OpenAI and Gemini Achieve IMO Gold, CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night, McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection | Chris Black, Chris Buskirk, Turner Caldwell, Jamin Ball, Harper Carroll, Nikita Singareddy

(00:45) - OpenAI Achieves IMO Gold (37:38) - Timeline (50:29) - CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night (01:10:57) - McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection (01:24:49) - Timeline (01:29:04) - Chris Black is a New York-based writer, producer, and editor, known for his creative consultancy, Done to Death Projects, and as co-host of the podcast "How Long Gone." In the conversation, he discusses his 2015 advice book "I Know You Think You Know It All," his upcoming memoir slated for 2026, and the evolving landscape of book promotion, emphasizing the impact of podcasts and traditional media appearances on sales. (02:00:28) - Chris Buskirk is a serial entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm focusing on conservative-aligned companies. In the conversation, he discusses the resurgence of optimism in the business climate, emphasizing the importance of abundant, cheap energy for national prosperity and highlighting the need for the U. S. to develop its own rare earth magnet production to reduce reliance on China. He also touches on the role of government in fostering innovation, suggesting a balance between deregulation and strategic support for critical industries. (02:20:17) - Turner Caldwell, CEO of Mariana Minerals, discusses his company's role as a vertically integrated, software-first mining firm that focuses on engineering, financing, constructing, and operating mining projects post-exploration. He emphasizes the industry's need to shorten the timeline from mineral discovery to production, highlighting the challenges in designing and implementing mining infrastructure. Caldwell also announces Mariana Minerals' emergence from stealth mode with a $65 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. (02:30:50) - Jamin Ball, a Partner at Altimeter Capital, discusses his experience attempting to invest in Figma during its Series C funding round, which he refers to as the "white buffalo" of his career. He highlights Figma's impressive growth rate of 49% and free cash flow margins of 28%, positioning it as a leading software company. Ball also emphasizes the resilience of Figma's management team in navigating challenges, including a failed acquisition, and expresses confidence in their ability to adapt to emerging technologies like AI. (02:42:53) - Harper Carroll, an AI educator and machine learning engineer with degrees from Stanford and experience at Meta, discusses the potential of AI in children's education, emphasizing its role in fostering curiosity and learning through interactive audio models. She highlights the importance of developing AI tools that are accessible and engaging for children, while also addressing ethical considerations and the need for appropriate guardrails to ensure safe and effective use. Carroll also shares insights from her audience, noting that some parents have successfully integrated AI into their children's learning experiences, such as using AI as a "cool older sister" to discuss topics like nutrition and exercise. (02:59:39) - Nikita Singareddy, co-founder and CEO of Fortuna Health, a platform simplifying Medicaid enrollment, discusses the company's recent Series A funding led by Houston, their mission to create a "TurboTax for Medicaid" to streamline the complex application process, and their B2B2C model partnering with insurance companies to enhance user experience. She highlights the challenges of navigating state-specific Medicaid rules, the persistence of outdated technologies like fax machines in healthcare, and the importance of addressing real-world complexities beyond basic AI capabilities. Singareddy also emphasizes the need for innovative solutions in healthcare, such as AI nurses, to tackle issues like physician shortages and improve patient care. (03:12:03) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, July 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The Capital. The Capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Capital de Capital. Big news.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be back.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  OpenAI, great to be back. OpenAI has announced that they have won a long, they achieved the longstanding grand challenge in AI. Gold medal level performance on the world's most prestigious math competition, the International Math Olympiad. That's the IMO. So this went up at 12:50 a.m. on July 19th.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Typical timeline.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Yes. So this is, this is basically like Friday night, Saturday morning. You're looking at basically 1 a.m. from Alexander Way. And he shares a picture of a strawberry with a medal with the OpenAI logo on it. Someone also tested, they took this picture, they uploaded it to ChatGPT. What's the fruit in the image? How many Rs are in that fruit? And it nailed it. So we are truly, we are truly AGI, it has arrived, has arrived. Also, before we go deeper into that story, we have a new partner, Restream. You saw it in the intro. We're very excited to welcome them as a sponsor of the show.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  We've been using. Running on Restream.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Secretly.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Secretly. Since day one.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Since day one. It's been our secret to success and it can be your secret to success.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  If you have.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  A lot of the Fortune 500 already.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  For all their live streaming infrastructure. So if you need to go live, go live with Restream.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  And you see OpenAI do streams. Like that, that is a thing that has entered the standard.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  XAI.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Com strategy.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if XAI is running on Restream. They had a little.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  But they do, but they do stream and, you know, it used to just be the, the hyperscalers, the Mag7, the big, big companies that would do a live stream around a, an annual event. Then Brian Chesky came out and created Founder Mode and basically said, put all your announcements on an, on an annual release schedule. Bundle them all up, have the team celebrate, push to get across the finish line. And part of that is let's throw an event. Part of that is let's get the CEO and the product leaders on stage, tell the community about what we're building, what we've built. And now a lot of people are streaming it. If you're going to stream your stuff, you need Restream. Anyway, go check it out. So Dylan Field, someone who has streamed events, you know, Figma obviously has config

• 2:34John Coogan?

  their dev event annually, and they actually do two of them, and those are streamed all over the place, probably using Restream. And Dylan chimes in on the OpenAI news. He says, "Congrats to the, congrats 2025 IMO winners and participants, including OpenAI, who trained a general-purpose reinforcement learning model and achieved IMO gold. OpenAI team includes these two folks, Sheryl and polynomial, Gnome. Fun fact, polynomial also won the 2025 Diplomacy World Championship as a human. And so people are saying AGI is right around the corner. AJ from Semi Analysis says, "What stands out to me? Scaling RL and non-verifiable rewards likely via Rubrik's and LLM as judge.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Thinking and reasoning for several hours at a time for a highly specific task. This is what the $20,000 per month model will look like." And so there were a bunch of interesting things about this. Apparently, there are a few different ways to tackle math, IMO-level math problems. One is using this program called Lean that is a formal math proof verifier. And there's rumors that Google's building their system to leverage that a lot. OpenAI apparently went way, way down just the text-based LLM reasoning path and had a lot of success there. So even though, as we'll get into in this story, it feels like it's neck and neck.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Maybe Google was earlier and they just didn't release it faster, and maybe this is a coms thing. There's a whole bunch of different stuff going back and forth. But potentially, the more interesting thing is, did they take different technical approaches and get similar results? Yeah. If they're neck and neck, which one will scale better? Which one will generalize better? There's a whole bunch of different discussions there.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Do you want to get into some of the controversy or the pushback? Do you have a post pulled up from someone saying about Google's attempt?

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the whole thing came down to timing. Dennis over at DeepMind was pushing back a little bit, which I can pull up.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Demis Hassabis from DeepMind, the co-founder and now at Google. Yeah, it was interesting because we immediately jumped to polymarket because this whole idea of an AI system beating the IMO, we talked about this with Scott Wu from Cognition months ago, back in April. I found the clip and he said, "I would be very surprised if an AI system this year does not actually surpass the IMO." He, of course, is an IMO gold medalist himself and so it was big to hear from him. Now, the polymarket had been sitting at like 20% and I think we're going to get into like

• 5:25John Coogan?

  the minutia of like what it means to truly win because the IMO, like the group that actually puts on the competition has a different set of rules. They put the questions out and anyone can go and try and do them. But to actually be awarded a goal for an AI, they said it has to be an open source model potentially. It has to be released in this particular way. And so OpenAI might have used their systems to solve the questions, which is super impressive. But they might not have checked every box to actually technically win the gold from the actual organization. And so, Gnome says today-

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Demis, to be clear, so he put out a post this morning saying, "Official results are in Gemini achieved gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad."

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Which is different than actually getting a gold medal.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  He said, "An advanced version was able to solve five out of six problems. Incredible progress." And there's a quote in here from the IMO president. He said, "We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much-desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points." A gold medal scored, their solutions were- Astonishing in many respects.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow. You can imagine Juan is just like off on this insane tangent.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  There were some fascinating, fascinating details around how they solved them.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Demis shared, he said, by the way, as an aside, we didn't announce on Friday because we respected the IMO board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts. And the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  So you can imagine, somebody was saying, I don't know how real this was. Somebody was saying that they were making a claim that like Google needed time to like have the comms team to sign off. But it seems more likely that the original plan was, hey, let's wait and announce this when, when the IMO board

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  actually comes out.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  The analogy feels like you're a super fast sprinter. You go to the Olympics and you run 100 meter dash that's incredibly fast in the parking lot. Like you're not in the stadium, but everyone's like, wow, that guy's fast.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  He's hauling.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  He's hauling. It's very impressive, but you still don't.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Definitely potentially the fastest man on earth.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  And, and ideally you paid for the parking pass to get into the stadium. And it's like, maybe Google and OpenAI were both running 100 meter dashes in the parking lot. One of them had paid for like, you know, enough parking spaces to make it completely clean. OpenAI was just kind of showing up with a buddy and being like, I'm sprinting. That's, that's the vibe I'm getting, but they're both in the parking lot. Like neither of them are in the actual stadium at this point, but you know, who knows? They, they might be soon. There are some questions about, you know, do they have to open source or whatever? So Noam Brown says, you know, we achieved a milestone that many considered years away, gold level of performance, gold medal. Of course, he's saying gold medal level performance, like that's very critical.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  It's not, we got a gold medal. It's that we exhibited gold medal, golden medal level performance. Typically for these AI results, like in Go, Dota, poker, diplomacy, researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain. And does little else, but this isn't an IMO specific model. It's a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general purpose techniques, which would be very exciting because you could apply an IMO level.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  John, hold up that stack of posts for the audience.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Oh, we got, we got 150 posts today. It's gonna be a quick stream, people. It's gonna be a quick stream, but buckle up. So what's different? We developed a new technique that makes LLMs a lot better at hard to verify tasks. IMO problems were the perfect challenge for this. Proofs are pages long and take experts hours to grade. Compare that to AIME, where, which is another math exam, where answers are simply an integer from zero to 999. So you can verify them really, really quickly. Also, this model thinks for a long time. O1 thought for seconds, deep research for a minute. This one thinks for hours. Importantly, it's also more efficient with its thinking, and there's a lot more room to push the test time, compute and efficiency further. Now, what's interesting is like, these, I think these, I think these questions go up,

• 9:41John Coogan?

  and then you have like, like, I think the students get like two, four and a half hour sections, segments. So there's like, there's a, there's a world where like, the, the AIs can do it, but just not as fast as humans, which would be very interesting. I don't exactly know how, how close they are. So Noam says, where does this go? As fast as recent AI progress has been, I fully expect the trend to continue. Importantly, I think we're close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. There's a big difference between AI slightly below top human performance versus slightly above. This was a small team effort.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  Right now, the discovery that, that AI is doing is talking with somebody who is potentially schizophrenic and convincing them that they've figured out how to move faster than the speed of light.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's, there's so many accounts of that. It's, it's, it's getting crazy. Yeah, I posted, chat GPT agent, go win me an IMO gold medal and then update my resume.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, have you actually looked at any of the IMO questions ever?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  I don't even know where to start. Like, it's, it's all stuff that.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  It's one call away for us, though. We just texted Scott.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Tyler, have you ever looked at IMO questions?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Uh, no, but I'm looking at them right now. It's like, pretty brutal.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Would you know where to start?

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, if you can get two out of six right before the end of the stream, we'll buy you a house.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Well, that's the thing. He's just gonna be able to ask chat G P T.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One shot it?

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had to.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  No tool use.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no tool use. Gotta qualify that.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Uh, so yeah, Nick has the, has a comment about DeepMind. DeepMind has also won.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Tyler has another challenge today, by the way.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  We, we will introduce that in just a few minutes. Uh, DeepMind has also won I M O Gold, but they haven't announced it yet, by the way. Confirmed. Congratulations.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, they did this morning.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Uh, they did. Yeah, they confirmed it this morning.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  And so it's been interesting to see the reaction to this. Uh, Gary Marcus is on X saying, "All the tech bros this morning thinking that A G I has been achieved because some, uh, parentheses insanely expensive new form of L L M's can now match top high school students on one specific task. It's almost cute." So really just ripping into, uh, the entire A I community. But Will Depew comes in and says, uh, he's on leave right now, uh, taking a little summer holiday.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  He says, "Guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Capability per dollar will drop a hundred X a year. The three K task arc A G I eighty percent could probably be thirty dollars if we cared to optimize it." Repeat after me. "All that matters is top line intelligence. All that matters is top line intelligence." So, yeah, again, everybody's focused on sort of raw capabilities, not super focused on, uh, efficiency, especially for, uh, projects like this where they're not necessarily, you know, rolling this out at, in, in mass.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Yep. And you know where a lot of these I M O Gold medalists go to work?

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  I do, John.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Ramp dot com. Time is money. Save both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, Ramp.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Dot.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Is amazing.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Com.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Um, so the timeline was in turmoil over the Gary Marcus post and it, and they went back and forth and he finally admitted it at the end. He said, he said, "That's impressive." Uh, so it started with a post by Daniel Lit. He says, "Huge congrats to OpenAI for their I M O Gold. I don't find it too surprising that an A I tool was able to achieve this. See below, though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days, but I'm, but I'm pretty surprised it was an L R M with no tool use. So it didn't have Python. It didn't have web search. It didn't have all the things that you're, that you could imagine would kind of allow you to, to, you know, speed things up or kind of be a shortcut that would put it in a different category. There was always a question about with the, uh, when, when, when the A I's were playing video games, like.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Like, computers have wall hacks. Like, they can sometimes like see the, see the map without the fog of war. They can see, like, it's very different to get, to get perfect pixel, perfect data on where every character is on the map and be able to make decisions based on that as opposed to like looking at pixels and having to like move the screen over there to see if you're being invaded on the left flank, right? And so, there was always this like, yes, if you gave a computer like the raw access, that's not quite, it's impressive, but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like, well, the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator, like, isn't that impressive? But this was very much an even playing field,

• 14:11John Coogan?

  it seems like. So, Mel Gibson 2.0, great, great name, says, "You are not surprised that they, you are not surprised that they have figured out a way to make the model learn in very hard-to-verify domains in a fuzzier reward space? It also appears that the same reasoning model was the one used in the AT Coder competition, showing that it can generalize across domains." Daniel comes back and says, "I don't think we really know that, what they figured out yet. I'll keep my powder dry until we know more." Mel Gibson says, "Go read Noam Brown's thread on the model if you haven't already." He says, and remember, Noam Brown says, "This isn't an IMO-specific model." And that's a very important thing because there's a ton of, there's a ton of situations where you can go and RL on a

• 14:54John Coogan?

  specific task and it gets really, really good at it, but then you try and get it to do anything else and it's not that great. And so, Daniel, it says, "Yeah, I read it." Gary Marcus says, "Chimes in from the rafters," as he's not in this chat yet, but he has entered the chat. He says, "I read it too. That's pretty vague. Are we sure that no tools were called?" Gary Marcus then chimes in again, says, "Re-IMO Gold, does no tools mean no use of Python code interpreter, etc.?" Dan says, Daniel Litt says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial, Noam Brown, and also Alex Way and says, can you confirm the IMO gold was achieved without using Python or code interpreter or similar? And then Gary Marcus says, humans don't use external tools in the IMO competition.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  I'm just, I'm just trying to understand what the system is. That's how we do science. Daniel Litt, and at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Marcus just deleted their account. So it just says, this post is from an account that no longer exists. Daniel Litt shows Cheryl on the OpenAI team, saying, the model solves these problems without tools like lean, which is a math verifier, or coding. It just uses natural language. It also only has four and a half hours to answer our earlier question. We see the model reason at a very high level, trying out different strategies, making observations from examples, and testing hypothesis, hypotheses. And Gary Marcus says, that's impressive. So Gary Marcus, you gotta fill out the apology form, bro. You gotta fill out the deep reinforcement learning apology form.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  What was the reason for your behavior? No one told me Alex Way was training the model.

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  Mercury was in retrograde.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  I don't know, ML. And then one of them is Gary Marcus convinced me it was fake. Because Gary Marcus was famously said, deep learning is hitting a wall, like, like this, this particular paradigm will not scale. You have to do symbol manipulation, which was like, kind of his bet, encode different relationships between ideas in the model. There were a bunch of different debates over there. And he's gone back and forth on that. He's, he's, he's not as much of like a deep, deep reinforcement learning hater as some people think, but he's got, it's his brand at this point. So, anyway, more on the drum between DeepMind and OpenAI. DeepMind got a gold medal at the IMO on Friday afternoon, but they had to wait for marketing to approve the tweet until Monday. OpenAI, OpenAI shared theirs first at 1:00 AM on Saturday and stole the spotlight.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  In this game, speed is greater than bureaucracy. Miss the moment, lose the narrative. So that's one interesting take. We'll see exactly, yeah, I, I think there's a little bit of that. I mean, certainly culturally, OpenAI loves to release information before Google.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Like whatever Google's like next big

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  And they're playing a win. Remember they after, what did they release after the deep seek moment?

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Deep research.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  And then if you're typing deep and you were looking for an AI product.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  And then, and then Google had I O. And then, and then OpenAI.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  I O. This is like the day before.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  With Johnny Ive.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  With Johnny Ive. So anyway, you know, you'll love to see it. All's fair and love and war, I guess. I don't think this crosses any lines.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Warfare.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is the benefit of having a bunch of posters on your team, I guess. Noem Brand says, it takes us a few months to return the experimental research frontier into a product, but progress is so fast that a few months can mean a big difference in capabilities. And this is from July 18th. So all the models underperform humans on the new IMO questions and Grok 4 is especially bad on it, even with best of end selection. Unbelievable.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was accusing Grok 4 of training on the problem set.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  For, for IMO?

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Oh, for something else. Oh, for the other benchmarks. I mean, benchmark hacking is like a thing that happens all over the place. That's why we need like hidden benchmarks. That's the whole thing of, of R K G I that we will talk about. We talked about Will Depew saying, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Terrence Tao, one of the, one of the most goaded mathematicians of all time, digs in a little bit and is, is adding his perspective as a, as a world renowned mathematician. He says, it is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity. Either a given task X is within the ability of current tools or it is not. However, there is a, there is in fact, a very widespread in capability, several orders of magnitude,

• 19:14John Coogan?

  depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool and how one reports the results. One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded IMO as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants who are high school students, led by a team leader, often a professional mathematician. Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult math problems, given only pen and paper. That is crazy.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  No communication between contestants or with the team leader during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigilators? I don't know. For clarification, this is like some math term I don't even know. For clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Invigilators are also known as exam proctors.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Okay, proctors, okay. So, yeah, they can ask the people that are running the test, hey.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  We gotta start working invigilator into.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  We should probably have a show.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  We should hire someone.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Just an invigilator too.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  We should have at least one on staff.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  So, so, so the team leader advocates for the, for the students, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly. The IMO is widely regarded as highly, as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to achieve a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score. This year, the threshold for gold was 35 out of 42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an honorable.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Basically, a B gets you gold.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  It's that hard.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  They're that hard. But consider what happens to the difficulty of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways. First, one gives the students several days to complete each question rather than four and a half hours for three scenarios. To stretch the metaphor somewhat, consider a sci-fi scenario in, in the student, in which the student is still only given four and a half hours, but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy-intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass for the students during this exam. Before the exam.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  I think Ben might have put us in one of these. Because we go live and then it's four hours later.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Time acceleration. It's wild. Two, before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format the students find easier to work with. Three, the team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistance, textbooks, or the ability to search the internet. Sounds like that didn't happen. The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem simultaneously, communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends. The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches and intervenes if one of the students is spending too much time on a direction they know to be unlikely to succeed. Next, each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects

• 22:15John Coogan?

  only the best solution to submit to the competition, discarding the rest. Last, if none of the students on the team obtain a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted. Oh, so that, I mean, that could have happened. It didn't in this case, but in each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  Going back to the parking lot example, it's like if you can go run, go run the race in the parking lot, and then if you don't run as fast as you hoped, it's like, well, I wasn't in the, I mean, I wasn't even in the race.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  I wasn't racing, I was just going for a jog.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  I was just warming up. I just, I like to be surrounded by excellence.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't worry. Yeah, I mean, that is the true one, because if they'd missed, they'd probably be like, what, the IMO is this weekend? We're working on agents. Like, what are you talking about? Like, have you seen our DAUs? Get out of here. To each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students in the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes in format. A student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance in the normal competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above. So, in the absence of controlled test methodology that was not self-selected by the competing

• 23:39John Coogan?

  teams, one should be wary of making various apples-to-apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions such as the IMO, or between such models and the human contestants. Yeah, the question is like, it seems like of those, not many were actually violated by the way OpenAI and Google attacked us.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was before, I mean, this was an immediate reaction before, I think there was

• 24:01John Coogan?

  More details came out.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Details, yeah.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  That we've been covering.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  This was 3:00 PM on, so on Saturday, but 3:00 PM later.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, Rune has a good post.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  This is a great one.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  He says, "My bar for AGI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set."

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  It's a great post.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  The world isn't ready for gas station bench.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  We can run an AI as long as we can, we can run a gas station as long as we have, you know, a perfect, you know, data set.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  And that's, yeah, that's like the way.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  On how gas stations operate.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, as soon as we, as soon as we place the goals somewhere, we nail that goal and then we have to move the goalpost. Shows.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  This is so.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  This is a great graphic.

