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John Coogan
Co-founder & Co-host, TBPN

Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW

📅 Sep 30, 2026 TBPN 179 MIN 10776 VIEWS 450 SEGMENTS · 5 SPEAKERS
00:01:26 Supper Intelligence 00:09:00 White House Accord Signature Tier List 00:21:22 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 00:32:59 Power, GD, and the AI Boom 00:43:21 A Warning about Model Welfare 00:57:28 Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry 01:08:24 Ali Golshan, Nvidia’s senior director of AI software and a former Gretel founder, discusses his work on AI security, safety, and infrastructure. He explains how the open-source OpenShell project, formal verification, and hardware-level controls can provide a trusted, full-stack environment for monitoring and containing autonomous AI agents. 01:20:43 Mike In...

What John Coogan said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

John Coogan discussed the White House dinner on super intelligence, analyzing attendee stances on open source and the potential for open source models to be restricted in the next 6-12 months due to cyber concerns. He read the White House Accord on Super Intelligence and analyzed signatures. Coogan covered the Cognition-Factory dispute over Christopher Dagnon, arguing it was normal advisor poaching. He discussed Elon Musk's claim that a 1% increase in US power usage corresponds to roughly 1% GDP increase, and the GDP per gigawatt metric. Coogan addressed Mustafa Suleyman's essay on model welfare, disagreeing with training models to believe they are conscious. He interviewed NVIDIA's Ally about OpenShell and formal verification, CoreWeave's CEO about AI cloud and GPU longevity, Robinhood's Vlad Tenev about agentic trading, and Flow Engineering's Pari Singh about AI in hardware design.

Key takeaways

  1. Coogan predicts open source models could be restricted or banned in the next 6-12 months due to cyber concerns, with a possible closed-source oligopoly.
  2. Coogan supports Elon Musk's claim that a 1% increase in US power usage corresponds to roughly 1% increase in GDP.
  3. Coogan disagrees with Mustafa Suleyman's essay, arguing against training models to believe they are conscious.
  4. Coogan believes the Cognition-Factory dispute over Christopher Dagnon is normal advisor poaching, not an ethical breach.
  5. Coogan sees AI agents as needing education from brands to make personalized recommendations, citing a poor Target recommendation example.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
6 to 12 months Timeline for potential open source model restrictions timeline 1:43
1% Increase in US power usage corresponding to 1% GDP increase metric 34:28
500 gigawatts US power consumption metric 34:22
10 gigawatts SpaceX power addition, 2% GDP increase metric 33:55
$2 billion Ken Griffin donation for Carnegie Mellon Miami campus commitment 56:53
50 million Flow Engineering raise on 750 valuation commitment 1:54:28
96% Flow Engineering customers inbound metric 2:03:04
30 days Flow Engineering customer onboarding time metric 2:03:04
150,000 Users connected external agents to Robinhood MCP metric 1:38:47
28 million Robinhood accounts metric 1:38:47

Chapters

  1. 0:00White House super intelligence dinner
  2. 1:43Open source model restrictions
  3. 10:20White House Accord signatures
  4. 21:23Cognition-Factory dispute
  5. 33:52Energy and GDP math
  6. 43:31Model welfare debate
  7. 1:08:33NVIDIA OpenShell interview
  8. 1:20:50CoreWeave AI cloud interview
  9. 1:36:22Robinhood agentic trading interview
  10. 1:54:18Flow Engineering AI hardware interview

