? Right?

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, well, Bentley's first electric car is set to be half the price of the Ferrari Luce. The launch of the luxury carmaker's Torkal SUV is aimed at younger and first time customers. What do you think? Are they over their skis with an E V at a time when people are sort of moving away from it? Or does it work for this particular luxury SUV buyer? If there's any place where having the, the, the silence of an E V, uh, a Bentley sort of fits. Uh, this is the, the thesis with the Rolls Royce Spectre. You take the engine out. Yeah, there's some enthusiasts who might be upset, but most people aren't buying it

• 49:48John Coogan?

  because they want to redline it. So, uh, it can potentially work. Uh, do you think we'll be seeing a lot of these? Or will it be, uh, passed over for the Urus and the new McLaren SUV potential?

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't think we're going to be seeing a lot because Bentley is just not selling a lot of cars right now. But, uh, I think the car looks great minus the grill.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  Minus the grill?

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  Grill is, is completely, completely insane.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Rolls Royce to me. Uh, it looks a little bit more squared off than what I'm, what I'm used to with Bentley.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's specifically like whatever lighting pattern this is.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Oh, just the, so it might look different in sunlight, you mean?

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, I just think it just looks horrible.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, it's smaller than the Bentayga, which was the first.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  Like you have, like you have this like quarter, sort of very clean, sporty feeling car.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  This is the company's signature diamond pattern. Okay. Put some respect on it, apparently. I'm just learning this.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  I know, but it, but, but it would just, imagine how good this car would look.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  How would you describe the design overall? Would you say it's muscular? Because that's how they're designing it, describing it. Is it a muscular design?

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  I would agree with that. I'm just saying, I, I think the car looks amazing minus this light.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Do you think it should have some more vascularity? Maybe in a wrap? You could add some rippling veins to it? To give it more, more of a muscular design?

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Instead of recreating the V eight engine noise, the E V has a propulsion sound handcrafted by musicians with a unique blend of sounds from percussion, crystal glass, birds, and the tapping of leather. So as you drive it, it sings you a song. The Volkswagen owned luxury brand said it had also completed a $350 million investment to design and build the Torkal at its plant in Crewe, bringing the total investment in the UK automotive sector to more than one billion. The E V launch comes at a challenging period for Bentley as it struggles with slowing demand in China, fallout from Middle East conflict, higher U S tariffs. As with the broader VW group, Bentley has slimmed its workforce as profits and vehicle deliveries have declined.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  It's serious. Uh, we have to bring back the competitiveness. We have to be quick. We have to work harder. You can hear, this is the sound it makes when you drive it. I suppose. You hear the, oh, it's the finger on the edge of the glass. Can you hear that?

• 52:16John Coogan?

  Imagine driving.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, with that sound.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we are ready for our first guests.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring them in.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  Show from a stealth AI security lab launching today. Welcome to the show. How are you both doing? Oh, we are going back to the timeline, back to the timeline. There's other news. Oh, okay. We are good. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Thank you for having us. Nice to see you.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Uh, please, since this is your first time on the show and first time, uh, and talking about this topic, uh, please introduce yourselves in the company.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Hey, so my name is Shalev and this is Romi. We're actually, we're actually siblings. Um, so I come from a decade of AI research, um, worked on reasoning and computer use way back. Sort of started doing AI research when I was 16. Um, sort of finished my courses early.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Oh, nice success.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  I did, uh, I worked on search navigation and then reasoning models and then verification of L L Ms and then AI and security. Um, and, uh, how porn actors might target AI infrastructure and stuff like that. Uh, and that's how sort of we got to, to where we are now with this company on my end. But, but Romi is really the true genius, I'd say.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Well, well, I come from quantum security and quantum computing.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Um, and so for the past few years, I've been working on enhancing the security of, uh, quantum communication networks. This was prior to the company. Um, and so quantum communication networks are, imagine a computer network, but at each endpoint you have a quantum device. And so there's lots of vulnerabilities that come alongside that. So I invented protocols to, to enhance their security. Um, and before, before that I, uh, worked on advanced methods for breaking encryption schemes, quantum machine learning for climate prediction, a bunch of stuff. And, uh, um, both of our backgrounds in security kind of brought us to this really exciting, um, time in AI security. Lots going on right now.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  Is there another sibling that's also cracked or, or is it just you guys?

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Doing rocket science?

• 54:25Speaker 04

  We, we, we said we needed a third co-founder. Um, that's our parents' fault for that.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  I would say that they're going to maybe do robotics or something.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, robotics or rocket science.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  That'd be good.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Where is the biggest opportunity in, in security and AI? I mean, Ilya was posting about the importance of securing Neo Cloud. There's obviously everything from prompt injection to, uh, application layer security, securing the weights so those don't get stolen. Like, uh, how do you see the, the, both the risks and the opportunities for the business?

• 54:56Speaker 04

  So security is a, a very large stack. Um, in AI, there's the model behavior part of security where, you know, prompt injection, the model's gonna get some prompt and do something you don't mean it to do. That's, that's that. Also, I would put alignment probably also in that category. Then there's the AI infrastructure security, which I think is a huge opportunity. That's where we operate a lot of. Um, you're having this massive AI infra build out and it's just going so fast that security can't keep up. Uh, and we're deploying these massively important, um, models which are approaching, you know, A G I or A S I on these systems that have limited

• 55:35Speaker 04

  security. Uh, and that's not good because then it exposes you to three main, uh, risks, which is, uh, the sabotage of the models themselves, you know, degrading performance, uh, sleeper agents, you know, inserting backdoors into models, data poisoning. And then it also exposes you to, uh, models that are, that can escape, you know, like we've seen in Hugging Face and the German Wiki and, uh, you know, we just heard about the Australian government, um, yesterday. And then the third is theft. So this is an external actor, you know, let's say a very sophisticated intelligence service that is breaking in to steal these weights, which compress billions and billions of dollars of investment into a few terabytes.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Right? Um, so that's a huge, huge problem. So I'd say it's, there's the model behavior side and there's the AI info side. Those are two big pieces of the pie.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  And where are you guys starting? Are you just like gonna do the whole thing?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  So today we released a report, um, called Secure Acceleration. So secureacceleration.com. Um, basically what it is, is there's been a lot of talk for the past few months about AI security. Since the Hugging Face incident started, it seems like every week there's another incident that has happened. Um, and it's precisely because everything is moving quite quickly and the infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  The point of accelerating securely is, you know, AI is going to advance and we need to secure the stack while it does that.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  And how are you thinking about the business? There's a world where you do all of this as a nonprofit. You engage deeply with all the labs. I mean, Dario Amade was calling for, you know, independent auditors. There's a world where you live there. There's also a world where you're, you know, competing with CrowdStrike and you're selling, you know, solutions to users who are maybe, you know, independent of the labs.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  So it's actually, it applies to almost, it applies to frontier labs, to the neo-clads, compute providers, hyperscalers, model developers. Everyone really touches the compute stack and the data center stack. And this is, you might think, you know, data centers are secure. They've existed for many years, but they have not been designed to contain superintelligence. Right?

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  So now we have civilizations, as we saw in the hacking face incident, we have civilizations within these data centers developing. There's like multi-agent systems and there, if you think in cybersecurity, there's a Swiss cheese model. The more agents you throw at a system, the more loopholes they can find. And so in the report, we talk about something called the cyber swarm. Right? So what we saw is the cyber swarm in hunting face. And the sabotage, escape and theft model is actually, it encompasses the risks that we are going to be seeing and we've already been starting to see from these types of cyber swarms and cyber superintelligence. And this is very important for all of these players to think about.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on launching the report. Where can people find it again? Can you give me the URL one more time?