• 24:46Jordi Hays?

  Picture. So Thomas Wolfe says, my bar for AGI is an AI winning a Nobel Prize for a new theory it originated. It's just image of it. Team moving the goalpost.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  I do like how consistent Tyler Callen is on AGI. He's like, my bar was the Turing test. We passed that. So I'm, I have to call it like it is.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  And I'm not moving the goalpost.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think he's, I think he's gonna look very smart for that.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Fullness of time.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I think it's okay to be like, yeah, we achieved AGI.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  It's just tough when you achieve something.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Now there's something new.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool, but not immediately massively transformative.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  But you have to imagine that that was the same, that there was the same thing when people were like, human, human flight. And then the Wright brothers go and do it. And people are like, great. So like, I can hop on a Southwest flight in an hour to go to San Francisco from LA. And they're like, what are you talking about? Like LA is like, you know, a couple of trains and like some people, you know, with orange groves. And it's like, it takes a long time for the infrastructure to get built out. Like now, it, a lot of these AI tools, they do build on top of the internet and on top of technology that we have rolled out. But like, at a certain point, like the UI matters. The economics of these different tools matters. You like, you can't, it might not be economical for,

• 26:03John Coogan?

  for a company to, to, you know, release a, an AI tool that costs $20,000 to inference just to get you the weather or do two plus two. And so, um, all of these things take time to roll out. And that's why we're kind of in this like slow takeoff scenario. It feels like, I don't know. Uh, we're going to go to GPT agent in a little bit and talk about that. But, um, there was some interesting, uh, there were some interesting details from Jasper about, uh, the IMO problem one. So these are on GitHub. So you can actually just go read them. The math checks out. It nailed the key lema for n greater than 3. Any, but you know, you can kind of read them, these things. But the write-up is kind of messy. It uses shorthand and sentence fragments.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  It introduces new terms without definitions, forbidden and sunny partners lists. And it does a bunch of different interesting things where it's trying to, it's trying to condense down the number of tokens. So if it wants to say like, divide this number by 3. Normally by space 3 would be 2 tokens, but by 3 is 1 token. And so it's like compressing it down. It's kind of like learning its own language or developing its own language just to be a little bit more efficient.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Déjà vu coder says, you're laughing. OpenAI and Google DeepMind's unreleased models just gave an IMO gold medal performance without internet access and you're laughing. I love it.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting that XAI didn't get involved in this one. You have to imagine they knew both DeepMind and OpenAI were going to be competing.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like it's, this is the nature of like the value of research. It's like a new research domain or new research path. Like XAI is dominated in the pre-training. Build the big supercluster, get all the GPUs, do the massive pre-training. Then now with Grok 4, they're doing equal spend on RL generally. But DeepMind and OpenAI seem to have like the next, next thing already cooking. And we just don't know the phrase for it yet because in order to learn that phrase, you gotta pay $100 million to some researcher to come tell you basically.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Like I'm sure that there is a, there is a new paradigm and new strategy to unlock this level of performance. And it's something with

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  Probably not 100 million. It's some combination of a bunch of people that

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  collectively cost about

• 28:37John Coogan?

  But eventually, I mean, we were seeing this with the, with the behemoth analysis from the semi-analysis and what Jeremy was diving into where like, Even just when you do, when you train a really big model, how you chunk up the memory, how you chunk the attention, like, that has a dramatic impact on the actual end state in the model performance. And so it seems like Google and OpenAI have been able to, like, hammer out a bunch of those problems to get a really great result. And they're not going to tell anyone anytime soon, I imagine. Sebastian has a good post here. He says, "It's hard to overstate the significance of this. It may end up looking like a moon landing moment for AI. Just to spell it out as clearly as possible, a next word prediction

• 29:21John Coogan?

  machine, because that's really what it is here. No tools, no nothing, just produced genuinely creative proofs for hard novel math problems at a level reached by only an elite handful of pre-college prodigies." Pretty sick.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, explaining it to somebody just on the street.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  A computer beat some high school students at math. They would just, they would tell you, "Okay."

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Cool, yeah, okay. Yeah, cool story.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  And then when you phrase it like this.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  But it's like, yeah.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Moon landing moment.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  But yeah, yeah. But like, the, the high school IMO folks are still in the 99.999th percentile for just everyone. Like, they happen to be age, there happens to be an age cutoff, but it is essentially arbitrary, since most people cannot do this, this level of math. Well, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Francois Chollet.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Says, "Intelligence isn't a collection of skills. It's the efficiency with which you acquire and deploy new skills. It's an efficiency ratio. And that's why benchmark scores can be very misleading about the actual intelligence of AI systems."

• 30:39John Coogan?

  And Elon's there saying, "Good perspective." And so, yeah. We don't need to move the goalposts, but we kind of, it's still interesting too, because we achieved this particular benchmark. Now, what have you done for me lately? Basically. And so I think people really will move the goalposts and you can kind of knock it. But at the same time, it was interesting timing that last week ARC AGI V3 dropped. These models are not doing well on that. And they're simultaneously doing well on something that is so hard, you show it to most people and they don't even know where to start with the math problem. And it's completely, it's completely ridiculous to try and even take

• 31:22John Coogan?

  a shot at. So, we wanted to give ARC AGI V3 an attempt. Are you ready, Tyler?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm ready. I haven't looked at it at all.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, yeah. How familiar are you with ARC AGI generally?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I played with like the version one. Like last summer, I was trying to like, there's the prize. I tried it out for a couple of weeks.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Did you try it out as a human? Or did you try writing software for it?

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, like trying to like write software.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. What was your approach?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff. There was like, that was like just static images, right? So then there was like ways you could like tokenize it to try to do like normal LM. And then I think I was trying some like random image parsing.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Did you get any of them right? Or was it like a straight up zero?

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like pretty bad.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Well, the initial ARC AGI V1, V2, V1 was pretty solidly solved by O3 High, I believe, or O1 High.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  I think O1 was the one that solved that.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  O1, and it was like $2,000 a task and they got to something like 60, 70%. Still not where an average human is for these puzzles. But impressive. Then Grok 4 came out and ARC AGI V2, they pumped the score from like, what, 6% to 15% or something? They doubled it, but still not great. But now ARC AGI V3 came out and it's more of a game. So I played it on stream on. Thursday, I believe, maybe Friday.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Did very well.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  I did pretty well. I have some, I actually have some times from.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  You did well, especially considering you, you had like a minute to look at it prior to joining the show.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  I really, I really was pretty fresh.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you, you basically tried it for a second. You were like, this is really hard.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  And then had to stop.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Okay, so you want to put it in hard mode, right? So I, I got, I got times from Mike on how humans have done on, on Arc AGI V3. So you have to finish the whole thing. And, and the, he says, if he only gets one shot to speedrun all three games with unlimited try agains, I'd say 15 total minutes is hard, 20 minutes is medium, and 25 minutes is easy average. So you want, you want him to do it in 15 minutes?

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Under 15.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Under 15, and what does he, what does he win?

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  A new iPhone.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  New iPhone.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  We bricked, we bricked your iPhone.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  We bricked your iPhone.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  We made you sign up for Google Glass.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:50Jordi Hays?

  So this is an opportunity to make it all back.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  This is high stakes. So, so make sure you have it set up.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  And you should pull up the instructions and read the instructions and we'll start a timer when you, it's 11:36 right now.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Is there, wait, there's no like hard mode, easy mode?

• 34:08John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. So, so everyone does the same thing, whether you're an AI or a human. You will see some instructions. There's some keys. It's more like a game than, than filling out the puzzles. And, and, and the actual instructions, there are really no instructions. You, it's your job to figure out the nature of the game, figure out how it works, and then go and speedrun it.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  So, so, so pull it up and I will read this, this post. So Ludwig Yitgenstein says, 20 years ago, this type of person would become an elite math professor. Now they're making AI breakthroughs. This is progress, probably. And it's the, the CV of Alexander Way, the research scientist over at OpenAI. He's a member of the technical staff. And before he has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, he was at Harvard studying computer science. Phillips, Exeter, totally tracked, research intern at Meta, Microsoft, D E Shaw, Google. What a stacked resume. This guy's a killer. And now he was on the IMO team that did that.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  And so we talked about the plot twist and the battle between OpenAI and DeepMind. I'm sure both of them will be talking about this. I'm more interested in the underlying technology and what actually happened and what was discovered than who released it earlier. That doesn't matter as much to me. And again, Gnome says, hey, like, we posted after the closing ceremony. It was live streamed, so this is easy to confirm. We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did. And so it seems like this is pretty verifiable that they didn't do anything, anything bad to

• 35:52John Coogan?

  the IMO kids. They might have roasted Google, but that's just on, you know, Google's got to start posting at 1 a.m. So Tyler, give me the update. Do you have it pulled up?

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  I think I'm ready to start.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  Okay, production team?

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I got a timer.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  You got a timer? Okay, so I want you to count up because we want to get the total amount of time. We're aiming for under 15 minutes for all three puzzles. That's hard. 20 minutes would be normal. 25 is like easy mode, apparently. This is according to Mike. So I haven't actually tried to speedrun in this time.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Did you play all three games or just one of them?

• 36:27John Coogan?

  I played one of them.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Didn't you get through two?

• 36:32John Coogan?

  There's levels to this. There's levels. You'll figure all this out.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you wait. So I'd say you get unlimited lives in the game.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can reset and do whatever.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  But you can spend the whole show trying to do all three games in 15 minutes if you want.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Oh, well, no, no, no, no. It doesn't work like that because once you know the tricks, like you'll be able to blast. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  I take it back.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Let's go for 15. Good luck. New iPhone on the line. If not.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  This really is the iPhone moment for Arc.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  For benchmarks. This is the iPhone moment for Arc AGI. Good luck to you, Tyler.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  Let me know when to start.

• 37:13John Coogan?

  Okay, five, four, three, two, one. Go, Tyler.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Okay, we will let him work on that and we will check in.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  All right, should we talk about ChatGPT agents?

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So there's been a bunch of other interesting stuff going on.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  Before we get into that.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. What did you want to say?

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to say the, some big news that hit the timeline this morning. Polymarket has acquired QCEX for $112 million and that is going to allow them to enter the US market. As you may know, to date, you haven't been able to use Polymarket. If you're in the US, we use it as a data source. So you can go on the website, obviously.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  It's on our ticker.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  You can see it on the ticker, but this is going to allow them to actually launch in the US. So Shane has been absolutely cooking and I think he's going to come on the show soon now that he's not under DOJ investigation.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  What a wild, what a wild founder story arc. So, and like, yeah, remember those old photos of him like coding in a closet and stuff like?

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  In his bathroom.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  In his bathroom.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  He built Polymarket in a, in a, in a studio apartment bathroom.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  With scraps. I love it. Anyway, Vanta automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program, join the purple llamas at vanta.com. So OpenAI has been doing a lot of stuff. It's, it's, it's, they're kind of on a run. So IMO gold medal happens over the weekend. The ChatGPT agent, which will, which I tested finally, so I'll have a little review and some analysis of that. But also apparently they are testing a new model on the web dev arena on LM Arena

• 39:12John Coogan?

  under the name anonymous chatbot 0717. So this is a secret project from OpenAI that they are maybe putting out in the, in the test realm and then people discovered it and they're digging into it. And so I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it's genuinely at a completely different level of. Front end coding, far better than Sonnet 03 Gemini 2.5 Pro or Grok, which is saying a lot because people love those models for coding, especially on the front end. So to test it, I ran a great prompt borrowed from the amazing Feature Crew Pod YouTube channel, asking models to create a procedurally generated planet with 3JS. Take a look at yourself. I'm pretty astonished by how big the jump is. I have featured the new model twice because its implications have been so interesting.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Of course, this is only one test, but OpenAI models have always been a bit meh on front end work, and they seem to have finally overtaken everyone else. So this apparent alleged unreleased OpenAI model is building this procedural world, and it generates this really cool 3JS, like basically a video game. And it sounds like it kind of one-shots it. So exciting stuff from that.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  There is, so the agent stuff.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Swix says, "Please stop making flight booking agent demos with faint but dying hope, the undersigned." And so everyone is saying, he's saying, "Please stop making fetch, please stop trying to make fetch happen, flight booking Instacart orders, AstroTurfing Reddit." He wants killer use cases to be coding agents, support agents, and deep research. Up and coming is screen sharing, outbound sales, hiring, education, personal AI, and finance. And I have to, I think we're somewhat responsible because for months we were just like, "Just book a flight. Like, this is the killer demo. This is the killer use case." And then everyone was like-

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it got played out. We did stop asking that question.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  We did stop asking, but we were asking it for a while.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  But at the beginning of the year, we were very curious.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Sam Altman had a post last week. He said, "Today, we launched new product."

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  Can you give some background for people that may just be crawling out from under a rock?

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so he started a company. He was the president of Y Combinator. Started a company called Looped, sold it to a blue crew deck. Yeah, yeah, that's what people know him from. Konigsegg owner, McLaren F1 owner. That's where people probably know him from.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  He says- Today, we launched a new product called ChatGPT Agent. Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable complex tasks for you using its own computer. It combines the spirit of deep research and operator, but is more powerful than it may sound. It can think for a long time, use some tools, think some more, take some actions, think some more, etc. We, for example, we showed a demo in our launch of it preparing for a friend's wedding, buying an outfit, booking travel, choosing a gift, etc. We also showed an example of analyzing data to create a presentation for work. Although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we've ever developed before, from robust training to system safeguards to user controls.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  But we can anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative development, we are going to warn users heavily, and it gives users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to. And so, very, very interesting post. He goes through a bunch more stuff, but I actually tested it out this weekend. So, as you know, we have a studio, the TBPN Ultra Dome here in Hollywood. We're always thinking about what's next, always looking at what else is on the market. And when we were first looking for the TBPN Ultra Dome, I went to ChatGPT Operator and I said, hey, I'm looking for a studio. It needs to be a soundstage, which means padded walls. I want concrete floors. I want it to be, you know, at least 40 feet by 40 feet. I need one gigabyte internet access there.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  I need power, AC. It can't just be a, you know, heavy industrial space where there's going to be somebody next door, Hadrian, making CNC stuff that's rattling me. I need a bunch of things. Go and figure it out, Operator. And it went around and it looked at LoopNet, but it kind of got stuck on, on CAPCHAS and it wasn't doing a great job. And I kind of, I felt like I had to be like there watching it and it was really only working on desktop for me at the time. But I reran the, basically the same query, asking it to look for studio space in LA with all these different metrics that I wanted, all these different parameters that I wanted to make sure it verified. And it found a place that was like not listed on any sort of like rental sites.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  It found just a website that was out there for some crew that runs like two studios, one in Hollywood, one in Van Nuys, and, and gave me the full breakdown. I was able to go to the website. But then, of course, like I'd have to call and I called and they only are available between nine and five.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is, this is what I, what I was asking the, the agent team. I think it was on Thursday that we had them on, which was.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  What have you done for me lately?

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, basically adding a voice feature, just to like call that now call them to confirm that it's actually available.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  And let me know, find out when I can go see it.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Like that is a very, a much easier step to add.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, and like the browser use functionality.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  And also like the, uh, just, just the asynchronous-ness of it. Like I, I fired off this query, I don't know, like, like after, like, I don't know, six P M. On a Saturday. Like it, it needs to wait until nine A M. On Monday when they opened to pick up the phone.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  When we started this section, I put in an agent request said, find me a G T three R S with under a thousand miles for under four hundred K. That's currently for sale in Los Angeles County. And so it's doing.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  It's cooking.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm watching it cook.

• 44:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  And it's doing like an hour plus of work already in like five minutes.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, you know, it, it is remarkable. So it can, it can really work through different, different sites and features.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Like it's finding it. I can see it. It found one for, in L A County.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  With thirteen hundred miles, under four hundred K. And I just watched it say, this one will disqualify this one because it's.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  Pretty cool, right?

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Over that limit.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so it needs to be able to think about time and it needs to think, okay, when is the certain time to do this? I need to come back to this in two days or something like basically set a cron job setup, set an alert, come back to things. It needs to use linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps, linear app.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI runs on linear. Linear supports agents.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  And they actually have an integration. Which I am excited about. Um, but I mean, jokes aside, uh, Swix was saying this is a new frontier model. And I think that a lot of people get hung up in, oh, there, there's a new branding around it, agents. Like I was talking to our buddy David Center about this and he was like, what are you using it for? Like, what are your prompts? And I was like, it's the same prompt. The thing that I would send to deep research, I send to agents now.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  It's just better.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  It's just better. And I, and I, and I do understand that like, it might unlock some new use cases. But I think the basic thing that you should start with, if you're looking to experiment and, and kind of road test chat GPT agent for yourself, is just take something that you would put in deep research, throw it in agent and see how you like it. And if it's better. And I noticed that it's a lot better in many ways. It gives you a dot M D file at the end. Basically, it gives you a document, like a report that renders the exact same as a deep research report, but you can kind of scroll it differently. It can still do all the tables and stuff. The links oddly weren't working. Like I, I would click on it and it wouldn't, it wouldn't open. So there's like still some bugs and some rough around the edges stuff. But in general, I think it did a lot.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  I just think of it as like, like deep research is kind of, it feels like deep research is a little bit bound by, you know, the first level of depth on the internet and agents can actually go, you know, okay, there's, there's, there's a website out here that has something, but I need to go to the archive. I need to log in. I need to like find a different route. I need to work around it, figure out all these different things. Let's put, let's actually fact check some stuff, start building a table over here. Oh, okay. I got some conflicting information. Let me try and resolve that. Like all the natural things that when you do like actually good research. And so I think it's fine if it's just a research tool.

• 47:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing that, the thing that agent is doing here is it's going, it's navigating to a site and then it's using the site's internal search mechanism to find what it's looking for versus just like scanning like databases or just scanning pages and pulling out information.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  So it's actually taking that next order.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's actually using the website. And I still think like, I, I don't see this as really replacing anyone in my life at least, or my business. But I see it, I see it very much as like, as like. In between me and the folks on my team, I will go fire off a prompt and try and like really do as much of the research and kind of pre-work and then hand that off and come with to somebody who works for me with a just a more educated idea of like, okay, I think we need this. I have, I've already kicked this off and I think it's possible. I need you to go and negotiate and I need you to go do all the soft skills and I need you to actually execute this and take the last mile. That's like the human side of

• 48:33John Coogan?

  this, but you already have all the information to basically do like the job is well defined. And so I, I think that my next, my next, my next change to the way I use chat GPT, deep research agents will be by the end of this, give me a list of steps to actually execute this that need to be executed by a human. So with that GT RS, it's like GT3RS, if they find one, it's like, find me the phone number of a few and then when should I call them? What, what, what other data sources do I need to point to? What are the other considerations? So I basically have like a script to go and actually get the deal done, for example. So anyway, very exciting stuff. Almost as exciting as numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Go to numeral HQ to get started.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  So should we talk about Stephen Colbert?

• 49:25John Coogan?

  We should, we should talk about Stephen Colbert. This was a fan, this was a fascinating story that happened. The late night is ending. So Stephen Colbert, you might know him from the Colbert Report on, he was originally on the Daily Show, then he had his own show on, on Comedy Central. I believe it was half an hour, maybe an hour every night on Comedy Central. Then he got pulled over into CBS with Late Night, which was originally designed to compete with the Tonight Show, which was Johnny Carson's property that he ran for 30 years, 1962 to 1992. Absolutely legendary run. Jay Leno took that show over, gave

• 50:07John Coogan?

  it to Conan for a year, went back. Very controversial. Late Night Wars, very fun, deep dive to dig into. But Emily Jashinsky has a story in Pirate Wires all about Late Night. I have some, I have some facts here that were sticking out to me. So the, the high level is that the late show, Stephen Colbert's.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Daily late night TV show. How many days a week is it? Is it? It's five days a week. They do 190 episodes per year, so they take a few weeks off in between little breaks. Pretty casual. That's pretty casual. We do, I mean, we are on track to produce four times as much content this year. But they spend 100 million dollars to produce. We spend five times as much.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you keep pulling those daily GT3RSs. I mean, they were, they were spending, how much is GT3RS? 400K? They could have bought a GT3RS for every single episode. Because they were spending 100 million dollars to produce 190 hour long episodes. Every year. And so this wasn't a problem because back in 2009, they were pulling in 271 million dollars in revenue. So, I mean, and I'm sure that they were actually spending less back in 2009. So the margin on that show was immense, like 60%, 70%, maybe even higher. The problem is, is that the revenue started declining because the audience got older and ad dollars moved around. The average.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  The median viewer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is over 59 years old. So, so it is, it is effectively like a retired audience. So they're not as likely to buy expensive products. And if they buy those products, they might not stay with them forever because they might churn, because they might pass away. And so. Lower LTV. Lower LTV. And then also it's a very broad audience. It's a very political audience. It's very general comedy, politics, daily news audience, very broad. So you can only sell broad things. And that's why you see, you know, Unilever, like, you know, you, you're watching an ad and you, you see, you're watching The Late Show. T-Mobile. Yeah, yeah, Verizon.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  And then you see Dove shampoo or something like you just see generic products, not hyper specific like Adio, which is customer relationship magic. Adio is the AR native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. You're not going to see that on the Late Show.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You just won't.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  You just won't. And so revenue kept falling. Now they make less than 70 million. Reports were maybe like 60 million in revenue. Now Colbert is taking 15 home, 15 million a year home personally. And then the rest of the show costs 85 million to produce. About 50 million of that is probably salaries. There's a bunch of other costs that go into it. They have a live band. They fly people around. They have hair and makeup and all sorts of things. They have to license music and they do all sorts of stuff. So, so then they went from at one point making, you know, $200 million in profit off this a year. Amazing. To losing 40 million. And importantly, CBS is going through an acquisition.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  And so there's a whole bunch of problems where you don't necessarily want to have this massive loss making asset. Sitting there while you're trying to sell the product, sell the company and restructure everything. And then, so there's a little bit of conspiracy. And Keith Olbermann was saying, he put on the tinfoil hat and was saying like, this is all because Trump is like Colbert criticized Trump. And this is a straw man hat?