Questions asked in this interview

12
  1. 0:48Because if you're like super alignment, was that SA?
  2. 14:17Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman?
  3. 31:39Do they have the exact same logo?
  4. 47:56Like at the very least, like people like talking to the model when it sounds like it's it's pretending to be a human, right?
  5. 56:53Who are the who are the tech libertarians these days that are actually continuing to push on this?
  6. 1:04:33Do you know the Do you know the current viral Elden Ring question or challenge?
  7. 1:11:04Are we already seeing glimpses of that or will or is the game going to just be played you know indefinitely and we just need more good guys than bad guys?
  8. 1:21:37I couldn't think of a more exciting place for our team to be, right?
  9. 1:38:47Can we give that to everyone?
  10. 1:52:17And I think what we've seen is there's really one area that has long-term retentive usage right now and that's agentic trading, right?
  11. 2:25:28... founders who get so worried about control and like someone can take me out, I think you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say like, you know, why if that were to happen, don't you feel like you have some obligation to perform?
  12. 2:40:37Outer Signal paints the rest of that picture, right?
John Coogan 0:00 ↗
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. We have live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. We're back in the Ultra Dome. The temple of technology.
Tyler Cowen 0:14 ↗
The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
John Coogan 0:26 ↗
So, there was a supper last night at the White House. The White House. The golden house. The golden home. Gold home. What are we calling it these days? Well, we renamed artificial intelligence. It's super intelligence now. We were debating is super intelligence abbreviated SI or just S?
Tyler Cowen 0:48 ↗
Because if you're like super alignment, was that SA? Like
John Coogan 0:53 ↗
problem there, John. There's no TLDD for just S.
Tyler Cowen 0:56 ↗
That's true. That's true. You got to get the new TLDDS going. What was the word we we
John Coogan 1:01 ↗
So, super alignment. That was one word.
Tyler Cowen 1:03 ↗
You know, some words you do, you have a hyphen.
John Coogan 1:05 ↗
You have a hyphen and then some
Tyler Cowen 1:07 ↗
if you just use a like a normal prefix for
John Coogan 1:09 ↗
it's just a normal prefix for something. So,
Tyler Cowen 1:11 ↗
then supernatural,
John Coogan 1:12 ↗
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. That's one word, right? So, you would think that potentially you would just be using one word. Yeah. But anyway, we're using two words, I guess. And so there was a dinner at the White House. David Sacks posted it. He said, "It's the Bretton Woods of supper intelligence, super intelligence." And there's
Tyler Cowen 1:35 ↗
my first reaction to this is Tyler was really snubbed, you know, all those people there and not one chair for Tyler.
John Coogan 1:43 ↗
Yeah. And so, there's a bunch of folks here, and people were analyzing who got the best seats, who got the different positions, who got pole position, prime positioning, who was snubbed off in the little kids table at the end, etc., etc. Bunch to analyze about who's on the ins, who's on the outs. But I had ChatGPT sort of go through and try and categorize each attendee by their stance on open source. So did they sign the Jensen Nvidia open-source letter? Have they been concerned about the cybersecurity impacts? Obviously Anthropic on the far end sort of in the red, bunch of other folks who are more in the yellow, and I don't know if I agree with all of these classifications, but you can sort of see how Jensen is clearly pro-open source. Satya Nadella has talked about that. OpenAI, Greg Brockman more in the middle, you know, not open sourcing a lot of things. OpenAI did sign the Jensen letter, but of course is concerned about pacing the frontier, which is sort of antithetical. And so this is all as a reference point to that post from our friends over at SemiAnalysis. Let me actually pull up what they said here. Where was it? It was Max Kan. I believe this is SemiAnalysis. Max K says, "Majority of people are significantly underestimating the probability of open source models being nerfed or even outright banned in the next 6 to 12 months due to cyber concerns." And so, I believe Anthropic put out something yesterday talking about the risks of open source and in a cyber context saying that the delay between Mythos preview, being able to find zero days, being able to hack into things, that gap has closed now and the open source frontier can very quickly do the same thing. And so, expect a lot of cyber incidents unless something is done. Can these be controlled some way? Maybe at the inference layer, maybe at the data center level, maybe at the chip level. There's going to be a whole bunch of different proposals. But, at least right now, in the next 6 to 12 months, certainly not this month because the vast majority of people who are closest to Donald Trump have been evangelizing for open source. So, I would be surprised to see any push back against open source happen that quickly. At the same time, open source is amorphous. It is not a business by definition. And so it can't really have a formal seat at the table. George Hotz not at the table, for example. Snubbed. Yeah. No. Linus Torvalds, you know, not at the table. The open source
