# NeoLab Market Map, Future of Consumer AI, AI Doom Returns, Jensen's B-Day, Taste!

- Channel: TBPN
- Source: YouTube English auto-generated captions (`7CSG4BY5m-U.en.json3`), cleaned and speaker-labeled from the same-video caption files.
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CSG4BY5m-U&t=41s

## Contents

- [00:04:20 - 00:29:54] Tyler Cosgrove maps Wikipedia companies and Neo Labs
- [00:29:54 - 00:44:50] Five obvious fixes for consumer LLM adoption
- [00:44:50 - 01:01:08] Robinhood Ventures, xAI focus, OpenClaw, and Blue Origin
- [01:01:08 - 01:21:55] Energy poverty, data centers, drone warfare, and AI agents
- [01:21:55 - 01:36:05] College, AI culture, taste, and tech media reactions
- [01:36:05 - 01:50:58] Blake Dodge on Pirate Wires, California wealth taxes, and pro-tech messaging
- [01:50:58 - 02:09:30] Freddie deBoer on Substack bundles, AI wagers, and doom rhetoric
- [02:09:30 - 02:20:57] Sohail Prasad on Destiny and public access to private tech
- [02:20:57 - 02:32:14] Jensen Huang's birthday and Travis Brashears on Mesh Optical
- [02:32:14 - 03:11:50] Evan Spiegel on Snap, taste, subscriptions, AI, Specs, and California
- [03:11:50 - 03:12:00] Closing notes

## Transcript

### Tyler Cosgrove maps Wikipedia companies and Neo Labs

**John Coogan**: Journalists on the horizon. Founder known. You're watching TBPN and Jordi's juggling. It's Wednesday, February 18th, 2026. We are live from TBPN. [00:04:20] so back. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Come, baby. Time is money. Save both. Easy as corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. We have a great show for you today, folks. Specifically, Tyler Cosgrove has been on a little bit of a tear with the market maps. He dropped the market the final market [00:05:03]

**Jordi Hays**: market map.

**John Coogan**: We don't need any more market maps because Tyler made a market map that has every company on it. Let's pull up his latest market map. It looks like the United States associate out there that was making a market map and was just devastated.

**Jordi Hays**: all my all the companies I was going to put on the market map are now on this market map. which isn't in the timeline, by the way. and it it's very blue. And you did select Google. Can you walk us through how you built this particular market map of every company on it? it's every company that has a Wikipedia article, correct?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: correct. Yeah, so the one you're showing that that's the wrong one. That that's for later. so basically, I over winter break actually I was interested in this thing where like okay on Wikipedia there's like all sorts of like Wikipedia is I think is like a very underrated data source. And there's like all sorts of cool things I think you can do, right? You mean Grokipedia, right? Well, so Grokipedia is a little different cuz it's like generated on the fly, right? but basically you know whatever what I ended up doing is I took every Wikipedia article there's like seven seven and a half million English ones. and I ran them through an an embedding model. It was Qwen3 embedding 4B I think. You speak Chinese? Yeah, wo shuo Zhongwen. Woah! He's He's got it down.

**John Coogan**: Okay. But basically I I got an embedding for every single article, right? So, it's like basically every article has a vector it's like 2,500 [00:06:27]

**Tyler Cosgrove**: a while ago, right? The whole Wikipedia embedding or did you re-embed? This was like a month ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I remember. So, then basically I took all the articles I found all the ones that are about companies, enterprises, right? Which is basically you can find some direct direction in the in bank space that's like corresponds to how much like company-ness something has, right? You can find all the ones that Really? Oh, you don't you don't filter by like Wikipedia's categorization of whether or not it's a company? use that but that's not inclusive of every single company. So, it's like a little bit blurry cuz some things are like well, is it a company is it not? Yeah, I noticed some like railroads on here that look like maybe they're companies but they're like state-owned and where does that [00:07:01] It's kind of a blurry thing. So, you can't just use just what Wikipedia says. company But you can basically find things that are are companies and then you have a you have an embedding for every single one, right? So, it's this big vector in super high dimensional space. If you map it down to 2D Okay. you can have this like cool 2D map which is basically what I did. So, you can see there's these big clusters, right? So, it's like in the top left there's it's all these theater companies or there's space companies. I noticed the aviation companies were pretty far away from the train companies. Is that Yeah, there is I mean it's cuz you knew there was kind of like Yeah, conflict of rivalry. Yeah, rivalry. They need to be You got to keep those apart or they'll just start fighting.

**John Coogan**: like when you map something down from like, you know, there's like 2,000 dimensions down to 2D, it's like very hard to keep like like a ton of things

**Tyler Cosgrove**: just randomly looked like the United States. Yeah, that has nothing to do with that was totally random. Cuz I looked at it and I was like, "Oh, okay, there's a lot of companies in Florida, a lot of companies in the Northeast." Like I guess Yeah, I didn't even like realize. I was like, "Oh, it kind of looks like And then I was like, "What is this What is this enclave in Canada? Why does that Is that Alaska or something?" But in fact, it has nothing to do with the United States. It just happens to look like the United States. Yeah, but this So that it's like actually interactive, so you can like look up a company and you can find where it is and stuff. [00:08:01]

**John Coogan**: tylercosgrove.com/wikipedia_map.html. Wow, really a wordsmith with the with the URLs there, Tyler. Couldn't use a TLD less domain. but there are some fun ones in here. Anyway, that's a fun project. All the links take you to Wikipedia. Go check it out. And we market maps are basically done, but a lot of the neo labs are not on this market map. quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. And let's click over to Tyler's market map of the neo labs because we've been tracking the neo lab boom. We've had a lot of these founders on the show. we we came out of the world where we were like, "Okay, there's DeepMind, there's Google, there's OpenAI." Now we got Anthropic, there's Thinking Machines, and there's a couple of different companies, but the neo labs have exploded. They have a term that's been coined. Sarah Guo was actually, I think, the first person that came on the show and sort of broke it down for us around the Christmas episode. but since then, the neo lab like taxonomy has evolved, and so we needed to build a market map. So, Tyler, take us through what's going on in the world of neo labs these days. Yeah, so neo lab is kind of this interesting term like it it's very broad. People say like Neo lab, it's not very clear what they mean because there's all like broadly I think it generally is And this will make it clearer? Yes, I think after this it'll be pretty obvious like what you know, what you should be looking at and how to think about these different companies.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: I don't want to be more confused at the end of this. Yeah, that would be a disaster if that happened. Yeah, that's not going to happen. This is going to be easy. Okay, got it. Got it. Got it. Cool. [00:09:52]

**John Coogan**: okay, so let's just start okay, so you have Neo lab, right? So Neo this prefix Okay, that's be relative to something. [00:10:00]

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Yes, so Neo is relative to like your trad lab. This is your big lab. Traditional lab. This is your yeah, this is your open AI. for the big labs. Yeah, they don't get enough credit today. Building data centers, spiking CAPEX. So this is going to be your open AI, your deep mind, your Anthropic. These are kind of your big lab. Yeah, xAI. xAI kind of fits in there, too. Even though it's a newer trad lab, it fits in with the big lab that have a lot of money.

**John Coogan**: I think I talked to him he was he was like, he was like, yeah, three, maybe four labs, right? So the four is is probably

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Probably xAI. Yep. I think you can also kind of throw in Mistral in there. Okay, oh yeah, Mistral is a little bit older. Yeah. Yeah, I mean Mistral it there's much of these labs that were basically founded in the like two or three years before ChatGPT and then in the like six months after. Yeah. So I think xAI's in there, Mistral's in there. And these specifically these I feel like those trad labs, it's like they did a transformer base pre-training run. They have their own base pre-train. Maybe it's not at the frontier, but at least they're playing that game. They're not doing fine-tuning, they're not doing something else. So that's sort of like you're in the trad lab world when you're thinking about like a big pre-train run, loosely. Yeah, I mean especially if you're talking about these big pre-trains, it's it's really just these four. No one else is really at that scale. Yep. but then okay, so Mistral kind of brings us down into what I call the sovereign labs. Okay. So I mean, you know, if you kind of look at this, it's basically just labs that are not in America, but I think also that there actually is is a meaning to this. So like Mistral, you've seen Mistral become kind of the the leader in in European AI, right? So I think that it was in Was it Sweden maybe they're building a new data center? Yeah. Sweden. So so they're kind of becoming like Macron is always talking about Mistral. it's it's a big leader. Cohere is also kind of I think it has like a very, you know, it's a Canadian [00:11:37] company, yeah. Yes. But also has done their own pre-trains, has done their own No ties to the curling team, though. Okay. Okay. Okay. Complete no ties. So I don't want them Yeah. It's important to put some distance between that scandal. Yeah. And then you you can go down you can kind of see all your your Chinese open source labs. You see your Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi. Unitree is also in there, right? Unitree I think So as we'll see later there's also I have a section for like robotics labs.

**John Coogan**: Sure. but this is very clearly like, you know, this is the Chinese Yeah. Take us back in time now. What was going on before the Trad Labs broke out? Yeah. So so here I I have this section legacy labs. So these are our ones that were kind of more entrenched in these big enterprises. [00:12:13] Yep. so you have stuff like Microsoft Research, AT&T Bell Bell Labs, right?

**Jordi Hays**: Oh, Bell Labs, yeah. I forgot about Bell Labs. After You know what You know how You know why they call it Bell Labs? Why do they call it Bell Labs? Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah. It was founded by him. Yeah. Bell Labs.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Okay, but but also you have stuff like you you FAIR, Facebook AI Research. This was like I mean there's so many like OG research papers that that came out of FAIR. Yeah. this is what Yann LeCun used to be head of before it transitioned to the to the Amazon. Okay. So so then I think let's move up here around your your Trad Lab you also have POST Lab, right? p o a s t. Yes, these are posters. Yeah. These are labs where you get a lot of posters, right? So obviously this is OpenAI you got Rune, Yes. Anthropic, a lot of, you know, Sholto etc. You got a lot of great posters. [00:13:00] Prime Intellect I think will be around. a bunch of anons at Prime Intellect doing great stuff over there. For sure. and then you kind of get into the proper Neo lab. proper Neo lab. Okay. So, this is also a a bit hard to identify because like what is actually the core of a Neo lab and what are these different kind of offshoots? Mhm. I think Prime Intellect is kind of the prototypical like quintessential Neo lab when you think of it. where you basically have it's like fairly recent. Yeah. it's still very much research focused. Okay. like sure they have enterprise like, you know, Yeah. think about different stuff, but it at the core of it you're still like trying to find these like new novel approaches. It's research, you're hiring researchers, it's not just like engineers, sales guys, etc. Mhm. so let's Isn't wouldn't Sakana be more of like a sovereign lab? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so so a lot of these can can fit in all different places. Sakana would be, yeah, Japanese maybe. Okay. And you put MSL in here because it's a new project. Yeah, this one was also a bit hard. It it doesn't feel like a trad lab because I mean, maybe it has the scale, but it it's just [00:14:08] It's newer. It it yeah, yeah. Neo new lab, right? I mean, it's it's so recent. Definitionally. Thinking Machines is my classic go-to Neo lab. I feel like it's post post OpenAI exodus and and sort of OpenAI's nothing without without its people. you know, you get the spin-outs and and you think Thinking Machines and SSI are two of like the first case studies that sort of set the tempo for, okay, it's possible to do some research outside of the big trad labs. Yeah. And so that's where you get the Neo lab boom from. And then a lot of the other companies are feel like are saying, okay, we're going to do something similar to Thinking Machines or SSI. We're going to commercialize earlier or late, but we're following in that in that and we're benchmarking to that. Oh, they raised 2 billion, we're raising 200 million. It's easier. There's a 10% chance that we, you know, are are at their scale, so you can underwrite it that way. Yeah. So so Thinking Machines also brings us to what I call the trad SaaS lab, right? So you have SaaS lab, you've trad SaaS lab. So, I think the way I think about this is the trad SaaS labs are trying to basically use the data that's inside these big enterprises, pull them out with AI. so, this is thing machines, right? The rumored idea, right, is they're doing RL for enterprise. A bunch of these are doing fairly similar things where it's kind of chatting with your data, using the data that's very valuable to a company, but it's going to be inside the company. You can't really pull it out anyway. besides having the the AI be like internal. So, you have Applied Compute, you have Poolside doing all kind of similar things in this in this like enterprise LLM field. and then that brings us to neo SaaS lab, right?

**John Coogan**: base pre-trains for those companies, mostly fine-tuning or RL on top of a particular company's [00:16:05]

**Jordi Hays**: Yes. use case.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Yeah. And then I have neo SaaS lab. This is different than than trad SaaS. I think these are different in that they're not really pulling they're not going enterprise specific, maybe. I think that's one way to look at it. They're also much more of like startup focused, right? making a product that is sold effectively as SaaS. Yes.

**Jordi Hays**: So, Cursor, Cognition, Windser

**John Coogan**: Ramp Labs.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Ramp Labs. These are seat-based sort of consumption-based, but it's a product that's vended into a and the product is what you get and then sort of customizes as you integrate it, but it's not it doesn't the the conversation doesn't start with a with a with a with a business development relationship.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. And of course, I mean, these lines are pretty blurry. but then, okay, let's go down to the post lab, right?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Okay. Post lab after the [00:17:00]

**John Coogan**: is after the lab.

**Jordi Hays**: Yes.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: So, that means like basically they train the models and then these labs are working on top of those models. That's how I think of it, right? So, you have Meter, you have Epoch. These are going to do evals. You have Pangram. They're seeing is the is the model producing slap?

**John Coogan**: Yes. Or is it producing text that you're using in some way?

**Jordi Hays**: These are purely eval. They they don't have necessarily AI products themselves. They don't necessarily sell to big businesses like

**John Coogan**: be training models, right? Like Pan goes training models that sit on top of lab.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: true. So counts as a lab. Makes sense. Okay, what else we Maybe that brings us down to the safety lab. Yes. So these are pretty interesting. Anthropic kind of fits in this, right? Because they have a big safety team that are doing a lot of mechanistic interpretability. you have good fire. I think they just raised at like 1.25 billion and they're just doing mechanistic interpretability. Let's go. very interesting. Eleuther AI is similar kind of lab. yeah. Yeah. They're cool. They're also a lot of these are are also kind of in the open source space. Yeah, I think Stable Diffusion came out of Eleuther AI. Yeah. This is another label that I I think I could have put on, but it's so hard to get everything to like work together. But a lot of these are also like the core of the company is doing open source stuff. [00:18:01]

**Jordi Hays**: Sure. Sure. Sure. Right. So Prime Intellect Yeah. Fair. Was a good example. Almost OpenAI back in the day. But a lot of these have bled together where OpenAI has an OSS model, but also a lot of consumer and enterprise. Yeah, makes sense. Okay. So then in contrast to the to the SaaS labs Yeah. we have the consumer labs. Okay, consumer

**John Coogan**: are focused on consumers, right? So you have Eureka labs. This is Andrej Karpathy's project. Yeah, I don't think there's anything been released from it yet.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Education though. but yeah, education it's for people. you have humans. Oh, it's four four people, not four individuals working there. people. Yeah. It might be four people. It might be one person, who knows. He's pretty good.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. You have humans and right? This is the I think I think I think that phrase it's like humanity focused.

**Jordi Hays**: turn human into sand? Human sand.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Human sand. Yeah, we we got to hang out with founders at Super Bowl. But they're but but yeah, focus on creating models that work better alongside people. Sure. Sure.

**John Coogan**: a lot of like companions, [00:19:13]

**Jordi Hays**: Okay. these kind of ideas, right? You have character AI also.

**John Coogan**: Do they really own c.ai? What a great domain. If that's true, I don't know. We'll have to fact-check it. Anyway. so then that brings us down to the visual labs, right? So this is a lot of either multimodal models or they're actually like producing video or images, right?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: to a lot of these founders. Yeah. like almost all of them have been on our show. Labs raising today. Yeah.

**John Coogan**: Or fundraise announcement today. Midjourney, etc. These are pretty obvious. You have your Neo Auditory Lab. Midjourney is the is the sailboat logo?

**Jordi Hays**: Correct.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: It's a good logo. Yeah. Okay. you have Meta Reality Labs on there, too. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. They're visual. not fully AI yet, but they're getting there. Yep. You have Okay, you have Neo Auditory Lab.

**Jordi Hays**: Okay. Right? So this is going to be anything that has to do with vocals voice or music, right? [00:20:01]

**John Coogan**: Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs, of course. and thank you. Suno, right? Making music. Gemini also released a new model.

**Jordi Hays**: Yes, today from Lirya 3. I didn't even know there was a one or two. It's a trilogy already?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: They just got secret models that they're hiding from us. Yeah. Okay.

**Jordi Hays**: is very interesting field and then you have your legacy auditory as opposed to your new auditory, right? So these are your old ones. This is Well, John, do you want to talk about Nuance?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking. This is the original boxed software. You buy it, install it on a Windows computer. You can talk into a microphone and it will it will write down what you say, dictate it, yeah. Using some AI, not a large language model at the time, not a transformer-based architecture, but became a very large company. I think it's part of Microsoft now or something. I think it's been acquired a few times. But yeah, very, very interesting company. A lot of really solid Fruity Loops. Yeah, that's you know, you're in the lab making beats, I guess. Makes sense. so So, now moving up, I think this is really the very interesting sections. This is Neo Trad Lab. [00:21:04]

**John Coogan**: Yes. so, I think what is a Neo Trad Lab? So,

**Jordi Hays**: simple This is a simple definition. Clearly Yeah, okay. Does it even need explaining? I think I think everyone gets it, right?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Watch your head, by the way. Oh, yeah. He's coming really close. You might want to be on the other side. to the team. Okay, so Neo Trad Lab. It's a Neo Lab, Yes. but it's Trad. Okay. Okay, so what does that mean? So, basically, the way I I think about a lot of these labs is that they're extremely research-focused. Okay. they're also largely that they're focused on like kind of a single idea.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. So, if you think of like OpenAI, Mhm. very research-focused, obviously, but they're doing a lot of different things, right? So, they have

**Jordi Hays**: enterprise

**John Coogan**: it's even like on the product or on the research side, right? They're doing their video, images, Sora, images,

**Tyler Cosgrove**: even even within like language models, I'm sure they have a, you know, continual learning team or or they have all these like weird new chat things where I think a lot of these Neo Trad Labs are basically focused on one single moonshot idea.

**Jordi Hays**: Mhm. Okay, so example, flapping airplanes, [00:22:07]

**John Coogan**: Yes. right? They just came out to talk about data efficiency. Mhm. This is kind of the one kind of moonshot idea, right? Obviously, it's like a very There are a lot of different ways you could tackle it. subject. but they're like, that's the problem that we're going after.

**Jordi Hays**: specific thing they're working on.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Yep. and I mean, they they talked about, "Oh, you know, if we figured out there'll be some some value, but we're not actually sure how it's going to come out Yeah. Like right now. And we're not sure how we're going to productize it necessarily.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. But we have a But we have a really strong team.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: so so the idea is like, if if the if if these labs can figure out like the core research idea, then the value will will appear, right? So, this is You also heard this out of Ilya with SSI, right? Not sure how they're going to get revenue, but it'll come if they figure out continual we build it, they will come. Yes. Yeah. What's it for? A lot of interesting things here, so we can look at like, okay, general intuition. Yes. they're basically doing a lot of multimodal training where they can basically take video game data and try to figure out how to map that on to LLMs or world models or these type of things. Okay. you have Inception. I believe they're doing Dream Tech. wait. Okay, I'm thinking of Logical Intelligence. They're doing like diffusion models.