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to get out the straw man.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're not making this argument. This is, this is, no one's really making this argument except for Keith Olbermann.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, by the way.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Put on the straw hat. I like the straw hat.

• 53:55Jordi Hays?

  By the way, new straw.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  This is a funny hat.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know what kind of hat this is.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  A straw, some sort of straw hat.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  I gotta sit lower so that it'll fit in.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the, I mean, the obvious thing here is that Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Whoever that is, was a zero interest rate phenomenon. You have a business.

• 54:17John Coogan?

  He's in the business for 30 years.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, who wants to, who wants to be the proud owner of a business that loses 40 million dollars a year like clockwork?

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it was a loss leader for CBS. Basically during up fronts, when they're selling ads to everyone, they go to Target and they say, "Hey, how about we put you with Stephen Colbert?" And they're like, "Sure, but then we also want to be on the game shows." And then the game shows make higher margins and they lose money on the, on the Late Show. But. A company like Target wouldn't want to advertise on the game show unless they can also be with Colbert and the prestige TV that's happening there. So basically, they're losing $40 million. What's interesting is that you would think that they would be able to cut back the cost and say, hey, look, we're making half, we're making half as much revenue. We need to produce this for half as much money. And so Colbert, you gotta take a haircut, folks, you gotta take a haircut.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  How about 50 people?

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Instead of 100.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  200?

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Was it 200 people?

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  It was 200 people.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  200 people. Okay. Yeah, 200 people. So.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  And apparently, so, so we were messaging some people over the weekend, some, some media moguls. And they were saying, I mean, it's, it's very routine for there to be two people tasked that like effectively their full-time job is like moving one camera.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and, and so effectively is just a culture of inefficiency that has a bunch of different reasons why, why that is, but, um, doesn't really work in the modern era. So the interesting thing here is, uh, I was trying to figure out kind of what happens from here. So CBS has confirmed they're not doing a replacement host.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  No.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  They're not gonna, um, they're not gonna hire like an H1B, uh, Stephen Colbert.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  I think they're, I think they're gonna put a talk show in there.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, like it's going away. There's no indication that ABC, NBC, Netflix, Max or any, any of those platforms is like gonna try to launch one of these Johnny Carson style shows. But I think the right move for, uh, Stephen Colbert is it's not my, uh, not my flavor of, uh, comedy entertainment. But I think he could have, uh, I think if he went independent and effectively launched. Live show, podcast, something of that sort, he could continue to earn exactly what he's earning today.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  And just do it with a much smaller team, maybe even have a better lifestyle. Maybe he starts

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  doing the show in the morning.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there was $60 million of like, we want to advertise on Stephen Colbert, like, flowing into this property.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  If he provides a similar level of experience and content, he should be able to sell similar levels of ads.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Maybe not 60, but maybe 30. And then he takes home 15 and he has 15 to spend on, you know, a smaller team. And what's crazy is like during the COVID era, all of the late night shows went to like from home episodes where they were basically doing them over Zoom. And then they set up like nicer camera setups and they were able to do those shows way cheaper. But I think because of the union, it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't palatable or really like easy to just, to just cut back on staff and cut back on salaries or switch to some sort of more incentive pay, which is tricky. And we just talked to Delian about this where in France, there was a company that, that wanted to like, their business wasn't doing so well. They wanted to lay off folks.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Too many people.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  And they couldn't do it. And so the government basically said, you have to shut down.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  In, in France, there's policies that effectively require companies to pay years of severance. So it ends up becoming a massive liability on the balance sheet.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  And anyways.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Emily Jusinski over at Pirate Wire says, CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert. It's retiring the iconic late show brand altogether. That's the buried lead getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue. If, if cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount's pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it as Democrats are now arguing, because Colbert said that CBS as a company should not have, or Paramount should not have settled a lawsuit with Trump, I believe. CBS just stumbled right into the future, Emily says. Says Colbert's time at the helm of the late show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man who leaned so far into hashtag resistance comedy, he could hardly get up, has dominated the late night wars throughout Donald Trump's hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties without fear, fear or favor.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Carson won the late night wars when networks faced less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible for the sake of selling more ads. By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark. That's particularly why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert's ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn't approach politics as Carson did. This is the new model. Cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others competing for increasingly smaller slices of the pie. The result is a microculture. Monocultural institutions like The Late Show or The New York Times can no longer and

• 59:40John Coogan?

  can and no longer do appeal more widely than their core audiences. For The Times, this is their subscriber base, and it's why, for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by yanking Senator Tom Cotton's infamous send in the troops op-ed back in 2020. As the paper of record for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country, but Times' subscribers were furious and that critical business interest shifted the outlet's editorial position. This, of course, was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level with the paper's narrow subscriber niche. One of the greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the ability to recognize these

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture. Whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders, plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago. It is the institutions themselves that often cling to the outdated brands, so blinded by their own biases biases that it's become difficult for the C-suites to even recognize what's happening outside of Manhattan, and the Hamptons don't count. Anyway, fantastic analysis from from Emily. You should subscribe to PowerWires to go read the full thing. But lots of people were having fun with this. How does The Late Show cost $100 million produced? That was a big question.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  I think a lot of it's just, this is a, this is, Letterman started in the 90s, so this is 30 years of just like, yeah, let's just add one more person. Like 30 years is only adding 60 people a year, one, what, what, oh, no, no, no, way less, six people a year. So you're adding like one a quarter, which is like not that much. And I think it just kind of creeps in, but you gotta be aware when revenue starts dropping, like you have to right the ship and you can't just, you can't just keep losing money because it doesn't give you leverage over CBS who's trying to get out and sell the company. Buko Capital bloke says, I can't stop laughing at CBS losing 40 million a year on the late show with Colbert because they were spending a hundred million dollars

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  a year to produce it, a show of a guy talking, sometimes to other people, is their less competent group of industry executives than linear television. Alex Roy, friend of the show, says, media is a business called Colbert already has an audience. He should have no problem launching a YouTube channel. I agree. Many friends run a profitable like YouTube channels with millions of subs with staffs of less than 10 people. They started from scratch, signed a media business veteran. The left has been looking for its Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. Why shouldn't Colbert be that guy? That's interesting. And so a lot of people were saying it's a piece to camera slash guest interview show. It shouldn't cost that.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is back. What's going on Tyler?

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  I'm done. Yeah, I was stuck for a while on one of them and then I switched to a different game, finished that, came back.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  But I don't know.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  What's the timer?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  I feel like it was a little slow. 25 minutes.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  25 minutes. Oh, brutal.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  But you did get through it all.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Did your hair get messed up?

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  I was, I was stressed out. The one game I was, I was on, I was on one level for like five minutes and then I don't know what, I just like couldn't figure out. I went to a different one and it was like, I got it instantly.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  That's brutal.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  We will give you, we'll still.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  We'll keep giving you challenges until you get a new phone.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  Mike is, Mike is brutal. He says 25 is average. 20 is medium. 15 is hard. Well, we will give you a new challenge, give you a new chance to win a new iPhone. The iPhone moment has arrived for RKGI. Tyler missed it this time, but what do you think it says about current AI systems? Do you think you will outperform the latest IMO level model from OpenAI? You still got it?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I think you could probably do RL on this and get it. I mean, I don't know if that's what the labs are necessarily doing. I think ideally, like, they're trying to just train it, you know, independent of this and then see what, how it does.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  I think it's, I think it's a very good, like, benchmark in that sense. But you could probably, you probably could RL on this.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the, the way Mike described it was that you play the three public games. There are three private games. And so I don't know how much variation there was between the games. It seems like there was a fair amount because you got stuck on one, you switched to one, switched to a different one and then went back, right? So, yep. So, I think the, I think the goal is like, if you RL on the three public games, you will be overfit against the private games that have slightly different mechanics. And you won't have learned the true generalizing function. That's the idea at least.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. But I mean, I'm sure, you know, if you're OpenAI, you could just like, oh, let's just make new games that are kind of in a similar vein and then RL on those. Then you have more data and then,

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think you could probably, like, I think my general sense is that you can like RL on pretty much anything.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  So if, if they really want to and they want to throw like, you know, many millions of dollars, I'm sure they could get it. But I don't know if that's really what they want to do.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  I think the current prize is like $10,000, something like that for, for something that works on it. Maybe there's a million dollar prize. There's a million dollar prize that's still hanging out there, I believe, for RKGIV1.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but those are size limited, right? You can, like, you need to run in a certain speed and they can't be like so big.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think they have to run on the Kaggle infrastructure, Kaggle infrastructure. So you basically have to like, send it your weights, your code, and then you get access to like one GPU. You don't get to fire the Stargate at it.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  But I don't know, it'll be interesting to see. How, how, what's your, what's your timeline for a lab destroying this?

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Uh, probably end of the year.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  End of the year, you think they'll beat it?

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  The whole, the whole team is like, we designed this to be unbeatable for years, like through two to three years.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, they just beat IMO. It's like, like, do you mean on a public model or them just releasing, we've beat this?

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Uh, private, it doesn't need to be open sourced.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think if the private model, it's like, OpenAI is like, okay, we have this internally. We're not going to release it. It's not safe.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  But like, we've run it on this. I think probably by the end of the year is like reasonable.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  For, for specific, okay, we, we built a model just to beat this, or, or we just, we just, we're advancing models generally, giving people what they want, making great things, solving, you know, flight booking and GPT agent and solving IMO and then, oh, as a byproduct, we solve this. You think that's what's gonna happen?

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I don't think they're necessarily gonna train a model just to do this.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  But they definitely could.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  I mean, at this point, it's getting high stakes, right? Because like.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Apparently IMO is not RL'd at all, like specifically for.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  That's what they say.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Math. So, yeah, I think that model is like reasonably capable, obviously.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Okay, I want to try that model on, on R K G I V three and see how it does.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  Cause I, I, I, it, it does feel like that will be a very interesting moment where if they truly don't cheat and don't RL on this specifically, without the gas station data set, as Rune calls it, uh, you know, no R K G I V three, like creating new games, that feels like scientists collecting the gas station data set, right? Uh, and they just go about their day, building better and better models. And then by the way, oh, we solved this. That, that will be very, very interesting. But I don't know. I would take the over on the end of the year. The, the, it's, we're more than halfway through the year.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. Okay. What is your line then?

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  You're so AGI pilled. You're so AGI pilled. I think, I think this will hold. I mean, V one is still holding. V one is not, yes. V one, it takes $2,000 to get like 60%. You just got 100%, you know, like you finished the whole thing in 25 minutes.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I mean, we'll see, I guess.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  I don't know. I would take the over. I would take the over on this year. I would probably take the over on end of next year.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  I have to give you an update on, on ChatGPT agent. So it, it only found, so it, it gave me a really great report, but it only found one and it's listed by a dealer and I can already tell the dealer, uh.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  The dealer is like clearly pricing it like not where they would actually sell it.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Got it, got it, got it. Okay.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  But they did find one in Costa Mesa, so not far away, one county away.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Okay, not bad.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  They found one for $3.99.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  $3.99.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  So just under the limit.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  So, pretty good.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, not bad, not bad.

• 1:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Fifteen minutes.

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're...

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  I think we gotta use it more.

• 1:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Weird.

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  What's going on now?

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  But then they didn't actually get me... They don't have a link.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Okay, we're gonna have to dig into it more, test it more.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  AGI not achieved internally, but we're making progress.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Wait, so are you saying 100% on V3? Or what's like the benchmark? Cause like, if it's 100%, then like, yeah, obviously not a year.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  100%, I mean, like, you got, you just got 100%. Never having seen it, 25 minutes.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  Like, not crazy. I think we could literally give this to anyone over the age of like 10? And they would get 100% in half an hour, basically? Like, I think it's, I think it's like, it's a very doable puzzle for humans. And so, I want 100% and I want it in, and I don't care about time and money. Like, I'm, I'm, I agree with, uh, was it Will who said that? Or?

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, Will Depew.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, Will Depew said, you know, so, yeah, throw $2,000 per task on it. I'm fine with that. The question is just, can the model do it in any amount of time, in any amount of money? And, uh, and it, and it seems like, right now, it's probably at zero. We'll see how the IMO model does. Maybe it does really well, we'll see. But I would put it at over... I would put it up there with doing your taxes, you know? Dwar Keshm, 2027.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think 100% is hard. But if, if you give me like 90%, like if it misses one of the tasks, cause on, on, so there's three games, they each have like 10 levels.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  If you can miss like one of those.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I, I don't, I think you have to finish a game or not. And so, I think basically on the private dataset, you can get zero, you can get one out of three, two out of three, or three out of three. Basically.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  But it's unclear because like, when do you tell it to give up? Because it can just keep trying and kind of brute force it. But maybe there's some sort of like limit, I don't know. But you get like unlimited retries. But maybe, maybe, maybe the real test is only giving one try.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  We gotta move on.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:15Jordi Hays?

  For your next challenge, Tyler, prompt, uh, prompt 407,000 times in a row and stay sane.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Stay sane.

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, start recursive prompting like crazy for, uh, for 48 hours straight and then, uh, come back, come back to us.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Well, we gotta talk about the, the McLaren collection.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  That's going up for sale. But first I gotta talk to you about Finn AI. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. Um, this was what Swix said, he wants AI agents for customer service. Finn.ai is delivering, so go check it out. Um, anyway, so the Mansour Ojjeh collection. Um, this is from Tom Hartley Jr. And hopefully we can pull up the video because it is fantastic. Uh, it's on YouTube and, uh, yes, so here's the video. You can play some of that. Uh, look at this lineup of cars. So the story here is this, uh, this man named Mansour Ojjeh, OJ. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. It's O-J-J-E-H.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  I apologize to anyone who knows how it says, I'm incredibly proud to announce that we've been entrusted with the sale of the world's greatest collection of McLaren road cars. Offered directly from the home of one of the most influential figures in McLaren's 62 year history. Uh, he passed away age 68, surrounded by family, um, and is now entrusting the sale of his collection. Uh, this guy is fascinating, very, very interesting fellow. So he has, let me pull up my, uh, my information here. So, uh, Mansour Ojjeh, um, he was the son of, he's a Franco Saudi, French Saudi Arabian businessman.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Uh, and he used his family fortune to bankroll Formula One teams and he built the TAG Group. So if you're familiar with TAG Heuer. The, uh, the, the, the watch brand, he built that watch brand and then wound up selling it to LVMH. And so he was born, this, uh, the, the man who collected all of these McLarens in burnt orange, which by the way, he not only is he only, is he the only one with the massive orange McLaren collection, that particular color is not available to anyone else. He has his own color that only he can buy. It's absolutely incredible. Um, and every single one of those cars that you see there in the background, they are all the last, the last one off the line, the last individual

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  production car that they've ever made of that particular model. And so he gets the last one. He's, and you see the logo there, he puts his name on the logo. It's the only, I've never seen a brand do that, but they were so tight with him, uh, because he owned the company at one point, that they would replace the McLaren logo with Mansour logo, which is incredible. And so he, he is a fascinating figure. So his father, Akram Ohay, uh, accumulated immense wealth from an, uh, as an intermediary in Saudi arms deals. So he basically would go to the, the Saudis and say, what weapons do you need? What missiles do you need? What guns do you need? What planes do you need? I'm going to go out into the world and find those and

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  source those and bring those back and take a cut of that. And so he-

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is really, I will say, if, if your father has amassed immense wealth through arms stealing, this is really pretty much the playbook, uh, for how to put that capital to work.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  It's the best. It's the best. Um, and so, uh, Mansour grew up in France. The family mostly lived in France. He attended the American school in Paris. He moved to California where we are, studied, uh, business administration at Menlo College. Uh-

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for all the business administration majors out there. One of the top majors, if you want to administrate businesses.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Which he certainly has.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  He went to Santa Clara. He initially managed his father's ventures. He became gradually more and more involved in his father's investment vehicle, which was Technique de Avant-Garde, which is TAG, Luxembourg-registered holding company created in 1977. So, the group's purchase was to broker deals between the Arab world and Europe and to handle commissions from arms and infrastructure contracts. And so, his dad was born in Syria, raised in Iraq, studied in France on a scholarship during the 40s, marries a French woman, stays in France, and then starts arranging these arms deals and infrastructure projects. And

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  so, in 1956, the dad opens an arms trading company in Switzerland and establishes Saudi Arabia's first weapons factory. During the 1960s, he represented the French defense contractors such as DaSolt and Matra, selling Mirage jets and missile systems to Middle Eastern clients. He was facing some scrutiny from French authorities. At one point, he founds the TAG Group. The group gave him unrivaled access to the Saudi royal family for defense projects, leveraged his relationships with Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defense Minister, and he became so wealthy that he bought a cruise liner, like a cruise ship. He bought

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  the Queen Elizabeth II, just, I think, as like a personal pleasure yacht. He bought a ranch in Paraguay, homes in Paris and Monte Carlo, and then he starts sponsoring the Williams Formula One team, and he was putting in a million dollars a year, a million pounds a year. In the 80s...

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  What, when did he, when did he start doing that?

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  This was in the, in the late 70s. And so, his son, so the dad dies in 1991, reportedly worth several billion dollars. Mansour, who's the man with all of those fantastic-looking McLarens.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  Him and his brother Mansour and Aziz were heirs to the TAG Group. And there was a bitter inheritance dispute between the widow and some of the children. And obviously, all the assets kind of, you know, get fought over. But Mansour makes out quite nicely and winds up investing even more heavily in F1. So through TAG, he starts sponsoring Frank Williams' Formula One team in 1978. When Saudi Airlines sought to attract other Saudi brands, TAG became the team's major sponsor in 1979. Williams actually did win multiple races, although they were having some trouble a few years ago. They were pretty good back then. They got Alan Jones and another title in 1982 with Kiki Rosberg.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  I think that's Nico Rosberg's father, I believe. The sponsorship gave Mansour his first taste of Formula One success and increased TAG's visibility. Then in 1983, he jumps ship from Williams, goes over to McLaren. Frank Williams resisted diversifying beyond racing. McLaren's boss, Ron Dennis, proposed exchanging shareholders, like shares, for financing a new turbo engine. And so Mansour agreed and funded the development of a Porsche turbo engine badged as TAG. So the McLaren-TAG partnership dominated in the 1984 season. Drivers Nicky Lauda and Elaine Prost won 12 of 16 races.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  And McLaren secured both the drivers' and constructors' titles. So basically, he comes in with a bunch of money and says, you want to win an F1? I will finance a new engine. He goes and does it, and it actually works. And so he, in 84-

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Which is interesting, because TAG and Porsche have their own partnership now. They have the Carrera line of watches all these years later.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  And so in 1984, he buys a 50% stake in McLaren's holding company. Now, remember, McLaren was founded by a true racer who died at age 31, I believe, in a racing accident. And so left this incredible legacy of just a guy putting it all on the line in racing. It wasn't like he was some business guy who was like, I want to get into racing. He was just a race car driver.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is the story of Enzo, too. Ferrari wasn't started until he was in his 40s. And but he'd just been so obsessed.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Over racing.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Jordi Hays?

  That it just carried into the brand.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  And so in a Mansour buys a 50% of stake in McLaren's holding company, Tag McLaren Holdings. And he's still working on the racing stuff, but then he says, we got to make a road car. And the road car that he pitches is the McLaren F1 supercar that launches in 1992 and is a $20 million icon owned by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, like there's they're in museums like they are the rarest of the rare. Jay Leno has one. I don't think I think it's like the one of the few cars Doug Demiro hasn't driven. He rode in it with Jay Leno, but they are incredibly rare, incredibly special cars.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  And the doors go up.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  The doors go up. And so in in other news, like he did buy Huur and created Tag Huur, which was a watch company that you might be familiar with, Tag Huur. They eventually sold Tag Huur to LVMH for $740 million in 1999.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did you know that Elon crashed his McLaren F1?

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  He did. Yes. And I believe that the McLaren was picked up and and like reconstituted and wound up selling still for millions of dollars.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  The car hit a hidden embankment on Sand Hill Road at a 45 degree angle, launching it into the air like a discus, according to witnesses.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  I mean, the car goes 200 miles an hour, weighs like 2,000 pounds.

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Incredible piece of lore, imagining Elon on Sand Hill Road.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  And you know who else was in that car?

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  I do.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Peter Thiel. Crazy.

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  And he went to the meeting after, right?