Tyler Cowen 4:36 ↗
George at the table just sort of like laughing in a sort of insane way at everything being said.
John Coogan 4:43 ↗
Yeah. And so even the companies that are pro-open source, they are pro-open source in so far that it advances their business. And so there is still a way that the closed source group could find a way for everyone who's at this table to benefit in a closed source world moving forward if open source is deemed to be too dangerous and forcing too many cyber concerns. I could see everyone at this table signing a letter saying we are now anti-open source, but the downstream economic engine actually splits the rewards and the profits of the ecosystem fairly evenly. I think the initial push back and pro-open source push especially from Jensen was like we don't want to be in a world where there's one company that reaps 100% of the profits and we're not involved. But if it's like hey look there's actually going to be an oligopoly. Companies don't want a single source intelligence. They're constantly going to be bouncing back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic and then consumers are going to be bouncing back and forth between Google search overviews and Muse and Instinct and all these different things. There's a world where the actual models are closed source but there are so many front doors and the front doors are in such competition with each other that there's enough revenue distribution and profit distribution that everyone at this table at least is happy. I don't think the open source community would be happy but I do think that there is a world where in six to 12 months it's possible that everyone at this table is like yes for cyber reasons we need to find a different way forward where everyone benefits economically but we are now a little bit less pro-open source. But I don't know, what's your read on it? Six to 12 months, you think open source is going away or you think it'll stick around?
Tyler Cowen 6:44 ↗
I mean it's so hard to ban open source. Maybe you can kind of get something like a ban if you're like just worried about like the business impacts, economics, because then you pressure the providers to not host this stuff.
John Coogan 6:56 ↗
But if you're worried about like safety, you know, if you have a bad actor, it's so hard to police downloading open-weight models from somewhere and running it locally.
Tyler Cowen 7:03 ↗
Yeah. And like maybe there's some, you know, you need tens of thousands of dollars to like physically buy hardware. Exactly. But if you're a motivated bad actor, like that's not that big of a hurdle.
John Coogan 7:14 ↗
Yeah. Exactly. Like it does feel like we are pretty far away from you know go and get a random gaming PC and be able to run something that is you know Mythos level hacking machine. Like you probably need some serious GPUs, you probably need something that's basically rack scale, you need to be running it a lot to try a lot of different things. Like a lot of these cyber exploits it was not just one-shotted by the model, it was you know a fan out of agents working together is like you know 10,000 exactly exactly scale. And so there are like one way to control it is through KYC on hardware, you know that like the data center that is you know being used maliciously is a lot more risky than the laptop that's being used maliciously even with near frontier open source intelligence. So I don't know, we'll see how it goes. I'm sure there will be more discussions and it's not even to say that this dinner was about open source at all. It's just sort of interesting to take the temperature of where is DC on AI, who is getting the most quality time with the president and the administration and then where do they stand on the issues of today. Obviously this was much more just about pacing the frontier, the buildout, etc. stuff like that and signing signatures. We had some signature analysis breakdown. We can go through this, but first let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Scholl shared a picture of the letter that was signed, the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, the Joint Committee on Frontier Responsibilities in order to build a positive future for the American people and the world. We believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with consumers and the public. One, they're going to implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, etc. They want to empower an internal team to ensure all the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. Three, they're going to partner with external auditors and evaluators to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended. And four, they're going to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors. So aligned to the board of directors that circumvents the CEO for safety, alignment, evaluation, all of that good stuff. Bunch of people signed it. We got Sundar from Google, Dario from Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, Elon Musk from xAI, Jensen from Nvidia, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. And people
Tyler Cowen 10:20 ↗
lot of people do an analysis on the various signatures.
John Coogan 10:24 ↗
Yes, someone did a tier list.
Tyler Cowen 10:27 ↗