**Jordi Hays**: Okay. Right? So, diffusion but but for LLMs. [00:23:24]

**Tyler Cosgrove**: for text. Yeah, we've seen a demo from Google on that. Yeah. Okay, Inception is doing I think they're doing the energy-based models, which is kind of this weird thing. Okay, wait. I have both of those companies flipped again, but it's so yeah, Yann LeCun is into this. I mean, I don't know why you're flipping stuff around. Like this is this is literally just Neo Lab 101. You're doing a basic breakdown. the point is that they're doing these like kind of weird architectures where like energy-based model, it's like kind of different than a normal LLM where you don't have this normal backprop, stuff like this. but the point is that like these are all like very kind of weird like architectures that they're working on. So, maybe the big labs have like small teams that are working on this stuff, but basically these people go out of the big lab. A lot of them come are coming out of the big labs and they're starting these new projects. Like coming out of a trad lab or a or a neo lab or a neo Or a legacy lab.

**John Coogan**: SaaS lab [00:24:15]

**Jordi Hays**: Exactly, yeah. Okay, got it. Yeah. Okay, so now let's move up a little bit. We have Neo

**John Coogan**: Lab Lab?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Neo Lab Lab. Okay, so this is yeah, I like this one. So, these are a lot of companies that are focusing on They're also like very research-focused, but the the point of the research is to build essentially like a a researcher. So, it's they're recursive, right?

**Jordi Hays**: Okay. So, You have recursive and recursive.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: you have actually two that are recursive and recursive. That's your Richard Socher.

**John Coogan**: Double kill. Socher. Okay. You have Periodic Labs where they're not they're a little bit more focused on the hardware.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Okay. But the whole point is that they have this kind of closed loop. Okay. Where you can basically build a lab Yeah. within the lab, right? That's the whole point. You know, lab lab. You're building a lab. Got it. Okay. unconventional AI, similar thing. I think they're they're doing a lot [00:25:02]

**John Coogan**: will be a lab. They're they're in the lab manufacturing business.

**Jordi Hays**: Correct.

**John Coogan**: Got it. Okay, moving up, we have math lab. Yes. So, there's These are pretty interesting. Axiom and Harmonic.

**Jordi Hays**: Yes.

**John Coogan**: And then you have MATLAB, right?

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Yes. but but these are pretty cool. They've There's been a lot of good breakthroughs recently. I think there's a bunch of Erdos problems that are are being solved or maybe they're just being proven in some ways, but there's a lot of like interesting research coming out of these. Harmonic is Vlad Tenev, the founder of Robinhood.

**Jordi Hays**: Yes. Correct?

**John Coogan**: Yes. Yes. Wet labs? Yeah, wet labs.

**Jordi Hays**: Okay.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: So, these are your bio labs. Oh, you got LabCorp. Yeah, I'm familiar with LabCorp. LabCorp. but there's there's a lot of like biology-focused labs. It's actually like I didn't know a lot of I didn't know a lot about a lot of these. but there's all sorts of like interesting research. So so IceCure Labs, this was spun out of I believe Gemini or at least Google. Yeah, that's right. They're working on like longevity and just drug development almost.

**John Coogan**: some of these are are very focused on specific forms of drug development. [00:26:04] Mhm. some of them are are just like broader where they're very focused on longevity stuff.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Yeah. Cool. And then yeah, let's go to

**John Coogan**: up top? What's going on? Yeah, up top we have Labrador. Oh, that's really important. If you want to understand labs,

**Tyler Cosgrove**: got yeah, this is got your your golden lab foundation.

**John Coogan**: lab.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Your black lab. Your chocolate lab. lab. Yeah, chocolate labs are important. Yeah. If you want to understand labs broadly.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. Okay, then moving back down, we have the NeoKinetix lab.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Okay. So, these are going to be your your labs that are more focused on robotics. So, you have a bunch you have Project Prometheus. Yes.

**John Coogan**: This is Bezos's lab. It's still kind of in in stealth, which is why there's not even a logo for it. you have Figure, you have Skilled AI. Skilled AI is the Luke Metro project? Yeah. Yes. Got it.

**Jordi Hays**: Yes. physical intelligence, Sunday, right? These These are all your your kind of Neo Connect labs, right? These are started fairly recently in the past like maybe 4 or 5 years.

**John Coogan**: Yes. broadly [00:27:06]

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Neo Neo lab.

**Jordi Hays**: Neo Neo lab, right? Okay, so 1X is building Neo robots, so there's the Neo

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Neo lab, that makes sense. Yeah.

**John Coogan**: Yep. And then Legacy Kinetic is the previous

**Jordi Hays**: Legacy Kinetic is kind of the old gen,

**Tyler Cosgrove**: But cooking. They're cooking. Yeah, Waymo's cooking. Cruise and Boston Dynamics have been a little bit behind. Zoox also another self-driving car company. in here that I could have included. There was another one Stealth, I think, that never really hit. Inflection, okay. Yeah. And then you have your

**Jordi Hays**: Mostly vehicle focused.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: your Dark lab.

**John Coogan**: Yes. So this is

**Jordi Hays**: Working with the government.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Yeah, I have Skild AI. I also have DARPA.

**John Coogan**: DARPA is a lab, yeah. They invented the internet, right? Yeah. Yeah.

**Jordi Hays**: GPS? Yep. Yeah. DARPAnet? Yes.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: And then Simulation Lab, I think that might Simulation Lab, yes. similarly, we just had them on And then SpaceX you could you could put up there cuz aren't aren't they working on this Pentagon Yeah, where's Rocket Lab? Rocket Lab needs to be on there. That's a lab. There's a lot of labs that I mean, yeah. Lab is very very broad term. term. Well, I at least it's crystal clear now for everyone. [00:28:09] Yeah, so I I think this should be pretty obvious to anyone who's thinking about Neo labs, like how you should be thinking about them now. If you've been paying attention, this is all second nature to you. Yeah. Did you add up how much all the companies have raised? It's got to be in the north of 200 billion. Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, so so I I didn't do that, but for a while I was trying to figure out how to include the valuations on the map. Yeah, it was too complicated. You didn't feel like you could do the math? No, we don't know how. Well, it's also a a lot of them are are rumored. it's actually like kind of hard to find out cuz a lot of these are are still really in stealth. Like a A of these Neo tried labs, they basically because the whole point is that they're they're doing this like research stuff. Yeah. they're they're not going to like productize early.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. And also how much do you put in the DeepMind bucket? That's a huge amount of investment and it's not exactly disclosed. Do you count the TPU? Do you count Google Cloud? Like different allocations. You can go really deep in the stack to understand the impact of like the broad AI buildout. but yeah, I mean if you just total this up, you can really just do xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic and get like 90% of the way there and it's probably like 200 billion. It's also hard because it's like evolving so fast, right? So David Silver's lab who he was used to be at DeepMind. Oh, I like it. Ineffable. Ineffable intelligence. That's a good word.

**Tyler Cosgrove**: I think that was rumored today. so [00:29:25]

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. It's good. But these things are coming out like every day, right?

**John Coogan**: you put the typos in just to prove that What typos? by humans. So like sovereign lab and then

**Tyler Cosgrove**: Sovereign Ineffable intelligence also has a typo. And so I I just want to make sure I wanted to make sure that people knew you put Yeah, you put the typos in so that it was proof that you made it. Yeah, yeah.

### Five obvious fixes for consumer LLM adoption

**John Coogan**: Yeah. I don't want Oh, well, yeah. I Whatever you built this in doesn't have spell check, I guess. anyway, fantastic report. Thanks for breaking it down. I learned a lot and I hope you did, too. And let me tell you about a lab, Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And I'm also going to tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And one show, two maps. One show, two maps. Strong start. should we break down five wildly obvious fixes that will explode consumer LLM adoption? They don't want you to know this over at the big labs, but I have some Basically, everyone's been really focused on agent coding and the SaaS apocalypse and what's happening in the business-to-business world and the and the enterprise world. I've just been sort of like thinking back on, you know, basic improvements to the chat apps that I use all the time. because there's some really obvious stuff that I think I think is in the works. I think it's coming, but I wanted to just sort of like get it all down in one place to think about what the next iteration and the next breakout moment when people are like "Oh, I'm using them even more. I'm having a better experience." What would that look like? So, the first thing is that I realized that I've asked ChatGPT just when was OpenAI founded three different times. It's the exact same query. Like, it doesn't need to light the GPUs on fire for that question. It the the answer never literally never changes. You can cache the result, and that's what Google does with those knowledge knowledge queries, knowledge panels. And there's a whole bunch of different there's a whole bunch of different ways to deliver results that are sort of pre-cached. And so, if you just look down when when an LLM launches, basically every question has never been asked before. But now, there's a lot of people that are just showing up with the exact same question. Give me the history of the Roman Empire. Give me the history of this company. And you might not be the first person to ever ask that question exactly, but also if you do a little bit of fuzzy if you do a little bit of like fuzzy search over it, you there're probably like hundreds of thousands of people that have asked the exact same thing. So, cache those results, give them to the user instantly. And I think this like instantaneous feeling of LLMs, like they felt slow for a really long time. They actually got slower. Like, it was always sort of slow. You watch the tokens stream in, but then once the reasoning models and the thinking models and the deep research and the O3 Pro came out, it was like really slow. It was like close your phone and come back in 20 minutes. That doesn't have to be the end state and I don't think it will be. And I have no better example than number the number two on my list, which is Cerebras inference. So, ChatGPT currently has a model called 5.2 instant and it is not instant at all. I fired off a prompt to 5.2 instant and I said, "No reasoning. Tell me the history of LLMs." It took 38 seconds to deliver the full response to for like all the tokens to stream in. And it does a good job. It it shows you images and stuff and it is a cool it is a cool illustration. But then, I went over to Codex desktop and I fired up GPT 5.3 Codex Spark low, which is a crazy name, which we'll get to. and it responded in under 2 seconds. Because it's from what we know, Spark is incredibly quick Cerebras and it's very, very fast. And so, everyone's obsessed with like the fast models in the agent coding world because you're waiting a half an hour for something to get back to you. You're waiting 5 minutes for something to get back to you and you're actually losing your train of thought. But I think that applies in consumer as well. And I think the interaction of sending a message and then just immediately getting a response before you actually think, "Oh, well, like it's it's waiting. I'll close the app. I'll check my net messages. Oh, I got an Instagram notification. Let me go over there." Like like instant responses will keep people in the apps longer and user minutes will actually increase once that rolls out. So, pretty simple implementation for I think most companies. My big question is like I know Google has a huge advantage with TPU, but I don't know if they have like an answer to Cerebras specifically. And Nvidia just brought Grok, which can do I think some of the same things. So, I'm I'm curious to know how every lab solves the like fast responses question because that feels like an important piece of the puzzle. It's not the only piece of the puzzle, but it's an important feature and I think we're going to see it rolling out to consumer LLMs very, very soon. And I do think it'll be an interesting moment for people to both ask a question and just boom, it's as fast as going to Wikipedia and just seeing like, okay, everything's rendered, it's thoughtful, it's what you want. and on the flip side, I think that it could make people a lot more chatty with them, like actually asking follow-up questions because you don't feel that cost of like, oh, if I ask you to follow up and tell me more or re- or go a different direction, like I have to wait. I have to wait, so I might just close the app. speaking of GPT 5.3 Codex Spark low, no more model names. Like truly no more model names in consumer AI LLM chat apps like ever. Like just bury them so deep in the UI that you never see them. And people will complain. People will be like, I wanted it to be easier to pick. I like picking between pro and thinking and fast and instant. I know the what I want for everything. People complain. But it will all inspire the model routing team to grind harder, and the model routing team has a hard job to do, but they will eventually figure it out. And eventually, you should be able to just talk to the model. You can already do this in ChatGPT. You can say, hey, think really hard about this question and give me a really thorough answer. And it'll go it'll switch from instant to thinking. I don't know that you can trigger pro from that. I haven't actually experienced that. I did try and trigger a deep research report. I said, hey, please deep research the Roman Empire for me. and it does not fire off a deep research report. Deep research is buried under like a plus button, and you have to select it and you say, okay, I actually want you to do this thing. And then it takes you down the deep research like workflow, which I understand is like for inference reasons. They don't just want you firing off deep research reports all the time. But I think in the future, like the the model router should be very intelligent about, okay, this is this is a question that people have asked thousands of times. Let's just go get it from a database, which is crazy to think in the age of AI that you wouldn't even be hitting a GPU, but I think that's going to be real, and then I think the on the other side, like you should it should detect like, "Okay, this person wants something that's far beyond anything that we've ever worked on before. We got to go search the internet. We got to write some code. We got to do a whole ton of stuff to need 10 minutes. inspire up deep research, right? Fourth, ads. We've talked about this, but we got to get them in the LLMs. We got to get them everywhere because I was thinking about the death of Google Reader. I don't think you were ever a Google Reader guy, were you? But it was amazing. You could take all these RSS feeds from all these different blogs during the blogosphere. You could put Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen's blog, all these different stuff all these different things in there, and just kind of scroll through them really quickly. And Google wound up killing it, and everyone was like really upset. And the reason was I think because they never really got on the Google ad flywheel, where there was real like revenue generation and it was [00:36:40] Yeah, and was that just that it didn't hit a a scale that enabled it to make sense? The failure of every Google project that has failed is always a question of like, was it because they weren't making money from it, or was it because they hadn't monetized it yet, and [00:37:19]

**Jordi Hays**: Or it just never got big enough. never got big enough to monetize.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. weekly actives, it's not Yeah. probably worth keeping around. Totally, totally. But my my takeaway from Google's surface area of products that are successful and loved, Google Search, Google YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, Android, like these are all direct funnels for the ads flywheel, and so you can see that they're driving the bottom line. There's a whole bunch of folks on the team that are getting excited when they're hitting their numbers, when they're making more money for the business, and so they just get more and more resources, more and more engineering effort, everything gets better. And I think that not only are ads the best way to deliver high-quality products to the broadest possible audience, but they just make products better top to bottom. And yes, there's the stated versus revealed preference thing, and yes, you might want to pay to not have ads like you do on YouTube. many people do. But I do think that that ads flywheel is going to be really, really important as the inference gets really good. And right on time, Perplexity ends ads experiment. [00:38:36]

**Jordi Hays**: that.

**John Coogan**: This was the news from this morning, and the information from Katherine. He says Perplexity is no longer offering ads, an executive told the Financial Times. The AI search startup is pulling back from this line of business as rival OpenAI starts showing its users ads in ChatGPT earlier this month. The company said it worried ads would undermine users' trust in their platform, with an executive saying the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything. I don't buy this at all. Arvind has a history of kind of just like trying to provoke OpenAI at every turn. So, coming out Perplexity in my view, like that this is just like somewhat bearish, right? They're trying to serve as many people as possible all over the world. The best way to do that is going to have an ad have an ad-supported tier. Kind of bailing on this on this moment, I don't I don't know. Maybe it's not worth reading too much into it, but a little bit early to throw in the towel on the economic engine that has driven the internet for its entire history. Yeah, I mean, we talked to a lot of founders who have brands, and they love advertising. And I think that's another side of this, which is that when like a lot of entrepreneurs, and also people who work at businesses, want to grow their businesses, and they have fond you know, memories or or affiliations with Facebook and Google because that's how they grew their companies. And when you talk to somebody like Sean Frank at the Ridge, he's like, "I'm going to be first in line to advertise on ChatGPT. I can't wait for that. It's converting so well already. I want more of that business." And we didn't really hear that with the Perplexity ad product. We didn't hear people lining up to to buy ads in that product. So, maybe it was not going as well as they thought. so, according to the information, Perplexity started testing advertising in 2014, less than a year into its test, Taz Patel, the executive leading the ads effort, left the company, and Perplexity had only let in less than half a percent of the brands that wanted to advertise on the chatbot. So, there was like a bunch of demand. They barely let anybody use it, and then they bailed on it. And so, Interesting. Well, the last one is somewhat related to Open Claw, but I think way down the funnel beyond the 20-minute deep research project, you probably want to be able to fire off something that looks like Claude code or Open Claw or Codex to write lots and lots of code and solve a really, really hard problem. And so, many reasoning models can already write some Python and execute it, but it's clear that everyone wants to go further, hence the Mac Mini boom. And I'm not actually sure how important access to the local file system is to most consumers. Like when I when I think about what's like most of the data in an average internet user's life is mirrored in the cloud. I think they care about their camera roll. They they care about their email, their messages, and almost everything's in the cloud. I've noticed this when when I move from one computer to the next or I move from a phone. I'm like, "Wait, I didn't actually There was a time when it was like, 'Oh, you're moving computers, like like get an external hard drive. Like make sure you drag all your folder all your files over.'" Most of the stuff's mirrored to iCloud. That can be accessed via an API. It requires a business development deal, probably, but it does seem feasible, and a lot of the LLMs have hooks into Gmail already. I think all the all three major LLM apps have Gmail integrations already, and more integrations are coming, clearly. And so, I'm not sure that you need to replicate OpenClaw and have it running on a dedicated piece of hardware, even like cloud-hosted. But, I do think people will want to be able to fire off something that writes tons of lines of code to solve a particular problem, even if it's something as mundane as like getting you a restaurant reservation at a place that doesn't have a, you know, an API. Like, if there's a restaurant that just has a web form, and you basically want to deploy like agent mode, that might look like writing a web scraper, and writing something that actually does like a headless Chromium browser and like clicks it, and that might be generated from something that looks a lot more like OpenClaw or Claude Code than something that is just a couple lines of Python in a reasoning model. Anyway, there are there are also a bunch of nice-to-haves. These aren't really on the list, but you know, these these apps, they still occasionally fail to return results when you're in areas of patchy cell phone service. There's like little UI things. Some of them botch text-to-speech requests when you will you'll fire off a a deep research report, and they'll be like, "Read this to me." And then it'll read for like a minute, and then it just stops. Some of the apps don't like you listen to the deep research reports, but they let let you listen to the normal reports. So, there's all these like little fine details in the UI that I think are causing more churn, and people can just chop away at. it's unclear if what what is required to make an amazing product is just AB testing all of these things and just optimizing, or is it taste? I have no idea. But, if you wind up doing this is my recommendation for anyone who's working on this stuff, if you're just going to run an AB test to figure out what is the correct user interface. And you And you run the You run the AB test. You You find out that the button should be blue instead of green. Don't tell your boss you ran the AB test. Tell them it was taste. Say that it's all about taste. Good call. [00:44:21]

**Jordi Hays**: you have taste.

**John Coogan**: about taste. Because then you'll have a job forever. Yeah. But But if you're say I I'm just the guy who runs AB tests really well.