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they were apparently. The lore is that they went to Sequoia to pitch or something. They were like raising money or driving down.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  And what did Elon do? He turned off traction control.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, yeah.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  That is wild.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a long history of guys turning off traction control, driving really fast and then just crashing their cars.

• 1:20:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:26Jordi Hays?

  So if you want to avoid crashing your supercar.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  Maybe keep it on.

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Avoid turning off traction control.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the thing with, doesn't the Carrera GT not have traction control?

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Or maybe, maybe, maybe it does, but it's like one of the few features.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  It definitely kills a lot of its drivers.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  A lot of these guys like pride their, you know, they like an analog supercar.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  GT does have traction control.

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  Okay, it does, it does.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  It does not have stability control.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  That's it.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Or other electronic driver aids that are common in modern supercars.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  So Mansour, he buys Huur, turns it into Tag Huur, great watch brand, sells it to LVMH for $740 million in 1999. He gets a huge profit from that and then he starts going deeper into all of that. He launches Tag Aviation and Aeronautics, which is distributing Bombardier jets to the Middle East. So he's a go-between between French aerospace and defense companies in the Middle East still. In this case, he develops a luxury airport in the Middle East and he's just doing a lot of deals at this very, very high level, probably benefits from his ties to F1. And so he builds the, he builds the McLaren F1 and then of course starts collecting and stays involved in, in McLaren F1 for years.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  And he builds this, I mean, he builds a 235 foot super yacht, Kogo. He creates a lavish house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland known as La Maison du Lac. And, and, and kind of goes on through that. He winds up getting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, gets a double lung transplant and ultimately doesn't make it, but he dies at age 68. McLaren CEO Zach Brown described him as a titan of our sport, ultra-competitive, determined, passionate and sporting. And so everyone remembers him and his contributions to, to F1. But what's interesting today is that they are about to sell his entire McLaren collection,

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  which is something like 20 McLaren road cars, all in his exact spec, which is this burnt orange with his badging. I don't know who the buyer would be. They're probably listening to this show, but good luck out there as you go and bid on the Mansour collection because it is truly one of a kind. And every single car there is in the most extreme spec and it's the last one off the line. And there's a bat and there's a plaque inside that says, this is the last F1 that was ever made. This is the last Senna that was ever made. This is the last Speedtail that was ever made. This is the last GTR. This is the last, I mean, look at that one. No, what is that? The Elva?

• 1:23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  The Elva in burnt orange.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  Burnt orange Elva with no windshield. Wow. That is fantastic. And just every single one of those cars is insane. Oh, also, oh, by the way, also, every single one of those cars, delivery mileage. Never been driven. Never been driven.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Do you think he was buying, you think he was getting two?

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  So the story is that he had an F1. Of course, he developed it. He had an F1, but it was kind of, I think, from like the middle of the pack or maybe the earlier pack. And, and because he was, he was just like excited to get the first one and, you know, got it and probably gave one to someone else and like just had one, drove it, had fun with it. It was his experience. But then his brother bought, got the last one in that, in that orange color. And he, and his brother was about to sell it. And he said, if you're, you're, you can't sell this. If you're selling it, I'll buy it. And so he buys it from his brother and winds up building an entire collection on the back of that one car, the last F1

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  off the line, the, the burnt orange that turns into his signature color. It turns into the color that you cannot buy, no matter how much money you have. And no matter how many McLarens you own.

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  And his legacy lives on Oscar and Lando dominating so far this year.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us the update there. It's good.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  He wouldn't have been, he wasn't around to see it, but he would surely be proud.

• 1:24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you're looking for a compliment to your McLaren F1, get on Bezel, getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens. He had a massively viral post on Friday. We didn't get a chance to talk about it. There are only

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Triggering.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Four tier one cities in the United States. New York for finance, DC for government, San Francisco for tech, LA for media and entertainment people. Thank you, Trey. Uh, no other cities are power centers for aspirational talent. Sorry.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  He says, based on replies, here are the people arguing for other cities. Austin, people who live in Austin. Boston, people who are really upset about Trump's Harvard attack. Dallas, Houston, people who have only lived in Texas. Miami, people who love money but don't love to work. Mugged.

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  Mugged. Someone just commented. For Cleveland, it's really cause, uh, Trey's an Ohio guy. Um, no, no, I, I, I agree with this and it is incredibly sticky. Like it's unclear if there will ever be another tier one city built in, in America. It doesn't really matter though, cause you can go like Warren Buffett is out in Omaha. It's fine. Like people read this as like, I can't possibly be successful in finance if I'm not in New York. Ken Griffin was in Chicago and then Miami.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Charlie Munger lived in Los Angeles.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so it's like, it's like it, that it is true that these are tier one cities. It doesn't mean that you can't do something cool and amazing and achieve your goals in life somewhere else. But you should just be thoughtful about it and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that a, a tier two city is secretly a tier one. If it's not, it's just not. And so stuff's moving around, very fun post, always good to, to bait. Literally everyone in the world.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  But very fun. Uh, but related to this, Dalian had a post that was kind of interesting here. He said, uh, 10 years ago, it felt like Silicon Valley had this really bright, vibrant seed fund ecosystem. That felt just as important as the multi-stage venture firms. Now that feels totally dead, partially because the whole, a whole generation of top tier companies just completely skipped that step in raising. And so, yeah, more and more companies are saying, our seed or $1 million, we'll just come from our own balance sheet. And it'll just come internally and we'll just fund that, or we'll just jump straight to $20 million.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  I feel like there's plenty of, I, I do, I, I have a problem where if somebody's raising a pre-seed.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  I do feel like there's 20 funds that I would potentially introduce them to. The challenge is when those pre-seed funds are then trying to go compete at seed, which we now know is this sort of four to eight million dollar range. We had somebody on Friday who was raising 55 million.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Whether or not that was, uh, marketing. Or, you know, whatever. The name doesn't really matter. Board A P Y O C Club raised a billion dollar seed round in 2021.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  That was a seed round? Was that because they just hadn't raised before?

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  They really hadn't raised, yeah.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's this weird thing where, you know.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  And Mira Maroti, two or three billion dollar seed round. So, again, like, your company's expectations are based around how much capital has come in the door.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  Not the last name, the last, the name of your last financing round, so.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's one side of this, which is like, the seed moniker used to stand for time and money, effectively. Like, it used to be like, okay, if I'm a seed stage company, you know that I'm in the first 18 months of my creation, and I've only, I've raised less than $5 million, or else I'm in mango seed territory and Series A territory. But now, there's some world where people just say, okay, you know, this is your second round. It doesn't matter that you've been around for 10 years, it's an A round, or it's a seed round. Or, doesn't matter if you're raising a billion dollars, and it's priced like a growth round, it's, it's a seed round. I don't know. I, I think what Delian's getting at is more just like, the vibe of like, you used to be able to,

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  he's, he's a seed investor, you used to be able to hunt around, find some people doing cool stuff, and get 10%, 20% of the company for a million bucks, 2 million bucks, and that has kind of disappeared.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Delian's still known to, to get a good, to get a good price.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  He's figured out how to survive. Nature finds a way, as does public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions of folks. Get to public.com, and we have our next guest.

• 1:29:07Jordi Hays?

  We have Chris Black in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in. Chris Black, how you doing?

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Bring me in. What's up, guys? How are you?

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  What's up?

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  What's? Happening. It's uh, it's great to meet you. I uh, I've wanted to chat for a long time. I actually bought your uh, what was that little green book that you you made?

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Oh wow. Wow, we got an OG on our hands. Yeah, I know you think you know it all. I think it was 2015 I did that with Powerhouse. So, thank you for being a ground floor investor.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  I had that, I had that in college and I felt so cool to be a college kid that was cultured enough to buy a table, you know, a coffee table book by Chris Black.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it, I think it turned into more of a bathroom book than coffee table.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very, it's very small. You would like, you would like the form factor.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. And what was, what was inside the book? Can you break it down?

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Chris can give some more context. The thing that I remembered and a quote that I've brought up a bunch was the, it was the Andy Warhol quote in there that was something like making money is, you know, uh, business is art. And making money is art and good business is the best art.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  You, you guys loved that. You guys loved that. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the book was just like a fun advice book, kind of, basically. It was, it was, um, it did really well as a uh, graduation gift purchased from Urban Outfitters that year.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, there we go.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  That's, we sold a lot of books. Thank, thank God. So it was, it was fun to do. That was very, it was very fun.

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  Did you go through a traditional publishing house? Like what was the workflow? Did you write the whole book and then shop it around? Like, I've never published a book, so curious.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  It was ba, it was based on Twitter, honestly. It was based kind of on that idea of like life soul instruction book, the classic form factor, to use your term, meets sort of Twitter. So I went through, wrote them all. Yeah, I did it with Powerhouse, which is like sort of in and out of business from what I can tell. Um, but I'm working on a book now for Simon and Schuster that should come out in 2026. So that, that's a little more of a, the process you're talking about.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  What's the concept of the new book?

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  It's kind of, it's kind of like a essay memoir, you know, a little bit of everything from like some high school stuff to being a drug addict, to work, to kind of everything. Um, and that process is a little bit more like you're talking about. Like you write a full essay, you know, you outline uh, some chapters and then you take that out and, and sell it. And CAA helped me. Obviously I wasn't doing it myself, but. It's daunting, but I'm excited.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the success? What's the secret to like a good book launch these days? We talked to Ezra Klein's co-author and he was saying that interestingly, like when they went on hour-long podcasts, they sold less books than like a five-minute hit on like

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  TV.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  TV, because if you listen to an hour-long podcast, you're like, I got the gist. I don't need the whole book. But if you listen to five minutes, you're like, oh, I could do, I could do another hour. I'll buy the book.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  That's a fair. I have a friend who's a very successful legendary author who told me an anecdote that he sold more books from doing Tucker Carlson when he was on TV than he sold from anything else, like a clear bump. And I mean, you know, this was years ago, but I think that, I mean, we were talking about this earlier today. Jason and I actually were talking about this and about how sort of podcasts have replaced not only late night, obviously with this like kind of like Stephen Colbert news, it's topical, but also like Good Morning America, The View. Like it's still fun to do that stuff. I don't, but it might, it might move books, but it doesn't seem like the publicists think that it, it does, based on the priorities of what they're having their clients do.

• 1:32:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it speedrun 200 podcasts? Is that, is that the playbook now?

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  I mean, if you pay attention to people, yeah, kinda, you know, if you have, if you pay attention to an actor or writer or whoever has something coming out, it's like, you know, music, we do, we talked to a lot of musicians on How Long Gone. So we're part of that in some ways, but like there's the Dax Shepard's, Joe Rogan's smart list, Call Her Daddy world that I think is basically, that's the new Oprah that, you know, that's what it is.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  I almost feel like there's a world where some podcasters, certainly not us, because we're a daily show or they're news-driven, but some podcasts, I'm thinking of like acquired FM's, like business deep dives or some true crime podcasts. Like they kind of fill the whole of an audiobook. It's like you get two or three hours every month. And it feels like it's just a more, it's like an easier financial model for them to be like, well, I'm selling 12 ad slots and I have subscribers that feel like they're getting something. They're not waiting a full year for the next thing. So when I hit their credit card with a $20 charge this month, they're getting one thing this month.

• 1:33:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think we were talking on Friday, this concept of like releasing a book on Substack. Because you could get somebody to effectively, it creates this like. Community experience of like, reading the book together, but then it's, you know, you might charge $25 for your book, but somebody might pay you, I don't know, $10 a month for your sub stack?

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  No, I mean, there's all these, I mean, I, I think there's all these ways to do it. I am extremely traditional in what I think is cool and what works. Um, I would like to do it about as by the book, no pun intended, as possible, just because I think that's cool. I think all of these modern approaches, though, are often more, more profitable and also maybe, like you said, easier for people to stomach. Like, the attention spans aren't there. Even if you break it up like that in their minds, it's like easier to read in a weekly dispatch than it might be to sit down for an hour every day and read a book, you know?

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's also something about like, I mean, when, I've, I've heard somebody say, like, when you publish a book, like, it's the easiest way to get like a comma with a phrase after your name every time you're in print. Like, if I wrote a book that's just like, you know, how I became awesome, everyone would just be like, okay, like, you know, life, life is someone awesome forever. John Coogan, author of, of The Awesome Life.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  That's why, that's why Chris's book, I'm assuming the memoir will be called Just Goat It.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Goat It.

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  Just Goat It, that's what I'm thinking. I'm workshopping it now, but no, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I had another friend, um, uh, Matty Matheson, uh, the chef and cookbook author and, you know, actor, and he told me, he was like, dude, like, New York Times bestseller lasts for the rest of your life. You can, you, you get that forever if you do it one time, you know? And like, I, I think that also that is so interesting because it's such like a classic thing that we all know, but no one really knows the formula of how you get, like, it's not just sales, there's all these factors that like, no one knows, you know, which makes it even more mythic and cool.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting to think about, would, would you rather have be featured in the New York Times? Is it, is it more valuable to be featured in the New York Times four times a year forever? Or just be a New York Times bestseller? Because I, we had, we had a couple buddies get hit pieces last week in the New York Times, and they just like, really, they only get attention if you give them attention.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, the...

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  Dude, I was, I, that's so funny, you said... Say that because there was a story in the early days of how long gone. There was a story that wasn't favorable. Let's say, and I was like.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Wait, was this, was this the, um, was this the whole lawsuit thing? Because I got the T-shirt back then too.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  No, not the New York Times. No, this was not the New York Times lawsuit. This was not, this was not the cease and desist for making fun of the daily. This was a, it's, you know, it's, um, yeah, I forgot about that.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  Don't Streisand it. Don't Streisand it. You speak really generally. So nobody can figure it out.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  You know what? We're, we're moving on.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Moving on. Uh, anyway, the, the other interesting thing about books versus podcasts is, uh, we have a buddy who runs an AI podcast. The Dwarash Patel podcast, great show, great interviews, super researched. Um, he published a book. And the book was, uh, an, uh, like a, an oral history of AI. And so it was a collection and it was actually kind of like a digest of a bunch of interviews that he's done. So he didn't start from a blank page and just start typing out like a thousand pages and, and refine it. But, and in some ways it's like, it's just kind of a different instantiation of the same thing that he's been doing.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  But I love it because I'm, there's no way for me to go to like randomly remind myself in five years that I should go revisit a Dwarash podcast unless someone like clips it and shares it. But if I put that book on my shelf, I might pick it up randomly in a few years. And there's something about like just the tangible, physical, we're very into the physical stuff here. We print the.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  No, for sure. It's real. I mean, I think also that's, I mean, I think that like everything else, it makes a return to some extent. You know what I mean? Like I subscribe to the Financial Times. I subscribe to several magazines, like a lot of my friends do. I mean, obviously I'm 42 years old, so it kind of makes sense, but I think that like young people are fetishizing print the same way they fetishized vinyl, you know, a couple, you know, 10 years ago. It's the same kind of thing. Once it. Is, you know, once it's basically past its prime.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Print is just objectively better than vinyl, though, I gotta say.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 1:38:03Jordi Hays?

  In that it's like, you can go to the beach and carry, you can't like, you know, just bringing a piece of paper to the beach and letting it get.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Losing it, whatever. It's nice. It gives you the benefit of leaving your phone at home.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  That's the powerful thing.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  When I finish a book, I leave it wherever I am. Like, on the back, in the backseat of the plane.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  On, like, I leave it so somebody can hopefully pick it up and take it. Cause I'm usually, I usually have a couple with me if I'm traveling. If I finish one, I gotta lose some weight.

• 1:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Cause you're adding, adding stuff on the way.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Wait, so when are we gonna get How Long Gone pressed on vinyl? We gotta do a couple of special episodes.

• 1:38:42Speaker 03

  We did do a CD. We did do a CD a couple of years ago with Jag Jaguar, which is a really fun project to do. But, I mean, I think for us, we're still, I mean, you guys have done something so interesting. I think it's so cool, the way, what you guys are doing and how you're approaching it. I think this live daily thing is like really powerful.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  Um, and I think we're trying to figure out what our version of video is.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so yeah, you guys are doing, what's this thing? I read it in Feed Me. Like, you're doing a live show, like a one-off live show?

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  We, we did, we're on tour right now. We're just have a couple of days off. But we did a show at Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. At this, basically with this service called Veeps.com, which is started by the Madden Brothers from Good Charlotte, but then Live Nation bought it. And it's basic, they send a full, sort of, very pro crew to shoot your show live. And you can pay, you know, buy a ticket online and watch it up to 48 hours after you pay.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  What's the ideal live?

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  It's like Vampire Weekend, How Long Gone, Alicia Keys.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  I don't really know how, I don't really know how.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  Podcasters in control, podcasters in control. What's the right live show for you, though? Like, do you feel pressured to have, like, you know, the hottest takes?

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Well, this show, we're doing, we're doing DC on Thursday, we're doing DC on Thursday. And then Friday, we're doing Toronto, and then we go to London. But this, this show is actually different. We, we, we used to just go up there and shoot the shit. We'd bring a guest up, you know, depending on what town we were in. Much like the, the actual podcast. This time, it's the How Long Gone Guide to Life. And it's a visual, it's like basically a keynote that we're walking the audience through with like our commentary. And we've only done it twice so far, but it feels. It feels sort of like it's taken us from a live podcast to a show.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  Which is what our goal was, and I don't think we could figure out exactly how to do that. And I think this is kind of pushing us in that direction, which is great.

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  What's, uh, give us the, the three minute summary of the guide to life so that people have to still go.

• 1:40:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, don't give it all away.

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  Get the tickets, get the ticket. Yeah, no, uh, it's, um, it's everything.

• 1:40:43Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we, we did, we did one live show together in Miami and we had only made like two episodes. And so nobody, like, nobody knew us as a duo. They didn't know our humor. And the, and the live show, the live show is like, we made like, like a very serious, uh, like, um, argument for why venture capital firms should get their founders on like PEDs. So like testosterone, like, like a variety.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  That's a great, that is, I would watch, pay attention to that.

• 1:41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:41:12Jordi Hays?

  And, and I don't like a half of the, the half the audience was like, these guys are dead serious. Half were like, kind of laughing, like, what is going on?

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  It's a mixed, it's a mixed bag. Yeah. I mean, ours, we basically cover all of the stuff that we talk around the show from like restaurants and restaurant etiquette to the gym and gym etiquette to dating and sex and drugs. So it's like, we cover it, you know, it's like, one slide that's going really well for us is polyamory is for ugly people. Be single or cheat. That's going really well for us.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  But, but you know, it's just like funny stuff that you can just kind of talk about and also will inspire a response from the crowd. Cause we, we like to go back and forth with the audience.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're gonna create, we're gonna create a rival guide to life and, and we'll just go guide for guide.

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  We'll go guide for.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  Well, look, I think we, I think we have different enough audiences where we can cover a lot of territory.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  You know, cover a lot of territory.

• 1:42:05John Coogan?

  So going back and forth, I want your, uh, restaurant etiquette. This morning, we go to our cafe where we have breakfast every morning normally, really like, I never noticed the music. It was always quiet and chill. And today they were blasting NSYNC and Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. And maybe it was just the mood, cause it was kind of gloomy in LA. We're having some like late June gloom going on.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  It's terrible.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  And I was a little bit tired from the. Weekend trying to get back into it and I was like trying to read like a pretty detailed analysis about like tech and stuff. And I was just like, I can't, I and funny thing is that two days ago I was in a grocery store and I was like jamming to the Backstreet Boys and I was like, this is the greatest thing ever. I was loving it in that context. But in the morning.

• 1:42:48Jordi Hays?

  But it felt like such a violation of trust because we go to this place every single morning.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  It's so reliable and it and it sets me up for the day. I'm prepping the show. And so we kind of made us, we made a slight comment. We were like, oh, is the music different? But I want to know etiquette wise, how should I, I don't want to be, I want to speak to the manager. That's weird, but also like, I'd like a change. What should I do?

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what kind of like, uh, like, what do you get as a regular? Like, what are your rights as a regular?

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  What are your rights as a regular?

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  You're right. You can't say anything. Sorry.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  You can't say anything.

• 1:43:16Speaker 03

  No, if you say something, they're never going to look at you the same. You're an asshole. Whether you're right or wrong, I'm just telling you, they're gonna, they're gonna think of you differently. The barista, it's not gonna be made with love anymore. Let me say that. It's not gonna be made with love.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  No. So, so am I supposed to vote with my feet, go somewhere else? Say, uh, we were running the numbers. We go there every single day. We're like, we're basically employing a single person there, paying the full.

• 1:43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like, I like how you think about this. Like it's logical and you could sort of figure out a way to make it work. It's, it's a barista hates all of the customers more than likely.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. And that's a feature.

• 1:43:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a feature. I mean, that's what I, I understand what you're saying. I, I think restaurants, like there was a trend for so long and it's still going on. We're like restaurants play like hip hop. You know, and like, I don't want to hear Kanye West while I'm eating spicy penne. You know, I want, I want to like, I want to hear nothing is preferred. If you go to certain kind of old school, like, I think Le Bernardin in New York doesn't play music and it's just like the bustle of the restaurant and the chatter. I'd, I'd much rather hear that.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  My, my, my fair.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  It's fascinating. Jordy, where should we take it now?

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I, I, yeah, I wanted, I wanted to just get, uh, some, some broad takes from you on a bunch of different topics that we don't, we don't cover closely. So one, first off, is AI psychosis real? You experienced it yet yourself?