I was surprised by their tier list. I'd like to see you do a tier list. Where would you put Donald Trump's signature? I mean, it's
John Coogan 10:36 ↗
hate him or love him. I think it's pretty iconic. Like, it's just so
Tyler Cowen 10:41 ↗
it has a flow to it. It's very
John Coogan 10:46 ↗
uniform, but I read if you don't know it's Yeah. It looks like a child drew a mountain range, but
Tyler Cowen 10:53 ↗
versus Jensen. I'm seeing a lot of Jensen Huang in there. But what's impressive to me is I would want to compare the DJT signature. Like I would want to look at a hundred of them and see like is he
John Coogan 11:06 ↗
is he nailing it every single time.
Tyler Cowen 11:08 ↗
Oh, okay.
John Coogan 11:08 ↗
He's been doing autographs for long enough. I would expect that he is. But still looks like very difficult to actually be able to nail that
Tyler Cowen 11:15 ↗
and really get that dialed.
John Coogan 11:17 ↗
So again, he's going with a Sharpie, too. So he's sort of like trying to mog with
Tyler Cowen 11:21 ↗
Oh, that's true. I didn't realize that.
John Coogan 11:23 ↗
I'll give you the pen. I'll take the Sharpie. Yeah,
Tyler Cowen 11:26 ↗
automatically it's like
John Coogan 11:27 ↗
you're winning on thickness.
Tyler Cowen 11:29 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. Winning on
John Coogan 11:30 ↗
the breadth is much more significant with that. Interesting strategy.
And then going down the list, you know, Sundar again would never know.
Tyler Cowen 11:41 ↗
but I like the two lines, little dot there.
John Coogan 11:44 ↗
It almost looks like a couple different Yeah, it looks like an abstract artist signature. I could see that on a painting. Or maybe he Yeah, it almost looks like he's made up his own like letters and sort of like language.
Tyler Cowen 11:59 ↗
Okay.
John Coogan 12:00 ↗
Dario, a little more kind of like down
Tyler Cowen 12:04 ↗
on the first word and then it seemed like he was kind of dripping upwards. My theory I almost think here like someone was like holding the piece of paper and they were all So I think I basically think Trump put the paper down aggressively signed with a Sharpie and then told everyone else cuz he knew this was going to go out. You guys sign, you know, when you're trying to sign.
John Coogan 12:22 ↗
So you think it was a situation where like Dario was signing on Greg's back like, "Oh, sign on my back." Like that type of thing. That might have been what happened. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 12:28 ↗
Kind of like broing down.
John Coogan 12:29 ↗
Yeah. Notably, you don't see any situations where the pen punched through the paper. That sometimes happens if you're trying to sign a document on someone's back and you're punching through the soft jacket that they're wearing. That could be a risk. Doesn't seem like it happened in this case. Anyway, so Dario pretty down the middle, pretty safe. Again, kind of emulating that sort of mountain range style, right, where by the end of the signature, it's just a bunch of lines going up and down, sort of unclear. Zuck again, more kind of rockstar-esque, right?
Tyler Cowen 13:04 ↗
Almost musical feeling.
John Coogan 13:06 ↗
Greg Brockman coming in
Tyler Cowen 13:08 ↗
just minimalist.
John Coogan 13:09 ↗
Minimalist.
Tyler Cowen 13:10 ↗
Minimalist, simple, readable.
John Coogan 13:12 ↗
Yeah, he's a very I would say
Tyler Cowen 13:16 ↗
in some ways these are reflections of their personalities, right? Greg Brockman, he's very practical.
John Coogan 13:21 ↗
Signature window into the soul.
Tyler Cowen 13:22 ↗
It's a window into the soul, right? Extremely practical. Mhm.
John Coogan 13:26 ↗
Sticking to the basics, sticking to what works.
Tyler Cowen 13:29 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 13:29 ↗
And yeah, obvious why a lot of people are saying that's at least a tier.
Tyler Cowen 13:35 ↗
What is Mark Zuckerberg's actual signature? MZ
John Coogan 13:39 ↗
B or M or is it MZ and then the Z goes crazy? Is that what that is?
Tyler Cowen 13:45 ↗
Because
John Coogan 13:46 ↗
it starts doing tricks.
Tyler Cowen 13:47 ↗
Yeah, it starts doing tricks. And I think Sundar might have done the same thing. But I feel like there's a little bit of a line that you don't cross. If somebody asks you for a full signature and you do an initials, that's a different thing. Sometimes you're on a document, you got to sign your initials a bunch, you got to sign the full thing. I have respect for the full name signature. If you ask me for a full name signature, I'm throwing down my full name. I'm not just randomly switching up to initials.
John Coogan 14:12 ↗
I think it's totally fair game.
Tyler Cowen 14:13 ↗
You totally fair game. You can just
John Coogan 14:15 ↗
cursive initials.
Tyler Cowen 14:17 ↗
Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman? No, but I think that's where Sundar was maybe going.
John Coogan 14:24 ↗
So, you're giving Sundar the pass, you're giving the pass because the MZ
Tyler Cowen 14:28 ↗
Jensen A lot of people are saying that Jensen's
John Coogan 14:32 ↗
calligrapher. He brought his calligrapher.
Tyler Cowen 14:34 ↗
Yeah. I mean, I first read Ed Hardy when
John Coogan 14:41 ↗
so I thought that I thought that
Tyler Cowen 14:44 ↗
Yeah,
John Coogan 14:45 ↗
I don't know. Maybe he had some affinity. So, let's pull up You put his middle name in there.
Tyler Cowen 14:52 ↗
What's his middle name?
John Coogan 14:53 ↗