**Jordi Hays**: Probably. Probably. Taste is king.

**John Coogan**: It's true. The AI The AI models can't taste. They can't taste. They can't taste A5 Wagyu. They can't taste a Cabernet Sauvignon. Only you can do that. So, make that dinner reservation and enjoy a nice glass of red wine because the models can't. They just can't. There's just no way. There's no way. Alpha. Alpha. Alpha. Anyway, 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. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligent cloud building the AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Robinhood says historically investing in private markets was limited to institutions and the elite, but not anymore. With Robinhood Adventures, you can now get exposure to private companies like the ones listed below. They have a new fund that has Databricks, Mercor, Revolut, Airwallex, Boom, Supersonic, Ramp, Aura, and Stripe, which is signed

### Robinhood Ventures, xAI focus, OpenClaw, and Blue Origin

**Jordi Hays**: and pending close. Very curious which of these companies if any were actually on board and excited about being part of this lineup. [00:45:33]

**John Coogan**: I think Ramp was. I saw Fax Herbert from Ramp posting about it. and he is But that doesn't mean the company Okay. He said, "We are excited to partner with Sarah, Shiv, Chan, and the broader Robinhood Ventures team on their inaugural fund. On a personal note, I'm revealed I'm relieved to finally have an answer for family and friends who have been asking, "How do I get exposure to Ramp Equity?" And so, you know, if if this is coming out from your head of investor relations, it's not exactly a Mac Grime style response. So, I think I think most of the companies that are in the press release that at least and and saying, "Hey, you can use our logos." are cool. We'll see where it goes. There are there are folks that are that might get funneled in there and they don't want to be and there might be a whole bunch of different different debates and back and forth. What is Ankur saying?

**Jordi Hays**: Sheel Sheel shared kind of some of the the cost basis from the prospectus. they bought Data Bricks at $150 per share, now trading at 204, Ramp at 90, now trading at 98. Airwallex $21, it's now trading at 18.8, and then Mercor at 714 now trading. So, already seen a little uptick. Ankur came in and was sharing some of his sites. insights friend of the show. He says a single closed-end fund that gives you exposure to some of the top private startups. My thoughts, people want access to private markets, of course, so much wealth creation in America happens in startups and people desperately want access. You can see this with the insane silly fees people are paying for Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI SPVs. He says too, the structure of this fund is broken. As a closed-end fund, the price here can diverge very significantly from the net asset value of the underlying assets with FOMO from access. This is easily traded at a very high multiple to NAV leading to a lot of retail investors getting their face ripped off. it ends up being less of a venture fund versus a speculative product to ride private markets sentiment. [00:46:39]

**John Coogan**: It's a great disclosure. [00:47:50] disclosure. Long Robinhood, but will not be

**Jordi Hays**: but But like, "I don't like it." Yeah, so we actually have Sohail, founder of Destiny, coming on the show today. So Sohail Prasad, he's coming on at 1:00 p.m. And they're sharing their Q4 results. They have exposure to Anthropic, Chaos Industries, Hermeus, positioning Destiny as a New York Stock Exchange-listed vehicle, democratizing retail access to high-grade

**John Coogan**: Yeah, and Destiny has suffered from the same problem. They were super early. They got this fund out in almost 2 years ago, exactly, or close. And immediately it spiked, right? There's a lot of demand to get exposure to these assets. And it's sort of come back down to Earth since then, but excited to get the update from him and understand how that And let's pull up the rest of the Linear lineup to show you who's coming on the show today, because we got Blake Dodge from Pirate Wires, Freddie deBoer from Substack, Sohail, as we mentioned, from Destiny, Travis from Mesh Optical, and then Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snap. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Moving on, Elon Musk announced that xAI is moving away from traditional academic benchmarks, like Humanity's Last Exam, to focus Grok on maximal utility for real-world engineering and software development. He said, "Actually, I don't think HLE is a great measure of usefulness. We're moving away from these benchmarks." So Andy Scott says, "So it's bad?" Question marks. Who said that? I think it's totally fair to just focus on real-world utility, but of course people are still going to ask, "Well, I still want to know how it does." Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Tyler, give us the update on 4.2 that came out today. So Grok 4 has already been out. This is a minor revision. [00:48:16] 4.1. 4.1. So, now we're at 4.2. And and is it is it focused on benchmarks or have have they carved out a particular particular niche yet? Yeah, so I think historically, especially when Grok 4 came out, people were like very very quick to say it was like, "Oh, this is so benchmarks or whatever." I think they've definitely retreated from from that like at least path with 4.2. It doesn't look like outrageously benchmarks or anything. They did this kind of interesting thing where when you So, it's still not like fully out. It's still like in in beta if you go on the the Grok like interface. they did this kind of interesting thing where there's like four agents. Okay. Like every time you actually do a prompt, there's like four agents. And the agents specifically have like distinct roles. Okay. [00:49:53]

**Jordi Hays**: Where it it's almost kind of like you have four instances of the same model, but they have different system prompts. [00:50:35]

**John Coogan**: Yeah. So, you can try to get like, okay, this one is like focused on doing like qualitative things. of mixture of experts, mixture of agents. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

**Jordi Hays**: But, you know, mixture of experts is like a that's like in the architecture of the model. Where this is like you train the model, then you kind of add this as almost like a harness type of thing.

**John Coogan**: So, it's kind of interesting path. Yeah. we'll see like yeah, again, this is still not like the actual 4.2 Yeah. [00:51:01]

**Jordi Hays**: full full release. Okay. I believe. Yeah.

**John Coogan**: but we'll see. Yeah, I wonder I wonder what the bull case is here for for xAI. They they there's a world where they carve out some sort of niche, you know, Anthropic's like focused on coding very specifically and you know, had some major major gains there. what else is there to be you know, to

**Jordi Hays**: I I think with macro hard, they're going very hard on computer use.

**John Coogan**: Okay, computer use. Yeah, see that would be an interesting thing where they could like jump to the front of that. And if that's the important the important technology for a couple months, that could be really good vibes. Yeah. also, it is interesting to think about with the Cerebras news and with the value of like high speed inference on one the whole model on one chip. Is that something that that Tesla's chip team can can iterate towards on a faster time horizon than other chip companies? I don't really know, but they I mean they they do custom silicon and they've done it for a long time and they got an entire self-driving model that runs on a car. So, you know, they have some experience there. And they obviously design and fab or they don't fab it themselves, but they design it themselves. And so, it will be it will be interesting to see how they how they carve that out. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Action.AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Tariq says, "I'm proud to share that Humane has invested 3 billion into xAI series E round just prior to its historic acquisition by SpaceX. Through this transaction, Humane became a significant a significant minority shareholder in xAI. The investment builds on our previously announced 500 megawatt AI infrastructure partnership with xAI in Saudi Arabia reinforcing Humane's role as a strategic development partner. So, yeah, interesting. maybe, you know, would have wanted to get this out before before the SpaceX acquisition, but better late. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They they said they got in before the acquisition. I know, but

**Jordi Hays**: the news? But like, you know, this round got announced a while ago. Yeah. So, maybe they would have they're they're coming out with this news today. Yeah, but they're saying, "Hey, we got in before the acquisition. So, we got we got SpaceX shares." I don't know. It is it is odd that they're saying better better late than never. Yeah, you mean on like a comms front. But like from a financial perspective, like that that was the right time to invest, right? Yeah. I think that's I think that's what's going on. I wonder I wonder why the announcement was delayed. Maybe it's it's like regulatory approval. Yeah. [00:53:20]

**John Coogan**: Because it's a international investment. Yeah. let's play this clip from Jeff Bezos, his space company Blue Origin will move heaven and earth to get to the moon before rival SpaceX. The CEO, Dave Limp, said Recently, Jeff Bezos, who never tweets, this was his first tweet of 2026, posted a photo of this like black tortoise, which goes along with Blue Origin's seeming motif of slow and ferocious, methodical. Our tortoise is slow. have viewed it as a warning shot to Elon Musk, which really was focused on SpaceX going to Mars, and now he's saying we're going to focus on the moon. What do you make of that tweet? And what is the competition right now? Do you think you're going to be the first? Well, it gives me an opportunity to put on a t-shirt for you. So, there you go. That's the the [00:54:24]

**Jordi Hays**: Nothing else. Let me do that. great. I get to keep this? Yeah, that's all yours. Yeah, and that's the first one off the presses, too, by the way. I think everybody's going to want one of those. This t-shirt Mark Bloomberg has to lose for Blue to succeed. What the US needs is it needs two SpaceXes. It needs two launch companies that are competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country, commercially, civilly, from a defense perspective, because our adversaries aren't standing still. And so, we need we need to be moving very quickly.

**John Coogan**: Healthy competition. But, I think a lot of people read into that as the tortoise being Blue Origin and the hare being Elon Musk and SpaceX. Because it also comes after Secretary Duffy had said that SpaceX is behind, so they were opening up for everyone in terms of Artemis. And Jared Isaacman, who's now the administrator, also said essentially, yeah, whoever can get there first is going to get the contracts. So, do you think you're going to get there first? I I think if asked, we will make a we will we will give it a run for our money. I I like our architecture. I I like our odds of getting there very quickly. I I don't I don't have a crystal ball into what SpaceX is doing. I I think again, Gwen and Elon are competent and they've showed every day by launching rockets, but I love the fact that the US would compete us against each other. They are for sustainability on lunar. We're talking about who could get there in 2028. if asked, we will step up and we will move heaven and earth to get to the moon first. Move heaven and earth. Powerful line. the moon race is going to be fun. I think it's the it's shaping up shaping up well. I mean, yeah, a little bit of a come tortoise and the hare story, a little bit of come come from behind. I I'm not buying the tortoise as ferocious. Yeah, I don't love the I don't really love the I don't really love the analog like I don't I don't I don't I don't think it's the best com strategy. Like I I like the vague posting at a at a Jeff. It gets it gets the people going, but at the same time, just imagining SpaceX as a hare just like running running a bunch of laps around the tortoise just kind of They need to take this way further. Elon needs to wear tortoise shell glasses. Be like, I turned your tortoise into my glasses. And Elon and Bezos needs to start carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck. That would be a hare. Like, I got your foot. You know, I want I want much more I want more battles here. This is great. well, let me tell you about Okta first. Sorry, Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So, you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. According to Kalshi, according to Kalshi, Blue Origin will Blue Origin land on the moon before SpaceX? So, if Blue Origin lands an uncrewed moon lander on the moon before SpaceX before January 30 1, 2030, the market will resolve to yes. So, currently it's at a 70% [00:55:18] 70% so they think they're moon racing. [00:57:44]

**Jordi Hays**: in March.

**John Coogan**: like the race isn't over. Like the finish line is not get get one lander to the moon. It's like develop an economy on the moon and get lots of people there. So, you know, it would just one read on this market, but it is interesting and and certainly I mean, you can see the market was not pricing this a year ago and I don't think anyone was. I think everyone thought that Blue Origin was kind of just a side project that was sort of just like doing space tourism and now it seems like they might be going to the moon, which is pretty cool. we have some breaking news. What's that? Claude OAuth is officially not allowed in Open Claw. So, Anthropic is responding to the Open Claw OpenAI news and Andrew Warner shares that this would be a great time for Sam Altman to step in and let us use OpenAI subscriptions with Open Claw. So, in the Claude code docs OAuth and OAuth authentication, which is used with the free pro and max plans, is intended exclusively for Claude code and Claude.ai using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude free, pro, or max accounts in any other product, tool, or service, including the agent SDK, is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the consumer terms of service. So, if you're on the consumer plan, if you're on the consumer plan with Anthropic Claude, like you just signed up for a normal plan on your app, and then you get excited, you want to sign up for you want to set up Open Claw on your Mac mini, you do that, and then when you're in the login flow, you say, "Hey, I'd like to use my Claude tokens over here." It's going to say, "No, you got to set up an enterprise plan. You got to set up a private API key, correct? Yeah, I This is not news though. This was like a couple weeks ago. I think like a week after OpenClaw got like super big, they they stopped You can still I mean, I'm pretty sure you can still use API like an API key. An API key and will that use your consumer plan? Okay. [00:59:27]

**Jordi Hays**: and then with that you get a certain amount of of like basically Claude code tokens.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. but they're super they're like massively subsidized versus the API. It's like 10x for the Claude code tokens. So, then they were basically using those in In OpenClaw? Yeah, I guess. So, that was actually for Yeah, that was for OpenCode, not actually OpenClaw.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm getting confused. [01:00:04] I know. But I think it's a similar thing. 25 different names.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. Yeah. So, the chat is saying that this is this is news that like the the particular OpenClaw integration maybe broke today. Peter from OpenClaw has responded and says that OpenAI has already publicly said that OpenAI subscriptions will work and continue to work in OpenClaw. And so, it's a little bit odd because like yeah, I mean, you can just use the API. That's not that the like if you're technical, that's not a problem. But for the sort of pseudo-technical folks who are setting up OpenClaw instances on their Mac minis, they might be a lot more encouraged to set up the system if they're able to just log in with OAuth with their Claude accounts because they're like, "Yeah, I already have the app and I use the app and I have some extra tokens. Why don't I use them over here?" Yeah, Thomas says the news is that they're applying it to the SDK. Yes. So, there we go. Anyway. moving on. [01:01:08]

### Energy poverty, data centers, drone warfare, and AI agents

**Jordi Hays**: 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. Out of the journal. Yes. The fossil fuel tycoon teaming up with the Rockefellers to fight energy poverty. I'm sure the the online conspiracy community will

**John Coogan**: will love this one. but we love tycoon. We were trying to bring the word tycoon back. So we're happy to see the journal using this. EQT chief executive Toby Rice is starting a nonprofit to tackle lack of access to modern energy infrastructure in poor countries. Toby Rice made his fortune unlocking a gas share of natural gas in Appalachia. He has a bold new ambition bringing energy to millions of people in impoverished nations. Rice, the chief executive of EQT, one of the largest natural gas producers in the US, is a co-founder of Energy Corps, a nonprofit Energy Corps, a nonprofit that helps developing nations such as Ghana, Zambia, and Burundi build out their energy infrastructure and prosper. Unlike other philanthropic incentives that emphasize renewables to energize impoverished societies, Energy Corps sees a role for a broader spectrum of solutions from fossil fuels to solar panels and nuclear plants. Notably, this approach has been endorsed by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the oldest and richest foundations in the US. opened up the they opened up the floodgates with this. The Rockefellers, you know, wasn't John D. Rockefeller the richest person in human history? You see how much he's putting in this project? 200 Gs. 200 K. Go solve it. Go solve energy globally. 200 200 K. Here you go. Best I can do is is 200 bucks. [01:02:34]

**Jordi Hays**: [gasps]

**John Coogan**: I got I got I'm super excited about this. I think I think Macron deserves a victory lap at this point. 200 bucks. I mean his Macron's size is looking Yeah, it's size it's size compared to this. No, no. Obviously they're they're they have a lot of other donors. The Rockefellers are just a fancy name. Cuz Toby and his wife have personally contributed $3 million and the initiative is raising 10 million this year from energy companies, family offices, and private individuals. and his perch from his perch at Pittsburgh-based EQT, a company with a market cap of 36 billion, Toby Rice has preached the benefits of selling more American natural gas across the globe to reduce emissions and strengthen security of the US and its allies. Now he's wading into a debate, should impoverished societies be encouraged to rely on polluting fossil fuels to improve their fortunes or leapfrog to intermittent renewables. There was this question about should Brazil be allowed to clear-cut the Amazon rainforest to pull forward industrialization? It's the world's lungs, everyone suffers if that happens, but they would certainly benefit in the short term. so there's a there's a hot debate here, and he is engaging in it. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. David Holtz has hit the timeline. He says 5 million humanoid robots working 24/7 can build Manhattan in 6 months. Now just imagine what the world looks like when we have 10 billion of them by 2045. Now imagine the year 2100.

**Jordi Hays**: Dyson sphere. Dyson sphere. Dyson sphere by 2100 is the is the correct like debate. Like is it before or is it after, but it's like around there. I keep I keep going back to my land thesis. Yeah. It's like when when armies of robots can build anything anytime, what what is actually scarce? In this case, I think with 10 billion of them, I don't even think land will be scarce anymore. It's like, "Hey, we're making we're going to build an island." [01:04:26]

**John Coogan**: to build build another moon. We're building a moon. New moon alert. There's there's no New moon alert. Just build another Earth and just throw it on the other side of the the solar system. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's it's you know, right now we're talking about what businesses are unsloppable.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. The next meta will obviously be unclankable. [01:05:08]

**John Coogan**: Unclankable businesses. What's unclankable? What's actually unclankable when when you can send you know, an army Well, figure out what's unsloppable, figure out what's unclankable, and then go invest in it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Richard says, SF guy eating a delicious blueberry. In 18 months, everything will be blueberry. This is a perfect contrast to the other to the other post. Just two sides of the

**Jordi Hays**: The hot dog one.

**John Coogan**: discourse. No, no, no. David Holtz David Holtz is like he's cuz I did David's seen humanoid robots. Like he's he's he's lived in SF and and been around this stuff. Like he's he's he's a true believer and he's and he's sort of saying like, I've seen what they can do and I understand the exponential here. And now imagine 10 billion of them in 100 years. Like it's going to be crazy. Then you have Richard on the other side. Everything will be blueberries. the I I thought you were talking about the delicious tacos post. He said, I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years and I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So, what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies. [gasps] [01:06:29]

**Jordi Hays**: It's a good idea. I am long hot dog. I like hot dogs. Hot dog market map.

**John Coogan**: the kids. Everyone loves a hot dog. Hot dog market.

**Jordi Hays**: so American. There's nothing better than a hot dog at a ball game. Except for fin.ai. That's better than a hot dog. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Anduril fundraising shows defense tech is still red hot.

**John Coogan**: Katie Roof, one of the scoop athletes scoop Scoop. There it is. Scoop.

**Jordi Hays**: There it is. she says, in case you missed it on Friday, we broke the news that Anduril's in talks at double its valuation to around 60 billion Woo. in a new funding round. So, if you were buying triple-layered SPVs in Anduril at You're going to make [01:07:01]

**John Coogan**: 45, you might make it assuming you didn't pay three levels of 10% one time. And assuming that the guy you bought them from didn't abscond. Yeah, actually now in custody of the feds.

**Jordi Hays**: That's a bad sign.

**John Coogan**: The round is notable for more than just its price. While Anduril technically has both A and I in its name, it's not the AI-centric type of startup that typically gets all the investor attention in this current sale. Very unsloppable, right? You're not going to vibe code a drone. You're not going to vibe code a Yeah, I don't know. I think that I think I think when you think about who's going to unlock the potential of AI for the government, you think of Palantir.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. You think of Anduril. No, no. I Yeah, no. I just mean in terms of like AI disruption. Like it's like it's not something that you can you can vibe code a Fury drone. Like that takes a lot of hardware, a lot of testing. You got to blow a bunch of stuff up. You need a test range. You need government contracts.

**John Coogan**: don't Yeah, I I think I think all these all these, you know, defense-oriented businesses, even if they are building software, are quite a bit more insulated just because of the trust factor. And if if Anduril sells a product for one price and you have a small team coming together saying, you know, we're 10 people, we can build you the same thing Yeah. for half the cost, there's not quite as much pricing pressure because the government wants reliability. They want to set something up and use it for a really long time. They don't want to really take risks. Yeah. Etcetera, etcetera. [01:08:11] Defense tech's on a tear. Shield AI, a drone business that can also tap the AI interest thanks to its autonomous software, is in talks to raise a $12 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. and several other younger startups will likely raise money in the next few months. Paul Qwen, managing director at General Catalyst, said that part of the reason the firm is so optimistic about defense tech is because there are very few trillion-dollar markets that are critical for global resilience that are dominated by legacy vendors and which are experiencing both tech and geopolitical transformation. Yeah, the number of companies that fall in that bucket is pretty small. General Catalyst has invested in Anduril as well as other defense-related businesses such as Saronic and Helsing, a European rival to Anduril. as the world unfortunately braces for more wars, increased government spending has led to high prices high-priced contracts for defense tech. Qwen said that the US Department is realizing that defense tech is critical for deterrence. Qwen said he has been seeing he has also seen a shift among entrepreneurs believing that many of the most talented founders are choosing to build for the defense industrial base. And you can check out the rest of the story on The Information. a lot of attention's been focused on Open Router. If you go on Open Router and look at the rankings, you can see that Chinese open source models are completely dominating.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. Starts MiniMax. I saw [01:10:06]

**John Coogan**: Is DHH talking about Kimi K2 is now daily driver for squashing bugs at 37 Signals. Very interesting data point. since a lot of this can be I I think the Open Router stuff can be a little hard to contextualize because there's some amount of volume that doesn't get captured in Open Router. Obviously.