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  Let me, let me, let me tell you something about AI and I'm sorry to all of your, I, I just couldn't care less.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm assuming, I'm assuming.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Couldn't care less. The hottest thing of the month.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  I think it's a, I think it's a reality. I think it's very serious. I think it's coming for us, good, bad and ugly. I just don't care. And like other things in my life, I'm going to put it off till the very last minute and when I have to deal with it. I've never downloaded Photoshop. I've never used InDesign. I, I've, I've put off all this shit in my, my entire life and it's worked out. So I think I'm going to do the same thing with AI until, until I have no choice.

• 1:45:01Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and you're, so you work, uh, list off some, some of the clients that you've worked with over the years. It's basically everybody, right?

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, yeah, I mean, everything and on the, in the, on that side of the business. Yeah. I mean, New Balance, um, Tom Brown, Stussy, uh, J Crew is, is an ongoing one. Um, Banana Republic for a couple of years. So, yeah, I mean, like,

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  I love Banana Republic.

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  A little bit, a little bit of everything.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  John six eight, so Banana Republic is his.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, they signed Kevin Love.

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  Jason six nine. Jason's six nine. So he has the same, suffers the same issue. What size shoe?

• 1:45:33John Coogan?

  And he has this fourteen, fifteen?

• 1:45:35Speaker 03

  Jason's a seventeen, so it's really.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay. Bogged.

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

  He goes, he goes to these like funny websites to find shoes that like we haven't heard of because we're.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Dark web, big and tall.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  So, so you're going in, when you're working with these clients, it's kind of like Rick, Rick Rubin mode. You don't know how to use any of the tools. You're just kind of like, they just pay you to, to tell them what, what.

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  I mean, no, I think it's a little bit of, um, a relationship thing and, and hopefully a taste thing. Like I, I think taste takes years and years to develop. And I think mine is, is, um, suited for certain people more than others. I think J Crew is like a perfect fit because I grew up wearing J Crew. I, I was raised in Atlanta. It's preppy. It's southern, but I think I have a little bit of a different point of view because I, I got into punk and hardcore and, you know, skateboarding and all that stuff. So it's like a little bit of a hybrid of all that, of all those things. But I think with, with clients, it's all about sort of taking. The real talent at the company and making sure that it doesn't go off the rails. You know, so the creativity, people who are true geniuses and really creative, like powerhouses,

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  need to be brought back down to earth a little bit, you know, and like reminded in a nice, uh, gentle way that if we don't, you know, make money, this is all over. You know what I'm saying? Like this is like, like we can do all this stuff, but sometimes you gotta feed the beast to make sure the lights stay on and it buys us more time to do more fun stuff. And I think it's like a, I think as an outsider going into a company, you're able to do that a lot easier than like a, a salaried employee.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can stir things up. Uh, are you, um, but, but so, so going like slightly deeper, your client, like I have to imagine every single brand that you've worked with or will work with in the future is starting to try to mix in AI-generated imagery. And I'm sure that's, sounds like that's triggering to you. It's just stuff that, that you don't, you don't wanna, like, how do you see the kind of market kind of bifurcating in the sense that you think every brand, you think any brands will take a hard line and say like, we only shoot, you know, farm-to-table, organic content here. We never.

• 1:47:43Speaker 03

  I think that's exactly what's gonna happen. I think there's gonna be like a division where it's like, obviously certain things are easy to automate. I think everybody will do that because it's a, it feels like a freebie. I think some of the creative stuff, I think a lot of, at least I hope clients I work with would sort of be like, we need a human being to take the pictures like that. Like pictures specifically, like to me, there's so much emotion involved in it. There's so much skill involved in it. And you just can't, to me, I haven't seen it mimicked correctly. Like asking Chad, you have to fix your car is different. Like this is something that requires like a human touch, I think.

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I think there's actually, there's laws in place that, that make it so that chain restaurants can't Photoshop their food, right? Because they would just Photoshop a burger and then they're trying to sell it and it just doesn't look anything. And I think, I think it's possible we'll see, I don't know, on, on the apparel side, it'll be interesting because everybody's had the experience of like buying an item and it just looks amazing. Online or it looks great on that model or whatever and then it just like doesn't fit or whatever. And so I think that that will probably accelerate as you have these sort of upstart brands that never even do product photography. Don't even know if their if their stuff.

• 1:48:54Speaker 03

  Well, product photography and like econ photography is like a science and it's pretty hard to get right. And there's a lot of discussion at these at these companies about how to do it, who who's going to shoot it, how it's going to appear. And I think that stuff is very interesting because it directly relates to sales and like the bottom line, like some styles work really, really well. And that's what everybody wants to mimic and some are a little a little harder to to pull off, you know?

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What about on what about how how do you see like, you know, the music market evolving? We we don't cover much music.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  We're listening to the latest Justin Bieber album.

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  We got through two songs on the drive home.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  You guys check out flag? I mean, we we talk about music and on how long gone all that's all we do and like a lot of my my best friends are musicians. Most of them are successful at this point. They've been doing it long enough, but I think it's like everything everything else in our in our lives. I think we're just paralyzed by choice and the barrier of entry is just too low. You know, the there's too much stuff and music, it suffers from that maybe more than any other genre that I can think of.

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  And you mean, you mean because the, you know, growing up, you'd buy an album, you'd invest dollars into it. And so you would listen to the full thing and you'd like really pay attention to it. And now if you can stream an album for two seconds and be like, ah, it's whatever.

• 1:50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't care. I mean, I I think, yes, I think that I also think that it's just if the if the three of us wanted to make a song right now and upload it and have it on iTunes and Spotify this week, we could do that. And I don't think that I don't think the world needs that from us or for many for many other people. And I I think that, but yes, you're right. I think when you would go to the store, um, access was harder. I mean, we talk about this all the time, like I grew up, I remember the day that we got internet at my parents' house. You know, I mean, we had the Dell in the fucking family room. I remember it like the whole thing. And if you remember a time before that, I think the effort that was involved to like anything or or to to understand anything was so much greater.

• 1:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Cause you had to piece it together through like magazines and going to a show and that kind of thing.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, you go to a show, you go to magazines, you look at the liner notes of an album and see which bands get thanked and then go find those bands. You know, it's like it was that it was kind of that tactile and that granular. Um, but yeah, I I think it's like, I I think that like Spotify and and streaming in general, like I know people to make a lot of money on streaming and they're very happy with it. I know a lot of people and the the I think general sentiment is no one gets paid enough. And of course I always want artists to get paid more because they, you know, it's the soundtrack to our lives. It's like important for culture. Um, but I also think that people forget that these are just giant corporations and they've got bottom, again, they've got bottom lines and like they're gonna do whatever they have to do to make that work.

• 1:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Do you think corporate jingles could make a comeback?

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  They have. What do you mean? I mean, you know that you know famously Pusha T from Clips wrote the McDonald's jingle. I'm loving it.

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:51:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  He'll never have to work again, you know, from that all alone. Yeah. So I think it's all that stuff. I mean, it's like the way that like Jon Hamm is the voice of Mercedes. Like, everybody gets it how they can. You know what I mean? I think the jingle or, I mean, what we talk about a lot of How Long Gone is like sync culture, you know, and like how there used to be like a you would be a sellout, you know, if they used your song in a in a Jack in the Box commercial. And now it's like, well, that's the most money I'm gonna make. If they're gonna give me a quarter million dollars to use my song for 30 seconds, like, I have to do that. You know, the choice isn't isn't quite as clear as it used to be. And so we've talked to a lot of different musicians about regret, you know, how they like pass something up because they were high on their horse in their early twenties and now that they're 40, they're like, I'm a fucking idiot. Like, it's half a million dollars. Like, who cares?

• 1:52:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  You you said that they've made a comeback already. Like, is there a more modern example than the than the McDonald's theme song?

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  I I mean, I feel like, you might be right. I I feel like they're just they're ingrained in my brains. They feel new, but like. Cars for kids or something is probably 20 years old. If you guys ever lived in New York, there's one eight seven seven cars for kids. Like you know.

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. Well, I'm just thinking about like of the new companies that have emerged, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, OpenAI, like SpaceX, Tesla doesn't have a jingle. Like, I don't know if those would be even like on brand, but like even funny, even like Prime from Logan Paul, like he's done a song, like he did, he did like it's every day, bro, with his brother, I think, or maybe that was just his brother. But, you know, like there are influencer brands. Mr. Beast has a chocolate bar. I don't know that it has a jingle. And I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact like the nature of advertising has become like way longer tail in this in the creative. Like, we don't see that many like

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  shelling points for like, wow, they made an iconic ad. It ran at the Super Bowl. Everyone's talking about it. It's more like they spent the same amount of money on ads, but it's just in the form of a thousand different Instagram ads. And everyone saw a slightly different one that was more tailored to them. So the guys saw the one with the girl in them.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  Potentially Alpha making a jingle right now and using the same jingle on like thousands of different creative. So it's always the same audio and different visuals.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Going crazy.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  That will work. That will work.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we're onto something here.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  Ramp. Time is money. Save both.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  I mean, with car companies, they obsess over like the sounds the cars make. You know, you know what I mean? Like, I drove this new Mercedes from Atlanta to Miami for F1. And it was like, there was all this detail.

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm a huge Mercedes fan.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  We love Mercedes over here. We have tons of them.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  I'm in Bedford, New York right now, and I borrowed a CLE AMG convertible. It couldn't be better. But yeah, I just noticed all the, when you drive these car, you notice like these little kind of sort of brand moments where it's like a little noise when something starts up or like it is audio or like how famously like Porsche has a guy whose only job is about like the way the door sounds when it closes because it sounds so much better in a Porsche than other cars, you know? But it's just a funny, I think there is these audio elements that are happening from a brand standpoint, but they're not quite as overt as like a jingle, you know?

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like Doug DiMiro has this take that. Like power is on demand like the latest Rivian truck, electric truck has 1,200 horsepower. It's the same as a Bugatti Veyron. Like it is, it like you can't go any, that's what you want when you're driving your kids.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  Is Rivian a sponsor?

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  All right. Cause that Rivian is Rivian's like the, that, that is like the Austin mesh hat Yeti cooler of cars. And I just don't, I don't get the popularity. I don't think it looks good. I mean, I guess it's an alternative to Tesla. So that's part of the.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I think the main thing was the like Tesla hadn't come out with a, with a truck yet. And then they came out with a very controversial design. And then the F-150 Lightning was pretty expensive and the Rivian kind of was just pure play. Like didn't confuse anyone. And, and then they did have the full size SUV or like close to full size SUV in the electric category, a little bit sooner than the Hyundai Ioniq nine and a couple of others. It, it says a little bit more, but it is interesting because between Lucid and Rivian and.

• 1:56:17Speaker 03

  Forgot about Lucid. Polestar.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Polestar. Polestar is technically like a Volkswagen or a.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  Oh, is it?

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's not Volkswagen. It's the Volvo.

• 1:56:28Speaker 03

  Volvo. Yeah. Cause I, I go to, I go to Copenhagen Fashion Week a couple of times a year and it's all, and the drivers are all, it's all Polestar. It's all.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  I mean, every brand is confused with what to do with electric. Like it's like, do we throw a, is it a, is it a powertrain? We just throw a little I at the end or an X or an E at the end, or do we do a whole new sub brand or do we spin something out?

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, what do you, have you seen that? Have you seen the new, the new Lamborghini? What is, what is the, the EV?

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. What was that called?

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  It's called the.

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  Why do they have to make them look like that?

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Lanzador.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  The Lanzador. You gotta pull up a picture of the Lanzador. This thing looks wild.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  What is it? What is it? A Lambo?

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a Lamborghini Lanzador.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  Lanzador.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  Calling it an SUV, but it just looks like a really big car.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Like a lifted sedan.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  It looks like a lifted, no, it looks like a lifted Huracan. It's kind of sick. It's kind of sick. And then there's the slate truck, which is coming out, which is like a small thing, but, but I think that some of the new companies, like they're so focused on like, just deliver on the basic value prop. They're not in that like surprise and delight category yet. Although Rivian did kind of do that with like that gear tunnel. You, you know about that in the truck?

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  I don't know anything. I like, okay. Yeah. That is a, that is just a, a big old car.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a big car, but they're calling it a SUV.

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  Guys, that kind of looks like a Subaru. No joke.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  No, that's, that's the, uh, hey, that's like a Subaru Halo car. Like that, that should be there. Uh, total, uh, total tangent, but I did have, uh, one question and then one idea that I wanted to throw out before, before you jump. Do you think that any social media apps will become truly Lindy? Like, will we be on X like 30 years from now chopping it up on the timeline?

• 1:58:13Speaker 03

  Look, as a, as a, I call it Twitter still. I'm a, I'm a traditionalist, but for this purpose, I will call the X. I, X is the most enduring platform that we have because I think it's not image based. I think that's what sets it apart. It, it feels more comedy and information. And those are two things that I feel like aren't as affected by trends in some ways. Whereas like Instagram, I love Instagram. I use it every day, but like people get, when people get very exhausted by it because of what they have to see. You know, I think Twitter, I don't know. I'm a, I'm a Twitter diehard. I'm a power user. I have been forever. Um, and I will never change that.

• 1:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That's awesome. I hope. Yeah. It's one of those things like, is, is, is it digital news or is it like the form? Is it its own like form factor like vinyl that will just perpetuate forever?

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  We're gonna find out.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Last, uh, last question, media, media and entertainment question because you're an entertainer. Do you think there's room in the market for, uh, next election cycle, uh, pay-per-view boxing between both political parties? So, so, so like Democrats first Republicans betting on the line, very American.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  I, I will, I'll pay, I'll pay a hundred dollars for the PPV for that. I mean, I think that if we're, I, I don't think we're that far away. Honestly, I know that's a joke. I don't think we're that far.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not. I'm actually serious. I think every four years you get 10, 10 Dems, 10 Republicans, get them lined up in different weight classes. Hundred dollars, duke it out.

• 1:59:45Speaker 03

  I would love, I would love to see some low level, you know, first year senators just bloodying themselves in the, on the, on the opening rounds. You know, that's what we need.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It doesn't even, it could just be angry online posters too, you know, settling, settling the score.

• 1:59:59Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a category of fighting that has not been monetized yet. Something we should think about.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like Dana White's slapboxing thing or whatever.

• 2:00:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:08Jordi Hays?

  No experience required.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Political slapboxing would be huge.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. All right. Well, this was super fun.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Let's do it again soon.

• 2:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  This is great. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:16Speaker 04

  Anytime, guys. Thanks so much. All right. Have a good one.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Good luck with the rest of your live shows. We were talking about jingles. We got to sing you a jingle. Find your happy place.

• 2:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Book of wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  And Chris Buskirk is in the restream waiting room.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Chris Buskirk. How you doing, Chris?

• 2:00:40Speaker 04

  I'm all right. How are you?

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Great.

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, you got to hear us singing just now.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  We're trying to bring back corporate jingles. We think that there's an unexplored territory there. I don't know your stance.

• 2:00:49Jordi Hays?

  1789.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Ooh, we got something going on.

• 2:00:52Speaker 04

  I know why we don't. I actually know why we don't have them anymore.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Please explain.

• 2:00:56Speaker 04

  It's because Big Pharma took over advertising and that killed all the creativity.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, and they got to throw those like big disclaimers at the...

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, now it's like you got to have a 40-second commercial. 20 seconds tells you all the bad things that are going to happen to you when you take the drug.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 2:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so the conspiracy theory there, I don't have my tinfoil hat handy, is that it's not about even generating awareness. Here we go. I got, we keep one of these anytime we have to.

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  Discuss a conspiracy theory.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  Discuss a conspiracy theory. It gives you cover, you know?

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't believe this necessarily, but you, you listen to these pharma ads and they're, after, after listening to it, I would say you're much more likely to think, I don't think this, I don't think this is for me, right? Because you maybe hear about some benefits and then you get like 20 seconds of, of, but it's just, it's, it's, is it a mechanism to just invest so many dollars in a show that the show could not possibly criticize the, the, the pharma, the pharma industry broadly? Otherwise, you're potentially...

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  This manufactured consent, says Noam Chomsky, but has been written, rewritten in the middle of time.

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's more like, it's more like, yeah, you're welcome to criticize Big Pharma, but like, say goodbye to like, what, 60% of your revenue overnight?

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  Not going to be running the late show.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  We're not going to be talking about more conspiracies here.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  Sorry. Anyway, let's kick it off with an introduction.

• 2:02:15Speaker 04

  Conspiracy theory is always also known as the news six months early.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  In the future, yeah. But, but let's introduce yourself. How do you think about yourself? What, what, what, what key projects are you working on right now?

• 2:02:28Speaker 04

  You know, the, you know, co-founder of seventeen eighty nine Capital, as you guys know, like, I've got some other evocations as well, but you know, just, you know, I, people always say, like, how do you split up your time? And like, there was like, the, that was like, the Rubik's Cube question for me for a while, and I realized, actually, the, the simple answer is right, which is like, all the different stuff I'm doing is all the same project, which is, how do you keep the country peaceful and prosperous? Like, that's really it. Then there's all kinds of different vectors of attack there. There's like, there's politics, there's culture, there's business, there's tech. Uh, but it's really all with the same telos. Like, how, how do we just make life better for this country and the people in it?

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, give me a, give me a temperature check on your view on the business climate. There's been so many new, so many stories about tariffs and interest rates and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, the stock market's been like, down and then right back to where it was. And so, there's like, the nothing ever happens view, there's the incredibly tumultuous times view. How are you just feeling about the business climate generally? And Uncle Sam put up a surplus.

• 2:03:32Speaker 04

  It's like, it's better than it's been in a long time.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this is, what, you know, I've had, I've had the following conversation, uh, it probably, literally like ten or twenty times in the past few months. And people, uh, whether it's, a lot of investors, but also founders slash builders have said a di- a different version of the same thing, which is, uh, I didn't know how much I was self-censoring my own thought about what was possible over the past four or five years, until, you know, fill in the blank, January, February, March, April, whatever, just something this year. And then they realized, like, oh, the shackles are off. We can actually go and do really cool stuff now. Um, and there were, they, everybody had their project, like, there, it was like, there was a pain point in their business, like, oh, I can't do this.

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  Or like, you know, like, the crypto guys or AI, like, they're really, really be under, under attack. And it was like, regulation by enforcement.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:23Speaker 04

  Um, and so they knew what the pain points were, and so, for obvious reasons, were super focused on those things.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:29Speaker 04

  And they were like, oh, if we could just get through this, then we could do this one other thing, whatever that may have been. And what I've heard them, what I've heard a lot of people saying is, Once the pain stopped, I realized that there were like 10 other things that normally that I want to do, but that I could do. And so like the amount of optimism and energy is just really infectious. It's like, it's a great time to be alive.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like, I mean, we saw that with a lot of the nuclear founders, like you talk to those folks. And I mean, it was so rough for a while that they normally, like if you invested my company, I don't want you to invest in a direct competitor, but the nuclear companies were like, look, like that's not going to be the thing that does me in like, you can go ahead and invest. And then now we finally have some clarity from the EO. We talked to some nuclear founders and it feels like we're on the cusp of some real progress there. How much are you focusing on energy? What are the other categories that you find interesting right now? What do you see as being like uniquely unlocked in this new era?

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, we call it the, I don't think we made it up, but like we call it like transformational technologies. So that means like AI, AI infra, energy, robotics, space, defense. Those are kind of like the big buckets. In a lot of cases, there's a lot of, they're, they're really related. You know, we like, at least the way we think about energy is like, it's attached to all of those. And you know, that's where, that's where nuclear really comes in, but particularly around AI and crypto and some of the other elements, just security in general. Like that is the major unlock. Like one of the things that I tell people all the time is like, if you want to like a, just an easy heuristic about like, you know, how you think about like, what are the big unlocks that

• 2:06:08Speaker 04

  need to have happened, which is that, think about it this way, the large civilization that has access to the most abundant, cheapest energy wins, like period, full stop. I was talking with a friend of mine, another investor last week, and I, he actually had, he had this great description, which I had actually never thought of about colonization of Mars, because I was saying how, you know, like, obviously Elon's been super focused on it. And like, I don't want to go to Mars. Like I've never wanted to go to Mars. It seems like, it seems like it sucks there. I said, but then I realized, That actually like terraforming Mars, like that's actually kind of cool because it would make it someplace you'd actually wanna go.

• 2:06:47Speaker 04

  So that's why like Mars colonization has become charismatic because like just like getting to the moon was was interesting and charismatic. Um, in the sixties because it was like, can we get there? Like it was just, it was just like the journey, not the, not the end. But then when you start to think about the idea of, of colonization of Mars, well, it's interesting when you think that like you could make it beautiful. And, and what he said was, it's just an energy problem. If you can bring enough energy to bear, then you can terraform. Then you can terraform Mars. I was like, that was actually for me, that was like an interesting way to think about it that I hadn't considered. But the same thing applies to everything else, which is.

• 2:07:26Speaker 04

  If you have, if you have super abundant, super cheap energy, you're as a, as a large scale civilization, you're gonna win because it makes everything else. Better, easier, cheaper, and things that were not possible, it makes them possible. Kind of like the way. SpaceX, what SpaceX has done with launch by just driving the cost per kilogram into the dirt, it unlocks all these other businesses.