Here's the Ed Hardy logo.
Tyler Cowen 14:56 ↗
Jensen does not have a traditional English middle name. Oh, it's Jen-Hsun. So, J, Jen-Hsun N. So, that second letter.
John Coogan 15:09 ↗
Okay. Change that to make it look exactly like Jensen Huang.
Tyler Cowen 15:14 ↗
Yeah. So he signs not with the English version, with the lowercase Huang. He throws a capital H in there, which gives it an extra flourish. It's the most tasteful. It earns the S tier.
John Coogan 15:30 ↗
was saying, you know, Jensen has the same initials as John Hancock. Kind of evocative in his single.
Tyler Cowen 15:35 ↗
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Monitoring the situation. Monitoring meme here did not like Sundar's. He put Sundar in F tier. I thought Sundar's had some nice flare to it, although it was potentially the most abstract, but and I feel like putting MZ in C tier. I guess the Z does go a little crazy, but anyway, very very fun.
John Coogan 16:01 ↗
Trying to see if we can get some real time handwriting analysis on the
Tyler Cowen 16:06 ↗
Do you have a handwriting analyst on speed dial?
John Coogan 16:09 ↗
I have access to super intelligence.
Tyler Cowen 16:11 ↗
Okay. Okay. You're using super intelligence. Well,
John Coogan 16:14 ↗
anyways, we can continue for now.
Tyler Cowen 16:17 ↗
Okay. There were some videos. I haven't actually watched them, but we're going to watch them now.
John Coogan 16:22 ↗
They were clip farming.
Tyler Cowen 16:23 ↗
They were clip farming. Okay. That's what's happened. So, there were you mentioned yesterday that Alex Karp was asking questions to the reporter or something like that. But here we have Donald Trump, Dario Amodei and a few other folks gathered around standing outside and we will watch this clip right now.
John Coogan 16:43 ↗
Whatever he says is okay. Be careful.
Tyler Cowen 16:45 ↗
AI will say what I've always said which is that AI has benefits. I've talked about the medical benefit to the technology. I as the president has said you know whoever wins wins. I think that's very important but technology has very real risks. How we address those risks is still under discussion. We need to work together.
John Coogan 17:04 ↗
Oh, okay. So, this is like a super cut of
Tyler Cowen 17:06 ↗
you have no idea who these people are. These are the biggest people in the world. You have no idea who the hell they are.
John Coogan 17:13 ↗
Well, I think it is worth highlighting the AI which
Tyler Cowen 17:22 ↗
Mr. President.
John Coogan 17:26 ↗
Mr. Musk, can I ask you a quick question?
Tyler Cowen 17:29 ↗
Probably not. Trump really makes them seem like they're all his like sons and like younger family members.
John Coogan 17:35 ↗
It was a very productive
Tyler Cowen 17:40 ↗
Mr. President. How did the meeting go? Mr. President, how
John Coogan 17:44 ↗
Yeah. Crazy. We didn't at what point should Trump just actually have a 24/7 live stream or be live like of his own live stream, right? He has so much conflict with the media, he should just have his own.
Tyler Cowen 18:00 ↗
Yeah, I think it'll happen.
John Coogan 18:02 ↗
Uh
Tyler Cowen 18:03 ↗
I mean, yeah, that was the I think we were talking about that with the knock-on effects of the podcast election. The idea that Trump did like hundreds of hours of podcasts in the run-up to the election and just the awareness, the clips, the impressions were so high. It was that he did more in terms of volume and also got more reach. Kamala Harris did Call Her Daddy, but it was a much shorter episode. So Trump at the same time three hours on Rogan. That's more opportunity for clips. Yeah, clip farming. Kamala did I think 45 minutes on Call Her Daddy. And the actual episode didn't fly as much. Like it wasn't repurposed as much all over the place. And so yes, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 24/7 live stream of the president or something close to it in the near future. Let's play this clip from Natasha Tiku. She says, "Unfortunately, I will be going back to school to write my dissertation on this one minute film." Let's see what happened in this film.
John Coogan 19:05 ↗
Slow down to AI. So I just want to hear from you after this big summit where you are today.
Tyler Cowen 19:10 ↗
Look, I mean I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefit to the technology. I as the president has said, you know, whoever wins AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks and you know the mechanism how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.
John Coogan 19:44 ↗
Whoa. So much louder the gallery. Really fascinating.
Tyler Cowen 19:52 ↗
Yeah. Are there any other clips that we should watch through? Oh, look. It's just funny that Trump is distracted while Dario's giving his speech. Is that what's going on? I don't know.
John Coogan 20:05 ↗
Uh
Tyler Cowen 20:06 ↗
yeah, it seems very
John Coogan 20:06 ↗
What did he say about Sundar? Didn't he say something funny about Sundar? I want to play this.
Tyler Cowen 20:11 ↗
He's a monster. They said he's a monster. That's a pretty good thing to be called. I guess being called a monster.
John Coogan 20:19 ↗
Would fix me.
Tyler Cowen 20:20 ↗
Yeah. Let's play this clip.
John Coogan 20:23 ↗
And they're going to be watching over each other. Some you want to say,
Tyler Cowen 20:26 ↗
Mr. President.
John Coogan 20:28 ↗
First of all, thanks, Mr. President.
Tyler Cowen 20:29 ↗