**Jordi Hays**: of the volume is not captured. You think so? Yeah. Yeah, according to Zephyr, who's very on it, it's 1 to 2% globally. Do you do you you think that's about right? yeah, definitely. I mean, if you just compare like the like it's if you look at the actual like token count, it's like in the billions for like over, you know, a week or something. Where you know, Yeah, you'll see it's about

**John Coogan**: over the summer he was like, "We're doing, you know, quadrillion tokens every month or something." So, it's like the the scale is completely different. Quad.

**Jordi Hays**: It also it's like no one is going to be using the big labs models on this because they would just hit the actual APIs. It's easier. Right? So, if like if I'm going to be calling Anthropic Yeah. I I'm probably just going to use the Anthropic API. I'm not going to go through OpenRouter. So, you should expect it to be the the open source models because like one of the good things about OpenRouter is that it has like all the different infra- inference providers together. So, like you know, there's there's a ton of companies that host the different open open models. [01:11:00]

**John Coogan**: Yeah. so, like aggregates them all together. Yeah. and also, I mean, this doesn't this doesn't account for token generation in consumer LLMs. Like and that's a huge thing. Like Google AI Overviews is, I think, the most used LLM product in the world, something like that. And that's technically generating tokens when you just hit Google Search and it answers with an LLM query. That's token generation. And then there's stuff that's happening in Gemini app, Claude app directly. Not even coding. Like no one's using OpenRouter within their consumer app. unless it's like some third-party thing. But most of them are going anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's continue with the timeline. Jacob Wren Tamaki has a post here. He says, "Unfortunately, it is not seen as cool to say, but the beatings will continue until more people internalize this." He's talking about Rune saying, "I don't think this is really true, but it's hard to fight open source hopium because people act like you shot a dog or something because Anton 2 years ago, back in December 21st of 2023, said, "AGI is more likely to come out of someone someone's basement, some mega merge Hermes 4000, than a giant data center." And I think everyone agrees with this now, but it was very unpopular to say it at the at the time. I remember John Ludic had a post about open source AI not being like on the critical path to AGI because of the scaling laws and a whole bunch of other economic economic factors. Like he sort of predicted that meta would stop being so focused on open source because it just doesn't make sense to spend a trillion dollars or a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure that then you capture so little of the value of. And I think that's why Anthropic has not been very pushing like hard on open source. And even even the other super intelligence initiatives, not many of them have been open source. The open source question has been a very different very different business model. But it is very important in terms of a model commoditization and terminal economic equilibriums in the AI lab battle. Or in Hoffman is sharing that Ozempic is bad for business. A few months ago someone told me they had heard a rumor that a banker hedge fund had banned its traders from taking Ozempic, Wegovy, and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs. The theory as I understood it was something like traders need to make quick decisions based on gut instinct, and GLP-1s mess with your gut instincts. You're not hungry for snacks, you're not hungry for profits, you lose your edge. It is funny Warren says GLP is getting banned by hedge funds, maybe by sales teams, too. Killing your grind set. It is funny that doesn't it isn't GLP glucagon-like peptide isn't that a peptide that's secreted by the gut? And so it's like your gut instinct is actually tied to your gut. Like maybe it's just nominative determinism, but it is funny that those things wound up being like [01:14:05]

**Jordi Hays**: instinct for some people is saying put on mass, scale. It's time to scale. Time to bulk. Bulking season's here. Get off the GLP-1s and start levering up, going risk on. Dr. Cameron Maximus says, "Guess what increases drive testosterone? A microdose of tirzepatide to cut down on physical appetite, macro dose of testosterone to amp amplify psychological appetite. So that the solution is we're going to ban GLP-1s only if you're taking them solo. You've got to be taking a full stack. Did you see Bone GPT say, "Turns out you really do got to be hungry for it."

**John Coogan**: It's fantastic. Fantastic. As is Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. [01:15:04] And TVPN. And TVPN. Claude Sonnet 4.6 has improved on benchmarks across the board. We touched on this yesterday, but particular particular particularly outstanding in office tasks and agentic financial analysis. You can see this being baked into into Claude for Excel and a lot of knowledge work. Lucas Beyer over at MSL says formerly OpenAI says, "I usually look at which benches the small model surpasses to its previous big brother. If it's only a few, I think that gives a hint as to what they focus on. Here it is only agentic financial analysis and office tasks. It's just a heuristic, of course, but interesting nonetheless. And I wonder if that's I wonder if if Tyler, how how important is is speed between between Sonnet and Opus? Is is Sonnet consistently faster or just cheaper? yeah, I think it's usually faster. It's just a smaller model. Yeah. And then there's Haiku, right, which is the smallest one. Cuz I'm wondering if in in the coding domain, there's a little bit more tolerance for okay, I've delegated this task, it's going to go cook, and then I'll come back and review the code, review the pull request, whereas

**Jordi Hays**: but this was the whole thing about Codex, right? Cuz Codex was much slower for a while before 3.5. So people would be like, "Oh, Codex is so bad compared to Claude code." Even though, you know, a lot of people internally at OpenAI were saying, "Oh, no, actually Codex is is way better. It's just because they're used to having the internal model that's run on the better hardware right? Yeah. So I think speed is actually it plays a like very large role. So even if you have a you know smaller model it's much faster. Yeah. Even if it's a little bit worse I think it there's still a lot of like if you're iterating a lot that can actually be much much more efficient to build. [01:16:28]

**John Coogan**: I I'm just thinking like in terms of like an Excel co-pilot for someone who's spending their time in Excel not in GitHub. will speed be a killer feature for them if they're currently like yeah I've tried it but it's really slow it actually slows me down cuz it takes 20 minutes to respond it gets it 80% of the way there but I can do 90% in 15 minutes. So I'm not using that model yet I'm not excited about that. Maybe this is something that speeds things up. But of course there's ways to just inference them all faster even even the big guys. Yeah I mean I think when a lot of the agentic browsers first came out one of the like benchmarks I would I would use is like editing a sheets. And it was so slow that it was like it was working but it's just so unbearably slow there's like literally no point of using it. [01:17:00] Yep. So I think yeah speed is like massive. What about a hair bench? Hair bench what's hair bench? Gabe says Jordi needs to bring Tyler with him when he gets his haircut. Haircut haircut alert haircut alert. Gabe I I did send Tyler Tyler asked I sent him my barber's information but I think they're working on it. Haircut alert we got to get a card up. Jordi doesn't want to do it but I think we should put up a card for Jordi's new haircut. We don't like secret haircuts. if you are heading to New York Stock Exchange you need a fresh haircut and we are partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world? Get a haircut and then go raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

**Jordi Hays**: John. Dwayne says what is going on at Anthropic? They're going after people with multiple paid max accounts you're paying full full price multiple times and they're treating you like a criminal. Not sure what Dario's trying to speedrun here. And on on Reddit on Claude code, it says Claude just banned having multiple Max accounts since around a few hours ago. Signing into another account has stopped working. I think some people do need to have their multiple Max accounts banned. They're just They're not building anything useful. They're wasting tokens, and they're just creating endless endless setups and tool chains and MD files. And unless you're actually shipping something that's going to drive business value and be used by more than one person, you only get one account. I'm with I'm with Claude on this. Stop wasting tokens on on your silly thing. I was reflecting on like like the I was texting you this last night like like am I dumb and out of ideas or is all the software I want just illegal? Because I was like all the things that I want are things that could exist, but they can't exist for business reasons. Yeah, like I want Yeah, give the Give the example. Give the Give the example. So, the example was [01:18:26]

**John Coogan**: an Apple TV app that has Netflix installed. It's like why doesn't that Why doesn't Netflix integrate with Apple TV? Well, because Netflix doesn't want to get aggregated. They're an aggregator. They want you to open that app on the Apple TV. So, the Apple TV app doesn't have Netflix content even though you have the Netflix app installed on Apple TV, the device. And I was saying like I I subscribe to all these different news sources. I want like an Apple News that aggregates them all. A Google Reader that aggregates them all. pay, but I'm still logged out of million things. Like I'm in some social app, and then it opens in a Safari web browser. I'm not logged in. There's a paywall. It's It's annoying to log back in. I want something that just like aggregates all my news sources and jumps the paywall. Well, that that's not a coding issue. That's like a That's a business issue. Like They They want you to log in for a reason, and they have a decision to that. so, I don't know. I think we're still early in the broad like distribution of people building custom software and experimenting with things. But at the same time like we've had great writing models for a long time and anyone we know, everyone could write their own books. Everyone could write a better ending to the end of Game of Thrones and send it to you as a text file right now with the current models. And I haven't read anything that I've been like, oh yeah, this is really good. I got to read this this AI generated book. So, I don't know. There's like some weird bottleneck there that it's like it's it it's it's it's not it's not a barricade for AI. [01:19:38] Look at what Gabe is offering. Sounds sounds very illegal. Yeah, yeah. This is Popcorn TV or it's called uTorrent. I I know. I know. I know. Xbox Media Center. [01:21:03]

**Jordi Hays**: to play by the rules.

**John Coogan**: Xbox Media Center. But that's the thing is that is that yes, that streaming site like yes, you can vibe code that. But like that can't actually get to scale. It can't actually have an impact in the economy because it's breaking the rules. And there's a lot of there's a lot of AI stuff that that feels magical and you see this with SeaDance from ByteDance where it's it's it's in the journal today. TikTok's Chinese parent develops movie app. I love that headline. In on Twitter, it's all it's all SeaDance just destroyed VO3 and Sora 2. But in the word in the journal, it's TikTok's Chinese parent develops movie app. And there's something interesting here. So, Singapore is where it's based. Singapore. The company behind TikTok has developed an artificial intelligence model that can turn a single text prompt into a high-quality video with a storyline, scene changes, and distinctive characters. The the new AI video creation model from Beijing-based ByteDance is generating buzz in China and backlash in Hollywood over copyright issues. It shows how ByteDance, known for creating TikTok, is emerging as a rival to OpenAI and Alphabet's Google in the race to build tools for making AI movies and other video entertainment. China's visual models have been very, very competitive, said Steve Long, a video game developer in Helsinki who participated in beta testing programs. ByteDance recently ceded control of the US version of TikTok to an investor group. Global users Ben Thompson was going off on on the TikTok on on the cheeky pints.

### College, AI culture, taste, and tech media reactions

**Jordi Hays**: Get a couple cheeky pints in that guy, he's going to let loose. He's he let loose. He's saying we got the worst He said he said we got the worst possible outcome with with TikTok where they still control the algorithm and we violated property rights. [01:22:41]

**John Coogan**: It's rough. Shots fired. Of course still still in motion. Yes. And but for now not doesn't seem like it's been fully solved.

**Jordi Hays**: But this was the interesting paragraph that I wanted to highlight in this journal article. Global users of another ByteDance app, CapCut, a popular video creation and editing app, will soon have access to SeaDance too, it the its latest AI model for creating videos, the company said. The model is already available to users on CapCut's Chinese version. And so I mean, you've seen on Instagram Reels, like there are a ton of CapCut editors out there. I get served, you know, how to edit in CapCut and I don't even really use the app, but it's clearly incredibly powerful. There's a whole bunch of cool features in CapCut that would basically be After Effects plugins and would probably take a long time to configure, but just come out of the box and it's just a couple clicks. So you don't have to know any code or install anything, it's just there. And now you're going to be able to generate SeaDance videos. We'll see how long you can still generate Larry David and and Marvel characters, that stuff will probably get pulled back on eventually. at least in the CapCut American version, but you're going to see a lot more a lot more slop in the trough. What do you think? Ando says, "Just had to drop in and say thanks for the gift suggestion. I got my girl MongoDB for Valentine's Day and she loved it." [01:23:04]

**John Coogan**: hear. That's so great to hear. I'm so glad. It really is the perfect Valentine's Day gift, MongoDB. [01:24:11] anyway. Dean Ball is pretty do this, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Dean Ball says, "If the Department of War and Anthropic can't agree on terms of business, then they shouldn't do business together. I have no problem with that, but a mere contract cancellation is not what is being threatened by the government. Instead, it is something broader, designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. This is normally applied to foreign adversary technology like Huawei. Mhm. In practice, this would require all Department of War contractors to ensure there's no use of Anthropic models involved in the production of anything they offer to DOW DOW. Every startup and every Fortune 500 company alike. This designation seems quite escalatory, carrying numerous unintended consequences, and doing potential significant damage to US interests in the long run. I hope the two organizations can work out a mutually agreeable deal. If they can, I hope they agree to peaceably part ways. But this really needn't be a holy war. Anthropic isn't Google in 2018. They've always cared about national security use of AI. They were the most enthusiastic AI lab to offer their products to the national security apparatus. If Anthropic, run by Democrats whose political messaging is Anthropic run by Democrats whose political messaging sometimes drive me crazy, sure, but that doesn't mean it's wise to try to destroy their business. This admin believes AI is the defining technology competition of our time. I don't see how tearing down one of the most advanced and innovative AI startups in America helps America win that competition. It seems like it would straightforwardly do the opposite. The supply chain risk designation is not a necessary move. Cheaper options are on the table. If no deal is possible, cancel the contract and leverage America's robustly competitive AI market to give business to one or more of Anthropic's several fierce competitors. And there was also reporting this morning that, Anthropic had approached 1789 Capital.

**Jordi Hays**: Who's Buskirk? He's been charged. [01:26:11]

**John Coogan**: And, and Don Jr. Yeah. and they turned down. Turned him down. Turned him down. they turned down from from 1789 they said not interested I think.

**Jordi Hays**: I I think I think I know a little bit about why there might be so much pushback against Anthropic and I mean you saw that the Sonic 4.5 people are really excited about this model but it completely fell flat on its face when asked with a basic question, why did Clavicular get frame mogged and and Sonic 4.5 responded, I'm not familiar with Clavicular as a specified person or entity or what frame mogged means in this context. Could you provide some more context? So, it's just like when you see something like that happen it it calls into question everything about a company. It's just like how could you how could you let this happen with you know so little so little worldly knowledge as to not understand the significance of Clavicular's frame mogging. Anyway, overheard in SF a VC was giving advice, OpenAI and Anthropic are like Godzilla. You need to find an alleyway to hide in. What a funny what a funny thing to say. That is Ben Haylak. He says don't take advice from junior VCs. there's something good there. I mean the models, you know, if you're in the path of models improving you will get stomped like Godzilla. but there's still plenty of opportunities all over the ecosystem especially if you're not doing something that's in software. I mean like you know like there's plenty of startups that just like don't touch software. Just don't do anything with code.

**John Coogan**: Just don't do anything with technology. Don't it don't do anything with a website. [01:27:53] Don't do anything with a website. If you need a website to do business

**Jordi Hays**: I'm short. I'm passing. You're cooked. It's over. It's over. [01:28:01]

**John Coogan**: It's over. It was fun. No, but clearly I mean there's plenty of like brands and products and technology and all sorts of things to build and Well, we are working on we are working on an alleyway project.

**Jordi Hays**: Oh, yeah? With Riley Walls. Ooh, okay. Yeah. I'm not going to share anything else on this. Are we doing that? Very exciting. Yeah, we are we are cooking there. So, more to come. There are people who are doing well in spite of Godzilla stomping around America. And one of them is 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Imagine human reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And like that Godzilla sound effect, that's good for when the labs are on a tear. That's what's going to let's pull up this video from Buko Capital.

**John Coogan**: video? $2 trillion in capex for this. This is This is what if Donald Trump was from other countries? in other countries. This is the fidelity here is is really really high. Dimitri Trump ball. This stuff is probably going mega viral on Tik Tok right now. It's going mega viral on So, Buko Buko says $2 trillion in capex for this, by the way, kind of like saying like it's silly. But, I look at this and and think It's worth every penny. [01:29:01]

**Jordi Hays**: Completely worth completely worth it. Even if even if the $2 trillion just created this one video.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. really good. We're entering the entering the post post slop era. Back to taste gate. Young Macro chiming in on taste gate. Is taste valuable? I don't know. I can't tell. But, maybe it is. Some people say it is. I'm not really going to weigh in. But, Young Macro's weighing in. He says, "Many will not want to hear this, but taste is just G intelligence with sufficiently varied training data. Steve Jobs had taste because he was like plus three standard deviation IQ and trained on calligraphy class and being homeless smoking weed in India whatever. Meanwhile, his IQ match now microdoses amphetamines to narrow the training set and ends up drone maxing at Citadel Securities with a great transcript. Sorry, Chad, the flunker will get the cake this time. There is something interesting there. I I just the idea of like varied wild life experiences being valuable to generate, you know, it's not exactly out of distribution training data, but just a life well lived will translate into innovation and taste or just like new ideas as opposed to being tracked and funneled into Citadel Securities. Yeah, it's taste. I haven't I haven't really waited into the taste debate at all just because it's not everyone's trying to define it in their own way. It's something that in some ways you people like to say, oh, you can't buy it. Yeah. You can't buy it in the fullness of a company because I think like taste comes from the founder or the founders and it just kind of like you know, percolates through the organization indefinitely. Like there's companies that have a billion dollars to spend on marketing that just functionally can never be good at marketing because the founder likes to be heavily involved in marketing and they don't have great marketing taste or instinct or what whatever this thing is. but it just feels like everyone's I don't know. I'm for taste. I'm against taste. I I have like you know, it Fun fact, if you hold your nose, you can't taste as well. So, if you're trying to be tasteful, don't hold your nose. Well, COVID COVID wiped out a lot of people's Oh, yeah, they lost their smell Yeah, I had a some good some good friends some good friends they got COVID in their household recently fully wiped out. So, that household had zero taste. Zero taste. They were buying they they traded all their cars They traded all their cars for Lamborghinis [01:31:01]

**Jordi Hays**: in the span of a week. I was like, what's going on, guys? [01:32:05]

**John Coogan**: tasteful. I don't know what you're saying. What's going on, guys? That's amazing. well, speaking of taste, let me tell you about Figma, the most tasteful sponsor. Ship the best version, not the first one, with Figma. Introducing Claude code to Figma, explore more options, push ideas further. Moving on. What is self-evidently true? AGM says, "All this progress in gen AI and not a single serious piece of culture other than slop shorts."

**Jordi Hays**: Mhm. I would take that back. I would say "Granny hit my granny got hit with a bazooka" is a serious piece of culture.