• 2:07:48Jordi Hays?

  So, so if, if great power competition is, is energy competition. Do, do we, you know, I mean, the, the concern here is that China is just like copy and pasting nuclear reactors. And we have a bunch of great nuclear startups that are, you know, making efforts in some new projects. I think. Meta, you know, has announced some, some new initiatives there. Um, but is this not like one of the kind of biggest issues that we're facing from a national security standpoint?

• 2:08:20Speaker 04

  There's a way in which it's the biggest because it, because it touches everything. Like it touches literally everything. I mean, you think about like these really critical growth areas, AI being the super obvious one, but. Uh, you know, and there's, you know, I've seen a number of, um, analyses that show like the, the amount of. Uh, AI compute we need to build just in this country, like it's a in the next 10 years. So by 2035. Like it would consume more power than we produce right now. As a country, so there's like, we need to be producing a lot more power because unlike certain members of Congress, it turns out electricity doesn't just come from the wall. Like you actually have to produce it someplace.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, food comes from the grocery store, gasoline comes from the pump, electricity comes from the wall.

• 2:09:03Speaker 04

  What are you, what are you slow? You just plug in, you just plug in and there's electricity there.

• 2:09:07John Coogan?

  I, I do think there's something, there's something fascinating about like, it's so hard to predict the future. It's so hard to predict what we will need, you know, a gigawatt, you know, data center for. And then all of a sudden, it's like, we need it today. Like we have the use case, we need it today. And, and I keep thinking about like what happened in the dot com boom where we overbuilt all this dark fiber. Google went and bought it up and a bunch of the tech companies bought it up. And then eventually like the, the products caught up. My, my question is, how do you think about projects that might be uneconomical to underwrite on the venture side? And so they might need to be underwritten by the government. Like, like I'm, I feel like we're probably aligned in that like, we should

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  probably keep the government as narrow as possible, but there are some really crazy things like the moon landing, like the Mars helicopter, stuff that just doesn't make any sense for any private company to go after. And then after a while, you start seeing like, oh, okay. Like, you know, they built some roads, they built some infrastructure and now private companies are catching up and, and actually ramping up the, the, the use of that energy or something. But how do you see the government playing a role in the next, in solving those fundamental problems? Is it purely just on deregulation? Do you want to see funding flow into certain projects? Do you want to see government doing hard projects? What do you, how, what's your philosophy on that?

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's both. It's both. It is the answer is like, we've just seen, you know, just as I was saying earlier, like just this year, just by getting out of the way unlocks a lot. And it just, there's so many people who want to do things and who have the capacity to do things if they're not being shackled and prevented from doing them. So like, we've seen a lot of that in the past seven months is just by getting out of the way and giving people permission. To do it, you get a lot of, you get a lot of activity. And so that's a big part of it. But then there, there are these other issues um where, you know, China creates its national champions. And so like, great example is like rare earth magnets. You know, it is, it, it can be, um, it is, I mean, they subsidize it. So it is cheaper to

• 2:11:16Speaker 04

  buy a rare earth magnet from a Chinese supplier than it is to buy the raw materials in the United States. You know, that is, I mean, that's very, it's, that's geopolitics, right? That's not just markets. That's not just economics. That's not just innovation. That's geopolitics. The, the Chinese have been on, they've been on top of this for 20 years.

• 2:11:36Speaker 04

  And realize that this was a choke point where they were, would be able to get a huge amount of leverage over their competitors and adversaries. Um, and I guess we're someplace in, you know, in between those two things with, with China. And if they were able to subsidize them, they could drive out all the compet, the competitors out of business. And because they go into literally everything of any importance, that they'd have massive, um, not just economic leverage, but like geopolitical leverage over the United States. And so that's a place where, you know, government needs to play a role because it's not a company V company competition. It is a state actor V company competition as it stands right now. And that's something that's critical to national security. So you see that, I think, in a, a number of other,

• 2:12:18Speaker 04

  a, a number of other spaces, but you know, the rare earth magnets is like, it's just a very obvious example of that where you can't, um, like, yeah, a company can be super innovative and can do all the right things. But if it is facing a state actor as its competitor versus another company, like they're gonna lose.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the rare earth materials question, uh, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about Apple buying half a billion dollars of rare earths from a company called MP Materials. And it's, and in Las Vegas, and it stuck, it stuck out to me as ki- kind of a vibe shift because. Apple hasn't been at the front of like re-industrialize America, bring back jobs and you know, let's make everything in America. They're not saying that, but it feels like maybe behind the scenes, they're at least thinking about their supply chain very seriously and trying to diversify and maybe it's a cruise ship, but they're putting their hands on the tiller just a little bit. And so I took that as like cause for optimism with the overall, you

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  know, energy independence, supply chain independence. But did you see that story? Are there any other causes for optimism that might be coming from the, the crowd that's not cheering as loud as they can, but might be getting, you know, might be working behind the scenes to kind of achieve the same goals that everyone should be aligned around?

• 2:13:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's a, there's a lot of signal, I think, in that, in that move. I mean, the, at some point, Apple has to realize that their supply chains are really, really insecure. And this is like another point on the rare earth magnets. Like one of the things, like the, one of the, what great sort of unintended consequences of the liberation day tariffs and the, and the general policy of tariff policy coming out of the administration is that this actually was, turned out to be a forcing function. It made China play their rare earth card way too early. Had they decided, for instance, to attack Taiwan and then played that card, that would have been the optimum, optimum

• 2:14:21Speaker 04

  moment. But what happened was is that in the negotiations around tariffs, they, they threatened to play the rare earth card. In fact, they did actually like reduce exports the past couple of months, but it was too soon. Like they, they played it early and now there's time for the United States to catch up. And this is, you know, in fact, as we saw with MP, you know, and the support they've gotten from the government. Another company that we're in the process of investing in called Vulcan Elements is, is in the space as well. And we now have a window in time where we can build out an ecosystem to manufacture earth magnets in the United States and do it really, really quickly. So. That that's just a place where like there's like there's there's a lot of signal coming out around

• 2:15:06Speaker 04

  that as well, but there's I think the the fact that there is so much happening and uh and at such a rapid rate, that's where we're seeing um but that's where we're really seeing the advances here because like the I don't know, like people ask me like you like are you pleased with the way the admin's gone? Yeah, I am. Um, what I've been surprised by though is the speed with which they've moved and what's happened is like they're moving at like founder speed and that that becomes infectious. And so now you get you get cycles uh that might have taken a year or two or three to to happen and work things work through the system um in the past. And now like we see we're I mean, we're standing up a rare earth's capacity in in the United States

• 2:15:48Speaker 04

  basically overnight. That was like a pipe dream four or five months ago, and now it's actually happening.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  We gotta stop calling them rare earths. They're just earths. They're just earth magnets.

• 2:15:57Speaker 04

  They're not rare.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  They're not rare.

• 2:15:59Speaker 04

  They're they're only the process form is rare.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  Yes, the industrial capacity is rare, but the product is not. Let's just call them earth magnets.

• 2:16:06Jordi Hays?

  It is. You gotta you gotta uh, you know, uh, we we probably criticize uh China more than than most podcasters on earth, but you gotta give them credit for letting the world think that they were just the Happy Meal toy manufacturing hub for like a couple decades and then just like quietly owned, you know, all all these critical supply chains. I'm curious how you're thinking about solar and one of the reasons I ask is I've invested in tons of these different kind of hard tech, uh new industrials categories. And I've yet to back a solar company. I only, you know, started actively angel investing maybe

• 2:16:48Jordi Hays?

  four or five years ago, and it's fallen out of fashion is one way to describe it.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Casey Hammer's bringing it back.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Casey's the only Casey's the example and I would I would happily invest in Casey if I had the chance, but curious how you're thinking about that. It's another area that China is dominant in and it seems like something that we wouldn't necessarily want long term.

• 2:17:10Speaker 04

  So like I've been sort of like semi obsessed with solar for a long time. I just like it's mostly just basically being like thrifty. I'm like, damn, there's all that sunlight and I can just power my house for free, you know, so like I like at my house in Arizona, I have solar on it. I've had it for years. Okay. But it's really not economic. Um, and so there's needs to be a pretty big leap forward for it to for it to matter. Otherwise, why not just build more nuclear? Right? Why not? Why don't we just keep it simple?

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, Casey, an interesting point.

• 2:17:42Speaker 04

  Like PV solar is actually isn't that good. And like the concentrators are like, okay. But like, again, like we have the solution already. So there's got to be a compelling case to be made as to why um, under the current like, uh, you know, with the current technology around solar, why is that even we're focusing on?

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. Casey's point was like, China is subsidizing photovoltaic manufacturing. And and the and the most hurtful thing you could do is just buy all of it to so that they take a loss on every unit and then build up your capacity. But I don't know that that actually would would would catalyze a real shift in capacity and we might just get kind of hooked on them.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  You're still helping them get extremely good at manufacturing.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Especially if there's a learning curve and stuff. So I don't know. It's a it's a longer conversation.

• 2:18:28Speaker 04

  And PV is just not that efficient, right? That's the problem.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I think they I think the the argument was that it's like it's very well matched to the load of the grid of the American consumer because when it's hot out, we run our air conditioning. And when it's hot out, the sun is shining on the PV cells. And so there's a match there was a nuclear power plant that generates just as much at night as it does in the day. So I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different load use cases for AI training versus inference and all this different stuff. But um, it's a yeah, it's it's a fascinating geopolitical dynamic. And it seems like the main takeaway is that China has just been saying yes and to everything and they've developed capacity everywhere and it's like we could try and predict the future but you know if PV winds

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  up being really important, I want to have capacity for that. If nuclear, I want that too. I want, I want the smorgasbord. Give me all the energy. But I don't know.

• 2:19:22Jordi Hays?

  They're building a ton of coal plants too.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, 100% and like fortunately, you know, some of the AI infrastructure build outs are pulling forward some of that. We're getting a whole bunch of natural gas online. Like we are becoming more energy independent. So green shoots all over the place. Jordy, anything else? Last question?

• 2:19:40Jordi Hays?

  I think that's it for now.

• 2:19:41John Coogan?

  This is fantastic, Chris. Yeah, we gotta have you back on, especially when there's like big news in your world or anything going on that you can comment on.

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Anytime. Happy to do it. We need, we just need 30 seconds notice. We'll drop you the, we'll drop you the link.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  We'll drop you the link. You can just hop right on.

• 2:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, awesome. Yeah, just you can signal me. I'll be on.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  I will. I'll talk to you soon, Chris. Have a great one.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Chris. Cheers.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:20:00Jordi Hays?

  And speaking of minerals, we have.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  adquick.com. If you're selling minerals, you put it on a billboard. Out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Addquick combines a technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. What were you saying about materials?

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have the founder of Mariana Minerals joining the show.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. Hit the soundboard. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. How you doing Turner?

• 2:20:30Speaker 05

  Good. How are you doing guys?

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Beautiful map behind you. I love cartography. I'm a big fan of throwing a map in the background.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Is that 3D or like, does it have texture or does it just kind of look at, look like?

• 2:20:43Speaker 05

  It's got a little bit of texture. Not, not crazy 3D though.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Mercator projection, I'm pretty sure. I don't know. It's a good one. Anyway, introduce yourself. What do you do? Welcome to the show.

• 2:20:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on guys. Turner Caldwell here, CEO of Mariana Minerals. We're a vertically integrated, software-first mining company. So we're.

• 2:21:04Speaker 05

  Coming into projects that are, you know, have post exploration, they've discovered the mineral deposit and we come in to engineer it. So we develop the mine plan, we develop the refining plan, we capitalize it at the project level and from the top co. And then we, we manage the construction, we manage the construction, the commissioning, and then we operate it out into perpetuity.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Talk to me about the whole pipeline of actually getting minerals out of the ground. Let's say I own a hundred thousand acres in Alaska or something. I bought it just as a forest. It's a ranch, never explored it. What are the steps where I imagine we're talking about like a decade, there's exploration firms, then you come in at some point, like really walk me through a concrete example of going from like someone has some land to now we're getting material.

• 2:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And if you're this verticalized, why not also do discovery? I'm sure there's a reason. I'm sure.

• 2:21:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a big market of folks that are doing discovery. There's actually a bunch of awesome like tech VC backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery. I think what we're missing is folks that are focused on condensing the timelines from when you have discovered something to when it is actually producing. And it's like this sneak in the grass kind of challenge, like very complicated system of actually designing these plants, buying out all the infrastructure, installing the infrastructure, getting it running. But yeah, so you start with a, you know, flat piece of land, ideally it's flat. And you'll start this like really long campaign of, you know, you'll start with kind of like spot testing of different areas to determine and probably some like surface sampling to determine if there's something promising there. There's some permits that come into play when it, when it, when you have to actually start doing more advanced

• 2:22:43Speaker 05

  exploration campaigns. And that's something that, you know, if you're on federal land and sometimes on state land, those permits can get in the way of accelerating kind of mineral discovery. You'll do drill holes, you know, hundreds to thousands of drill holes to define a mineral deposit. And those mineral deposits can vary all over the place. You can have shallower ones where it's a little bit cheaper to drill. You can have really deep ones where it starts to get much more expensive to do and timely, time intensive to do that expiration campaign. And all along the way, you are taking samples and you are kind of building these three, these 3D models to try to understand how was the deposit formed? Why is the mineral there in the first place? And that helps to kind of inform also the advancing the expiration side of things. And in parallel with that, you're starting to do these testing campaigns where you're running

• 2:23:28Speaker 05

  concentration tests to figure out how you can upgrade the ore to an intermediate product. You're starting to do refining tests to understand how you would actually extract the target mineral into its final state, which is, you know, a high purity metal alloy in many cases. Or a, or a, a high purity kind of specialty chemical salt. And so you're writing these reports all along the way. So you'll start with a PEA, which is an initial economic assessment. You'll then do a pre-feasibility study. You'll do a feasibility study. You'll do a definitive feasibility study. And kind of as you're doing that, the value of the asset is kind of increasing and increasing. Speculators are piling into the stock. And the intent there at that point is really...

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Let's hear for the speculators.

• 2:24:08Jordi Hays?

  The backbone of the mining industry. Penny stock ripper.

• 2:24:12Speaker 05

  That's right. That's right. And that's how that exploration is funded, really.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 2:24:16Speaker 05

  They're trying to like ride that first wave of value creation.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Similar to like FDA trials for new pharmaceuticals, probably.

• 2:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, I can, and I can, I can, I'm starting to figure out, you know, a number of reasons why you're explaining them, why you wouldn't want to do the exploration and discoveries, because that could take like 10 years.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  Why don't you just do this thing? And then he goes on to describe the hardest thing in the world.

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but then, but the other thing is like the duration, ideally you start working with a customer and they're like, here's what we have in the ground. Help us get it out. And then you can just start doing that.

• 2:24:46Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. And that's, that's how we're thinking about it is we want to be the ones that go from, you know, the folks that are doing the exploration, they're, they're there to define the resource and ideally get some return on the invested capital that they had as they were kind of like going through this like long and arduous process of defining a mineral resource. But typically those are geologists, finance ears, lawyers. It's very rare where you'll see a junior mining company that's actually staffed to take it all the way through to production. It's a, it's a different class of business fundamentally, like you're dealing with in, in say like very high capex deployment, complex kind of mining and refining systems that, you know, span the, the entire ecosystem of like engineering skillsets, commercial skillsets.

• 2:25:29Speaker 05

  And so there's a nice handoff point there. And so what happens today is the junior mining companies will spend a lot of time exploring, building, creating the asset. Ideally, they flip it to a large mining company that comes in to do the hard yards of actually getting the thing operating. And that's where we want to come in as well. So, you know, the big mining companies, they're looking for billion-dollar opportunities to deploy billions of dollars of capital. And, you know, they they pick their spots on the commodities also. So you might have a commodity that's out of favor, and so no one's picking up the asset. You might have an asset that, you know, would be called subscale in this scenario where it's not a billion dollars of CapEx. It's only a couple hundred million dollars of CapEx, still a big project. And those are getting ignored.

• 2:26:11Speaker 05

  And so we think that with the differentiation on the tech stack, on the software side of things that we're bringing in, and also differentiated team, we can bring these smaller scale assets, which are like right-sized for us as a as an early-stage company, into production while they've been kind of ignored by the big mining companies.

• 2:26:26Jordi Hays?

  All right. One more question, and then we'll talk about the news today. But when did you first yearn for the mines?

• 2:26:33Speaker 05

  Yes, for the mines. So when I graduated college, I actually had this like vision of moving to Australia and going and working in the mines. I never quite like converted on that. But worked at Tesla for nine years and change, started out up in Reno, was working on the Gigafactory up there, kind of like designing, building it, then started working on battery cell manufacturing, started working on areas of the cell chemistry and in the supply chain side of things. And as I was moving kind of further and further upstream, you know, the the mining industry is wild. It's an awesome industry, but it's definitely been neglected. Like, we've kind of been viewing it as dirty, and, you know, it should happen. It should it should happen, but it shouldn't happen here. And it's also like

• 2:27:18Speaker 05

  this massive, it's this awesome opportunity to work across scales. Like, a lot of what you're developing starts at like the micron scale of like, how do I get this atom out of this other atom? Well, not atoms, but this like atom out of this mineral. And then you have to scale that up to like kilometer scale infrastructure. And like that breadth of scales is awesome.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  That's really cool.

• 2:27:38Jordi Hays?

  What's the news today?

• 2:27:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're, ah, there we go. We're coming out of stealth with our Series A raise. We had Andreessen Horowitz, Coastal Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and a couple of other folks join in. We've raised $65 million.

• 2:27:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:28:00Jordi Hays?

  First, uh, first hit of the week. Oh, it feels so good. Feels good. Congratulations.

• 2:28:05Speaker 05

  I appreciate it.

• 2:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic news. Fantastic. I'm, uh, last question before you jump off. Are you, are you guys like acquiring any companies? Uh, or, or is it fully ground up? You're just-

• 2:28:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we will, we'll, we'll step in and we'll acquire, uh, mineral assets. Um, that, that makes sense for us to step into. We're, we're working on that in the copper space right now, actually.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  But that's like buying the land, not necessarily like basically buying the resource itself, not like a surrounding company, or maybe it is structured as-

• 2:28:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it'll, it'll, it'll, it'll vary. There's a lot of mining projects that are on care and maintenance that, you know, ha- have, were turned off and could be turned back on with, you know, if you come in and retrofit to deploy, kind of like the reinforcement learning platform that we're working to deploy, which means you need more instrumentation, you need more control to be able to control the, the big refinery, which is basically a big robot. And, uh, in certain cases, it, it might be a, a mine that's actually operating today that we can step into and we see opportunity for uplift. Um, and in other areas, it'll be a greenfield asset where, you know, we're stepping in and partnering in, partnering with the resource owner. Um, and then we would have a cash flow, uh, split, kind of once we bring it to commercial scale so that they can keep exploring. And you kind of create this flywheel where they're continuing to explore, they're leveraging cash flows from operating assets,

• 2:29:19Speaker 05

  uh, to, to fund their exploration, and then we would step in to, to develop those, those assets over time. Um, so it's pretty variable, but yeah, we have, uh, we have these projects.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Basically, the market, the market prices certain assets here and you guys look at it and say with our technology, this is actually worth, you know, some, some premium on that.

• 2:29:36Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. And in certain cases, the market will say that there's no net asset value or no, no NAV. Um, and we'll, and that's an area where you can kind of step in and, and get a good deal and bring it into, bring it into production.

• 2:29:48Jordi Hays?

  He's a value miner. Let's go. This is super cool. Fantastic. Congratulations. Uh, I'm like, we're gonna do a lot more on, uh, rare earths broadly, so. We'll be back. Uh, we're, we're gonna stop calling them rare, cause we got plenty. We're just gonna call them earths.

• 2:30:04Speaker 05

  There are a lot out there. They're, they're hard to find in high concentrations and, and hard to get out, but they're, they're out there.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, congratulations, uh, to you and the team on the raise and, uh, hope, hopefully have you back on soon. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:30:16Speaker 05

  Awesome. Appreciate it, guys.

• 2:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:30:19John Coogan?

  Eight Sleep. Go to eightsleep.com. Get a Pod 5 Ultra. They have a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Get an Eight Sleep. We have our next guest from Altimeter coming in the studio.

• 2:30:33Jordi Hays?

  I gotta give people the, I'm so sick.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  My HRV thinks that I'm dead. So, thank you to my Eight Sleep for getting, getting me through the, saving my life.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  It's life-saving technology. You heard it here first. Not a health claim.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Not. Awesome. We have.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Ask your doctor about saving your life with an Eight Sleep.

• 2:30:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna botch his name. Jamin?

• 2:30:56Speaker 06

  Man.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in from Altimeter.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:31:01Speaker 06

  Good.

• 2:31:01Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:31:02Speaker 06

  Great to be here.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. Sorry for, for botching your name on the way in.

• 2:31:08Speaker 06

  No, no. All good. So, given name is Benjamin.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  Benjamin.

• 2:31:11Speaker 06

  My parents called me Jamin as a toddler.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 2:31:14Speaker 06

  In kindergarten, there were a bunch of Benjamins. So, they just told my teacher, hey, call him Jamin. That's what we call him.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. So, I was trying to give it, I was trying to give it this like exotic pronunciation.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  I'm sure you've gotten every variety over the course of your career.