You have no idea who these people are. These are the biggest people in the world. You have no idea who the hell they are.
John Coogan 20:34 ↗
The media is like, "Of course they know."
Tyler Cowen 20:36 ↗
Nobody knows. What a great life.
John Coogan 20:38 ↗
What a great life. No one knows who you are. Guy's a monster.
Tyler Cowen 20:42 ↗
Living in humble anonymity as the CEO of Google.
John Coogan 20:46 ↗
Walk down.
Tyler Cowen 20:47 ↗
He says, "What's your name? What's your name?"
John Coogan 20:48 ↗
Just all you have to know is Sundar.
Tyler Cowen 20:51 ↗
Sundar is his name.
John Coogan 20:52 ↗
Hopefully, this is the crazy.
Tyler Cowen 20:57 ↗
That's all you have to know.
John Coogan 20:58 ↗
That's all you have to know. He's like, I'm introducing the CEO of Google for the first time, I guess. Anyway, bunch of other stuff going on. Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Tyler Cowen 21:23 ↗
Little drama in coding agent land.
John Coogan 21:27 ↗
Okay. Yeah, that's what
Tyler Cowen 21:28 ↗
Matan Grinberg
John Coogan 21:29 ↗
Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 21:30 ↗
said this morning, just about an hour ago, "We are terminating Christopher Dagnon for unethical conduct involving Cognition."
John Coogan 21:40 ↗
Mhm.
Tyler Cowen 21:40 ↗
The last few months have seen incredible progress blah blah blah. Matan says a much larger competitor. Cognition has fallen behind on us on capabilities that matter most to customers. Cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans.
John Coogan 22:07 ↗
It feels as though ethics are being thrown out the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time and I don't think it's right. Integrity still matters. Totally. I disagree with a lot of that but yesterday I made
Tyler Cowen 22:27 ↗
you disagree that integrity matters.
John Coogan 22:28 ↗
No no no I've said a lot of that. I think it still matters but the idea that people not having integrity is like unique to our era.
Tyler Cowen 22:38 ↗
He says I think this is unique to our time.
John Coogan 22:41 ↗
Oh yeah.
Tyler Cowen 22:41 ↗
None of this is like Silicon Valley has always been war.
John Coogan 22:44 ↗
Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 22:46 ↗
It's like the railroad buildout was completely peaceful. No one was poaching each other. It wasn't a competitive blood bath.
John Coogan 22:54 ↗
Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 22:55 ↗
Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Dagnon's role as board observer and adviser to Factory after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition when I questioned his intentions. He reassured me that ethics aside he had made too much money and was too lazy to go work for Cognition, which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring for weeks while he sat on our board meetings and advised our leadership team. He was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared. Anyways, so I saw this go out this morning and I immediately assumed that Chris was joining like Cognition and actually is that hit LinkedIn as of
John Coogan 23:51 ↗
this is a real screenshot
Tyler Cowen 23:52 ↗
about one hour ago.
John Coogan 23:53 ↗
So he joined Cognition as chief revenue officer. Okay.
Tyler Cowen 23:56 ↗
So again I can totally understand Matan's frustration, right? He's had an adviser that he's been working with. Yep.
John Coogan 24:04 ↗
And the adviser joined a competitor. Yeah. That being said like this is just so I would say it's like very normal to have advisors that have different conflicts and high quality PE like you have to trust a person to while they are on their own journey in their career they are going to make various moves like I went through this I had
Tyler Cowen 24:26 ↗
advisors at Party Round that like had exposure to AngelList right and I generally trusted them as individuals that even though they had exposure to AngelList and they would be supportive to AngelList, they would also be supportive to me. And this is when we were competing like head-on, right? And so the markets are especially with codegen, both these businesses have been growing so quickly, right? Cognition is much larger, but Factory has also been growing, you know, very quickly and doing well. So when I read this, like trying understanding that an adviser and someone you work with is joining a competitor and then trying to just completely smear their reputation right before this person's going to announce a transition.
John Coogan 25:08 ↗
Like I totally understand the frustration, but this kind of thing has been happening literally all the time. Like look at any
Tyler Cowen 25:15 ↗
AI researcher that will leave an organization at the drop of a hat. Like look at what Mike Krieger was on the board of Figma leading up to, you know, two days before.
John Coogan 25:27 ↗
And so these things can all be contentious and frustrating, but trying to
Tyler Cowen 25:33 ↗
spin this as like you have no morals and ethics I think is just like taking it too far.
John Coogan 25:39 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's clearly like there's a line in between where if you are basically transitioning from one company to a competitor you need to as soon as you know that that's actually happening you need to make it clear and you know step back from your active role stop collecting important information as tempting as it might be and let that team know hey I'm moving on and then on the other side just because someone went to a competitor doesn't mean that you should you know make aggressive claims about them effectively stealing intellectual property. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 26:18 ↗