• 58:51Speaker 04

  So it's secureacceleration.com.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Okay, secureacceleration.com. Everyone should go and give it a read. It's a white pill. It's a solution.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  I know. I know. I wanted to have that.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  We can do it.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  It is dramatic. Yes, I like it.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  I believe you.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  It's important that we work on these things.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  Please work on that whole wet lab thing.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  That one's risky. But congratulations and thank you so much.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

• 59:19John Coogan?

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

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, guys.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. User favorite agents to deploy web app, service, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And coming back on the show, we have Leif from public.com, co-founder, co-CEO. We're very excited. Anytime you get a chance to join the show. Leif, how you doing?

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  My man.

• 59:45Leif Abraham?

  What's up? Is it cold in LA?

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's always cold in the Ultra Dome. We have no light. It's a windowless room.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  It's a windowless room. So I get to pretend like any, there's whatever conditions outside.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's like 72 and sunny today. Let me actually check the weather. It's 78 degrees, Jordy. It's not cold at all, but it is a little chilly in here. How is it in New York?

• 1:00:10Leif Abraham?

  Um, it's fine. It's getting a little cold out.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  It's crisp. I like when it's crisp out.

• 1:00:15Leif Abraham?

  Crisp. It is crisp. That's how I would put it.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Is it putting you in?

• 1:00:18Leif Abraham?

  I'm still, I'm still metric system. So it's like 18, 17.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Is it putting you in?

• 1:00:24Leif Abraham?

  I don't know, is there anything?

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Is it putting you in the Christmas spirit?

• 1:00:27Leif Abraham?

  Of course.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  91 days.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  91 days.

• 1:00:30Leif Abraham?

  It's just 91 days left.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Well, lots to do between then and now. What are you launching through the end of the year? What did you just launch? Take us through the latest in, in public's world.

• 1:00:42Leif Abraham?

  So today we've launched AI agents for prediction markets. Like our take on that's twofold. Number one, again, public is a multi-asset investment platform, as your ad read likely states every single day, hopefully. And as part of that, obviously prediction markets, AKA event contracts, is something that people are also asking for. Our take on that is no sports, no entertainment, but essentially events that could impact your portfolio, right? Events that moves the markets. So, you know, economics, things around companies, you know, and so on. But then on the other hand, obviously we have AI agents built into the platform. And so that combination creates some really interesting things. Like the one example I right now always make all day long here is, you know, if you see

• 1:01:26Leif Abraham?

  that the market or where the probability of a rate hike goes above 70%, sell my treasuries, for example. And so you can suddenly, you know, not just trade the events as you can do, you know, in many places, but you can also use the kind of real-time probability, you know, data as a signal to do other things in your portfolio. It could be trades, it could be alerts, risk management, whatever you might want to do.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  But yeah, that's, that's so interesting because that, that rate example makes a lot of sense. And yet I go to that like Reddit meme of like, it's all priced in, everything's priced in. And because the, the, the yield curve of the treasury market, it is a prediction market. And so you could just trade the underlying asset, but at the same time, psychologically, people do go to prediction markets for this thing in, in, in the very real sense. So how do you think about the way the user actually engages with this? Is this, is this something that was like customer pull? Like they were already doing this behavior? It makes sense to centralize it? What are the benefits of actually having it all in one place?

• 1:02:30Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, I mean, number one, yes, we have obviously some people asking for it, you know, as new as this instrument is, I think it very quickly also becomes something that at least certain people are expecting you to have, you know, you've had Frank. And then secondly, obviously like for AI agents from public, with, with anything we add to the platform adds basically power and capability to the AI agents. And so any asset class we launch, any data source we add, you know, just makes it more encompassing and, you know, makes it smarter in a way and, you know, creates more opportunities for people to do something with it. And obviously like we can't predict every single thing someone will do with these things because it's very open-ended, but it kind of, you know, creates more kind of tools at the arsenal for people to be creative with it.

• 1:03:16Leif Abraham?

  Obviously like when it comes to these markets, we always say like, it is a signal, not just the signal, you know? So as much as they're called prediction markets these days, you know, I would, I would still, you know, put it as a, it's one signal, it's not the signal.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:30Leif Abraham?

  That it can predict, but yeah.

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Talk more about the decision not to do sports markets because it's one of those things like this feels like entirely like a principled decision, staying true to, to the mission of the company. Because even though you guys feel, might feel a certain way about sports markets, I'm sure you have hundreds of thousands of users that actually would like you to have them and would use them if you, if you offered them, but it doesn't feel like you think that's in their long-term best interest.

• 1:04:04Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, I would say it's, it's always important that you know who you're designing for. And you might have other customers as well, and you might acquire those customers, but I think it's very important to know who you're designing for. And for us, we're designing for always like the top quarter in the US, right? Like people that have money left over at the end of the month, they can put into the markets. We handle people's life savings, you know? And so these are folks that take their investing seriously and they, you know, truly, you know, manage their all-encompassing portfolios and retirement funds and all that in a public account. And so with that, there's a certain serious business that comes with it. And I would argue that like things like sports entertainment contracts is more like entertainment finance, right? And so we think it's, it's, it is, it is just logical for that to kind of happen arms

• 1:04:49Leif Abraham?

  length from your actual, you know, portfolio and so on. And then the kind of principle that we look at again is this notion of events that could have an impact on the markets and therefore on your portfolio at large. And there, you know, there are certain use cases where it makes sense to engage in these markets, you know? And like one example we always make is if you, you know, we've, like, we've all been in this moment where we had like a very defined, specific idea on like an earnings call of a company, right? And we ended up being right and the stock still dipped and we lost money on the trade. And it was not because, you know, we were wrong on, on, on what we thought would happen last quarter, but it was because the CEO said something stupid on the earnings call or, you know, the outlook that they presented was different than the analysts expected

• 1:05:34Leif Abraham?

  or whatever.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Or like oil prices spiked that day and so there was an exterior factor.

• 1:05:39Leif Abraham?

  Exactly. And so sometimes for people to, the, the ability to kind of dissect the company's performance and their KPIs and being able to place a trade on very specific kind of sub KPIs of a company can have a very good, you know, kind of use case as well. And so those things for us make sense, right? And I would tell this little story of like, I've used Kalchi myself the other day when we were at US Open and I had my German homeboy, Swerber, who was obviously, you know, killing it. And I was sitting there, you know, placing these trades and like, as, you know, as amazing as this backhand is, like it's not moving the markets.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Leif Abraham?

  Right? And so I think there's a very clear kind of line to be drawn there. And again, you can have long discussions about where do you draw the line between speculation and gambling? And everyone will have their subjective kind of, you know, arguments on, on whether it should be drawn. But we feel like there's a very obvious line to be drawn for us in these markets and that's basically there.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  What about the New York Knicks? They're owned by Madison Square Garden. It's a public company. If the Knicks go on a crazy run, then maybe the stock moves. Manchester United also publicly traded, so you can own the actual asset. Yeah, I would definitely, more sports better should get into just owning the teams. I feel like that's where the money's made. You see it every day.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Just steadily compound.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, just steadily compound, for sure.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  That's very funny. What, what is, what is driving top line growth for you these days? Are there specific channels? Is there anything like secular trend going on in the market? What's actually working in terms of, in terms of just overall growth?

• 1:07:15Leif Abraham?

  As obvious and stupid as it sounds, but like AI agents for us is that obviously like it's the main core topic. We see a lot of large sophisticated accounts come in. Like we had a guy come in who was with UBS Wealth Management, fired his wealth management team, moved $50 million, five zero into a public account.

