Google I/O Reactions, Birth Rate Debates, Spotify's New Icon | Jim Belosic, Aidan Dewar, Fai Nur, Tanay Tandon, Ajeya Cotra, Philip Inghelbrecht

(00:09) - Google I/O Reactions (24:14) - Karpathy Joins Anthropic (28:29) - Reactions to Spotify's New Icon (33:49) - Birth Rate Debates (45:18) - Jim Belosic, CEO and founder of SendCutSend, a company specializing in on-demand manufacturing services, discusses the recent achievement of securing a $110 million investment, valuing the company at $1 billion. He shares plans to utilize the funds to expand operations, including hiring additional staff and enhancing software capabilities, aiming to establish facilities near major metropolitan areas to expedite service delivery. Belosic also highlights the company's commitment to supporting STEM education through a $1 million sponsorship program, providing resources and expertise to engineering students and educators. (01:04:18) - Aidan Dewar, co-founder and CEO of Nourish, discusses the company's mission to address chronic diseases through dietitian-led metabolic clinics that combine a vast network of registered dietitians with virtual medical care, including lab interpretations and medication management. He emphasizes the importance of pairing GLP-1 medications with behavioral changes to achieve sustainable health outcomes, noting that patients working with Nourish dietitians while on GLP-1s lost 33% more weight than those using the medication alone. Dewar also highlights the company's recent $100 million Series C funding, aimed at expanding their services and integrating AI technology to enhance patient care. (01:12:41) - Fai Nur, CEO and co-founder of Status, discusses the app's rapid growth, reaching a million users in 19 days, and its appeal to young users seeking immersive, gamified social experiences. She highlights Status's monetization through in-app purchases and subscriptions, achieving millions in annual recurring revenue and a tenfold increase in revenue in Q1 2026. Nur also addresses the platform's use of AI to create user-generated worlds, emphasizing its role in offering unique experiences that complement traditional entertainment. (01:22:57) - Tanay Tandon, CEO of Kamir, discusses the company's recent $70 million funding round at a $7 billion valuation, aimed at accelerating R&D for their language model-powered EMR platform and voice agents. He highlights the trillion-dollar administrative burden in the U. S. healthcare system and how Kamir's AI solutions automate tasks like claims processing and documentation to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Tandon also addresses the rapid adoption of language models in healthcare, the potential for AI to empower independent practices, and the evolving dynamics between providers and payers. (01:33:02) - Ajeya Cotra, a technical staff member at METR with a background in AI safety, discusses her role in leading the Frontier Risk Report, which assesses misalignment risks in advanced AI systems. She explains METR's mission to develop measurement tools for tracking AI capabilities and motivations, and describes the collaboration with companies like Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic to evaluate their internal models and alignment processes. Cotra also highlights the importance of establishing robust, independent auditing practices to monitor and mitigate potential risks from misaligned AI agents. (01:48:11) - Philip Inghelbrecht, a Belgian-born entrepreneur and CEO of Tatari, a company specializing in technology for TV advertising, discusses his journey from co-founding Shazam in 1999 to leading Tatari. He highlights the challenges and innovations in TV advertising, emphasizing the importance of measuring real outcomes and the integration of AI in media planning. Inghelbrecht also reflects on the evolution of TV advertising, noting the shift from traditional methods to data-driven strategies that bridge the gap between linear and streaming TV. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, May 19th, 2026. We are live from the TV panel, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Google I/O starts today and the stock is ripping. I think people might have missed this if you haven't been watching closely, but Google is up 140% in the last year. Absolute ripper. It's almost a $5 trillion company now.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was really confused what chart you're reading because it's down 1.3% today.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Today, okay. No, it is up massively.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  We think in years, decades.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And yeah, they pulled in just shy of $110 billion revenue last quarter and they're in a great position for the next era of the AI story. So GCP is growing faster than AWS and Azure. Wall Street has basically fully repriced the company as a like a full stack AI winner. That's the new narrative across Google Cloud, Google Search, Gemini, the models, DeepMind, everything that they're doing. So long gone are the concerns about Google's search's weakness because even core Google search is showing resiliency. Google Search, the business continues to grow. Queries are at an all time high. They're not reporting