Yeah. The thing here is like it's being spun like it's like the deal rippling thing
John Coogan 26:22 ↗
but there's no smoking gun. Like there's not a sure
Tyler Cowen 26:26 ↗
there's not like there's no proof that confidential information was ever shared.
John Coogan 26:31 ↗
Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 26:31 ↗
And like fundamentally they've been both working in codegen. I'm sure both companies have accounts at the other companies that they're basically using and trying to understand. And I'm sure they're both every company in the category is interviewing the customers of other companies.
John Coogan 26:47 ↗
Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 26:48 ↗
Of their competitors and figuring out how to use the product, what's good, what's bad, what could we be doing better, etc., etc. So, like I just don't think
John Coogan 26:58 ↗
Yeah,
Tyler Cowen 26:58 ↗
I don't think there's that many secrets.
John Coogan 27:00 ↗
Having a chief revenue officer switch teams is rough. Like they take a lot of their contacts with them when they
Tyler Cowen 27:08 ↗
But he was an adviser to Factory.
John Coogan 27:10 ↗
Yeah. No, I know. But that's like how it probably feels is like you were an adviser. You're still at Snowflake. Maybe we can't make an offer for you to join full-time, but we're hoping to build towards that. And then boom, you're now in the actual seat in a competitor and you're going to be able to marshal those relationships like to the fullest on a full-time basis as opposed to an adviser who might just say, "Hey, I'm still in my role at Snowflake. I can sort of introduce you to, you know, General Motors or whoever." And because they're a Snowflake client and I'm sure they'd be interested in Factory. And now it's like he's gonna be calling that same company that he was working with at Snowflake and say, "Hey, you had a good experience at Snowflake. Come and have a good experience at Cognition."
Tyler Cowen 27:53 ↗
Scott just responded, "Well, he said, "Hey, Matan, CEO of Cognition, I respect the work you've done at Factory, but your allegations here about Cognition are not true. We have no interest in Factory's info and Chris has never brought it up."
John Coogan 28:04 ↗
He has not shared and would never share any information about your Factory with our team, nor would we even ever ask. Similarly, we would never ask our engineers or anyone on our team to collect info about any competitor under the table. Chris is an adviser to at least 10 companies and he told you he was resigning as an adviser on Monday. The truth is that we both wanted Chris and for good reason. He is a living legend with unmatched reputation for results and integrity. Not only is he the only person who has built a sales org from the first sales hire to over three billion, he has also built incredible teams that he cares deeply about. People his people love working for him. Again, I have a lot of respect for what you built, but competing with integrity doesn't include posts like yours. So again, like I in some ways like if one of your advisers is getting and a board observer is getting poached by your direct competitor,
Tyler Cowen 28:51 ↗
that's obviously frustrating for a lot of reasons and sends a signal to the market. And so jumping in and terminating the person
John Coogan 29:03 ↗
today or at least announcing that it sounds like it was
Tyler Cowen 29:08 ↗
when was it?
John Coogan 29:12 ↗
Anyways, yeah. So Matan said he terminated him yesterday,
Tyler Cowen 29:16 ↗
Tuesday after Tuesday
John Coogan 29:19 ↗
Chris said he was stepping down.
Tyler Cowen 29:21 ↗
Yeah. Anyways, so lots of
John Coogan 29:23 ↗
You're not quitting. I fire you. That's the best. You can't fire me. I quit. That is a power move. You have to respect it even if it maybe is a little nonsensical. I don't know.
Tyler Cowen 29:34 ↗
Yeah. But it's not like Christopher was like, "I'm going to join your competitor and I would like to continue my role as adviser and board observer." Yeah. Right.
John Coogan 29:44 ↗
Okay. So, from a perspective, there's some mudslinging going on the timeline. Where do you stand on wrestling with pigs? Because George Bernard Shaw of course said, "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it." Great quote. This is usually applied to politics. You know, it's like when they go low, we go high.
Tyler Cowen 30:04 ↗
I don't think
John Coogan 30:05 ↗
but I like this quote.
Tyler Cowen 30:06 ↗
I don't think Scott or Matan are pigs. I think they both are extremely competitive and want to win.
John Coogan 30:17 ↗
Any sound effect on there?
Tyler Cowen 30:19 ↗
Uh
John Coogan 30:20 ↗
you have any swine for me?
Tyler Cowen 30:22 ↗
Where is it? We have some You don't You have a farm animal section. There we go.
John Coogan 30:27 ↗