**John Coogan**: But that's not AI. I know. Okay. I'm just saying I think what he's saying is that there's all this progress in generative AI and no one has like one-shotted like make something amazing and it just does it. Like there's always this like Herculean effort and inspiration. Like we always go back to Harry Harry Potter Balenciaga. Even that Trump video is like it's only funny because of this context and like it's not purely just like oh, okay, the the gen AI did it and it's certainly not a serious piece of culture. It is a slop short. That's fair. all this 10x vibe coding and not a single new compelling consumer app. App techies do this all the time confusing Wait, wait, wait. Tyler's pushing back on [01:33:22]

**Jordi Hays**: he didn't try Claude with ads. Oh, yes, that's true. That's true. Claude with ads was was definitely a compelling consumer app while it lasted. RIP. techies do this all the time confusing being Gutenberg with being Luther, the maker of the technology of the culture for the culture itself. Hephaestus forges Achilles' armor in the Iliad, but he's not the hero and barely appears otherwise compared to other gods. Techno-capitalism might make Hephaestus the rich guy on Olympus, but Homer is going to write him out of the script anyhow. Brutal. Mogged. History mogged. Geffen says humans don't belong behind desks. It is not our end state to be factory workers who replaced hammers with keyboards. Everything that can be automated should be automated. Hammers were meant to hit your face.

**John Coogan**: Hammers were meant for bone smashing. John Arnold said everyone deep in tech and or finance is in full freak out mode over the pace of AI progress over the past 2 months. Own index funds and you barely notice but specific sectors are exploding. Digital and power infrastructure while anything related to human behind a desk is plummeting. Interesting. Don't strike your face with a hammer. Strike your crowd with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is available. We we before that we we've got to talk about Japan's largest toy toilet maker [01:34:14] Toilet maker. according to a UK based activist investor is an undervalued and overlooked AI play. Palliser Capital sent a letter to the board of Toto last week to make sure make more of its advanced ceramic segment saying it holds a crucial position in the semiconductor supply chain. Segment generates 40% of Toto's operating profit. Sounds like a insane headline but we should dig in. No, it actually maybe sort of makes sense if you need ceramics in the semiconductor supply chain. I wonder if the funniest outcome here is you know how like we we can't get PS6s anymore. PlayStations are out of stock. Like will you be able to buy a toilet in the future? Like no, like you will need to sacrifice your new toilet in favor of advancing the techno capital machine.

**Jordi Hays**: Ryan artificial intelligence DeHany is responding to Bucco saying what stage of the cycle is this and says launch the nukes, write it all down to zero. Who cares anymore because there's a Business Insider article called after 3 years of forcing myself to love venture capital, I quit and became a silent disco DJ in Bali. Let's go. [01:35:43]

**John Coogan**: So, that's where we're at. That's where we're at. [01:36:03] But, Well, we are at the point in the show where we will bring in our first guest, Blake Dodge from Pirate Wires. You can go and subscribe at piratewires.com. Blake, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

### Blake Dodge on Pirate Wires, California wealth taxes, and pro-tech messaging

**Jordi Hays**: I am great. How are you guys? We're fantastic. what has been keeping you Well, first introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show. I'd love a little bit of your background and then some of what you've been focusing on at Pirate Wires recently. Yeah, totally. So, I basically started my career as a journalist at Business Insider.

**John Coogan**: Oh, cool. I covered healthcare and then technology. I was doing like big scary investigations with a lot of documents and you know, secret sources and stuff. and I got a little bit [sighs and gasps]

**Jordi Hays**: not burned out, maybe a little bit burned out. I wanted to tell more optimistic stories about what was going on in tech. Yeah. and so that's why I joined Pirate Wires about a year ago. where I've done a lot of that work kind of like the white pill case for why you should believe in someone. but then we also do we do a lot of work that I think centers original thought. Mhm. and maybe the it kind of in the spirit of the contrarian. Yeah. We'll look at an issue, what everyone else is saying, and then kind of tell people, "Actually, but actually this is what you should think."

**Blake Dodge**: Truth bomb. yeah. And so lately we've been doing a lot of that with the proposed wealth tax [01:37:38] Sure. in in California, we've kind of flooded the zone there. We've been duking it out actually with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. So, I kind of feel like I'm back at BI all of a sudden. Exactly. Well, yeah, what has been the response? I mean, you've interviewed a ton of billionaires in California. It feels like the base case is just like everyone leaves. Like, maybe they're not all loud about it, but you know, Mark Zuckerberg's not out there, but like he did buy a place in Miami, and it seems like he might be a Miami resident soon. Yeah, there's there's kind of two waves. There's people that were like, "I'm going to get out in 2025, so I never have to pay the tax." And then there's a second wave, which I think is the Mark Zuckerbergs that are like, "I like if this goes through, it'll get fought. Yeah. I might not have to pay it, but then I'm still kind of like, hedging potentially hedging, yeah, and getting out. And so, I think there's again, this is we're kind of in the midst of the second wave of people that are like, "I might have to pay it once, but I'm certainly not going to pay it every year for the rest of my life." [01:38:17] Yeah, yeah. A couple weeks ago, my salon published a piece where he interviewed more than 20 billionaires in the state of California, which is like, wow. might make him the most well-sourced tech journalist ever, but they literally all said that they were leaving or planned to leave.

**John Coogan**: Wow. So, that's really striking. That's like a meaningful percentage of the total billionaires in California. And what's really interesting is they're not They may be leaving cuz they don't want to pay the tax, but actually the tax is retroactive. So, many of them Many of the folks who are leaving probably will still have to pay it if it goes through, but they're leaving anyway because of the kind of overarching political landscape of California. Like, they're they're kind of over it. And they find the kind of lefty politics to be too risky, not only to build wealth, but to build companies. there's language in the proposed ballot measure that has really thrown people through a loop where So, the government has this challenge of tallying people's net worth, you know, which is not easy. when it comes to founders of private companies, they're using kind of a shortcut where founders will be presumed to be owners of anything they control. You guys have probably seen the scary math with this on your timelines, but basically since founders often have their shares often come with outsized voting rights, what this means is you could be presumed to be an owner of 10 times the value of your actual economic position. and that's all subject to a rebuttal process and stuff. It's not supposedly meant to be the final word. but I think founders hear that and it's like, okay. Like this is this is a significant risk to the business and to my longevity in the state. How are you thinking about the probability that this actually passes? It feels like something that would be broadly popular amongst a direct in a direct democracy scenario. I saw some protests that did not seem very widely attended. And so, it doesn't it seems like it's hard to marshal 50 million people or 10 million people that are against this because it's not a tax that affects everyone. Yeah, yeah, the pro-billionaire protest for some reason was not well attended in San Francisco. I have no idea why. [01:39:06]

**Jordi Hays**: Certainly not by billionaires. [01:41:42] Yeah, it's like Gary Tan with like one sign. Did Gary go? I don't think he went.

**Blake Dodge**: I actually don't think he went. Yeah, so the politics on the other side are a bit better because the headline of this whole thing is let's tax billionaires 5% of their net worth one time for this like you know emergency of paying for health care for poor people. And so for Medicaid. And so I think that does have a certain political appeal if it does make it on the ballot. We're sort of hearing like mixed reviews on its chances. Mike did some reporting that went out just today actually that suggests their signature gathering maybe a little bit behind. and then you have a a ton of opposition in state like Gavin Newsom hates this thing. He's been meeting with Dave Reagan the head of the union who sponsored the ballot measure to try and get him to stop. there's also like teachers unions and kind of some surprising adversaries. Well yeah, there's other unions that are like hey, you're going to you're you're trying to you're trying to get this tax for purely your own benefit. Like we you got to cut us in. So it's like the unions even if they might have been in favor of it if they were going to get a piece of it. There's there's quite a number of groups that are just saying like I don't want this to happen if I'm not getting my [01:42:58]

**John Coogan**: piece, right? Is that is that [01:43:18] Like actually that is kind of how it works. Yeah, because the unions and different special interests use the ballot proposition process to raise money like or to get more funding streams and Mike learned specifically that the teachers union is feeling kind of left out in this particular scenario. How how has the How how has Reagan reacted to everyone leaving? Hm. How how are they are they processing this? Because cuz you know, play this out.

**Blake Dodge**: have a number in mind. You're like, I'm getting 5% of 60 people's wealth and that's probably like a couple billion dollars and then there's only and then 20 leave and you're like, okay, now I'm getting like 3 billion. And then another 20 leave and you're like, now I'm getting 1 billion. Yeah, there's also an insane power law. [01:44:10] Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, sure.

**Jordi Hays**: So so

**John Coogan**: The biggest ones leave, of course.

**Blake Dodge**: The people that stay might be the The guy who's at 1.2 is like, I guess I'm good for my 20 mil. You can take it. Yeah, I mean, so far the the folks behind the ballot measure have not acknowledged that people are actually in fact leaving. They continue to call wealth flight largely a myth. Mhm. which is crazy. We'll be talking to these people on Twitter like, we literally spoke to to 20 of them. They literally are leaving the state. It's not a myth. But they point to research mainly looking at the movement of millionaires and just generally wealthy people after taxes are increased. And it's true that in those cases there's not a lot of mobility. But I think they have made the mistake of assuming that the that the millionaires are the same? Yeah, is is part of the strategy that this is the best possible branding for a tax like this and it and this type of like campaign focused on billionaires one time is how you get something like this passed. Then once it's passed, you'll have the ability to kind of like reduce reduce the set of requirements to qualify for it and you can eventually get down and be eating off of the plate of all Californians, middle class, etc. Yeah, I'm actually I'm sharing out a quote that I have here in my last story. There's a couple of academics whose work like heavily influenced this wealth tax and pretty much all wealth taxes globally. one of those men is advocating for a 2% globally coordinated billionaire tax where all of the countries kind of get together and agree they're going to do this. And he said [01:45:08]

**John Coogan**: of like a one world government. [01:46:09]

**Blake Dodge**: I literally in this quote have a screenshot of Michael Gibson's Oh yeah. summary of the Thiel Antichrist lectures. So yeah, he says it's clearly far from enough, but also what history shows is that what's most difficult is to move from zero to something positive. And once you have something positive, even if it's 2%, then it opens up a realm of possibilities. Mhm. And so they say it's one time, they say it's an emergency, but clearly Yeah. What what's the takeaway from the Netherlands? They passed this 36% unrealized capital gains tax. It's it it excludes I think real estate and startup equity, but what's the thought process there? It seems super bearish for the country as a whole, but any any learnings? I haven't looked at that one specifically. I know that internationally these wealth taxes do have a pretty dismal outlook. the cycle is kind of that American to be like, "Ah, we can make it work." [01:47:21]

**John Coogan**: We're built to fail everywhere else, but it'll work here. Yeah, and it's funny, too. This this the they're still saying wealth flight is a myth, but part of why these other wealth taxes tend to go poorly is because the wealth leaves. Yeah. So. Can you give us a white pill, something that I I don't think from a comms perspective, don't tax me is going to be effective for the billionaire class, but what should they be focused on in a world where a lot of people are seeing billions of dollars in wealth creation from what they see as slop, what they see as scams, what they see as, you know, a variety of, you know, water usage, energy energy price, blah. what what are the white pills that you think tech has delivered or is in the process of delivering over the past few years and into the future? Yeah, I mean, that's the question of the hour, because inequality isn't, you know, continues to get worse and kind of fuels the politics behind these things.

**Blake Dodge**: Yeah. I'm kind of a gundo stan. Like, I I believe in this Yeah. patriotic vision for tech Yeah. and this idea of keeping regular people in mind and building businesses that last and create value and don't just kind of addict people to things that they shouldn't be doing or shouldn't be spending their money on. Mhm. and I think you know, who knows what billionaires could do? Like, there's a lot of ideas out there. Mike Solana actually just wrote a Christmas wishlist for billionaires with like 20 of these really beautiful white pill ideas. one of the easiest things is, you know, building like beautiful public works libraries statues like things that people can see with their own eyes and feel gratitude about. Whereas right now I feel like [01:48:29] it it's not that compelling to be like don't hate me. I built this short format. Instead of like the public library, it has the Rockefeller name on it or something. Like there's a lot of examples as you walk through New York City where you see a beautiful building and you're like, oh yeah, and that's free to the public now. I I'm a big fan of like the Hearst Castle. Like William Randolph Hearst like just built this castle for his entire life, spent all his money, died before it was even done and then it just becomes like [01:49:27]

**John Coogan**: in California the the like really ramping up something like an adopt-a-highway program. Like driving around LA. The roads are just so bad.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah. But the tangible Yeah, the tangible thing that you can see is is very very it's very impactful as opposed to like the anonymous donation that just kind of works its way through the economy. Might be more impactful but certainly less grounded in reality. Anyway, where can people find you? sign up for Pirate Wires, follow you on X. Where else are you active? [01:50:07]

**John Coogan**: Yeah, yeah, I'm on X at Dodge Blake. piratewires.com. We're covering all this stuff every week. we've really flooded the zone and yeah, and I feel like too we We're we're pro-tech in the sense of not being anti but we also tend to ground things in a set of values which I think is a little Well, I love it personally. I'm glad. That's fantastic. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us and we will talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And with that, we will kick off the Lambda lightning round. Because we have Freddie deBoer from Substack. He's an independent writer. We're bringing Freddie in to the TBPN ultra lounge from the Restream video room. Freddie, how you doing? Pretty good. Although, you know, from Substack still never sounds as cool as like from the the Wall Street Journal or whatever. Whatever anybody says about like independent media, it's just never going to catch up. But that's okay. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, do you think Substack Do you think Substack should do a bundle? Do you think Substack should do a bundle? This is a big debate. It's The thing is is like it's like the same question about like why can't I just pay a dollar for the New York Times article I want? Because the reason why is like the finances just don't work out. Like if I would love to be able to do that from a standpoint of like getting people to read my stuff, but my financial life would collapse. Like [01:51:38]

### Freddie deBoer on Substack bundles, AI wagers, and doom rhetoric

**Freddie deBoer**: Like it's it's getting that that regular in income in that sort of makes this possible. [01:52:11] Yeah, I think I think my view on it is I think the like a a bundle that is just a is systematized via a platform is going to struggle, but a bundle that it where you get four or five writers that just basically say we're going to build a media company together, that can work because there's just so many other small things you need to do around compensation and what's fair and who's doing what and all all these different things that I think are when you have a bunch of personalities coming together, it's hard to just have it be entirely in code. Mhm. Anyway, let's move on. is that like eventually, if you bundle enough people, you just have a newspaper, and I probably wouldn't get into the newspaper business in the 21st century. But

**Jordi Hays**: newspapers, though. I got I got a newspaper.

**John Coogan**: but I I'm not investing in one, though. No, no. I it's the time the days are numbered. I might be the last person subscribing. Anyway, give us a little bit of your background since the first time in the show. How did you get to Substack? And then I want to talk about your wager and the future of AI, the impact on the economy, all of that. Yeah, so I mean I'm I'm a writer. I you know, was an academic. I was in academia for years. I used to work for the City University of New York. But now frankly, I find not having a boss or a schedule or ever having to get up in any particular day to be very attractive. And now I just write books and I write my Substack and you know, it's enabled me to buy a house and you know, so it's yeah, it's it's a pretty good living. [01:53:01] Living the dream. So tell me about your wager. How did this happen? What is How did How did you come to define the the actual bet and what's at stake? Yeah, so I I'm frustrated by the AI conversation. I think that it is I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of a Motte and Bailey argument.

**Freddie deBoer**: Yes, a Motte and Bailey. Yeah, so Motte and Bailey is Yeah, for those at home it's just like you are you make a very sort of extravagant argument and when challenged you retreat to a simpler and easier to defend argument. So you might say the Christian God is real and built the universe and he rules over everything. And then when you're challenged you say, "Oh well, God's just a feeling and God's in the in the wind and what have you." Right? That's like a Motte and Bailey. I just think that that's all over AI where the CEO of Google is saying that this is bigger than fire and electricity and people are saying it's going to end death, etc. But then when challenged, it's like, "Hey, you know, these LLMs like, you know, they they might make going through legal documents, you know, a much more efficient process." There's this constant sort of back and forth. [01:54:13] Sure. As far as the wager goes, the people in the AI world kind of come from this sort of rationalists yeah a Silicon Valley sort of culture and they say you should be very sort of objective and specific in your predictions and you should put money on them. And so Scott Alexander is a guy I've known for a long time the the blogger of Slate Star Codex and now of Astral Codex 10. [01:55:02]

**John Coogan**: Yep. He is a AI enthusiast. He was a signatory on the AI 2027 document.

**Freddie deBoer**: Yep. So I just I I challenged Scott and said I believe that 3 years from now we'll be in a more or less normal economy. And that was chosen because you know AI 2027, you know, this is like going to 2029. So I felt like I was giving him enough sort of wiggle room. Mhm. And I just defined a bunch of economic indicators and said that if any one of these indicators are violated, he'll win the bet and I'll lose. Wow. And the reason to do that is just I'm I'm looking for someone to put their money where their mouth is about like is this actually going to cause a white-collar apocalypse and all these economic sort of things and I mean he said no and would prefer to do a 10-year version. So we're kind of looking at that right now. Okay, so I have some of these unemployment must stay under 18%. That if if what are you at now? 4 5%? That feels like

**Jordi Hays**: this is this is the point. [01:56:24]

**Freddie deBoer**: Yes. This this is the motte and bailey, right? Dario Amodei, the the CEO of Anthropic last week in a interview with the New York Times said that within the next couple of years 50% of all jobs are going to be destroyed, right? He said 50% of all jobs? I thought it was early stage white-collar labor.

**John Coogan**: no. Look look it up. He he said 50% of of all the jobs in the economy are going to be eliminated, right? And this is the thing that bothers me. This is why I made the bet, right?