• 1:07:38Leif Abraham?

  And now has AI agents managing his portfolio, mostly basically doing like covered calls and generating income and like on the back of that.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Leif Abraham?

  And I think, and those are things that we see happen every single day. And it's interesting to see how kind of that first cohort that actually sees the most use in it, in the AI agents on public, have been very sophisticated, wealthy people that have these like complexities and have this idea for these like specific strategies that they want to execute on and so on.

• 1:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's typically because they were historically paying management fees to get those capabilities. And then they're realizing like, hey, this is basically like software code that I'm paying for.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Not even capabilities, just like the actual execution of a strategy. And so if you have an AI agent that can do that for you on a repeat basis, yeah.

• 1:08:27Leif Abraham?

  Exactly. Like tax loss harvesting is now a great example. Like we have people who basically just do portfolio wide tax loss harvesting using an agent.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:34Leif Abraham?

  Yeah. And it's a very simple strategy that, you know, people wanna, wanna, wanna put in their portfolio. But again, tax loss harvesting makes most sense if you have a sizable portfolio, where the tax losses actually make a difference in your life. And so again, it kind of applies more to people who are, you know, who have a decent account size and, you know, some sophistication.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch and the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  I actually have only one ad read left for the show and it's none other than public. I'm not making this up. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Thanks for hopping on the show.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great to see you. Excited to hang soon.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have the founder of Type Safe AI. You've, you saw Jeff launch massively viral launch and we have the founder and CEO here to break it down for us. The new model's faster, structured decisions, software can use it directly. Lot of excitement, lot of questions to answer. So let's bring him. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  You're in so great, so sleep deprived.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:44Speaker 06

  And so excited. Yeah.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  Sleep deprived because you're

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  No time to sleep.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Everyone's onboarding and everyone's and demand is through the roof. Is that what's going on or is it fundraising?

• 1:09:53Speaker 06

  Everything. Everyone wants to talk. Like everything, every customer wants it. Like as far as I know, all the companies I've ever heard of are using us.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  And the systems are on fire on dimensions I've never even known were possible. And I'm like a backend guy.

• 1:10:09John Coogan?

  So I imagine

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but back up a little bit. When you, when you launched this, like where, where, what was your expectation? I'm assuming you felt like, you know, you had something pretty cool.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Polish launch.

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a hit, but.

• 1:10:22Speaker 06

  I don't think that this launch could have been expected if I'm like totally frank. It's like I've planned for a lot of scenarios. It's above a hundredth percentile. People are calling it like a chat GPT for developers. And that shouldn't even be possible because chat GPT is a consumer product, right? Like why, how is it this happening? And I have my own hypotheses, but it's insane, you know?

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  I imagine you've at this point honed the, the elevator pitch, but just for anyone who, who is not familiar with Jeff and the product and the value, how are you breaking it down for people these days?

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  Oh, I have not honed the elevator pitch, but I will try. I will try. People just tolerate my like over, like overly intense teching.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:04Speaker 06

  But I would say the simple version is make AI actually fucking useful for automation. I hope I can curse. But I think AI under promise, over deliver, over promise, under deliver has been a major issue, major issue for years. And it's been like automating almost nothing. And I think people are like super fucking frustrated with that.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, I saw, I saw people, uh, like there are trade offs when you go for speed and reliability and you want to over deliver. What are you giving up? What can Jeff not do? When is it not the right tool for the job?

• 1:11:37Speaker 06

  Oh, there's a couple of dimensions for that. One of them is it doesn't generate strings. So like it will not write code for you and it will not address the largest market for L M's right now, which is coding agents. I think that that's perfect because actually what I want to do is like not the superhuman math, but the really boring automation, you know, like why can't like simple data entry be solved in accounting and customer service?

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:59Speaker 06

  Another trade off is it's not, doesn't do what we call system two thinking, like mathematical reasoning. It's really focused on instinctive judgment.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Okay. So then, uh, instinctive judgment can be subjective. One company can have a policy. They want to automate their accounting workflows one way. They have a definition for what is GAAP profit. The other one has a different one. So how much, uh, like, uh, you know, one shot or like pre-loading into like a context window is happening versus like talking to you, doing some fine tuning, like what, what, what terminology actually does carry over from what we know? And what is entirely new?

• 1:12:38Speaker 06

  So I would say like the former is the most accurate thing, but the real thing that's happening is this logic actually would go in code. So L L M's don't play nicely with code due to like a lot of properties about L M's. And the logic you're describing should happen in code instead of like in a system message. The classic example of this is L L M does something bad and the way to prevent it is say, pretty please don't do that in the system message on top. And you just have to pray it doesn't get context rotted out of it and it keeps on listening.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of these things were sort of like begging for JSON, begging for it to be structured the right way. And it's not guaranteed to be that way. It might be that way very reliably. And people have worked around that, but it's not a hundred percent, right?

• 1:13:21Speaker 06

  Exactly. And we are not a hundred percent either. That would be like crazy to guarantee intelligence. But what we try to do is we try to encourage the best practices and we try to be calibrated. So this is another problem with AI. Like it could, might be able to be like Einstein 95% of the time, but Mr. Bean the other 5% of the time. But it doesn't tell you if it's in like Einstein or Mr. Bean mode. Like, how are you going to automate anything, right? But like calibrate.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  It's just a funny reference, but I love it. It's really funny.

• 1:13:49Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Einstein shot at Salesforce, Mr. Bean AI. They need that as well. Um, so yeah, where, uh, so you're, uh, I mean, you mentioned like the servers are on fire. Are you compute constrained in the same way? Are you looking for like large, like GPU clusters and systems? Or, or does some of the, are some of the knockout effects of like the speed of the system that I've seen on display? Can it also run on like more commodity hardware? Are there any different elements to how you should think about your compute scaling? Or is it, or is it going to look like any other Neo Lab?

• 1:14:26Speaker 06

  Extremely different from other Neo Labs. Like, like, uh, you know, people know that about a year and a half ago, you raised less than $40 million. You can't get Neo Lab compute with less than $40 million. And also you can't build a profitable AI company with that, yet we have because we are just innovating. You know, we're just doing different stuff that everyone else is. So we have extremely different compute needs. Actually, the bottleneck changes every single day. I think it's just growing pains of scaling a system. Like you can't grow at the rate that we're growing without realizing like, hey, our system was not designed for this level of stuff.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:15:01Speaker 06

  So it's a, it's a constant battle there.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I saw some, uh, pushback that I didn't really, uh, fully understand, but I'd love for you to sort of break down what people are saying and how you'd respond to it. This idea that like this is innovation, but it's also a return to a prior era, a classifier model. Some people are like, well, we've always had this and like personally from this perspective, I don't care. Because if we need to pull something old off the shelf and it's amazing and it's delivering value, that's great. But is that, is that real? Is that a good criticism? Is that completely misinformed? How do you process that idea that, uh, that this is actually building on the, the shoulders of giants from years ago?

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Or a lost art.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Or a lost art. Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 06

  Yes. So I can curse, right?

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Please, we, we, we tend not to, but do whatever you need to.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Do it. Just.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Just, just rip it.

• 1:15:54Speaker 06

  Heck yes. It's fine. It's fine. I'll try to be controlled. I'm sorry if it gets off the rails. I love this question so much. Heck yes. Heck yes. It's a classifier. Is it just a classifier? No, but classifiers are awesome. Classifiers were not constructed because like a mathematician would think it's like a fun thing to do. A classifier is designed to make intelligence useful in systems, right? That is why everything was classifiers before Gen AI, because it was made for usefulness, not for demos or playing around. And actually that we don't take all of the ML 1.0 concepts, right? Some of them don't apply. What we do is we try to unlock the best that like AI of today has. And some of that doesn't apply, but like the other stuff definitely does.