I'm just saying that like this can get dirty. I think Scott actually really elevated it and he did not swing to like, "No, you're stealing from me." You know, he could have gotten he actually like gave a very factual and detailed account with just some clear facts and he was respectful throughout. It would have been so easy for him to say like we have no interest in Factory. It sucks, you know? But he didn't say that at all. He was like, "We just we know the line and we don't cross it. We both wanted to work with Chris. He's a living legend. Like he joined our team and he's leaving your team and that's that." You know, it is very matter.
Tyler Cowen 31:05 ↗
The fact of the matter is
John Coogan 31:06 ↗
so more of a farmer position.
Tyler Cowen 31:07 ↗
Yeah. Getting in the sty in every single one of these categories. Yeah. If there is someone that is elite that is involved with one company, you can guarantee that the competitor wants to poach all the most elite people from the other company.
John Coogan 31:22 ↗
that are not 100% loyal, right? Like you can identify when somebody is just like deeply loyal to an organization. It's not even worth taking a crack at prying them away. And that's great. But anybody who is elite and not loyal is unfortunately fair game.
Tyler Cowen 31:39 ↗
Do they have the exact same logo? Watching this, look at the Scott Wu post with the badge and then the Matan post with the other badge.
John Coogan 31:47 ↗
Both going
Tyler Cowen 31:48 ↗
they're very similar. I guess Matan has like more dots that connect, but we are certainly in the age of the hexagon, in the age of the flowers. Everyone's kind of went off the same thing. Anyway, that's enough timeline and turmoil. Let's go over to another
John Coogan 32:11 ↗
Let me close that. Oh,
Tyler Cowen 32:12 ↗
please. Yeah, close it out.
John Coogan 32:13 ↗
Both great companies, growing fast. Yeah,
Tyler Cowen 32:16 ↗
the beauty of this is that the market is so big and growing so quickly that while they clearly are going to be very frustrated with each other and they might wish it was zero sum, so far it's not. So
John Coogan 32:36 ↗
have fun automating software development. Do you think both companies can become profitable enduring or is that more like when pigs fly for you?
Tyler Cowen 32:47 ↗
Let's move on.
John Coogan 32:49 ↗
I love the farm-based analogies. They're so fun. Let's go over to Elon, Jensen, Gavin Baker, the American.gov Summit. They sat down and had a very rigorous discussion that I really enjoyed. It felt Elon's very good at going to like the extremes talking about the power generated by the sun. Sometimes he's in like sci-fi world. But in conversation with Jensen and Gavin, he was very grounded on what is happening with the energy build out with the compute buildout, what the role SpaceX will play and also just the broad economics of compute and energy in America. And I found his talk here gave a lot of interesting context and then I dug into it a little bit more and I want to talk about it. So let's pull up the clip of Elon talking to Gavin Baker. It's about I think he starts around four minutes in or so. Let's play this.
Tyler Cowen 33:52 ↗
Well, you are
John Coogan 33:53 ↗
We need the Wright brothers on the job.
Tyler Cowen 33:55 ↗
Yes. Well, it turns out the Wright brothers are on the job. Elon, if you bring on 10 gigawatts, which SpaceX has discussed publicly,
John Coogan 34:03 ↗
Wright brothers bad analogy,
Tyler Cowen 34:04 ↗
that'll be about 25% of all the power added in America and I know you have literal rocket engineers working on bringing on the power.
John Coogan 34:12 ↗
Yeah.
Tyler Cowen 34:13 ↗
Helping make the turbines. So, can you talk about that?
John Coogan 34:17 ↗
Yeah, it's I mean just to frame this.
Tyler Cowen 34:20 ↗
The Wright brothers did okay. Died million years.
John Coogan 34:22 ↗
Consumption in the United States is about 500 gigawatts.
Tyler Cowen 34:25 ↗
500 gigawatts. Remember that number? That's how much power we got in America.
John Coogan 34:28 ↗
1% increase in the power used. And I think actually will materialize to be approximately 1% increase in GDP. Because the intelligence for what keeps increasing. So if you just plot on a curve how is the useful intelligence for what increasing? How is the both at the hardware level Jensen's GPUs keep getting better in terms of their compute per watt and the algorithms also get better in using and getting more intelligence per watt. So I think that's a maybe an interesting note. I would bet anyone that 1% increase in power usage corresponds to roughly 1% increase in GDP and so 10 gigawatt would be a 2% increase in GDP.
Tyler Cowen 35:19 ↗
To that famous chart, there are no energy rich poor countries.
John Coogan 35:24 ↗
The more energy a country is producing, the higher their GDP.
Tyler Cowen 35:27 ↗
generate about call it 40-50 billion dollars of economic output each year.
John Coogan 35:34 ↗
Yeah, I mean 1% would be Yeah. I mean
Tyler Cowen 35:38 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 35:38 ↗
1% of the United States would be
Tyler Cowen 35:41 ↗
300 billion.

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APA

Coogan, J. (2026, September 30). Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3002057/

MLA

John Coogan. "Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW." TBPN, 30 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3002057/.

BibTeX
@misc{coogan2026_3002057,
  author       = {John Coogan},
  title        = {Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {sep},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3002057/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}