• 1:22John Coogan?

  exact numbers of queries, but Sundar said that in the last call that it's at an all time high, certainly not going down. And search and other revenue, which is their bucket there, is up 19% year over year. So holding up well. And Google I/O generally offers consumers launches or previews of tons of new products. I'm getting called. Previews of tons of new products and features. And The Verge was saying that there might be some like AI fatigue, which is maybe an overstatement, given that, you know, people are getting booed. Actually, the former CEO of Google. You mean understatement? Yeah, understatement, given that the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt,

• 2:06John Coogan?

  was booed offstage at a commencement speech. And so that is a good point. But, you know, the people that watch Google I/O, the Google core consumers, they are fans of this stuff. I think they're generally pro-AI, excited about new features. Some of the new features that we'll show are very, very cool. But there is this like goal of being ambient and useful instead of pushy and desperate. Many Google experiences now have duplicative Gemini panels. And I was writing this update in a Google Doc, and I noticed that I had two Gemini stars, basically. One Gemini star in my Google Doc. And then another in the Chrome browser that I'm using to load Google Docs.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  And it's a really hilarious outcome because I was writing this in sort of like a half-window to the side of the screen. And if I open both Gemini panels, the Google Doc disappears entirely. And I'm just left with two chat boxes to interface with the Google Doc, which I don't really use AI in the actual Google Doc. I just kind of write it. But there's, you know, there's stuff it everywhere and then actually make it useful, make it ambient, make it delightful. And so that is, I think, what consumers are looking for, more than just an AI button in a new place. But they're certainly showing that already.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  And so the new Gemini video model looks incredible. We'll play some videos of that. And there will be tons of delightful experiments that may turn out to be blockbuster products, or they may get shelved by year end. That's kind of the beauty of Google's culture, is that they have plenty of opportunity for experimentation. We sort of, some people remember all the things that are in the Google graveyard. But Most people just remember Gemini and whatnot. So yeah, we can play this video with sound because the sound is-

• 3:56Speaker 02

  A V8 engine features eight cylinders, arranged in a V shape, driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth, massive- that's pure mechanical genius at work. A V8 engine features eight cylinders-

• 4:08John Coogan?

  So, I feel like this got rid- I mean, the video fidelity is incredibly high quality. There's no Six Fingers, it looks HD, the motion looks good, the lips are synced, and I feel like they got rid of that hollow sound that you used to hear in AI video, where the audio was generated alongside-

• 4:26Speaker 03

  You can still clock it, but it's a lot more subtle.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  It's really subtle. There is one weird thing in this where it says, he says, "Deliver pure, massive," and then it just cuts to the next scene if you-

• 4:37Speaker 02

  That's pure mechanical genius at work. A V8 engine features eight cylinders, arranged in a V shape, driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth, massive- that's pure mechanical genius at work.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Smooth, massive energy, smooth, massive propulsion, something like that. So like, it's crazy because you see these and you're like, "Oh, this is it." Like, it's done. Like, this is fully, fully done. And then there's just like, "Ah, we're at 99.9% now, and I want to be at 99.999%."

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Also, like, this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V6, right?

• 5:07John Coogan?

  Oh, is it? Wait, play the video again. Let's see. I want to see if it's a V6 or V8. Because when I look at those graphics, I think, okay, let's count the cylinders. Oh, yeah. No, no, it looks like an eight. It looks like eight cylinders in the back. Now, count them up. I can't really tell. But, yeah, it's odd. It's so passive. But, I don't know, is it good for video explainer channels on YouTube, bad for video explainer channels on YouTube? Certainly commoditizing the production of video explainers. I've seen a lot of these video explainers that will show you like, inside of a rocket, or inside of an RPG, or an AK-47, or a Glock, and those get like, tens of millions of views.

• 5:51John Coogan?

  They can be viewed in any language, but they're very intense from a CGI perspective. You have to go and model every little detail, every pin in- The in the weapon or whatever the object is that's being visualized in this particular video explainer, uh, close to being on command. And then the question is, where does the value sit? Does, uh, if you prompt YouTube and you ask for a video explainer of, uh, you know, a, a chair, break it down, explode it, show me the innards. Will it just do it on demand for you? Will it just generate that? Or will this still sit below the creators?