• 1:16:35Speaker 06

  This calibration thing of like telling you when it doesn't know, that is table stakes for simple automation. How can you have it like run in the background and process something that would like normally require an accountant? If you don't have like extreme guarantees in how smart it is. So absolutely it's a classifier. And this is the kind of thing that I think ML people really don't get with our launch. You know, like this is a launch for developers.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, yes. I, I totally get that. Is, uh, is there a, uh, a version of this? You, you know, the, the story and I mean, you would know whether or not it's apocryphal of like Google had L L M's. They invented the transformer. They had a product that was similar to chat GPT and they didn't launch it that quickly. Is there a world where a technology like this maybe exists inside of a hyperscaler? And they just haven't actually gotten it out into the world? Or, or do you think that that's less likely to be the case?

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  I would guess that it either I'm a clown or it's extremely unlikely. We worked really hard on this. Like when I started, I was one of the best in the world at pre-training, uh, post-training, sorry. And I thought it would take a week. So, um, I would be, and actually, when I first, yes, when I first started, I thought this is such obviously the way to go. It's so obvious that for sure Anthropic's working on this already. OpenAI is cooked. I was at OpenAI when I first started thinking about this direction. And it just seems so obvious to like someone who's at the intersection of developer and researcher, but so non-obvious to pure researchers.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, what's this, uh, what's this thing that you're wearing?

• 1:18:13Speaker 06

  Oh, pink or that shirt?

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I guess both.

• 1:18:17Speaker 06

  Oh, it's a, it's a TANIS shirt, anti-language language model. Um, technically, it's not a language model, but it is a sick brand, so we wear it. And this is, this is my classic Temu twenty-dollar pink for a shirt.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  There you go. Very good. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and breaking it down. Congrats on the broadcast.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can only, I can only imagine how, how busy you are. Good luck with, with, I'm sure, a new round and serving all that demand.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:18:44Speaker 06

  Heck, yeah. See you around.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Bye. Goodbye.

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  That's a lot of fun. Great energy. Uh, up next, we have the co-founder and CEO of Silco Industries, Huma Reza Nazad. Let's bring Huma in to the TV. We've been altered now. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:19:01Speaker 07

  What's going on? Good to see you all.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Good to see you. What, what was that?

• 1:19:06Speaker 07

  We just made our announcement today.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Tell me about it.

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  Metal, we're making lots of metal soon.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, wait, so, yeah, sorry, reset. What is the announcement? Take us through it.

• 1:19:16Speaker 07

  So, Silco was a, a rare earth metallizer. We produce the metals of power and motion, the metals that go into any electric car, any fighter jet, data center, your phone, wind turbine, and we are completely unable to make these metals in the West. Silco is changing that. We just raised seventy-five million for our Silco One project. It's our, it's our five hundred ton per year rare earth metallization plant in Nevada, and it's the first step we're taking, uh, taking to market.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  How much of this is like the redwood materials playbook where you're using, uh, rare earths that have already gone through, been used, and you're recycling them versus engaging with mining companies to get new raw materials out of the ground and then refine them?

• 1:19:56Speaker 07

  So, when we, when we chatted the first time I was, I was on here, we were a recycler. Uh, so almost all of our production was from rare scrap. We would take material from hard drives, from cars. About a year ago, we moved to primary metal making. So now we work exclusively with mines. We take virgin mined ore that has been refined, and then we convert that to metals. We did that because of scale. It's just hard to get the volume of recycled material we need. So today, we do a little bit of recycling for, for a few customers, but almost all of our production is, is primary virgin material.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  How, what is the state of rare earth mining in America? Everyone's heard the, the catchphrase, like, the rare earths aren't actually rare, they're just stuck in the ground, and we don't really mine them. But it feels like, uh, the timeline to set up a new mining capability in America would be longer than your timeline, so there's some sort of mismatch there. So, uh, how much is that a reality? What are you running into? Where are the bottlenecks? What's the state of the American rare earth mining industry?

• 1:20:52Speaker 07

  So, contrary to popular belief, we do mine in the West, right? We, we have, we have an enormous rare earth mine in, in Australia. There's one in, one in, in the US in California. There is other dozens of projects scaling up across the West. There is mineral sands deposits in the US and elsewhere. The actual raw feedstock is not rare. It is produced in the West. The bottleneck is what you do after. It is the processing. That is something that we are completely unable to do in the West. Now, we actually invented these processes in America, right? America has a history of incredible work in, in metallurgy. The example I gave in the announcement was Charles Martin Hall with Alcoa, a twenty-two-year-old in Wichita, Ohio, who drove the price of aluminum down ninety-eight percent. The technologies used to make rare earths in China today are American technologies from the Manhattan Project. So, we did this at one point, and we built this technology and these, these systems, and then we shipped it to China.

• 1:21:38Speaker 07

  And China dominated, they matured it, they took over. And, and now, in the West, it has become incredibly difficult to be able to bring those technologies back anywhere where we can actually compete in the free market. It's very expensive, it's very dirty.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, there are two stories that people tell about why this capability went to China. One is, uh, labor cost was cheaper over there. Uh, they were a developing nation, and it was able to, you know, new, new people coming out of poverty, so you can pay much lower wages. The other one is more, um, about the effects of industrialization, uh, ecological effects, the fact that, you know, NIMBYism, no one wants a mine in their town that's dirtying up the water, so put it halfway across the world. Uh, which one of those speaks to you more? Is it a combination? And how are we overcoming those in America?

• 1:22:26Speaker 07

  Well, it's both. The first thing that happened was the environmental repercussions, right? There was, there's the enormous mollicorp, mollicorp deposit in, in, in the US. That was one of the, one of the first major rare earth projects in the world. There was a lot of scandals and a lot of, a lot of issues, uh, several decades ago regarding the environment. And rare earth deposits have thorium in them that can lead into the ground. So, one of, that's one of the initial triggers that actually shipped a lot of that production to China. And then we effectively gave all the technology to the Chinese, right? And Chinese, Chinese companies started buying up, buying up American rare earth companies, and, and they were able to take it, scale it. And once that happened, there was the economics that took over, right? Their cost of labor is, is ten times less, your cost of power is a third.

• 1:23:07Speaker 07

  So we really just could not compete with China if we were just copying that same technology stack again. It was impossible. The economics don't close. And so to this day, the economics, the economics don't close.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  But the geopolitical considerations sort of overweight that. Like, there's a lot of defense companies that have to buy American, and so the, the indigenous supply chain is, is, is pulling forward, correct?

• 1:23:30Speaker 07

  Hundred percent. But defense is only one part of the market, right? At the end of the day, we want to beat China at scale. We want to be the, the fact, the rare earth producers, uh, around the world. And as that demand, as that demand surges, we have to be able to compete in a free market. We can't just subsidize forever. And I think the only way we do that, and the only way we can win that next industrial era on, on the merits of our technologies, is we develop that technology, right? And if we can drive the cost down, and there's a lot of room for improvement, right? Rare earth processing today is very inefficient. There's, there's no reason it should be done the way it's being done today. It just happened to have been status quo in, in the eighties, and that, that's what we're copying again. So, at Silco, our vision is we need a new generation of much more effective technology. And that's what we did with our first chemistry that we're now scaling in, at Silco One in Nevada, and then we're planning to continue doing that as, as we go forward.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordy, please.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Super impressive last year for you. I, I am assuming it's been about a year since you were first on the show, but, but, uh, how, how have you grown the team? Where, where are you guys based? Uh, it sounds like this new hub in Nevada, uh, is not where like the primary, you know, the, the engineering is going to be, but, but what's the, what's the status of everything?