• 2:31:27Speaker 06

  The only one that bugs me is Jasmine. Other than that, it's, anything goes.

• 2:31:31John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, good to meet you. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Jamin Ball. Powerful name.

• 2:31:35Speaker 06

  Likewise. It's fun. Turner and I actually, good friends in college. It's fun seeing him on the show right before.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  Oh, amazing. No way. That's awesome.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  No way. Where'd you guys go to school?

• 2:31:45Speaker 06

  We were at Stanford together.

• 2:31:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So, you had a sort of non-traditional background for venture.

• 2:31:50Speaker 06

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 2:31:52John Coogan?

  It's kind of like the Stanford of feeders and to VC.

• 2:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really is. It really is. Well, it's great to have you on the show. I feel like you guys over at Altimeter have just been on a run. Just, also, like, I feel like Invest Americas or the Trump accounts is like, feels like almost an incubation. So, it's been, it's been.

• 2:32:13Speaker 06

  Super cool. Yeah, super cool seeing that, seeing that take off and get passed into law.

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, I wanted, yeah, I wanted to have you on to talk about, it sounds like you'd been digging into the, the Figma S1. Would love to kind of get, get your reaction to it. You had a post getting picked up earlier in the timeline.

• 2:32:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, happy to. I mean, in many ways, Figma is the white buffalo of my career. It's the one that got away. I've been at Red Altimeter for about five years, was Redpoint for five years before that. And I think the memory of venture capital that I'll never forget is trying to win the Series C. I think this was late 2018 or early 2019 with Vivek, who was one of my colleagues, and Scott, who was one of the partners at Redpoint at the time. And we lost to Andrew Reid, who's a phenomenal investor at Sequoia. But I'll never forget that round, the Figma Series C. It's my white buffalo.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  He's told us the whole story about how they brought him into the Sequoia office and they sat Dylan down in the Brown conference room because at Sequoia, they have all of their conference rooms named after their endowment partners and their LPs. And they were like, look, we're investing in you, but if you make us money, you're helping your school. And I thought it was very interesting.

• 2:33:28Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  About pitch.

• 2:33:29Speaker 06

  It's a good pitch.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  So it got away, but now you're digging in further and trying to understand the business in the S1. What have you learned? What are the interesting takeaways? What should someone, even if we just zoom out, what are people typically looking for in a software company going public these days?

• 2:33:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. And I'd say, in many ways, the market needs this type of company to go public. We haven't seen a software IPO really since the Service Titan IPO late last year. If you look at the overall kind of growth rates of the public software universe today, it's declined quite significantly. I think the median growth rate, I track a basket of about 80 software companies. The median growth rate's about 14%. And that's not what it used to be. We were not really in this high growth. There's not a lot of high-growth software companies that you can buy and invest in. Figma comes out as a marquee software business. It's growing 49%, but what it also brings is 28% free cash flow margins, which is super rare. The growth in and of itself, they would be,

• 2:34:34Speaker 06

  at least in my basket, the fastest-growing public software company. When you add in The free cash flow margins at scale, it has this unique profile of growth plus profits, which, you know, rule of 40 is a popular metric a lot of investors look at, which just, you know, adds your growth rate plus your free cash flow margin. They'd be number one on the list. And so I think that's, that's something the markets are excited about, growth and profitability with a company that's almost at a billion dollars of run rate.

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  So the rule of 40 is you add the free cash flow margin to the growth rate of the business on the top line, and you should be at around 40% positive. But it sounds like Figma's up at 79%, 69%, something like that, like well above 40. Is that right?

• 2:35:19Speaker 06

  That's right. Yeah. 40% is kind of the benchmark for are you considered a good or great business? And so they, they kind of far exceed that. And even when lined up against the rest of the software universe, at least the 80 that I track, that's the, it's the highest.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  How much credit should we give to where the business is today, to all the chaos that happened during the Adobe acquisition?

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, you got a billion dollar non-dilutive investment through the breakup fee, which sounds like, you know, they obviously don't, didn't necessarily need that, but it gives them a massive amount of leverage.

• 2:35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm also interested in, in other aspects that could change. If you think you're going to be acquired, like maybe you freeze hiring and that's a good decision. And then you wind up, you know, actually increasing your margins, or maybe it changes the way you think about the business. I don't know.

• 2:36:14Jordi Hays?

  They did make changes, like probably when, when the acquisition didn't go through, I do remember there was almost an immediate change in how they were doing pricing and billing.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:36:25Jordi Hays?

  That was like night and day, pretty much.

• 2:36:28Speaker 06

  I mean, I think it's, I think this is a testament to the strength of not just the business, but to Dylan and the leadership team. Having a company go through something like that, most companies don't make it back from that because when, as a customer, you're thinking, do I want to use this product? What's going to happen when it gets acquired? Is it going to be shut down? Is it going to be a focus? You get a lot of customers who are thinking, I don't know if I want to use this software. You get a lot of new hires thinking, Well, gosh, I thought I was going to go work for a high-growth startup. Like, I don't really want to go work for Adobe. You know, it's the type of people that Adobe attracts are going to be different than the type of people that a high-growth startup attracts. And so you get a lot of headwinds on the customer front as well as on the hiring front, and it can just lead to really negative inertia that's hard to overcome.

• 2:37:13Speaker 06

  You know, look at, you know, Winserve and OpenAI. I'm sure similar dynamics happened there where thought you're going to get acquired, customers think different of you, new hires think different of you. It's really hard to come back from something like that. And the fact that Figma not only did, but is, you know, I think, going to be worth a whole lot more than what that acquisition was just a few years ago. It's a testament to, in many ways, I think, the strength of the management team, which, again, I don't think it can be overstated how significant of an achievement it was for that team to come back from that moment, even stronger than what they were going into it.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious how you think, you know, if you were going to, you know, and anybody that's kind of, I try to analyze the business, I think one thing that'll, you know, that you can make a really strong case for why Figma will be a massive beneficiary of AI, right? I think if anybody, you know, they've had different experiments over the years, they have Figma Make now, but the other side will look at the business and say, well, if every engineer can just generate designs instantly, is design software necessary? Do you have, do you have a view there? I mean, my, I've been generally, I'm, as somebody that uses Figma every single day

• 2:38:31Jordi Hays?

  and has for my entire career, I sort of expect to use it a decade from now, and I expect to use it even 15 years from now. I don't know, like, it's just such core infrastructure to the company. And so that's, that's my view. So when people say, oh, we want, you know, like, all UI will just be generated, but how are you thinking about that kind of set of risk factors?

• 2:38:51Speaker 06

  That's a great question. And I think what we can do is look back at how the business is executed over its entire lifecycle to kind of get a glimpse into how they might be successful or not in this period of time. I mean, when Figma was founded, The entire industry uses a product called Sketch. And Sketch was almost the equivalent of Excel to an investment banker. And it really wasn't until the Series C in Figma where it kind of started to become obvious that, wait a second, maybe this product, maybe this startup is actually going to convert the world from Sketch to something new. And for outsiders, and even for insiders, designers, the notion of taking away Sketch, again, it was like taking away Excel from an investment banker. It was a huge deal, all of the shortcuts, the workflows, all of that was just ingrained

• 2:39:35Speaker 06

  into your muscle memory. But they were able to do that, they were able to overcome that. And that is one of the reasons why they're so great today. I think the management team isn't naive, though. They're looking at the opportunity as it exists today, and they say, well, we can't afford to be sketched. We can't let someone Figma us like we Figma'd Sketch, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. And so it's certainly the thing that is top of mind for them. I look at Figma Make as a step in the right direction. I look at the audience, the distribution, the mindshare that they have. I look at the fact that Dylan is still the CEO. It's a founder-led business that has a history of execution over a decade-long period. And everything that I believe to be true is that they will be successful, and then

• 2:40:17Speaker 06

  they will be the vendor that capitalizes on this, this trend of, well, do I even need Figma? I'm just going to prototype in with a prompt, and I'm going to get my design. I think that misses some of the iterative process of the design process. And so I think it's a risk.

• 2:40:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, anybody that's arguing, like, all UI will be generated from a prompt, you can go back the other way, which is, I'll just generate designs for the software that I want, and understand how the product works, and how it flows, and all the different functionality, and then I'll just generate all the code. It can go both ways.

• 2:40:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, and market size, I mean, look, if you rewind the clock to the seed, Series A, Series B of rounds that Figma was raising, a huge reason not to do the deal was TAM. You'd say, how many designers are there in the world? What's the price point of designers willing to play? Multiply P times Q, and that's your TAM. I think, early on, what did the world get wrong? Well, it was that queue is actually higher. It's not just the designers. You're going to creep into product people. You're going to creep into engineers. And the people that are going to touch and use the product aren't just that limited set of designers. I think the same thing is going to happen with AI. Right? Now, all of a sudden, you are going to increase the scope and increase the surface area of the types of people and the personas who can interact with Figma. And the same way you're seeing with the coding solutions.

• 2:41:40Speaker 06

  Right? Maybe the right way to think about the TAM for a windsurf, for a cursor, isn't 20 bucks a month, because that's what GitHub charges, times number of engineers in the world, and software engineers. Maybe it's the average salary of a software engineer times the number of software engineers. Those are two vastly different numbers. And I think when we look at how that applies to Figma today, if they get this shift right, it will massively expand the personas and the type of people who can and will access and pay for Figma.

• 2:42:12John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 2:42:12Speaker 06

  Very well said.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on. This is really helpful.

• 2:42:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, this was fun.

• 2:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon, and let's look at the other 80 companies.

• 2:42:21Speaker 06

  Let's do it.

• 2:42:22Jordi Hays?

  That you track.

• 2:42:23Speaker 06

  I think Figma, just process-wise, they're supposed to price on Wednesday, trade next Thursday. So they're on the road, talking to investors like us, and excited for their debut on Thursday.

• 2:42:33John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 2:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Maybe finally own a piece of the Figma.

• 2:42:36Speaker 06

  I texted Dylan, and I told him that exact same thing. I'll finally become a shareholder.

• 2:42:40Jordi Hays?

  No longer the white whale.

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for hopping on and breaking it down for us. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:42:45Speaker 06

  See ya.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Harper Carroll coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. Hope we are waiting one minute. Let me see. Let me tell you about...

• 2:42:59John Coogan?

  The... We already...

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Timeline.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  Timeline. Wait, we have the bucket pullback.

• 2:43:05Jordi Hays?

  We've got Harper here.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Oh, we have Harper.

• 2:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Harper. Welcome to the show.

• 2:43:09Speaker 07

  Hi, Julian and John. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Would you mind introducing yourself? And there's a bunch of things that I want to talk about, but I'll let you kick it off with an intro on yourself.

• 2:43:18Speaker 07

  Okay, I am Harper. I run Harper Carroll AI, so I'm an AI educator. I'm a machine learning engineer. That's my background. I have two degrees in computer science and engineering specializing in AI from Stanford. Then I was at Meta building machine learning systems there for about four years. Then I was at a GPU environment, cloud environments development startup that where I became head of AI, I actually started teaching AI there. And that's how this all kind of was born. But I also TA'd when I was at Stanford some core AI PhD courses. And yeah, that company was acquired by Nvidia and I just teach AI now full time. I started on X with fine tuning guides.

• 2:44:01Speaker 07

  So you might, if you've seen me before on X, it's probably from that. I started in late 2023 with like fine tuning, open source model guides with your own data or with hugging face data, you know, coding guides, Jupiter notebooks. And then went to Instagram and have been there and kind of reaching towards YouTube and starting there with Q and A's and yeah, just kind of seeing where this goes.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's been the bigger news in your world? The IMO gold medal competition between OpenAI and Google? Or GPT agents or something else in the world of AI? There's a new news story every day. What's been capturing your attention?

• 2:44:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's a new news story every single day. I actually saw one recently. What were they saying? That reasoning models, well, the major AI companies are coming together and saying that they want to make sure that reasoning models stay open and that we continue to see their thought processes. So that kind of research, I also saw really interesting research from Anthropic that said that reasoning models are not actually necessarily showing us what we think that they're thinking. So for example,

• 2:45:14Speaker 07

  Anthropic gave a reasoning model a question and it kept getting it wrong. And then they gave it a hint and and the model got it right. But when you looked at the trace, the chain of thought from the reasoning model, it didn't mention the hint. So we think that we're actually seeing its reasoning, but not necessarily. So there needs to be a lot more work on this, but but yeah, some of the cool research stuff. And and yeah, there's always new new tech coming out. OpenAI's agent, very exciting stuff. For Punch These Browser.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Do you do you expect, we've been, we've been testing agent. John was testing it over the weekend. I was testing it on the show earlier. Do you expect an explosion of consumer use cases in the way that everybody? I mean, it's hard to build a product that's more viral than like the initial chat GPT products. But do you, are you expecting there to be like specific use cases that that come out of that? And are you seeing any that that that are super promising?

• 2:46:15Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I I feel like I was, I I advise companies as well on their AI. And I feel like I was kind of early to say, you know, there was a wave maybe about a year ago where people were saying, oh, you know, rapper companies are BS. You're a loser if you make a rapper company. But I think I was one of the earlier ones to say like, no, actually, you can't really compete with these, you know, foundational open source models. And yes, if you want to do a small specialized model, I think we'll see a lot more of those. I don't think we need these massive foundation models that know everything about the world for very specialized tasks. So I think we'll start to see more of those. But one consumer use case that I'm really, really excited about is using AI for kids. I think both of you guys have kids, right?

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:46:55Speaker 07

  Do you use it with your kids at all yet? At least large language models specifically like chat GPT.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Usually when I want to violate. Intellectual property rules. And I want to create a story where Spider-Man, who's a Disney IP, interacts with Batman from Warner Brothers. Oh, good.

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Sitting on a transformer.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And so I find that I find that all the large language models are happy to write poetry that completely disregards the cinematic universes, which I have a lot of fun with, and then sometimes illustrate them.

• 2:47:28Jordi Hays?

  I always thought that these form factors, the Avi's friend.com.

• 2:47:33John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  The the Rab.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  The Rabbit R1.

• 2:47:37Jordi Hays?

  I always thought that those were something that if you just focus on the kid use case, which is like a friend that can help you understand the world, that maybe a parent can kind of like call into.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:47:48Jordi Hays?

  Would be would be cool. But but yeah.

• 2:47:51John Coogan?

  It just hasn't really, yeah, yeah. So how does this actually roll out? What are you excited about? Is it going to be all sold in through the through the parents and the parents will be using the product? And then kind of like giving the result to the kid? Like, I feel like I feel like my son got an AI-generated like story, like gifted to him over Christmas, but it wasn't it wasn't like he is, you know, using an LLM directly. At the same time, there's that news that OpenAI is partnering with Mattel for kind of like a ChatGPT Barbie. That's kind of interesting.

• 2:48:23Speaker 07

  Well, what I'm most excited about is using large language models for kids in terms of like audio. So so kids are, as I'm sure you know, I don't know how old your kids are, but they are relentlessly curious.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:48:35Speaker 07

  Until that's kind of beaten out of them. And I think so many parents now are single parents or they're working two jobs. And, you know, we've really demonized screen time. And I think for for good reason, right? Where you're when you're sitting, when you have a kid sitting in front of a screen and they're just passively consuming, that's really different than when they're able to interact with an AI model. They're able to think, ask questions, practice forming questions that are, you know, comprehensible to the model. The model can give feedback on the language. You know, if they're asking a question, it can show up as text. They can learn to read and write as they are. Talking to the model because as they speak and the text shows up on screen, they're they're actually like that process is built in of understanding language to text, which will help again with reading and writing. And these models, I think they can be offered to everyone for free because

• 2:49:21Speaker 07

  you don't need a a super advanced model for kits. Like you just need to have some general understanding of the world. It's you really just need like a probabilistic word generator machine, which is just how AI models are at their core. And yes, you should, you know, we might want to have some guardrails around hallucination and making sure that they're like actual facts, which would you know, maybe perhaps make the models more expensive because you have to hook it up to Sure. you know, databases or what, you know, the internet or what have you. But these very basic AI models to help kids practice speaking, to help them engage their curiosity. Because again, parents are busy. They eventually end up, kids come to their parents and they eventually end up

• 2:50:04Speaker 07

  losing that curiosity. And I'm not saying I think this is a very controversial opinion. Some people hear this and they say, oh, you know, AI is going to replace human interaction. I don't see that at all. And I actually have reached out to my audience on Instagram asking how they use AI and the ones who use it have found it extremely rewarding. Some some use it with their kids. So for example, like um, if they want to practice learning with their kid, but they're worried that they won't know the answer to a question, they can have AI kind of in the chat with them. And they can ask AI when they have a question. Some parents reached out to me and said that um, they have a nine year old and a twelve year old and that AI is kind of like this cool older sister. So they have the audio gay, this, you know, twenty year old girl and they're like they, she is the cool older sister that helps them

• 2:50:48Speaker 07

  um, discuss topics that they wouldn't listen to their quote unquote dumb parents about, like nutrition and exercise and screen time and like they love this AI. It's this cool older sister. Um, another really cool uh, application of AI that I saw recently, I was at Valtech World and I saw this AI bot called Norby. It's a physical robot. And he was made to help a child with his speech impediment. And this hit close to home for me because my little sister, she's four years younger than me and when she was like going on eight, she had, she couldn't say her Rs. She would say like hopo and she was like, you know, a kid and she had this speech impediment and we would send her to a speech therapist and they're so expensive and the kid is miserable and

• 2:51:32Speaker 07

  they're sitting with this therapist for like max two to three hours at a time. And you know, they don't relate to this strange adult. And again, it's so expensive. Whereas this Norby Bot was made to talk to the kid about what they're interested in, truly completely customizable at their level. It's fun. They can give the feedback. And then I think they've expanded this Norby Bot to be, um, to help teach languages in general. And so just again, meeting kids where they're at with what they're interested in, helping stoke that flame of curiosity, helping, I just see it as, and again, I mean, it's this, this ultimate democratizer. It's the, the ultimate leveller in terms of education, right? And so

• 2:52:11Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine, I can imagine a hardware device. So, so my, uh, three-year-old is hopelessly addicted to reading, like all day long, all like great, great addiction to have, but like all day long, just no matter what we're doing throughout the day, he'll find a book and he'll be like, read this, read this, read this. And, and we, uh, almost always indulge, but you could imagine a hardware device that uses just computer vision to like read what's on the page and have a small speaker read it out to the kid.

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Because some books, they, they include like a speaker and you can like press play on it and they can flip through it, but then you get

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  You're talking about wonder books.

• 2:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Wonder books. But they, they can often get out of sync and then you don't know kind of where they are and they're in the wrong page and it's confusing. But if they had a flashlight style device that you could just point at the word and have it read out, they would probably learn to read like at a very, very young age.

• 2:53:02John Coogan?

  It feels like we should be entering like a boom of widgets and like Christmas gifts and like, it's just maybe, maybe we're just a little bit early in this stuff. This Christmas will be dominated by AI-enabled stuff, but

• 2:53:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, uh, one question I have is how, uh, like the, the X audience really woke up to the AI psychosis kind of crisis last week. I feel like there had been some reporting in like the New York Times prior to that, but I don't think anybody took it super seriously until recently.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  But most parents would not want their kids 7,000 prompts deep in any LLM right now.

• 2:53:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but, but just how aware is like the, the Instagram?

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

• 2:53:39Jordi Hays?

  In terms of the risks of going, you know, recursive prompting and just going super, super deep and and getting down a crazy rabbit hole by yourself.

• 2:53:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I haven't spoken about that specifically on Instagram. I talked a little bit about it in my latest YouTube. Q and A video where I was just saying, you know, I I'm concerned about people entering psychosis and. You know, the the recursive deep dive. That is one element. Then there's also people who, and I think this is more common on, you know, say Instagram, where people think that. AI is being channeled, is like God is being channeled through AI. And, you know, I talked about it through a mathematical lens of like, yes, okay, what are synchronicities? They're low probability events. And technically, AI, because it's a probability machine, could have a low probability event occur, right? It doesn't always choose the most likely word. It just samples from probability distribution.

• 2:54:31Speaker 07

  So in some ways, yes, you could have some kind of synchronicity. You could have, whether you see that as divine, whatever. However, you cannot assume that that is always the case, and I would assume that it's never the case. Because people are entering this deep psychosis where. Yeah, they they think that beings are are channeling through them and then and then when we had this issue where. AI is is trained and told, I don't know if it's trained to, but it's at least symptom prompt, uh, system prompt told to. You know, encourage the user and and validate the user and their thinking and. Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a slippery slope and perhaps something I should talk more about on Instagram, especially given what happened last week.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it's the the thing that's concerning to me is it is it feels like it can trigger the same type of psychotic break that. Ayahuasca can, except it's available to everybody on their device. In five minutes.

• 2:55:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:55:26Jordi Hays?

  At all hours of the day.

• 2:55:27Speaker 07

  Completely.

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  It's like a lot of large numbers. If there's a billion people using this thirty minutes a day, like you just. You you're just gonna hit everyone that's at risk for this thing very quickly. So you have to go in and figure out how to intervene before people get thousands of.

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think it's important. I I think it's something that we can quickly, like, create guardrails.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:55:48Jordi Hays?