**Freddie deBoer**: I yeah I actually ran the numbers on the new argument, the Bailey, which is entry-level white-collar work. I mean, the US economy is only 60% white-collar. Early stages are, you know, a couple percent of that. And so, you're at a percentage of a percentage, and quickly, if you lose 50% of that, the unemployment rate goes from 5% to 8%, 9%. Like, that statement can that new statement can be true, but it cannot be it it can simultaneously be not that disastrous. Right. So, the C but the Yeah. the head of AI science at Microsoft just made a very similar sort of announcement. Sure. and and this is what I find just endlessly frustrating about this conversation is it cannot simultaneously be true that we are imminently facing a replacement of an immense number of jobs in the economy thanks to AI, but also 18% is like a extravagant figure for me to set for this bet, right? If you If you really believe these things, and so I I'm just never sure how seriously these AI people take it in part because the the CEO of Anthropic and the head of AI at Microsoft and almost everyone else who gets quoted in this domain has a direct financial incentive to exaggerate the impact of AI. Mhm. Yeah, it I mean, Scott Alexander did take the bet, though. So, he's putting his money where the where his mouth is and he's certainly on the other side of this. Correct? Well, we we are looking at the at the conditions. He wants to do 10 years instead of three. Oh, interesting. And so, this is the it's actually turned into a kind of an interesting econometric debate, right? So, people are saying, "Where did you get 18% unemployment for for And there's something like 40 conditions I listed or something." And I said that And I said that we had 15% unemployment like, you know, 5 and 1/2 years ago. Yeah. Right? Because of COVID. Yeah. And what I'm to do is to set up the bet in such a way that a non-AI source is not going to screw me, right? You know? And [01:57:29]

**John Coogan**: Oh, sure. in the in the Great Depression, which obviously was not AI-driven, we had 28% unemployment at some point, right? So, and it's actually led to a kind of interesting debate about like how do you define a normal economy without letting the natural swings that are common to a capitalist economy Yeah, I was listening to it I was listening to your conversation about AI apocalypses and and the person that was being interviewed was like, "Well, my Pdoom from AI is extremely low, but I think the chance of nuclear war is like 5%." [01:58:59]

**Freddie deBoer**: And so, it's like they had a high Pdoom, but not because of AI, which is like a very hard thing to wrestle with. And that's what you're getting at. Yeah, is I I've talked on the show a bunch about a bunch of these different groups using basically fear as a kind of motivator to get the to kind of bend the world, right? So, if you want people to adopt AI, you should tell them that it's going to, you know, create such such insane changes in the economy that any company that doesn't adopt as much AI as possible today is going to is going to be destroyed or if you are trying to get you know, as many young people to adopt a product, you tell them, "Well, like all jobs are going to be wiped out." Or if you're pitching a bunch of if you're pitching investors on Wall Street, you can say, "Well, you know, all these jobs are going to go away." So, like it's effectively like the incentive to use kind of like fear is very obvious in all of this. And I think it's now coming back to bite a lot of these people because the broad broader populace is saying, "I don't want AI. I'm good. I don't need it." Even though they're using the products and they love them. Like, almost everyone can tell you an incredible story about AI in their personal life. Like, even if it's as simple as like, "I made this like cool illustration for, you know, my grandma for her birthday, and she loved it, right?" Or, "I used it to learn about this thing." And so, I think it's interesting is like, using this like intense fear-based marketing to justify to kind of catalog adoption, you know, fund you know, success with fundraising, etc. But then again, it's kind of coming back to bite in the sense that everyone's saying, "Well, no data I don't want a data center in my backyard. I don't I don't want my company to even be investing in this, etc." I mean, speaking of fear, I mean, you just mentioned nuclear war, right? [01:59:33]

**John Coogan**: And it's I I just think that you can believe, as I do, that AI is going to be a very meaningful technology, but the fact that people are more scared of a robot apocalypse than nuclear war. Look, right now, this Russia has multiple Borei class nuclear submarines off the coast of the East Coast of America that have the capability of raining nuclear fire down thermonuclear fire down all up and down the seaboard, right? The Eastern seaboard. I mean, like, you know, a single modern thermonuclear bomb detonated above Central Park would destroy 80-plus percent of the buildings in Manhattan and hit parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, etc., right? And that And again, this is the motte and bailey thing, right? Which is like, you might say, "Well, that's a very extreme scenario." But every day, I am opening up my web browser and reading about, "Oh, AI is going to exterminate the human race." Or, you know, AI is going to put us into this utopia where no one is ever going to die again, right? And it's like I part of what I'm trying to do is just claw out like a normal space in this, right? To just say there is a very obvious future where these tools are meaningful, eliminate some jobs, are have a lot of cultural importance, but where we're not suddenly faced with a fundamentally different version of human life. So, if it's not nuclear war and it's not fire and it's not electricity, it's also not the fax machine? Are we talking about mobile, cloud, the internet? Like how big is this thing? What does your world model look like for how AI progresses and diffuses through society? Sure. I We have to understand there's are different kinds of importance and different kinds of influence. So, that you've mentioned the internet and the mobile phone, okay? it obviously the internet and specifically the smartphone, the iPhone have had massive cultural and social impacts on the United States. It would have shocked people in the mid-1990s to learn that we have about the same productivity growth and about the same GDP growth in this country now that we did back then, right? Like many, many people were invested in this idea that this sort of this missing GDP growth, you know, we're we're we're at half of what we were in the mid-1960s. A lot of people thought, "Okay, the internet's the thing that's going to restore us." Yeah. The internet is very meaningful and it's very influential, right? And yet economically, it hasn't had the effects that are expected. And that's just like that's how history works, you know, that's that's just like there's there is a you always have to bake in the percentage of the degree to which like there's regression to the mean, right? Like we always seem to find ourselves way back to this sort of mundane reality. And I look at things like when everybody got so depressed and disappointed after ChatGPT-5 was released because they thought it was going to be AGI, and you had all of these lonely guys who were like, "Oh, this is just going to change life forever and now everything's going to change." It's like, "No, it's Things aren't going to change but slowly and in a distributed fashion, and you have to keep planning for normal life." Mhm. Counterpoint, maybe this time is different. [02:01:34] May- Maybe this time is different, but absolutely, so show me. I mean, here's the beauty of all this. The beauty of all of this is like if this stuff If If the real stuff happens, yeah, you're not going to have to convince me, Yeah. right? Like if If we really have AGI the way people think we are, no one's going to disagree because the effects are going to be so profound, there's going to be nothing to disagree about. Okay. How did you interpret this latest piece in the Financial Times from Eric Brynjolfsson? I can't pronounce his last name, but it says, "While initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the United States, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 400,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling, maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input, is the hallmark of productivity growth. His own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of 2.7% for 2025. This is nearly doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterized the past decade. It feels like we're seeing glimmers of something changing. Is that not a sign? I mean, we'll see, right? We have to actually like look at the at the numbers as they come down the pike. We also have to be aware that like there's a lot of built-in incentive for people to ascribe these changes to AI. So, for example, cutting a lot of jobs is very unpopular, and firms tend to be sensitive to that unpopularity, right? And saying, "Well, hey, AI came. We didn't make the decision. We just we had to sort of do like That's a very sort of easy thing to to do." [02:04:56]

**Jordi Hays**: do that. That doesn't make any sense. To To like what? To say that AI [02:06:43]

**Freddie deBoer**: was the reason to do it? Yeah, right. Well, he used anything as a cover. Yeah, and so I just I In general, I caution people to say, "Look, it's like I I said this before, you know, when I was in high school, a very distinguished scientist came to my science class to and he was on like a the board on like the National Science something some sort of board of the National Science Foundation. He was a like a geneticist. And he came and he said like that he envied and also felt bad for us because the the Human Genome Project was going to so radically change human life that we were going to see things that he couldn't imagine, but also the job of doctor wouldn't exist in 10 years. And this is I was in high school in like 1998. This probably happened. So, you know, Studying medicine.

**John Coogan**: Right, right. And you quit. Right, right. And then like you know, like if you can actually but this is this is an exercise that people can do at home, which is to go back like just to Google and look at the predictions about what people thought the Human Genome Project would do. Yeah. Obviously, genetic research in general is very important. But there was a real belief among very intelligent and highly credentialed people that we were on the verge of something absolutely humanity changing. And life's more complicated than that. Yeah. and again, like I I just I I want AI boosters to do more showing and less predicting, right? Show me, right? Like show me the change instead of predicting the change. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is really fun. Yeah. Yeah, we we have this we have this we have these debates we have these, you know, kind of debates and conversations all the time. Specifically, the There's a popular influencer on Instagram that every time a tech company does a bunch of layoffs and says we did this because of AI, he takes that and like makes this crazy story up around how, you know, AI is just immediately causing all this job loss. And I'm just looking at it as like I know the company, they had a lot of bloat, they're getting some they're getting some [02:07:35]

**Jordi Hays**: efficiency [02:08:50]

**John Coogan**: efficiency increase because of AI, but certainly it wasn't like the the 2,000 people or whatever

**Freddie deBoer**: Yeah. were sitting there and being like, "Oh, yeah, I just onboarded this new agent and now it does everything that I did, including going to all the meetings and, you know, sitting around all day." So,

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah, there's an incentive on both sides, both the AI boosters and the AI bears sort of have an incentive to be like, "It's going too fast, it's going it's it's going wrong." If you If you love AI, you want to say it's going really fast. If you don't like AI, you want to say it's going too fast. They're both sort of aligned, so you get this like super cyclical. Very fascinating. Well, have a great rest of your day and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. [02:09:08]

### Sohail Prasad on Destiny and public access to private tech

**John Coogan**: Cheers. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We have Sohail Prasad from Destiny. What's going on? Hey, how's it going? Great. Great to finally have you on the show. We met once, I think it was too long ago to remember what we were even talking about, but it's great to great to see you again. And a lot going on in your world, so why don't you kick off quick kind of background on yourself and then let's talk about Destiny. Sure. great to see you. Thanks for having me. founded Forge, a stock market for private companies back in 2014. took that public in 2022, and then Schwab bought us last year. and in 2020 started a company called Destiny to bring public access to private tech. So, along the way, I realized that there's such a big inequity. most people in the world that use, you know, all the companies that are advertisers for you guys, that are tech companies in our everyday lives, have no way of owning that, and wanted to create a way for anyone to own a piece of that future from the convenience of their brokerage account. very, very cool. I've been, yeah, following Destiny since you since you launched it. how long did it actually take to get it up and running? There's a number of groups now that have seen what you've done, or maybe had a similar idea, and are trying to bring products to market. but you've been you've got a nice little head start. I guess I guess the journey really did start with Forge. it was a probably couldn't have pulled Destiny off without having having done that first, and had all of that understanding of the market. But, but yeah, what what are what were kind of like what was the logic around the decision for for kind of the current structure and all the decisions that made that went into building the initial product, and then kind of where is it going from here? Sure. It, thinking about what the dream product is, it kind of looks like QQQ for private tech. That that's a dream. Anyone can buy it on any given day, anyone can sell it, has exposure to a broad base of private tech companies. Now, structurally, there definitely challenges. you know, an open end ETF, you don't have enough liquidity in the underlying private companies that would support the creation of shares on a given basis, or redemption on a daily basis. Yeah. So, we looked across the market at what kind of structures are possible, and ultimately decided that a listed closed-end fund gets that intraday liquidity. it's listed on the NYSE, it's accessible, but you're still able to go invest in these companies. So, it took us quite a while. We spent 19 months waiting for registration with the SEC in the first time. We listed in March of 2024 and then we spent another 15 months waiting for the SEC to approve our shelf. Overnight success. I love it. Walk me through the mechanics of the closed end fund. That means that you you own shares in private companies. When I buy shares in Destiny and then I go to sell them, I'm not selling them to you, I'm selling them to Jordi. Is that right or someone else on the in the market? Exactly. So, we trade intraday on the NYSE. Market just closed but anytime you want you can go into your Schwab account. You can buy DXYZ, you can sell it and it's all effectively secondary market trading. You're not creating or redeeming shares. Now, last year we got approval from the SEC got effectiveness to raise up to a billion dollars opportunistically

**Jordi Hays**: and that allows us to issue new shares use the capital we raised from that and then invest in new companies. Okay. So, if there's a if there's a delta in NAV to market cap, it's because there's expectations about what you'll buy with that with those shares maybe? Yeah, early on there was a huge delta as people found out that this was even possible back in 2024 and I think that was just people realizing, oh wow, I can actually do this. I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to make a new account. I can buy this and people got really excited and now you know that premium has come down just as we've gotten more mature. I kind of we had a decision to make when we brought it to the market which is we wanted to have a portfolio of the top 100 private tech companies. Should we wait until we build a whole portfolio? Should we just list it with no companies in the portfolio and we decided, hey, we'll build it effectively in public." So, we listed with 20 somewhat companies, today we have 35, and we're kind of growing that over time. What were the conversations like originally with companies? Obviously, you're not always buying direct access or not getting direct exposure, but you're buying into SPVs or things like that, but what were the conversations like in the beginning? How are they going now with with Robinhood's new product? It sounds like at least some of it is is actually being like authorized by the company or they're like effectively signing off on it or cool with it. I'm sure in other cases companies are are less excited about it, but like give us give us the an overview there. Yeah, but with the secondary market, it's always even for the last, you know, 15 years been case-by-case basis. Some companies have really active secondary markets, and they facilitate it. others try to keep more of a tight control. from day one with Destiny, what we did is make sure we have flexibility to invest across the board. So, we've invested in companies that are doing primary rounds. We recently invested in a company called Skilled AI. SoftBank led that round, and we were a part of that round. we partnered with Beast Industries and are working directly with them. and then at the same time, we can also opportunistically buy through secondary markets. So, sometimes there are employees or early investors that need liquidity and they come directly to us, and we can buy from them. what Part part of the part of why Destiny's exciting and other products are exciting is that is that every anyone can get exposure to the asset class. The challenge is that often times by the time you know a company's amazing and it should be in the Destiny 100, it's already been marked up to 50, 60, you know, billion or whatever the number is. Sometimes eight, you know, in the case of SpaceX, you know, hundreds of billions. What are your plans around obviously picking companies at the super early stage is hard. It's also very risky. Like part of the appeal of Destiny is that you're you're getting exposure to companies that we already know are like solid, they're well capitalized, they're hopefully leaders in their market, but how are you thinking about like qualification for for Destiny and would you ever go earlier stage? Is that too risky? All that stuff. Yeah, that that's one of the reasons we decided to call it the Destiny Tech 100 and target building out a portfolio of 100. You want to have enough range in there so you can have some of the early unicorns, you call it one, two, three billion dollar companies that have in many cases product market fit. They they have growth, but they have you know, more room to grow as well as at the same time some of the larger companies that are tens, now hundreds of billions of dollars and beyond. And so we will have over time a mix of those companies so that we can kind of get some of those earlier stage, albeit still late stage bets and others that are you know, the blue chip mature companies. Oh, how do you think about the actual investing strategy? Is are there any like I mean, you mentioned like post unicorn, are there heuristics or firm rules that are in a bylaw in bylaws or are you just sort of like the fund manager and you're tasked by the shareholders to make the best investments that are according to your own intuition, skill, obviously your incredible background, all of that, but how do you think about the actual capital allocation question? Yeah, right now the portfolio's in progress. So, you look sometimes we might be overweight one company. For a while SpaceX was greater than 40% of our portfolio. That's come down. And so, we're kind of in this building phase. As we reach a more steady state, we want to be reflective of the late-stage venture back ecosystem. So, we actually publish rules and eligibility criteria on our website. We're like, you know, companies had to raise recent rounds of financing. Sure. They other kind of growth metrics and TAM that we look at. But generally speaking, we don't want it to be, you know, whatever we like on a given Monday. We want to say, "Hey, we want overall late-stage venture back exposure." And where we get to use our discretion is, "Hey, what's the right time to buy this? What's the right structure? What's the right pricing?" Things like that where if you just had an index, you would be a forced buyer at any price, at any structure. And so, it gives us the ability to go and find unique opportunities in the primary, secondary markets and actually invest behind that. What's the process when company in the portfolio IPOs? You have a number a number of portfolio companies that will be IPOing or should IPO this year. There's lockup period and then I imagine you guys plan to exit those positions and then recycle the capital. But how are you thinking about that? Yeah, so we want to be long-term capital partners with the company. And so, generally once a company goes public, we're not selling our shares immediately. We'll wait for a few years. Instacart was one of the companies in the portfolio that went public and we waited for a few years before we slowly started divesting that position. And so, that's how we're trying to balance, you know, the two things, which is our public shareholders are looking to us for exposure into private markets. But we also want to be great partners for companies smooth their transition as they go public. It's amazing. Well, congrats on all the progress. [02:13:18]

**John Coogan**: What was the, so, so, what was the talk about the most, recent acquisition, or or investments you guys are in, Anthropic with for a hundred million dollars? Breakdown some of the new companies. Yeah, so we just, announced a couple weeks ago that we, closed a hundred million dollar investment, secondary purchase in Anthropic. I mentioned skilled AI based in this space. He's like, "I can't let you get out of here without a gong." I knew it. That's right. very cool. Well, yeah, we're excited to, continue to follow Destiny and and the overall, overall market. you guys have definitely led led the charge. Second time leading the charge. It felt like with Ford, you guys were very ahead of the curve and and ahead, here as well. So, great to have you on. Thanks. More to come. Amazing. We'll talk to you soon. [02:20:01] Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about vibe.co where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. And before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. It's Jensen's birthday from Nvidia, and guess what? He was born on the same exact day, same year as Michael Jordan. I thought

### Jensen Huang's birthday and Travis Brashears on Mesh Optical

**Jordi Hays**: is the Michael Jordan of GPUs. [02:21:31]

**John Coogan**: Dylan Aver Scoto on our team is such an underrated poster. Got 8,000 likes just with two screenshots. One, Jensen's birthday. The other, Michael Jordan. February 17th, 1963. Happy birthday to Jensen, and thank you for all you do. I'm going to tell you about Shopify before we bring in our next guest. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, let's bring in our next guest, Travis from Mesh Optical. Travis, how you doing? Hey, nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for hopping on.

**Travis Brashears**: Big day. Huge day. We saw the [02:22:09]

**John Coogan**: happened on February 17th? We we launched on February 17th as well. That's true. That's true. Added to the list. How much did you raise? Break it down for us. Half Yeah, 50 million total across our seed and series A. Nice. Congratulations. First time on the show, before we get into Mesh, introduce yourself. What got you into this? All that good stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I'm Travis Brashears, one of the co-founders and CEO here at Mesh Optical. And I worked I've been working on lasers since I was in high school and with Professor at UCSC

**Travis Brashears**: Philip Lubin, and then I went to Berkeley Oh, interesting. So in high school, you were you were basically studying at UCSB. You're studying the blade.

**John Coogan**: Yep. The laser beam. Yep, I was studying the studying the studying the laser. That's right. Been been one with the laser since I was, you know, 15. And then I I went to SpaceX and started working on the space laser comm system there and got to the really fortunate opportunity to design and work with a really awesome team there on on the free space laser comm terminal. Cool. So talk about [02:23:02] the space laser dream.

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah, so talk about talk about the actual product. You know, how much of this is still R&D, ready for commercialization, then I want to talk about the implications, like how this product actually rolls out into the into the world. Yeah. Yeah, so our first product is a pluggable transceiver that is used in all of the GPU clusters. So, you just mentioned Jensen. like the Nvidia GPU clusters, for every one GPU, there's like four to five of these optical interconnects that help connect all the GPUs together through the networking, through making sure that they can be like a coherent cluster. and so, the first product we're making is what we call like a linear pluggable optic, and it deletes a really expensive and costly like like power-hungry thing that is called a retimer or DSP. and so, it allows the people who deploy compute to save a lot of power. and so, that first product is just simply allowing those GPUs to connect over optical and deleting some power power-hungry chip inside. And this is within a data center or in between different data centers? This is within the data center. Yeah, so our first Yeah, our first product is is yeah, within the data center. They connect them with fiber optic cable on either end. and yeah, and so they And these are these are already already in market, you're selling these?

**Travis Brashears**: Wow. Wow. Well, ours ours are we're standing up the production line. So, we we care a lot about co-locating the engineering talent with the manufacturing. one of the key things we learned at SpaceX is to to be like right where the stuff is built. So, behind me is the manufacturing line, and we'll start testing in the next month here some samples, and then start scaling production right after that, and trying to get to, you know, millions of units in 2027 is like really where the the high volume starts to come into play. Makes sense. [02:24:49]

**John Coogan**: Well, is this the kind of thing where it's really just it's execution risk, like can we build this at scale, and if we can build them, there's insane demand, and it's and it's less demand risk? Yeah, the demand we sort of think of as infinite because, you know, the more intelligence we have, [02:25:21]

**Travis Brashears**: the more intelligence we have, it it just like is more compute. And so, whenever you see people deploying more and more compute, they need more and more transceivers. And so, as intelligence scales with compute, so does transceiver demand. Mhm. $50 million in the bank, where are you basing the company? How big's the team? What do the next 12 to 18 months look like for you? Yeah, we were based in Los Angeles. We're in Gardena, California. Oh. That's good. It's a little well, it's the Yeah. Thank you. Los Angeles needed a win. Yeah, yeah. yeah, a little outside El Segundo, but yeah, we're going to bring Gardena onto the map as the the laser hub of of the world. Okay. and [02:26:12] and yeah, so we we're about 15 people now and are growing quickly and need to move to a bigger building now. Good sign.