• 1:24:35Speaker 07

  This building I'm in right now is Silco Alameda. This is our engineering, R and D, pilot operations hub. This is where we, where we've been for the past year, and then Nevada is just production. That's just about three or four hours away from us today. So this is still the, the primary base of Silco. This is where we're developing a new generation of processes. And then, once a process is matured and ready, we, we deploy it to our, to our Nevada site.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  So, uh, you're, you have the money, you raised seventy-five million dollars for this new facility, five hundred tons of material for permanent magnets. When is that coming online? Who will you sell it to? Is, are you already doing biz dev deals with car, car makers, robotics companies? You mentioned defense being just one small piece of the market. Is there a eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the, uh, on, on the buying side that everyone sort of needs to, you know, figure out how to work with? Or is it a, a very diffuse market?

• 1:25:32Speaker 07

  Well, defense is, is a smaller part of the market, but it's a, it's a very important part of the market, right? So, Silco has two products. We make N D P R for the auto sector, and also a little bit for defense. And then we make samarium. Samarium is almost exclusively used in defense, it's used in F thirty-fives, et cetera, used in these high-power, high-temperature magnets, using guided missiles. China is one of the only producers of samarium. China banned the export of it, so there is this enormous shortage in the defense market right now for samarium, which is, which is why we, we launched that product and why we're selling that. And then N D P R, the majority of that goes to the auto sector, right? So we sell to magnet makers, major auto companies, we sell to the defense market. And all of that, all of that starts at scale in, in July, July fourth, uh, of, of next year, when we're commissioning Silco One for both of those products.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  But it sounds like, um, there, like, the supply chain is so deep and complex that you're not calling Ford to get your magnets in the next Mustang Mach-E. You're going to go to a, you know, a, a, a, a motor manufacturer, an electric motor manufacturer, and then they will wind up supplying to Ford or something like that.

• 1:26:32Speaker 07

  We, we do both. So, after China's rare earth restrictions, uh, in April of, April of last year, there was a significant shortage, and there still is a significant shortage of materials. Ford, you mentioned, shut down a factory because they just couldn't offer sure enough of these materials. So, the automakers, we find, are actually becoming very involved in the upstream. They're actually sourcing the raw oxides and raw metals themselves, so they can have a stockpile and have that access to that, have control of that part of the supply chain, and they can then pull it through their magnet production partners. So we work directly with automakers, we work with the magnet makers, directly with the, with primes. So we're, we're involved across, across all components of that, of that downstream supply chain.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Insanely impressive.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Uh, you, you are announcing fundraising today? Is that correct?

• 1:27:14Speaker 07

  That is correct.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:27:16Speaker 07

  Seventy-five million.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for doing what you're doing.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  It's very important.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Amazing progress.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

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

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  What a year.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  We got Jordan Nanos from Semi Analysis coming back on the show. We're going to get to the bottom of this whole AI thing. Do you think there's anything there? We'll, we'll figure it out. Jordan.

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  This, this AI thing people are talking about, you think, is there a there there?

• 1:27:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:49Speaker 08

  A little suspicious, but I've been using it.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  You've been using it? Okay.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't trust it, but I use it eight hours a day.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  Check it out. No, things are good.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Reset on ClusterMax and then let's go into 3.0. How long have you been working on this? What does it take to actually rank all of the NeoClouds, which of course is a semi analysis, semi-analysis coinage, which I think is awesome. But, and then how do you deal with all the, all the pressure that you get from every NeoCloud, probably following you around and threatening to break your legs if they don't make it into platinum tier?

• 1:28:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, the words in the Cambridge Dictionary, we found out as of last year. So we're proud of that one.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, a coinage. That's so good.

• 1:28:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's been four or five months of hard work on ClusterMax 3. The last major version was November of last year. So the big focus was the new B300 GPUs and 800 gig networks. That was, yeah, a lot of work testing with everybody. NeoClouds are at the center of the world right now. So many of these companies that you guys have on the show raised tens, hundreds of millions of dollars and then give like 90% of it to a NeoCloud and trust them as a partner. So the decision they make is super critical and, you know, we're proud to give our take on our experience doing hands-on testing and talking to all these guys.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of it is, there's a spec sheet that comes from a NeoCloud, then you have to fact check that? You actually have to run a test with them. Are you also doing the occasional site visit and actually seeing what they, what their infrastructure? Like what is the process for assessing the claims? Because every, every NeoCloud is going to say they're the best, right?

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Cheapest, fastest.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, all the above.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Thinnest, newest.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Probably biggest.

• 1:29:39Speaker 08

  Best looking.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Thickest.

• 1:29:41Speaker 08

  Best dressed. Yeah. We have done some site visits. I mean, it's part of our consulting business more so than the ClusterMax research itself. I think for ClusterMax, yeah, it's, it's a bit about validating that the claims that they're making publicly are real when we do our hands-on testing. It's also about getting in there and putting the cluster through its paces. So we do a bunch of performance testing and most recently for this one, we've also been digging in on some research of how to simulate failures and see how the providers respond. Probably the most critical piece of like decision criteria that people use when it comes to really big providers who might have roughly the same GPUs, the same amount on the same schedule for a similar price is like, who can I trust? Who is going to be reliable?

• 1:30:27Speaker 08

  And so we simulate failures. We identify how long it takes them to identify when a failure occurs, how long it takes them to recover. And the spread is massive. Like top providers do this in 20 minutes end to end. They have hot spare pools available so that they can make these changes. Some of the providers down the list, we simulate a failure or we actually induce real hardware failures on certain ones when they let us and it'll sit there for hours, days. They don't identify it. We have to let them know to make the replacement. When that happens, it takes hours, maybe even a day or longer sometimes. That's like, you know, time is money in the world of NeoClouds. And if people don't trust you to make these replacements, it's, you know, that's a big issue.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Is there a fear that they know you're going to be checking them out on a particular day? They're going to be on their best behavior and you need the next version of ClusterMax will be more of like a secret shopper program? You'll come in dressed as just a NeoLab through a partner and then all of a sudden a failure happens and they're like, well, like I'm, I'm pretending to just be an average customer.

• 1:31:31Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, that's why in our imagery, we have the Michelin man cutting off a nice piece of NeoCloud to see how they're going to rate on the three stars.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, to me, to me, it's notable that, you know, that this is, these NeoClouds are opting in and then they're having issues and they know they're having, they, they should know they're having issues or they should be paying more attention because they're getting graded and there's still that gap between a 20-minute fix and a multi-day fix or having to be notified that there's an error. I, I would expect that, I, I think that's probably just because there's so much demand everywhere and they're saying like, well, I have this customer paying me like, you know, a billion dollars a year and then I have you who's just like grading me. And technically like, you know, it's hard to say like who's more important, right?

• 1:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Is it, the customer should probably come first, but at the same time, this will impact future relationships. Overall, outside of these like edge cases and, and errors and reliability and things like that, is there, what can you say about like general performance? Like is the, is the gap growing between different providers? Or is it shrinking? I'm curious if it, if it ties at all to what we're seeing like at the, at the frontier, whether it's closed or, or open models where there's different points where you feel like the gap is shrinking or it's, or it's growing. And I'm wondering if there's any ties to this.