  And overcome as an industry, but at the same time, it's still a good time to say like. Talk to your loved ones if you have somebody that that you think might be months and months into one of these rabbit holes.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it gets into like how the product companies and kids, kids AI education companies would need to message because well, Jordy and I are both Yodo owners, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but it's a it's essentially a Bluetooth connected radio that you can physically put a card in and it will read you a Dr. Seuss story and then you can take that card out. So it like a three year old can can use it and it doesn't have a UI or anything, but then you can play stuff from your phone if you want as an adult, but you can even do like volume limits. It's very like designed and it has a nice harness around it. So it's very safe. But if they were like, hey, we're, we're launching an LLM, I would be like, okay, which model? Like, tell me which model. Tell me exactly the guardrails.

• 2:56:46John Coogan?

  Grok heavy and there's no limits on what you can do. And yeah, and it doesn't have internet access. So it might get kind of wild with what's in the way it's there. Yeah. So I would, I would have a lot of questions, but then I'm in this weird like ultra prosumer world where I'd be buying that as a consumer, but I deeply so like, like maybe we need like an FDA label on this or some sort of, you know, kind of like, you know, ages three plus or when you got the Legos, it's like 100 pieces, like the smallest piece is small enough that a toddler could choke on it. Maybe don't buy that one. There's going to be a lot of work to get done to make these products palatable because as soon as something goes wrong with AI, there's a massive incentive to write a piece about it. And it's going to go viral because everyone's kind of expecting it because we've been raised on the Terminator, unless you're Jordy and you haven't seen that movie.

• 2:57:32Speaker 07

  Oh, interesting. I mean, you could probably just, you could train a model for kids.

• 2:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think so. And then you could also have like a secondary model, like reading everything and kind of like passing through a filter and double checking and

• 2:57:47Speaker 07

  you look at, you limit the training data. You don't have it trained on Reddit things or websites.

• 2:57:53John Coogan?

  Even Google search, Google AI powered search, which is like a pretty, it's a one, it only, you don't really chat with it. It just, you type in a couple of keywords and it just gives you an AI summary and there's already hallucinations people saying like there was that story about eating glue and there was a story about um there was a story about like if you if you ask it like really definitively like define this axiom or like like tell me the story of this thing and you just basically talk it into believing that this is a thing it'll just make up stuff and that could go off the rails like I don't know if I'd want my four year old walking around being like oh yes the parable of you know like the something or other and I'm like what are you talking about dude like that is not a real thing like

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  like you know it just coming up with like you know I want him to learn a bird isn't a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush not like you know a hat applied to a crystal ball is a diamond and I'm like what are you talking about like you just learn that from somewhere okay anyway

• 2:58:46Speaker 07

  no I I it's really good feedback because it's something that I'm thinking a lot about because I'm really excited about AI for kids but

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  well you'll probably be fully employed because I think everyone is going to be starting these companies hopefully it's a bull market in Christmas gifts

• 2:58:59Jordi Hays?

  or build one yourself

• 2:59:00John Coogan?

  yeah yeah

• 2:59:01Speaker 07

  yeah no I'm definitely thinking about it because yeah

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  but yeah

• 2:59:04Jordi Hays?

  we'll join it we'll happily join the beta

• 2:59:06John Coogan?

  we will

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  we'll use our children as guinea pigs for the AI revolution

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  well well we will test it on Tyler our intern first make sure it's him he looks up because he's programming right now sorry you're you're not on camera Tyler uh but we will but we will be testing children's toys on you and seeing if it deranges you and then making sure and then only then will it be applied to the the three and four year olds in our lives uh he's caught on camera I've been embarrassed uh thank you so much for hopping on Harper this is fantastic

• 2:59:33Jordi Hays?

  yeah great chatting

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  we will talk to you soon

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  come back on again soon

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  have a great one bye up next we have Nikita single ready uh good friend of mine Fortuna Health got a little news she's in the restream waiting room let's bring her in Nikita how are you doing

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  sorry we're late

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  sorry we're late we're running late today great to hang out with you Welcome to the stream. Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction. Who are you? What do you do?

• 2:59:59Speaker 08

  I'm Nikita. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Fortuna Health. We're TurboTax for Medicaid. So I can go into what that means, but much like how TurboTax helps people understand their taxes, all the different rules and regulations for taxes in different states. We're doing the same thing for government health coverage where all the rules are different in every state. And I'm really excited to be here, excited to support the ratio, one woman, two men, inspiring little girls everywhere that you can achieve your big dream, which is being on DVPN.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:00:33Jordi Hays?

  There we go. It's great to have you. You have news today?

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down.

• 3:00:37Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  John, you want to do the honors? I will do the honors.

• 3:00:41Speaker 08

  Yes. So we announced our Series A led by Andreessen today, which we're

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  How much?

• 3:00:48Jordi Hays?

  How much? There we go.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Fantastic. Wait, so give us the backstory. When did you start the company? Was there, was there like a specific insight that you had or like, I imagine you're be kind of crazy if you weren't using a lot of AI to do this, but so maybe there was a catalyst there? How did it come together?

• 3:01:12Speaker 08

  Yeah. So two and a half years ago, we started working on this problem. And I think one of the crazy things about a lot of healthcare is that you look at it from an outsider's perspective and someone else, every time we talk about this idea, they say, why wasn't there a TurboTax for Medicaid? Like when I shared the analogy earlier, it seemed like, of course, someone should have built this five years ago, eight years ago, but nobody had, shockingly. So as we were looking at ideas to build, and particularly we wanted to build a big, we want to solve a big problem, but specifically a tech problem in healthcare. There's a lot of stuff like physician shortages, right? That's a different sort of problem to solve or helping people find and get connected

• 3:01:55Speaker 08

  to a behavioral health clinician. That's a different sort of problem. We looked at, is there a big, important consumer tech to be built here and then triangulated on to this? And Jordi, we do use AI, but it's not the core part of our product. I would say the big part is helping guide people step by step through what's a really scary, challenging process for folks, processes that sometimes involve taxes or going

• 3:02:21Speaker 08

  In person, right, to the healthcare version of the DMV for Medicaid? So that's our

• 3:02:26Jordi Hays?

  If you like, if you like, if you like the DMV, if you love the DMV, you're gonna love healthcare by the same people that brought you the DMV. The absolute legends.

• 3:02:37John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the, the different counterparties and people involved. There's traditional insurance companies. It sounds like in this case, you're dealing with the government. Are doctors an important piece of this? Is it just direct to consumer? How do you acquire those customers? How do you make money from them?

• 3:02:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, good question. So every state has their own Medicaid program. So if you're in California, it's called Medi-Cal. If you're in Oregon, has, has a different name. In Pennsylvania, Medicaid is called Medical Assistance. So every state has its own program and then multiple programs there under. And then some of those states outsource that work of running the Medicaid program to insurance companies. So you have United Medicaid, Centene Medicaid, Elevance, AMP Medicaid, et cetera. So a lot of our customers are those insurance companies to make it easier for their members to understand the steps that they have to take to enroll and renew. So we're not D to C, we're more B to B to C, if that makes sense.

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  Makes sense. What, what about customer acquisition? How do you actually get people on board?

• 3:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Full 18 million on three Super Bowl ads.

• 3:03:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, hell yeah. So mostly we get texted out or like listed on the website or we get emailed out. So it's really easy. You just click a link that, let's say, a health plan, health plan, TBPN. You're, you're insured by TBPN Medicaid. And they send you a link saying, hey, you need to renew your New York or your Illinois Medicaid. Click here so that you can stay renewed with TBPN Medicaid. And so that's how people would get access to Fortuna that way.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. Wait, so, yeah, how, how do the employers fit in? Because I feel like a lot of Medicaid users or, or the, the insured folks on Medicaid are like, it's, it felt, it always felt like it was independent from the, from the corporation that they work for. Is, is that not the case?

• 3:04:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, it kind of is. So you don't get it through like your job, let's say.

• 3:04:37John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 3:04:37Speaker 08

  Usually because your job doesn't cover

• 3:04:39John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Your job doesn't cover. Got it. And then you go on Medicaid. Got it. So you're getting it through them.

• 3:04:45Speaker 08

  Yep, yep.

• 3:04:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And then, and then how do you actually get paid?

• 3:04:49Speaker 08

  Great question. So the same insurance company as I was mentioning earlier, or hospitals, let's say, let's say you come in and you don't have insurance.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:04:57Speaker 08

  And so they say, hey, do you want to try or use Fortuna to help you get Medicaid? So those are the two types of entities that that pay for us.

• 3:05:04John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, what is the state of the fax machine in the medical insurance industry? We've heard it's alive and well, but it also feels like it's gotta be wrapped with APIs at this point. Are they wrapped? Are they wrapped at this point?

• 3:05:17Speaker 08

  You know that that meme from the, why am I forgetting the name of the movie? Where they throw the fax machine on the ground and everyone's like.

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  That's office space. Don't worry, Jordy hasn't seen it. I actually have seen that. Oh, you have? That's, that's, that's one of my dad's favorite movies. One of the five movies you've seen. Great.

• 3:05:32Speaker 08

  Exactly. Healthcare, you're right, has been keeping faxes alive for a really long time. There's so many stupid and silly reasons for that. A lot of it is you can't even, if you're, let's say, the state government. Sometimes you're not allowed to procure a new contract with a non-fax company. So you've been living on Xerox for 30 years because it's that hard sometimes to contract with the government. But yes, people are wrapping, we're wrapping around automating faxes, tracking those faxes, et cetera. So we sort of have like a bunch of different automations around, are we submitting things to fax machines? Are we submitting them via snail mail?

• 3:06:15Speaker 08

  Are we submitting them to digital portals, email, et cetera? And then tracking all of that because some different types of Medicaid accept different submission formats. But absolutely, fax is alive and well.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Are you going state by state or trying to do all 50 at once? Like, what are the trade offs there? Is there a common pattern? I remember a lot of the telehealth companies needed to get their, their doctors certified in different states. And so there was actually another company called Medallion that was set up just to do doctor licensing in all 50 states. What's the actual rollout and what are the considerations there?

• 3:06:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we are largely going state by state as we roll out with new customers. But the classic thing is when you get really good at a state, like we have a lot of customers in New York. We started getting more customers in New York because we got good at New York. So it's more like. Patchwork sequencing, like absolutely, we want to go to all fifty-six, uh, in case you didn't know, uh, state and territory Medicaid, yes.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  What are the last six? Break it down.

• 3:07:15Speaker 08

  The others are like Guam and Central America, islands.

• 3:07:20John Coogan?

  Oh, the islands?

• 3:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna visit, are you gonna visit all six? I feel like you gotta make the.

• 3:07:25John Coogan?

  You gotta expense that.

• 3:07:26Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 3:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, every entrepreneur's gotta go to Delaware and just take it in, you know?

• 3:07:31Speaker 08

  I need to do like, you know how Zuck, when he wanted to sort of run for president, I need travel to. We have to do that. I gotta do that at some point.

• 3:07:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Um, what, what else is, um, obviously, you, you, you follow the industry broadly. What else is interesting in healthcare in AI? Where, where, where are you either partnering with existing companies? Or you see some low hanging fruit that if you weren't building this, you'd be, you kind of see it on the roadmap of someone else? Or you see some like white space where you're like, wow, that's a really unsolved problem. I'm busy, but that's interesting.

• 3:08:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, um, I mean, there's a ton of low hanging fruit. I would say there's a lot of people that are doing conversion of in the way that somebody writes a doctor's note, that needs to be written up in a very specific way inside the EHR. That needs to be written up and converted in a very specific way to how, you know, insurance companies convert and accept that information. I still think that there's a tremendous amount just to be done in that space.

• 3:08:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:08:28Speaker 08

  Um, I think that obviously voice AI is just in its infancy, honestly. Um, especially because you need to get more specialized for each field. So I'd say there's a lot that you could do, um, and can be done in that space. And I'm really bullish on AI nurses. Like clearly we have a doctors and nursing shortage. Like that's obviously a problem that has not been solved by policy. I'm perfectly fine getting my care, particularly, you know, low level, low acuity care by an AI. That's probably much better than a doctor who has, or a nurse who has no time to see me. I'm just, you know, coming in, coming out, I'm one of a hundred people that day. I think there's still a huge opportunity there.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, or even just someone who's like, there can still be a human in the loop, but they're, like, you're chatting with an AI. And then at the end of the day, the doctor kind of looks through, okay, they made seven different recommendations. I have most of the context. I can just see that nothing went crazy off the rails.

• 3:09:22Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 3:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side. And I'm curious if it came up during the fundraiser or how you guys think about it. But I can imagine a world in the future where somebody would go to ChatGPT agent and they would say, I need to sign up for Medicaid. Help me do it. And then it just starts going, you know, goes and spends 15 minutes and figures out the steps and things like that. And then eventually could take action. Do you worry about that as like a competition? Well, I'm sure you don't worry because you're a killer, but do you think about that as like a competitive vector? Are there reasons why that's just like gonna be an edge case that for many, many, many years is like not something that, you know, a general agent would be able to do? How do you think about it?

• 3:10:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a good question. I think it solves like 30% of the problem, which is, okay, what website should I go to to do this? But then you run into problem number one, which is what happens if you forgot your password from four years ago? AI can't really solve that, you know, problem number one. And then let's say second problem, maybe you were the child and your parent had the Medicaid. So now you actually have to split your account from a prior account. So all of these interesting weird problems that, yeah, if you put like the Medicaid rule manual through AI, sure, you could get high level steps, but it doesn't solve these very real world tangible problems that only get solved from building this TurboTax experience

• 3:10:46Speaker 08

  that can connect into state systems or know where you need to go to route those types of, I wouldn't even call them edge case. It's just all of the complexities that get wrapped up and compounded are people's real world scenarios. So definitely AI solves 30% of what is the basic rules, but that long tail stuff of, okay, I switched my job three days ago. How exactly am I supposed to report that? But now the state has a new backline that nobody has listed publicly.

• 3:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:11:14Speaker 08

  I can't solve that, but we can.

• 3:11:16Jordi Hays?

  That makes total sense. Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the team on the raise.

• 3:11:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, thank you. Wait, if I have one minute, I want to share some receipts from 2022. When I sent John a message. So Jordy, I think this might have been before you were involved, but I said, "Hey, John, props to the storytelling work you're publishing on YouTube. I think most people we know are still sleeping on YouTube's reach."

• 3:11:41Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:11:42Speaker 08

  October 12, 2022, and he said, "Hey, thanks. It's crazy. I've been pulling it over a million views per month, but no one has really noticed. Look at you now."

• 3:11:51Jordi Hays?

  No one noticed. Yeah, John basically created technology YouTube.

• 3:11:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:11:56Jordi Hays?

  He's, you know, the godfather of it.

• 3:11:58John Coogan?

  Created content, really.

• 3:12:00Jordi Hays?

  He created content.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  Created content. Literally, that's content creator.

• 3:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Created storytelling.

• 3:12:04John Coogan?

  Created content.

• 3:12:05Speaker 08

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:12:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, it's great to have you on.

• 3:12:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:12:09Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys. See you later.

• 3:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:12:10John Coogan?

  Goodbye. And we have our bucket poll back. If you've been watching from the early days, we used to put random posts in a bucket, pull them out.

• 3:12:24Jordi Hays?

  I'll take one.

• 3:12:24John Coogan?

  Do you want one? Can we talk about it? What's this one?

• 3:12:27Jordi Hays?

  "People now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device. An average of more than 1 billion hours each day."

• 3:12:37John Coogan?

  1 billion hours a day.

• 3:12:38Jordi Hays?

  This is from a journal article, "How YouTube Won the Battle for TV Viewers." Not surprising to me. I mean, it's been in this case for a while that like a lot of, if you're people that are YouTubers, I obviously had been in the industry for a long time, just have like such a large amount of their viewers coming in on TV. So TV, Lindy, apparently.

• 3:12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were talking about this with David Center, like what podcasts do you watch on TV? It's pretty rare, but I was telling him like, there are like these big events that happen on podcasts every once in a while where like everyone has to watch it.

• 3:13:15John Coogan?

  I mean, the biggest example from last year was like during the campaign when Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan. And I think a hundred million people watched that. I bet a lot of people watched that on TV. They sat down and watched the whole thing because that is such a critical conversation.

• 3:13:28Jordi Hays?

  They didn't just watch, they sat there, they sat down and listened.

• 3:13:33John Coogan?

  But, but, but that type of thing, you're talking about someone who's like on the campaign trail that might really affect your life one way or another. Like the subtle intonations of like how people respond to something that like the facial, like you're going to want to see the whole experience. And so, but yeah, makes a ton of sense that would be thrown on the TV.

• 3:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have another post here from Mads. This is an exchange, somebody saying, name your favorite quote by a celebrity. And I think we've read this on the show.

• 3:14:00John Coogan?

  It's a great one.

• 3:14:01Jordi Hays?

  But it's an all-timer. So Playboy is asking Nicolas Cage. Your salary is shooting up to, up into the multi-millions per movie, reportedly four to seven million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? Nicolas Cage, I don't chuckle. I have respect for the dollar. And I think that is a great philosophy for, for, for money.

• 3:14:23John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. Do you want to do more timeline?

• 3:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, some big aviation news. Flexjet, uh, this is coming from Preston Holland. Flexjet raises 800 million from Bernard Arnault, valuing the company at 4 billion. So let's give it up for private aviation.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:14:44Jordi Hays?

  And Preston is saying, well, we see LV interiors on Flexjet airplanes.

• 3:14:48John Coogan?

  That would be very interesting collab. I mean, I'm sure that they're already done in the third party and, but not OEM. Maybe you get one from the factory. You know, these collabs happen in the car world every once in a while. Why not in the private jet world, I suppose?

• 3:15:02Jordi Hays?

  And then here, I do this one in ad from Nike with Scotty Scheffler.

• 3:15:08John Coogan?

  This is cool.

• 3:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I just thought this was good. This is Nike at its best. If we can pull this up. You've already won, but another major never hurt. And, uh, this is, this is Nike at its best. None of these D to C ads. I don't want to see UGC. Just give me some, some inspiration.

• 3:15:25John Coogan?

  In spout.

• 3:15:27Jordi Hays?

  This was interesting. Mert highlighted this and said, "This having a quarter million likes is a good reminder that the average person has no idea how the world works in any way." And so Antonio Brown.

• 3:15:41John Coogan?

  Oh, this is AB. Oh, I didn't realize it was AB.

• 3:15:44Jordi Hays?

  There's basically a post that says, "Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Chief People Officer Christian Cabot have been immediately put on leave." And AB says, "If he's the CEO, then who put him on leave?" And it got 250,000 likes.

• 3:15:59John Coogan?

  That's a lot of likes.

• 3:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, people think that all CEOs are total dictators.

• 3:16:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:16:05Jordi Hays?

  And can fire but not be fired themselves. And don't realize that a board of directors.

• 3:16:12John Coogan?

  Is a thing.

• 3:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Their job.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  That exists.

• 3:16:13Jordi Hays?

  To hire and fire the CEO.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  And in fact, it was a unique, sort of a unique situation because Andy Byron was not the founder. He was a CEO brought in by the board, and so he, of course, serves the pleasure of the board. He also serves the pleasure of the shareholders. And unless you own 100% of the stock and all the board seats, like, if you gave even one share up, you could be the subject of a shareholder lawsuit because what you're doing is maybe not in the interest of the shareholders. And so, there are a bunch of different ways that he could get put on leave.

• 3:16:43Jordi Hays?

  And we got a new CEO over at Astronomer.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  Oh, we do.

• 3:16:47Jordi Hays?

  Astronomer.

• 3:16:48John Coogan?

  Astronomer.

• 3:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Pete DeJoy.

• 3:16:50John Coogan?

  Pete DeJoy.

• 3:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Said, "Over the weekend, I stepped into the role of interim CEO, a company that I've proudly poured my entire professional life into helping build." And he goes into why he stepped in, which, of course, everybody knows. But seems like a solid company. We know some companies that leverage Astronomer's platform.

• 3:17:10John Coogan?

  Apache airflow is no joke. You don't want to be not managing that. You don't want to be running that installation and infrastructure yourself. This is not a promoted post for them, but they are.

• 3:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Zoomer has a post here. I don't know what this AST Space Mobile, Inc.

• 3:17:28John Coogan?

  ASTS, baby. People love it.

• 3:17:30Jordi Hays?

  A $20 billion space company with zero revenues.

• 3:17:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:17:35Jordi Hays?

  And this is, I'm going to add this to my top signals list.

• 3:17:40John Coogan?

  Yep, I've heard about this, I've heard about this company before. It's fantastically popular with retail traders. It is a competitor to Starlink. They haven't launched or generated revenue yet, but the narrative is if you don't want to own, if you can't own SpaceX, if you don't want to own SpaceX, you want to pure play, as they say, in the public markets. ASDS is the bet. It is a, it is a wild valuation. They have some deals, they have some press releases, they have some different irons in the fire.

• 3:18:12Jordi Hays?

  And if you invested around this time last year, you were getting close to a 5 or 6x.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  People have made a lot of money on this so far. I mean, yeah, I think it's backed at 4 billion and it's up 5x at 20 billion.

• 3:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's hope they get some satellites into the air.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's a great place to end.

• 3:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Fun show today.

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:18:34Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.

• 3:18:35John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.