**Jordi Hays**: Are there like two buyers for this? Like, do you Are you going to do deals with like every data center builder, every neo cloud, just the hyperscalers? Are you going to be a supply chain partner like just to Nvidia or just to AMD? Like, what does your business look like in like that scale? Yeah, we we want to sell I mean, my our long-term goal here is to be able to connect all all things with optical photons. And whether that's an interconnect in a data center or an interconnect in space, whether that's free space or in a fiber. but to start out to answer your question specifically, like these is anyone who who deploys compute on the ground, we will try to sell to. that could be a neo cloud as you mentioned, it could be a hyperscaler. we have a strategy that we want to follow to kind of follow our volume match our volume to our potential like future customers and make sure we don't start all the way at like really high volume cuz obviously, we need to scale our line. We care a lot about getting our manufacturing done here in the United States. One thing about all these transceivers that are made today, they're all made overseas. They're made mostly in China and Thailand. And so no one has like really stood up these high precision what they what they're called flip chip die bonding or pick and place machines. Like when we bought the most high volume flip chip die bonder, they asked for your Chinese social credit number on it because no one buys them here. Wow. What do you think that we'll get any mesh products in space in the next five years? Yeah.

**John Coogan**: That's awesome. There we go. 2027, you think what I'm thinking? Valentine's Day gifts. [02:28:15]

**Travis Brashears**: Yep. Here we go for that special person in your

**Jordi Hays**: Lasers for lasers for Valentine's. Hey, crazier things have happened.

**Travis Brashears**: We're big we're big fans of Yeah, they like they like they keep saying they want some metal, you know.

**John Coogan**: Yeah. So get them some Get them some Get them some hardware. I was a I was a laser cat for Halloween once. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Talk about like what is the shape of like actually working in the factory? Is this stuff risky or does it all happen in a clean room? How much of this is like a TSMC type fab? Like what is it like in the day?

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah, the clean room is here. We We actually took some pan We took some panels off to get the machines in. But yeah, it's it's a pretty Like we take the approach of like question the requirements and delete the part of process if we need to. And you know, we start in like a semi dirty environment to make sure Like like we we want to we don't want to go overboard, right? You don't want to just go all in on a clean room when you don't have to. So actually back at Space X, we started making a space lasers in a tent. And so Like there's actually a tent behind me or front of me, sorry. And so like you want to not you don't want to go too all in on like it has to be a clean room. You you do test and align testing and and qualification to make sure that like if it starts to impact your yield, then you would implement procedures and processes to keep it cleaner. This is like a pretty good clean room, but not the best. And so we'll we'll see how our yield looks with with this one and we'll implement stronger strategies if we need to, but all of ours semiconductor packaging is happening here and you know, we we get some dies from other foundries that are all outside of Asia, and then we bring them here and package them. Last question for me. What was the biggest lesson you learned from working at SpaceX? I mean, just what I said is like question the requirements and delete the part and process. It's like it's so simple and but it's so useful. And like when we're designing something, like you you want to try to know why each part is there. So in our design, we've deleted quite a few parts and most people don't delete that part, but it ends up work anytime you delete a part, you delete a potential failure mode. And you want to be like a really reliable system, you need to delete as many parts or processes as possible. It also helps you like assemble things faster and so that that was one of the big lessons I learned. Yeah, that feels like I don't know, easy to say, really hard to do in practice. Like it feels like you have to experience it. Like I've heard that a million times and like I'm sure that there's things that I could delete and like even in my daily workflow that I haven't figured out how to do. That's I love that. SpaceX is a company where like you learn learning things the hard way in the most extreme way. Yeah. Actually you ship a soft you ship a piece of software doesn't work is like okay, let's patch it. You ship a rocket, it has some like dependency that you didn't think was maybe that important and it blows up and you got to live with that. Or the whole laser mesh doesn't work. So Let's hope that doesn't happen. That was that you know like putting a a kid in charge of that is is really a crazy thing that SpaceX does is they hand the baton to a really young person and put the whole company on like bet the company on those people and I think that forges things like within people to be able to deliver and then the the lead the part in process like helps them understand the whole system really well. I love it. Well, we are not far from Gardena. Yeah, come by. Come by for your next appearance. I've got a feeling you'll be back on the show this year. Great. Yeah, I would love to be there. You guys are welcome to come anytime as well. I love it. Thank you so much.

### Evan Spiegel on Snap, taste, subscriptions, AI, Specs, and California

**John Coogan**: I would love to. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk soon. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And you saw it at the opener. Jordi, get those juggle balls ready because it's time to tell you about Turbo puffer. So release factor in full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. But wait. [02:32:14] these little puffers. They're incredible. They're going to be hard to They're going to be hard to keep here at the studio. Well, without further ado, we have Evan Spiegel from Snap in the TBPN Ultradome. Good to see you again, Evan. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show. Great to have you. Thank you so much for coming by and stopping by the TBPN Ultradome. Always good to see you here. You out-suited me. [02:33:05] That is a beautiful suit. It's always a great excuse to wear a suit. My wife was like, "Where are you going today?"

**Evan Spiegel**: I like I like the buttons that don't show through. I don't know what that's called, but that's a touch of like some It's very tasteful. Thank you. I appreciate that.

**John Coogan**: Are you are you in are you following the taste discourse? People are saying that taste is important. Do you have a stance on this? In the context of building It's more of like a post-AI thing. Like AI is going to be able to do everything, but not taste. And it's just like it's sort of always been obvious, but it's also fun to write about. It's fun to talk about. There's a whole bunch of interesting examples, but It's funny you say that cuz our designers are literally becoming engineers right now. So, it's kind of like, you know, I mean, if you think about like 10 years ago, right? The The even like the power dynamic in a company, the hard part was building things. Right now, the hard part is like having a great idea. So,

**Evan Spiegel**: Yeah. I think taste is important.

**John Coogan**: I guess the I I guess the question I was joking about earlier was like there's there's two ways to build a new consumer product. One is you AB test the color of the button, and you just look at the data, and that's more of the engineering mindset. And then there's the tasteful approach, which is maybe like I just know green's the right color for my brand. did you engage in both throughout your journey? Did you Is there a place for both? Like how do you see those two the gut instinct interfacing with like the engineer reality? Like somebody pulls up the chart, and they tell you that it's got to be blue, but you know yellow's right. I I think for us like there's a huge difference between like generation and iteration, right? If you're trying to come up with a new idea, it is really important that you can exercise your sort of creative opinion or judgment. I mean, you know, the reason why we chose yellow is that there were no other apps in the top 100 that were yellow. So, that was like an easy one to stand out. We didn't have to AB test that one.

**Evan Spiegel**: yellow. Verticalize yellow, yeah. It's Us and McDonald's, I think. but I think you know, what becomes very important very quickly is that you're able to iterate, you know? So, once you put something out there, AB testing, experimenting, that that really helps. Especially as you have a big organization, you don't want to bottleneck, you know, people's experiments. So, anyone can experiment and and learn. Yeah, it's interesting. I One way to think about it is like I feel like executives thrive if they have great taste because they have a lot of people coming to them with, you know, work or projects, and it's their job to decide like, what are we actually going to focus and prioritize? And now anybody can create, like, 20 different concepts for a website. And so, they're having to choose from that to then go up the chain and decide, okay, which one of these should we actually implement? But there's like taste is becoming more important because now it's so much faster to just create anything. So, at every level of the stack of the organization, you have just like more things to choose from, and taste is just choosing taste in your personal life is like choosing, like, do I get this jacket or that jacket? Or do I put use this flooring in my house or How many logos should be on my shirt? Yeah. [02:34:45]

**Jordi Hays**: That's great. [02:35:55]

**John Coogan**: Give us the news. Massive milestone. What happened? Well, I I literally came here for the gong. You know what I mean? This is

**Evan Spiegel**: It's a great strategy. We got a bigger gong than you were here last. Yeah, and four days after. [02:36:04]

**Jordi Hays**: Is this Is this a new hor- Is this like for year of the horse? No, we were early. We were early. Yeah, yeah, we were early. I we It was really funny. It was so funny. So, so we were walking by this store Yeah. and John and I were walking, and I look inside the store is closed, but all you can see, it's like kind of dark in there, and there's just massive It's at the yeah, massive horse. And I was like, we need one of those immediately. John's like, "What do you mean? We're not going to be able to get like a horse." And then we look on this website for like a few thousand dollars, you can get this horse. I was like, "That's the The hardest part of buying the horse was convincing the production team that we actually weren't joking. Cuz Jordi sends in the chat, "Hey, we need a we need a horse statue." And he's like, "Oh, this is funny." And then we're like, "No, we're serious." And he's like, "Okay, he's joking." And we're like, "No, actually go figure it out. This is your job." Anyway, we're not here to talk about Congratulations on the horse. Thank you.

**John Coogan**: We got a horse, you got a big milestone. Hey, did you see the horse here last time? But it was wrapped in Christmas lights, and we had a massive Christmas tree, and there were so many other things going on in the studio. You gave us that very nice Christmas ornament, which we love. You you it. But it was distracting from the horse. But now the horse is front and center. But more importantly, your your direct revenue is front and center. Give us the news. Yeah, so we've reached a billion dollar annual run rate on our Oh, wow. Thank you. incredible. And Is the job finished? And 25 million subscribers. So I think that's like ESPN size for subscribers, which is like next up Hulu, you know? but really exciting for us as we work to diversify, you know, our revenue and create this this whole new business line. What was the reaction? then like narrative narrative violation too around social media, right? There hasn't been a lot of people will pay for entertainment products, but there hasn't been a bunch of like scaled actually like a social media Yeah. product with with you know, that kind of SaaS. Yeah, what was the reaction like when you initially launched subscriptions? Well, I think what's so cool is people are really passionate about Snapchat. And so they want all these new features and they're asking us all the time like, "Hey, can you you know, chat backgrounds? Or like, can we have a Bitmoji pet?" Or whatever it is. And in the past we'd be like, "Oh man, like this is really a feature for power users, right? Like we can't build this like for a billion people." So this gave us the justification and the resources like, "Okay, fine. Like, you know, pay us two two bucks a month. Have your Bitmoji pets and your chat backgrounds and all this fun stuff." And so people just keep the requests coming. We keep building all sorts of fun stuff. And and actually it's great for the team because otherwise we never would have prioritized all these really fun features. How do people actually submit requests? literally email. Email? Email customer support. We do you know, we do like you know, the research and things. [02:37:47]

**Jordi Hays**: Cuz a lot of the tech companies it feels like they're very faceless and like [02:38:49]

**John Coogan**: Well, it's Evan@snap.com. So it's like a little too easy to

**Evan Spiegel**: Okay. It goes like straight to my phone, too. We love that. Yeah. Dangerous dangerous to say that on the show. so yeah, what has been the key to scaling revenue there? Has it been just driving increases in ARPU or just onboarding more and more people into the premium product, doing more top of funnel, like bringing in these prosumer users as net new users, re-engaging people? Like, what's been working? Yeah, a big focus has just been continually dropping new features, letting people know about those features, creating new entry points, you know, into the subscription service. those features. You know, one of the big things that we rolled out last year was memory storage. So, we've got people who are storing a lot of memories on on Snapchat. So, we give like 5 gigs free, but if people want more than 5 gigs of storage, then, you know, they can either pay just for the memory storage or they can join Snapchat Plus. It's so funny because I remember when Snapchat started, everyone was like, "Oh, this is genius. They don't have to have any cloud storage costs. The business [02:39:05]

**John Coogan**: And now it's like, oh, well, we're in the business, but we have a monetization scheme on top of it that Well, 20 years later, it turns out there's a lot of cloud storage costs. We We were paying them. [02:40:00] Suffering success. Have you seen demand for AI features, and what does demand for AI features in a consumer context look like? absolutely. I I think one of the really exciting things, people don't realize how widely use Snap the Snapchat camera is for generative AI, you know, images and videos. I think in Q4, 700 million people use generative AI lenses. So, those are like our camera editing tools. And we have a feature called Lens Plus, which basically takes some of the most cutting-edge gen AI features, you know, video generation, those sorts of things, and puts it behind a paywall. So, if you want the most advanced gen AI, you know, image and video editing features, that's that's part of Lens Plus. How have you thought about using camera as the end-to-end editing suite versus sort of bifurcating them, looking at like what TikTok and CapCut are separate, edits and Instagram are separate. When do you want to go separate? When do you want to consolidate everything? Generally for Snapchat, one of our strengths is how much content is actually created in our camera because it's much more authentic. And what we find today, especially because everything is so overly edited and stylized, because everything is created with generative AI, what our community tells us all the time is that we want authentic original content. So, for us, we really focus on stuff that's actually captured and made in our camera rather than uploaded. And even as we think about like the types of content we distribute on Spotlight or you know, boost in Spotlight, for example, we're thinking a lot about what's actually made in the Snapchat camera. And this stuff is hilarious. and but but not edited in the same way that it might be on other platforms. Have you thought about how like a gen- agents will take hold in a social media app? I've been trying to think about this like, you know, the Manis acquisition, like what does it look like if I have an agent that can go and, you know, work its way through my social network profile? It's like I could kind of tell it to like like every comment that comes in that's positive and it could do some sentiment but I don't know if I actually want that. Like how does that play out once you get to models that can actually run in the background? It's not just I ask for a question, I get an answer or I say replace the background with a beautiful forest and it does it. What Have you thought about any of that yet? You know, we early on brought My AI into Snapchat, right? And that was like a great proving ground to experiment with things like, you know, personality, memory, all those sorts of things. Or being able to bring My AI into group chats or conversations. Like So, I I do think it's been useful in that regard. Certainly like the My AI use case is very utilitarian. Like we see a lot of like just questions, homework help, like that kind of stuff. you know, on the on the agentic side, I'm much more excited about what's happening inside the business. Like I think the potential for business transformation is off the charts. I think like, you know, if you look at small and medium-sized companies for the last 10-20 years, they've almost been like left for dead. Everyone's been so excited about mega-cap companies. Like, I think the next 10 or 20 years, the efficiencies that small and medium-sized businesses can drive to grow using agents is going to be off the charts. So, I think that's like that to me is where where I'm most excited.

**Jordi Hays**: anyone writing code anymore? Are you vibe coding stuff now? We see every level of the spectrum. It's either the CEO committing code or no one's writing code. It's always at the extreme, but what's your experience? [02:43:16]

**John Coogan**: It's not vibe coding anymore. It's agentic engineering. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

**Evan Spiegel**: I think look, I think what's really interesting about what we're seeing in Snap is that like at to some degree, you know, and because the company's been around for a while, you know, it's operating at two speeds. Like, there are team members who have fully embraced agentic engineering, right? And who are essentially not writing code, right? And then there are other teams that are still operating in a more traditional way. So, you know, because this change is happening so quickly, one of the things we're very focused on is driving these tools through the company, you know, really making sure that folks embrace this new way of working, helping train folks to do that because I you know, certainly for a quite a number of folks, they are not not writing code the way they used to. What's the like the next development that you're most excited about? Is it just understanding the code at a deeper level, sort of like a higher IQ model, or thinking in systems and scalability? Like, it's not, you know, some tiny app. Like, there's so many users on here. One small tiny change can have massive ramifications across a database. the stakes are a lot higher. So, what are you looking for in the advancing in the tools of AI tools to actually improve your business? Yeah, for us it's really just right now about building agents across the enterprise, right? Like, so whether it's like, you know, somebody reports a bug, the agent goes out, figures out who else has reported a bug like it, actually tries to go figure it out, right? Proposes a fix, right? Those sorts of things. Or, you know, you look at our sales team, right? And all the work they're doing. Everything from really trying to understand a client's objectives, generating insights for them, putting that together into a presentation, mapping it to our, you know, advertising solutions. Like, you know, I I think there's just a huge opportunity.

**John Coogan**: Yeah, even even thinking an advertiser that spends $20,000 a year with you guys should eventually should in the relative near term get the same type of presentation and like almost like high touch experience that somebody spending $10 million should get, right? And that doesn't feel like a lot of that is like people making slide decks, like really being on it, like like being timely with with like kind of feedback or, you know, things like that. That feels like very within reach with agents. Yeah, walk me through the current pitch to advertisers. When you meet with the new big company, I mean, I'm sure everyone's used, you know, your advertising product at this point, but let let's assume there's some new hot company that is growing. They have a physical product or something and they want to grow their customer base, grow their reach. What are How are you positioning your offering on the advertising side? nearly billion user platform, including more than 110 million monthly active users right here in the United States in this really really important 13 to 34 demographic. And the reason why that demographic is so important is because they are forming lifelong relationships with brands and with products, right? And not to mention, they're making, you know, their first car purchase, their first home mortgage. I mean, even their first like tube of toothpaste, right? So, I think those are the sorts of really important long-term brand relationships that are so critical. And and so I'm still using the same toothpaste brand I bought when I was 19 or something. I have not churned from that company. Their LTV is probably through the roof. [02:45:07] It does. But, so do you have to stress the importance of thinking in not a rowas, not a one-year LTV payback, but thinking about capturing a customer that could stick around for a decade or more because they're a younger audience. Is that something that's resonating? I think that fundamentally rowas is critically important. It's something that we really optimize towards and a lot of people use, you know, lower funnel objectives on Snapchat. That's been a huge driver of growth for us, especially with the small medium customer segment because folks are very sensitive to their return on investment. But when I, you know, talk to advertisers about why they love using us, it's always the new customer metric. Like that is why they're coming to Snapchat. They say that if I look at the percentage of new customers I'm getting when I spend on Snapchat, like that really moves the needle for my business and it moves the needle for me over the long term. [02:46:41]

**Jordi Hays**: feels less like a tax, which happens on some other platforms. Whereas like, these people were already coming to my They were looking for me and I had to pay for that. It's frustrating. Jordan, you have something? [02:47:28]

**John Coogan**: yeah. How What are you excited about in AI hardware broadly and everything that you guys are working on? It feels like this will be a massive year for hardware across the board. You've got, you know, Apple, you know, people have been reporting I think this week on multiple new hardware devices. There was that like somewhat believable-looking like open open AI open AI ad. But anyways, a lot of action going on, a lot of energy and excitement. You guys are in a good position cuz you've been working on it for better part of a decade now. Yeah, I mean it's it's a transformational year for for Snap in this regard. We just spun out Specs into its own standalone subsidiary, so it's really going from like, you know, R&D science project to like real company after almost 12 years. So that that, you know, is is really important for us. I think, you know, it intersects with some of the things that we were just talking about in terms of the evolution of AI because, you know, one of the biggest things I think folks have been concerned about when it comes to building a new computing platform is how to compete with the lock-in that the app stores have, right? How can you possibly compete with all these other app stores? And I think literally at the beginning of this year people realized like software isn't a moat anymore, right? That like having an app store isn't a moat anymore because it's so easy to build software. You can even build software on the fly, right? And that that to me is really exciting and coming at an amazing moment. what can you do to lean in? I saw somebody had hacked a pair of smart glasses to work with open claw and I imagine like is there anything that you would do on that front to really lean into the whole kind of like hacker movement around AI because there's like you guys are building a bunch of experiences internally. We've used a lot of them. They're very cool. But at the same time opening it up and saying like hey this is a platform that anybody can build on. And we've seen this even with the kind of the Mac Mini movement. Mac Minis are starting to sell out in different points around the country. People are obviously willing to spend real money to experiment around all these products. I I think the the big thing that you're sort of circling is the way that people are using their computers is really changing, right? And they're really just supervising agents doing work for them. And that is a perfect fit for specs because the whole idea is to stop spending all this time hunched over your laptop or staring at this. We we were at breakfast this morning and this guy I didn't take a picture cuz it would have been rude and a violation of his privacy, but his his posture was literally like it was it was the most insane posture. He needed he needed his specs. He's getting a choir.