• 1:32:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, for sure. So in terms of performance, I think the biggest thing that we see change between providers is the network design. The difference in how you set up a network for 100,000 GPUs is quite different than 10,000 and even smaller. And some providers are going with non-standard networks. In other words, they don't buy the switches and the NICS from Nvidia. Instead they build them themselves. I'm looking at Amazon EFA as an example there. But others are just deciding to go with InfiniBand instead of Rocky, two different Nvidia options.

• 1:33:30Speaker 08

  This can really affect performance. The other thing is just configuration.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  To the downside?

• 1:33:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, to the downside. And it's, it's, it's not necessarily that the physical hardware has any significant issue in it. It's that, let's say you are a customer and you're trying to use some open source piece of software. So VLLM or SG Lang for inference comes out and they've got some new feature. The people who have developed that software have likely been using an Nvidia network. Almost exclusively, they use Nvidia networks. So how long does it take for you to get that software supported and performing well on your custom network? I mean, this delay can be months and again, time is money. So do these guys want to wait and think about their network for four months, waiting for that new feature for KV cache offloading to be supported? People get frustrated and so they want the Nvidia standard on the networking.

• 1:34:20Speaker 08

  And it's this balance between like a proper design upfront while also having the skillset on the team to be able to set things up, make upgrades to software, to firmware, support people with what they're trying to do. And reliability plays into this too. If you're constantly having hardware failures, like I said before, all of a sudden jobs are failing, they're not finishing, researchers are getting frustrated. So I think reliability underpins a lot of that, but software support, network design, even storage can really affect performance as well.

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  What is Nebius doing so well that they made it to platinum?

• 1:34:58Speaker 08

  They're serving this middle tier of the market. CoreWeave has set the standard. I mean, they are the best in terms of technology. This reliability stuff I'm talking about, they just have so much data for monitoring. I mean, these guys deploy 10,000 GPUs a week at the peak when they're like building data centers. And so that, you know, that's incredible, but like their balance sheet is full. They've, there's only so many people that you can marshal and resources to build out another gigawatt when they're going to 1.5 and beyond. So Nebius has really capitalized on this middle tier of the market, which is not small. Like I said, this is customers who are coming to us and saying, hey, I saw you write such good things about CoreWeave. I just have a hundred million dollars. I'm trying to give it to them.

• 1:35:41Speaker 08

  They're telling me they can't accept it until May of next year because they're backed up. And therefore Nebius has been capitalizing and they've also executed very well. Like the technology that they've developed is strong. We think that managed clusters are approaching like this feature complete world where it's hard to tell the difference in quality between Nebius and CoreWeave. Certainly our testing experience has been really solid on both of them. And our experience with these providers is actually that they're moving to other aspects of the business. So they're, they're going into these big bare metal deals at which, you know, we are not ranking bare metal here.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Speaker 08

  Nebius and CoreWeave, there are differences there.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:17Speaker 08

  And then inference endpoints, RL infrastructure, all sorts of stuff that we're going to be testing in the future where there is differences and, and these guys are not necessarily the household names in inference endpoints as the leaders right now. They have the offerings, but there's others that are ahead of them.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this seems really relevant to that mid slot of the market, inference heavy companies, NeoLabs. But are the big labs able to take something valuable away from this? Or are they doing things at such a unique scale that this is maybe a little less relevant because they're going to be talking to one of these, one of these providers as like, we're going to build something together and it's going to be exactly to our specifications. So we're not even really interested in what your, your, your stock configuration is.

• 1:37:09Speaker 08

  Look, the Frontier Labs read ClusterMax, they take it into consideration. I'm not going to say they like outsource their thinking to us, but they certainly do their own due diligence.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 08

  But, look, they have everything. They have their own self-build.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:25Speaker 08

  Sites for 100,000 to 400,000 GPUs in size, and then they also have smaller clusters.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Okay, so they need it for both, yeah, because they're doing it, they're doing everything. That's very interesting.

• 1:37:33Speaker 08

  It comes into play, I mean, especially in a world where there's so much demand. This is why we've seen SpaceX basically pivot and become a NeoCloud and sell to Anthropic and Google so successfully, because those guys are buying from anybody who, in this case, could turn on 200,000 GPUs overnight, and so therefore they paid like a 3X premium to get in there.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is SpaceX on ClusterMax? I actually didn't see.

• 1:37:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, we threw them in the unavailable tier. We were ready to test them when they are ready to have us tested, yeah.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  That's exciting. Well, we're rooting for them to make.

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Last question from me for now. How, has there been like crazy NeoCloud talent wars? Like, I imagine the smart thing to do a year ago, if you're spinning up a new NeoCloud, is to try to poach as much as you can from CoreWeave and like try to take over some of that, you know, knowledge and expertise?

• 1:38:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, and it's across the entire supply chain. So we see this in like the SREs you might think about that command like million dollar salaries and a bunch of equity and get this idea that they should start a NeoCloud for themselves, and some have, and some are being successful there, kind of going out on their own. But we also see this in like electricians, data center technicians, operators, like the, all of this stuff depends on being able to build a facility and like salaries for electricians in Louisiana and Abilene, Texas, and all these other places that we're tracking are like up 3 to 5X. Crusoe just came in and paid these guys so much more money, and they're out of people, they need to train. And I think this is just what we're seeing across the entire industry.

• 1:39:12Speaker 08

  No matter what job we're talking about, people just need to be trained, and that's the most, the most successful NeoClouds that we are seeing have this pipeline to take talent from other related areas and get them contributing to the, you know, NeoCloud management, day two operations world, where a software engineer can start to work as an SRE on one of these teams, and somebody who's good at front end can work on backend performance and stuff like that. And I expect we're going to see, well, we are definitely seeing cross-training of people who do real work on the ground, like electricians and stuff like that as well.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  On that, on that like reallocation of capital, labor, resources, it feels like the first big narrative around the NeoCloud boom was like pivoting from crypto mining to AI inference and GPU compute. Is there, is there another wave coming? Is there another source of NeoCloud talent and energy and capital, or is every NeoCloud, it feels like, have all the crypto miners pivoted at this point, or are there still some holding out?

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think the next, the next wave is, is the like inference platforms, the base 10s, the modals, like they're going to have to own chips.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Oh, and if they do, then they'll become a NeoCloud.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  And, and how do you expect those players to do when, as they move into spinning up their own sort of like power shells and getting their own GPUs? In some ways, it feels like they'll be very well positioned because they're already used to working with different providers and seeing the, the pros and cons of different approaches, but what's your view?

• 1:40:51Speaker 08

  I agree with that, and I think that the people who have been customers about NeoCloud know exactly what a good service is that they should be offering, and so I think they'll have good opinions. I also think that they are driven to do this by like real customer demand, and so in some ways they don't have an option, they just have to buy this stuff for themselves. I think they will, you know, be successful. Some of them already are going to that mix of managed capacity versus self-build. The other thing I think you might be overlooking is the chip startups. So like Cerebras has become a NeoCloud, Grok, the remainco after the Nvidia Aqua hire, is buying Nvidia GPUs and spinning up a NeoCloud. Others like Sam Minova are doing this themselves. We see OpenAI Jalapeno that's going to go into self-build

• 1:41:34Speaker 08

  sites. I mean, your companies are like, not only do I need to battle in the supply chain for allocation at like TSMC and the memory providers, I also need to go get my data centers set up, I need to learn about construction, I need to learn about day two operations. Who's going to train people to repair a Cerebras wafer scale engine in their 250 megawatts of compute they're bringing on in the next couple of years?