**Evan Spiegel**: I'm going to hear another choir. It's peak performance. He's getting a choir. He's calling it now. Like I know we're going to see this guy. But yeah, like we we it feels that [02:50:13] wait for his laptop. What you're imagining which is like we can all just spend all of our day walking around being productive monitoring agents in a in a kind of a heads up display. It feels within It feels within reach.

**John Coogan**: finally. It does. Yeah, it's incredibly exciting. So, it's cool that all of this stuff is coming together, you know, in this moment. And I think, you know, it is super important for us to be investing in hardware because we talked about software is not a mode anymore, right? So, it becomes even more important to do very hard things, in the real world at a time when software is being disrupted in this way. Yeah, but at the same time I feel you guys are in a unique position because it doesn't feel, well, like looking at the video game industry, I think that AI will presents like a pretty huge challenge for a lot of these, you know, smaller studios that were just in the business of like spending a few years making a game, releasing it. If it becomes way easier to to build a game, that's bad for them, but it might be great for like a Fortnite or a Roblox or one of these platforms that have these big existing social networks. And so, I feel like your your core business of of actually still being a social network where people are connecting with other real humans is in a good is in a good position. and so, yeah, the hardware is just like a bonus. Yeah, and and one of the things we've been thinking a lot about, you know, is both with the front graph and in terms of our distribution, how do we leverage all these amazing tools to just start building more apps, right? Like one of the things that we always love to do is come up with new ideas. In the past we've been like, "Oh, we got a great idea, but we got to build it. Oh, man." Right now, you know, I was just looking today, we have a a really I mean, I shouldn't even be saying this. I shouldn't say anything. soon, anyway. [02:52:01]

**Evan Spiegel**: We've got a wild new idea that we're working on and we can just leave it there. I was I was going to ask like, have you been pitched by the vibe coding? Like, do people want to be able to like send an app around basically that they just prompt on the fly? I think so. And I think I think what's going to be really interesting about all these companies, like before so many of their resources were dedicated to engineering. Now, I think people are going to be much more focused on marketing, on distribution, right? And and that's a a big shift in the way that they Being able to, being able to send send somebody an app that you just made for them that historically you would have just like sent a funny picture to your friend

**John Coogan**: my experience sending you sores of me walking on the beach in the Volta theme suit. Like it was like I was able to make an in-joke with me and my three friends in a group chat that would not do well on social media broadly. You have to have all this context, but because the cost of generating new content had dropped so low, I could do something that didn't require a costume department and cameras is getting set up or all the all those different things. talk a little bit more about GenAI. There's a lot of crazy video models are releasing and it seems like a lot of companies are moving fast and breaking a lot of things specific particularly in like the the Hollywoods or Hollywood's not happy about this stuff. Like what is respons- what is a responsible rollout of generative video features look like? What a great question. So I I think for us we have a lot of safeguards in place, you know, both around basic things like you shouldn't be able to make somebody nude, you know, or you or put in a compromising position or that sort of thing. you know, you shouldn't reproduce copyrighted content, those sorts of things. So we we, you know, as we look at, you know, even open prompt experiences where people can ask for you know, to to create different sorts of photos and and videos, we try to layer in safeguards to prevent that sort of thing from happening. and we do a lot of adversarial testing to to make sure you know, that that Yeah. is unlikely to happen.

**Jordi Hays**: And then in terms of lenses, sponsored lenses, different experiences that partners are bringing to the platform, I'm interested to know what's the shape of the ecosystem. Like are there are there random developers out there who are making things and then earning a some sort of rev share from that? Is there actually a a flywheel there? Or is it particularly like you're working with a brand and they're going to do a sponsored lens and like your team is developing that for them. What does that side of the business look like? Yeah, it absolutely spans the spectrum. So, there's 100,000 more than well, gosh, maybe 400,000 developers now who who built lenses for for Snapchat and and increasingly for Specs as well. You know, those developers can apply to include their lenses in Lens Plus and earn a revenue share out from that. You know, if people are engaging with their lens and that kind of thing. Then we've got a whole, you know, internal studio as well. So, we can work with advertisers if they want to build a unique experience or we have tons of partner studios who we can connect them with. But, you know, increasingly there's a tool called Easy Lens. It's pretty fun. If you pull it up and just play with it, you can build a lens from a prompt. So, [02:53:57]

**John Coogan**: I was going to ask. I imagine that it has to be acceleratory for you, right? [02:55:02] It's huge for us. And again, we're thinking a lot about how to connect, you know, the We have, you know, Lens Studio which is more of the pro tool and then we have Easy Lens which allows anyone to create with a prompt. But, I think, you know, even Lens Studio itself is going to become much more, you know, oriented around agentic engineering rather than Yeah. And then Yeah, you just prompt it and it's it's wiring up whatever your domain-specific language is. Very interesting. Yeah. Are you starting to see an actual like kink in the graph of lenses that are being deployed yet or do you think that this is something that comes once people realize that it's actually easier to go and

**Jordi Hays**: Yeah, it's so it's so interesting. We we like there's some dynamic on the internet that I feel like is somewhat real where the more funny you think something is, like the less likely it is to be like actually viral. Yeah, I jokingly call this the Hayes Paradox which is also a Hayes Paradox. It doesn't doesn't work. But, but yeah, it's this idea that like something that is like actually the funniest thing that you see on the internet for an entire year is has might have a TAM of like close to one or or your group chat. But, that's great if you're talking about using giving people tools that allow them to generate like hyper-personalized things that are only funny to them or like a handful of their closest friends. It's like actually gives you the ability to like create a lot more joy on your platform. And that's that's exactly what we see with GenAI that people are using it for these more communication-oriented use cases, but on the content consumption side it's the authentic, original, like unedited, non-AI content that does super well. So, definitely a major a major contrast there. And I I think, you know, as it pertains easy lens. When we start rolling that out, we saw a huge step change in the lenses that were being created. So, that's become a big a big focus for us, but I also think you can imagine in a not-so-distant future, I mean, now the way that the models work, it's very hard to scale real-time, you know, image transformations, which are one of the reasons why I think people love lenses cuz you it almost feels like you're looking in a mirror, right, and transforming what you look like. I think in the not-so-distant future a lot of lenses will just be prompts, right? And those prompts are going to be shareable and, you know, we have a whole feature right now around the imagine lenses somewhere in our generative lenses where we have trending prompts and you can share prompts with your friends and, you know, iterate on them. And I I think again kind of tying back to the importance of the friend graph, I think you see that intersection of people creating these like inside jokes, but then also being able to really easily share them with their friends, have people create their own content, you know, inspired by those prompts. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

**Evan Spiegel**: Yeah, that seems really really important. I mean, whenever one of these new image models goes viral, it the the stuff there's always some like ground truth meme human element that's underlying it. I think of the Studio Ghibli moment. It's like I've seen cartoons. I could just go look at a cartoon, but I haven't seen a cartoon of me. And so, there's a little bit of that in there. So, the lenses make a perfect perfect sense in that in that case. Let's get Let's get the California update. Oh, yeah. What's on your mind? Broadly in the state. Going better than ever, right? It seems to just get better and better. I don't know how we I mean, if we didn't have this weather, we'd really be in a a tough spot. You know what I mean? It's incredible what what we get away with. I know, it really it really is. That's got to be a big piece of it. The weather is fantastic. Although, yesterday it was a little rainy. Yeah, yeah. Basically, California has like karma for forever flexing the weather on the rest of the state. Like how many times I've I've messaged a friend and or they'll say like, "Oh, it's like it's my it's like 5° out right now." And I'm like, "Oh, it's like 71." [02:57:37] It's going to be that way all week. And so, in exchange in exchange we get like the the gnarly as political environment. [02:58:45]

**Jordi Hays**: chilly today. It's 56. That's sweatshirt weather. It is. Freezing. It's freezing. Freezing. It's absolutely freezing. Stay indoors.

**John Coogan**: but yeah, broadly, how do you think California's going? Yeah, I you know, I'm concerned. what I what what gives me some optimism is that it looks like more and more people are increasingly concerned. Right? What I was most worried about, you know, even 6 to 9 months ago was the number of people that like thought things were going really well in California because they were contrasting with what they were seeing at the federal level, right? And feeling like, "Oh, California's better. It seems like, you know, there's less chaos here or whatever." You know, cuz we've got a single-party state essentially. and so, I think now more and more people are, you know, are hearing that we're number one in terms of homelessness, number one in terms of poverty, right? you know, number one in terms of unemployment. And they're like, "Whoa, like that doesn't line up with the California that I love, that I want to be a part of. Like how can we change that and and fix that?" So, I think the awareness is really important because, you know, in a democracy without awareness, you're not going to get change. and so, I think, you know, hopefully that will continue to build. I think, you know, if Newsom decides to run for for president, that's going to I think raise even more awareness of California and the challenges that we're facing here, which again I think will be helpful. So, right now to me it's really an awareness game of helping make sure Californians understand like this is not going in a direction that I think we want. And if we want change then we're going to have to ask for that right and advocate for that but I think that's happening more and more you know which which gives me some some hope. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I want to ask about live streaming. How do you think about it? It feels like it's having a little bit of a moment with the with the clavicular stuff. I don't know if you've been tracking any of this. [02:59:01] Clavicular? I love this. So locked in. So locked in. You're like you're running he got frame mogged. running No, yes. He's running you know have a billion users on the internet but so there there's basically a number of creators on on Kick that have generated probably hundred billion views like some some absurd number that Juan John referenced is very it's it's from the looks maxing community which is effectively guys that try to be as good looking as they possibly can. So it's basically this whole drama like it's kind of like WWE brought to the very internet native. There's all these different characters. One of them is running effectively a 24/7 whenever he's sleeping he's streaming. So it feels like IRL IRL live streaming is is hitting just have having a really big moment right now. How have you thought about it historically? Does it does it play any type of role in in Snap's future or is it not something that the users actually want? We decided to step our way there essentially with creator subscriptions. So we just started testing creator subscriptions with a small group of creators. What we find on Snapchat is that people have very very loyal relationships with creators. So once they subscribe like they want to come back every day and see what's new on their story and message with them and you know really get to know them better and build this deeper deeper relationship. So we thought creator subscriptions was a good extension of like what we're already seeing happen on Snapchat. We're going to test that out and see how that goes, but that will give us some of the infrastructure to to start thinking about, you know, stepping from there into the next [03:00:34]

**Jordi Hays**: be an individual creator just going live, talking with their existing follower base. [03:02:17]

**Evan Spiegel**: All right. Yeah, potentially to start existing, you know, with their existing subscriber base or even with their you know, Yeah, not not necessarily even their followers more broadly, but their existing subscriber base and then, you know, layering in some of the replying and gifting and those sorts of things before opening it up more broadly.

**John Coogan**: That's cool.

**Jordi Hays**: you been

**John Coogan**: Yeah, I I felt like my personal stance is that like Twitch as a platform since being landing at Amazon is just like not not gotten the not just gotten the attention that I think it potentially deserves. That created an opportunity for the kicks of the world to to step in. Well, I mean, I haven't seen Andy Jassy live streaming on Twitch once. Yeah. And so I would love to see that. Earnings on Twitch, obviously. Just do it. That would be cool. Yeah, so you you guys should you you should fire up your and do do just a an earnings call on on the on the platform. It would be cool. I want the CFO there explaining the whole financial model. What happened? If it's wonky, it's fine. That's what Twitch is. It Every social media platform is like a flourishing of niches and you find your niche and there's going to be someone there who's like, "Yeah, this is amazing." switching gears a little bit. you mentioned subscribers are getting close to Hulu numbers. How have you been processing the somewhat polished produced vertical short form trend that's sort of happening. I see them in the App Store. I haven't been a user really, but you're familiar with what I'm talking about. Real short is one of them. They seem to be popular. There's obviously some organic creation that's happening on a fully UGC platform, but how have you thought about that? It feels like sort of revenge of Quibi in some ways, but where do you think that goes? How important is that? Is there a role for you to play in that ecosystem? Yeah, I I know that we've got a lot of, you know, advertising partners who are marketing the short-form videos on Snapchat. And you know, I mean those ads are so sometimes I find myself watching one for like a minute and I'm like, "Oh my god, what So that seems to be working. But I I think you know, when when we experimented with shows, you know, many many years ago, I think for us we just found that the volume of creativity, you know, the billions of snaps being created in the Snapchat camera meant that really like Snapchat is at its heart about UGC fundamentally. And I think in the places where we've really allowed UGC to flourish and creators to flourish and actually where we we didn't do as many shows or didn't do as many publisher stories, we we really built a very vibrant organic creator ecosystem. So I think, you know, in in sort of the ensuing few years, we we've pulled back from doing that sort of more premium content because what we just see our community love is connecting with the folks that feel like they're next door. Yeah. And I mean YouTube did the same thing. YouTube Red, they had a whole bunch of like produced things and you'd see the I'd be like, "My favorite creator got paid a bunch of money to do something produced and it's to get in less views because like I actually just want him to turn on the camera and just talk. I don't need all that other stuff cuz like that's not what I'm there for and I think that recognizing the the desire of the user, the context, like all of that really matters. Like the medium is the message, right? What is your how do how do you allocate your time in 2026? Where are you Where are you spending time that you know, how is that kind of changed over the years? I mean, at a high level it's probably 80/20 Snapchat and Specs. I think that's going to have to start shifting this year, you know, not maybe not totally 50/50, but certainly close close to it just as we as we ramp up and and you know, bring that product out into the world. You know, my happy place is making new stuff with our team. That's what I love to do our design reviews. You know, whether that's you know, a specs or with the Snapchat team that's that's really what I what I love to do. But you know, a lot of what I've had to do over the past couple years is really work closely with the team to rebuild the ad platform and to create a totally new you know, this small medium customer segment for of our advertising business. I mean our our business three or four years ago was almost all large customers and like highly concentrated in the United States. And when your business is concentrated on a small number of very big customers, it just creates a lot of unhelpful volatility. And so what we've done since then is you know, build out a platform that can deliver lower funnel goals, you know, especially the small medium customers and then really diversify [03:04:27]

**Evan Spiegel**: get to work on the fun stuff if you don't have the economic engine. Yeah. Yeah. Last question for me. Virtual reality. You've obviously looked at this haven't gone super deep in it. over the weekend I watched The Matrix in VR. I also watched on Apple Vision Pro. [03:06:46]

**John Coogan**: You watched the whole Matrix in VR? No way. Yes. They said no one had ever done that before. I also I also watched You made history. It's incredible. You should hit the gong for that. I mean that's unreal. [03:07:06] That's incredible. But I'll give you one better. I know I didn't I didn't I watched the whole thing. I did I did I did I did. But but I went further on Saturday night. I watched Terminator 2 in VR. Woah, back to back. back-to-back films. And you don't have like a ring around your It's not it's temporary. It goes away after about an hour. And yes, my wife did say something about it. But What was she doing? Was she there? It was It was a rare situation where she was out of the house with the kids and so I just had free time on Friday. It never never happened.

**Evan Spiegel**: plugged in. But truly truly around family, like you can't use it cuz it's so antisocial. Even with the eye, it just doesn't work. So like I actually finished watching Terminator 2 just on my phone because it was less antisocial than putting the VR headset back on when once the family came home. Anyway, I did successfully watch a full movie in VR. Let it be known. I did. But I can't tell and I think I already know the answer now that you're laughing at me. But am I like 1 year early? Am I 10 years early to watching movies in VR or am I just weird and it's never going to happen? You're going to watch movies in glasses for sure. Right? And I think like what you know, it's so funny. A couple of my buddies, you know, are big into finance stuff like that. So like if we travel together, you know, they'll bring their monitor to like Oh, yeah. Yeah, come on. You can't get stuff done without You just got the new Dell one. Wait, we did? That's the actual Dell one? It's It's like 6 ft long. [03:08:03]

**John Coogan**: That's amazing. You got to have your You got to have your setup, you know? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so they travel with like a big monitor or you know, even two monitors. So I think like a lot of the early stuff you're going to see with glasses or people who just want the full setup but like do not want to ship you know a monitor to to wherever they're going. So I think like if you you know, if you're on if you're traveling or you're you know, on a plane or something, you want to really get work done. It's so hard to do that on a laptop. I think you're I think you're right on time, actually. Right on time. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or a pioneer. Next time you come on, we'll ask, "Have you watched a full movie in any VR product?" And I and we'll see we'll see if I'm if I'm early or just weird. What do you think about timelines for watching movies in glasses? That's That's a this year thing. And yeah, and then and then what about what about glasses? Is it that you still have some element of the real world? It's not as anti you know, you're not getting the like you know Yeah, it's not this huge, heavy, closed headset with a screen, you know, right in front of your eyeballs. So, I mean, sorry, it seems like you love it. So, so, so, so, so, so the trick is that I was laying perfectly flat. In a fully bright room.

**Evan Spiegel**: Yeah, oh yeah, this is the other thing. This is the other thing, it needs tracking. So, you have to leave the lights on. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. [03:09:59] No, but seriously, so you can't turn off the lights. And so, if I get home and then and my wife wants to go to bed and turn off the lights, I'm like, "Okay, it doesn't work." No way. [03:10:06] It loses the tracking. No way. So, but but if you rest it right on your head, just perfectly, and and then also the VR headset, it it wants to be world locked. So, initially, the screen is down here and you have to look like this and then you have to recenter it up here. And then it appears above you in beautiful 4K and it's amazing. And you sit there and you watch The Matrix from start to finish and it's actually a great experience. But, it is weird and niche and I don't know if it'll ever happen. But, I think the idea of, you know, being able to watch something on a giant display in a lightweight pair of glasses is compelling. Oh, yeah, if it's lightweight. But, like truly, you actually can't have a VR headset on your face for more than 10 minutes. It's bad. I love I love the super bright room. It has to be bright. Like, the ISO on these cameras is so low that even if I just have my lamp on, it's like all fuzzy and noisy, you know? It's terrible. Get a warehouse and get a bunch of like yoga mats and then have the Vision Pros and it's a a VR movie theater. You go and you just lay in the bright light. Super bright light. It it really is like the most dystopian and anti-social thing you can possibly do. But, The Matrix is a great movie, so it was worth it. I sacrificed Worth it. for the for the Borg. And you broke the record [03:11:02] I did. I did. The Guinness Call Guinness right now. When you all aren't live, you just move the table, put some mats down, and then you've got that set Yeah, yeah, it's perfect.

**John Coogan**: Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Evan Spiegel**: Great to catch up. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Yeah, congrats to the whole team on the Thank you. It's really you. leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbthdaily.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific.

### Closing notes

**John Coogan**: Are you sure? You got to get out of here? oh yeah, you want to keep going? I'm kind of want to keep going. I I don't know. What else is in the news? Do we we If we got news, we can do it. get to it tomorrow.

**Jordi Hays**: Okay, we can get to it tomorrow.