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 08

  Well, it's, it's them. They need to build that capability in-house. And frankly, I think they're going to realize a bunch of benefits to their margin profile for doing this, instead of having this like stack of other people that you depend on. Do it all yourself. I mean, do it end to end. AWS, Google, they already proved you can do this with TPU and Tranium.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:15Speaker 08

  I think this chip startups are going to do that as well. And then last common throwaway is just that there are lots of crypto miners to unlock, and there's also these like legacy clouds that haven't gotten into GPUs. I'm thinking about Cloudflare should be unlocked, Akamai, we just saw Iron Mountain, the guys who do all the tape backup, they're going to do GPUs. I mean, all of these companies that have experience running data centers.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:40Speaker 08

  Why not run GPU data centers too? You should be getting into this as well, so.

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 08

  Just going to keep seeing more and more people take this seriously and try to make money off it.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  What is the state of the mixed GPU NeoCloud? How many are pure plays? There are Nvidia shops, or there are AMD, and then how many are trying to actually rack multiple chips? Even if it's in multiple data centers, they at least have both available, and does that give them leverage? Like, what are you actually seeing, and then what is the strategy?

• 1:43:12Speaker 08

  For the guys who play it well, it seems like they basically partner with Nvidia on the way up, and then they start partnering with others to get some negotiation leverage, and they do both. You know, hyperscaler would be the goal, where you could have a self-built chip program, and you can also buy from Nvidia and get preference there. But you got to be big to do that. And so people who try to do this from the start, I don't see them being as successful, because you need that partner to help you grow to start.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:38Speaker 08

  And, you know, if Nvidia starts showing preference to certain people and not others, I mean, that's like they make or break your business in some ways. Yeah. Maybe another thing, yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe another thing about the, like the custom chip programs and stuff is just that the, the way you build a NeoCloud is like driven by the workload, and so big pre-training clusters can look a lot different than inference clusters, and there's a whole bunch of people building for RL right now. And like, we look at environments and sandboxes is a really big, important thing, that you need data centers full of chips that are not GPUs, because they're mimicking the behavior of your phone or your laptop

• 1:44:23Speaker 08

  during training. And so there's lots of ways to get into this space if you understand the workload. You don't necessarily need to deploy the latest and greatest Nvidia GPUs. And for what it's worth, somebody else is, we're going to be testing all of it in the coming months.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think there was reporting that OpenAI bought like 10,000 Mac Minis or something for maybe computer use stuff, and you could imagine like a NeoCloud of Android phones in the future, NeoCloud of iPhones or something, as people try and do more RL. Fascinating stuff. Congratulations on the launch.

• 1:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Excited to talk to you again.

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  Give our best to the team.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon. Goodbye. Up next, Pioneer Labs co-founder and CEO Erica Alden Ben David Nidictus. Welcome to the show. Let's bring in, how are you doing? Welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:45:13Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Yes. Congratulations on the launch. You took over the timeline, but for those who have been living under a rock on Earth, break it down for us. What are you building? Introduce yourself, please.

• 1:45:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I'm Erica. I'm the CEO of Pioneer Labs, where we engineer life for Mars so that we go there and breathe and eat and have flowers and have an awesome life.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I saw a picture of Mars on the timeline, maybe a week ago. It didn't have the orange filter. What was going on there? A lot of the, a lot of the images of Mars that I've seen in the past have this sort of like orange coloring. This one didn't. What's going on there? Was there, am I normally, am I used to seeing Mars?

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Is the red planet really red?

• 1:45:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:59John Coogan?

  That's your question?

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  My question.

• 1:46:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, currently, yes.

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:04Speaker 09

  Mars like sucks at the moment.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:06Speaker 09

  So, I mean, Mars, taking us back four billion years, Mars was really similar to Earth. It had liquid water, it by all accounts like should have been a place that could have hosted life. And, and then three and a half billion years ago, like the two planets, their paths diverged and Earth, you know, evolved photosynthesis, and we have this amazing biosphere that breathes out oxygen for us all day, every day, along with a million other things.

• 1:46:34Speaker 09

  Exactly. We and everyone ever alive is like so lucky to live in this, you know, live on the one example we know of, of like a functional planet. And Mars, it's a little smaller than Earth.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  It's a dysfunctional planet.

• 1:46:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, things went sideways for Mars. It is now really cold, and it still has like the raw materials necessary for life, so much of its northern hemisphere has permafrost. So like just below the surface, there's a glacier of water, but it's frozen. And there's other problems too, like the dirt on Mars over billions of years of having a lot of surface radiation now has weird toxins in it that would be, be very toxic for us if we grew potatoes in it directly. So there is, is work to do to, to go there at all, or even more work to do to live there permanently or in great numbers.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  So how do we fix it? And how do we make money off of it?

• 1:47:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we, over the past sort of two years, we've tried to break this big problem of how you make Mars nice down into an actionable first step. So what we announced on Tuesday was that we had engineered the first microbe that can, we can take it to Mars and it eats basically Mars dirt, water and air. That's it. And when it eats those materials, it turns them into bioplastics, which is this super useful category of materials that in this case, we suggest a good first application is to build houses with it. So you can pack your starship with equipment, you can go to Mars, you can unpack it, and you can continue

• 1:48:22Speaker 09

  to just convert local resources into materials to build houses and build like a small city in about two years. Because we now have life that eats the nutrients in the dirt, and that's it.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  That's amazing. And I was joking earlier, the company is a nonprofit, but if I get in early, I imagine that there'll be a for-profit conversion at some point. Just kidding.

• 1:48:43Speaker 09

  That is the traditional path trodden by OpenAI, isn't it?

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the new playbook. But why a nonprofit?

• 1:48:52Speaker 09

  Yeah. Listen, there's no customer on Mars.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Okay, makes sense.

• 1:48:56Speaker 09

  It's a little early. I mean, what's cool about this research is that many more people have started working on it just in the past couple of years because the technology is maturing enormously. And lots of other headwinds are sort of in favor of actually going to Mars and having there be biology. Notably, there's an enormous amount of investment going into space data centers, along with all of the other reasons that that sort of Earth's launch capacity has increased over the past decade. And so like, I think it's hard for the average, everyday person to feel it. But like, humans are going to space,

• 1:49:36Speaker 09

  like materially. And, and so like, the case is building for there being one day a customer on Mars who's going to care that you could make the planet not kill you immediately when you go outside. Or even that in the first contained, you know, human mission, you can have food and water and, you know, oxygen to breathe and stuff like that. So we're a nonprofit because it's early. And I think if this stuff continues to mature at this rate, then yeah, maybe you get to the point where you can start executing in a few years.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  So is the, if I map out the next five years, I mean, or 10 years, I imagine that the, you know, NASA will be doing important work. They're the most recent visitor to Mars. They put a helicopter there a year or two ago. And then also you have SpaceX building the, you know, private company capability to actually get there reliably economically on the future. Is the idea that if you, if you have some breakthrough, you would be fine with the implementation happening with either organization? Is there sort of like a, like a MIT license for some of what you do that might get picked up by NASA and experimented with further? Or do you want a deeper collaboration with, with either side of that, of the two organizations?

• 1:50:59Speaker 09

  I, I think the way you kind of describe this is like, almost as if space is this monolith, that it's like NASA and SpaceX do stuff.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:09Speaker 09

  And, and that's like, not how it will be, right? Like, as we start doing more stuff in space, there will be many different sorts of industries that develop, right? So NASA has like, cornered the market, let's say, for like, human spaceflight. Like, they are currently the best at it. They're not the only ones. So they have now competition from others who like, can also like, successfully execute human missions. SpaceX has, is currently vastly wiping the floor with everyone in terms of launch capabilities. But again, they too have competition from, you know, relativity and others. So the, the space, like, all

• 1:51:50Speaker 09

  of these different components of space, like, are hopefully going to continue to mature into like, a competitive ecosystem. And I would say, like, the thing I'm doing, which I'm excited about, is like, doing the biotech is its own totally separate, independent slice that like, I'm lucky to sort of get in early and there's a ton of low hanging fruit. But like, that itself is like, a whole nother slice of the space ecosystem that I hope one day will have many competitors, right? All trying to figure out how to do it better. And of course, will rely on networks of others to provide infrastructure and launch and human flight and like, all of that.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:30Jordi Hays?

  Quickly, like, what are, what timelines are you working off of? I think it's refreshing to ask somebody about space timelines that's, you know, not currently running a for-profit business that, you know, is public or needs to be public.

• 1:52:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, quite so. I don't have, I don't have valuation to guide my answer. Um, yeah, so we've, it took us about two years to make this first organism from Mars. There are five organisms we need to make to like, have a way to go to Mars and scalably make like, livable area on Mars. And the sort of general timeline for that is, I think we will have some version of all five of those by the end of the next three years, which puts us in like, 2029-ish. There's a launch window in 2028. NASA's doing some stuff. It would be really awesome to also have like, a search for life and a test that we can grow a first

• 1:53:30Speaker 09

  Earth organism, like, in that 2028 launch window. There's another launch window, early 2031. And that's the one where maybe we could actually like, go there and, and demonstrate something. And SpaceX, I'd be shocked if they don't try to get to Mars in 2028. But I think they might succeed in 2031. I mean, longer term, I think, like, technology broadly is accelerating. And so there's a lot of investment going into space close to Earth and on the moon. And, and much of the interest in the moon is because it's like, it's like

• 1:54:13Speaker 09

  the close testing ground for going farther out. But there's a lot of reasons why the moon itself is not necessarily the spot we want to set up shop forever. It has like, fewer natural resources to, to like, make use of than other places we could go, including Mars. And so I would not be surprised if we start seeing, you know, first human mission to Mars in the 2030s and like, substantial build out of like, the robotic precursors to that, like, sooner.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how do you grapple with NASA's historical preference for leave no trace when going to a celestial body? They, you know, build the rover in a clean room, so there's no, you know, Earth microbes or anything.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we need to be talking about pioneer safety. The idea of dropping a bunch of microorganisms on a far-off planet and saying, how about it?

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  So, yeah, some people are worried about this.

• 1:55:15Jordi Hays?

  There's some sci-fi scenarios where, you know,

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  Becomes more powerful than us.

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  Becomes more powerful and they decide to come back.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:55:22Jordi Hays?

  You left me here to die.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I survived. But yeah, I mean, how do you deal with like, I don't know if there's laws around what you can do, if there's just conventions. There's certainly people that are impassioned on both sides. I'm super excited about this. But it is a departure from the way humanity has been engaging with Mars to date.

• 1:55:43Speaker 09

  That's absolutely right. So, I mean, we've gone to Mars, the narrative for why we've gone to Mars for the past 20 years has been searching for life.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Speaker 09

  And so going there with the intention of, like, having humans live there, for example, is a huge philosophical departure. That there's a lot of inertia, like, against that and for that. Obviously, like, many people want to go to Mars, it'd be super awesome and like, kind of inevitable. In terms of law, so

• 1:56:15Speaker 09

  Basically, the law that governs space is like relatively underdeveloped and all of the activity, all of the private space activity is stressing the system. And I think folks recognize that like, we need to think a lot more about space law. There's a line in the 1970 Outer Space Treaty, which I kid you not is like, kind of the most recent, like, big outer space, like, law effort. And the line says, basically, thou shalt not contaminate planetary bodies with harmful, not harmfully contaminate planetary bodies, which at the time when they wrote that, that meant thou shalt not test nukes in space and spread

• 1:56:57Speaker 09

  radio radioactive stuff everywhere. That has now been in the modern era interpreted to also mean like, don't contaminate places that might have life with Earth life. Like, don't put invasive species places willy nilly, which is a really important thing to do. And it poses a big problem for the first human mission, because humans are covered with bacteria. We have a skin microbiome, and a mouth microbiome, and a gut microbiome that is, like, we can't be sterilized in the way that robotic science missions have been sterilized to date. And so, there's a body called COSPAR amongst other organizations

• 1:57:40Speaker 09

  that are trying to figure out what the policy should be to, like, assess risk when we have the first human mission. And actually, as part of our announcement, we published a paper that's like a suggested framework for how to gather data on like, here's an organism we're proposing to send to Mars. Let's actually measure whether or not it could possibly be invasive, which is possible to do for like, the biomanufacturing organisms we've made, because they're like, well characterized, you can take measurements. And spoiler, if this organism gets out of its bioreactor, it's going to be so dead, like, so fast

• 1:58:21Speaker 09

  that it can't even evolve. So like, this is not the one you would worry about. But even with that example, like, it's like unclear how to apply that to humans. Like, you know, our microbiomes can't be rigorously safety characterized, like, in that same way. And so, the discussion continues about how to handle that. Because it like, really would suck to go to Mars and interfere with life there, if it exists, which is like, not looking likely, but still is a big, a big concern.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Well, I look forward to your future speeches at the UN General Assembly. I'm sure you'll be there, breaking it down for everyone with all the progress you've made. But congratulations on.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really cool point of view. Come back on as you make progress.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to talk again soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:59:09Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  Goodbye. One last piece of car news? One more?

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Twist my arm.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Porsche is working on a successor to the 918 Spyder Hybrid Supercar, and it will be powered by an engine not seen since the 60s. That's according to Germany, Germany's Handelsblatt, which reports that the new model will be powered by a flat eight engine, eight cylinders. The suspected price tag, half a million euros, $575,000 US. The reporting also states that the project is known inside Porsche as codename S1, and could be revealed to investors as early as October 7. Just five days or seven days after the Tesla Roadster announcement, Porsche will be responding.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be so much demand for this, it makes me sick. The suspected price tag of $575,000, I mean, this thing's gonna trade up. I would expect it to trade up at least 2X instantly, probably.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Hard to say, but I mean, we have no idea what it looks like. These are just like, made up renders.

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  Some of these are, I think, based on the previous project that they were potentially working on, which was an EV successor to the 918 Spyder. The lineage with Porsche is the Carrera GT, then the 918. Everyone is waiting for the next thing, the next supercar, the next really special, unique car, not in the, not built on the 911 platform. This should be it, although, of course, there's a lot of 911 styling and heritage in there. But yes, if it's anything like what they're pitching here, it's gonna fly off the shelves. Do you think they do a manual? Are they gonna go that far? If they ripped out the EV, they went to the flat eight, you know, combustion engine, are they doing turbos? Are they doing

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  naturally aspirated? Are they gonna go as far as giving somebody just, you know, pretty close to Carrera GT experience? I don't know. We'll see. It's gonna be exciting.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of questions, but I can't wait.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  I can't wait.

• 2:01:26Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Was there anything else we need to talk about? Congratulations to Huberman Lab. Andrew Huberman is number one on the New York Times Bestsellers in Advice, How To, and Miscellaneous for Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. You can go pick it up everywhere books are sold. And I think that's it for today. Jordi?

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  That's our show. It's been an honor and a privilege, and we will be, we will be back.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  There's also a new Eight Sleep. The Pod 6 is live, the sixth generation of Eight Sleep's intelligent sleep system redesigned for every kind of bed. The new hub is small enough to fit under your bed frame, more powerful than ever, nine times as many sensors, new solos.

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Take you and your tie, go smash the gong, and we'll be out.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  Okay. Tyler's gonna do it. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we'll see you tomorrow.