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've always had the question, at what point do you go to YouTube and there's just a series of videos waiting for you that were generated based on your interests? Right? Sometimes, sometimes, you know, you might be going to YouTube because your favorite, uh, sports team just played and you want some analysis on the game or, you know, your favorite fighter or something like that, or some news is happening. And it doesn't seem like we're that far from a future where you land on, on YouTube and YouTube is just, again, fully generated a video based on what it knows about, uh, your interests. Uh, that said, that would cause potentially a creator strike.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  Because it's YouTube starting to compete against, uh, their own, you know, content producers on the platform.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  So we'll see.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. At least in the interim, it feels like, uh, the dawn of stock footage, YouTubers have been creating these, have been using these tools for a long time. They have been getting cheaper. Even the, uh, the CGI world has become, uh, increasingly commoditized every year as you get more to templates and, uh, and the tools become cheaper. Uh, you used to have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a license of Cinema 4D or 3DS Max to render anything. Now Blender is open source and free and there are tons of Blender artists out there with, uh, custom packs. But yes, this is a new capability and, uh, it'll be interesting to see how this gets integrated, what the pushback is like, how clockable it is, once it's actually in the hands of creators and they are pushing it

• 7:59John Coogan?

  out. Um, let's watch this other, uh, science explainer from the timeline. Uh, Gemini Omni explains science with video. Thanks a lot for this, says Chetosluwa. Uh, now every student will get a custom video for the topic of science and math. I'm so happy, like while typing, I want to see all your reaction to this. I don't know. This is about photosynthesis, I think.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  As this light enters our atmosphere, it crashes into molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This triggers a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. Because gas molecules are tiny, they affect shorter wavelengths much more than longer ones. Blue light has a very short wavelength, so it's scattered in every direction, filling the sky with color. Meanwhile, longer red wavelengths pass through.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  There has been a big push on YouTube for like, as people ask questions, like, they would go to Google and say like, "How do I fix this particular washing machine?" You type in the number of the washing machine and it would take you to not just a single video about someone fixing that washing machine, but the actual section in the video with the solution to the exact problem you had. And being able to read a manual and constitute a video on the fly of exactly that is pretty incredible and you can imagine satisfies that use case very, very quickly. And then, of course, there will just be entertainment and all sorts of different use cases. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, says, "Introducing Gemini Omni.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input, starting with video." Starting with video. Think Banana Banana Bud for video. Okay. Yeah, let's play this because there's some amazing, like, different styles here going on.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  I wonder if those, if that, if that motion graphic transition was created in Omni, because that's something that would you'd normally bump out to After Effects for. Or like the edit here, I wonder, I wonder if, if, if you'll be able to upload multiple clips and have it edited together to the beat of a song that you pick, or will it be able to AI generate a video and then match the, match the footage to the, to the beat of the video? So is this, give it anything? So I think you could potentially give it a bunch of videos and it could edit it together into a vibrio, something like that. Swap style, swap environment, swap angle. They've been having a lot of fun with this.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Everyone is very, very excited about this. The other news out of Google today is Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of intelligence, speed and cost, putting 3.5 Flash in a class of its own. We spent the last six months making sure Flash is great for real-world use cases. It's the strongest agentic coding model yet from Google. It delivers frontier-level performance at 4X the speed of comparable frontier models, often at less than half the cost. So dominating the Pareto frontier has been the goal for a long time. The speed is being heralded as a key feature.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Google just showed a demo of Gemini Flash running between 600 and 1,400 tokens per second on TPU 8i. It peaked out around 1,480 talks per tokens per second with an average of around 800 tokens per second, so very, very, very, very fast. The flip side is it's more expensive than previous Flash models, but that's been the trend with smarter intelligence for a while. So investors are focused across three key areas, not so much the consumer story, more the next Gemini model, so where this fits in, and then what adoption and diffusion looks like, how Google through Google Cloud will be getting this out into enterprises, into coding agents.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Obviously, they have anti-gravity, but Gemini CLI has not seen as much traction. And so better model, might pull that forward, might wind up seeing more traction there. Overall, I think token generation at Google is up 7X year-over-year, which seems great. It's unclear how much of that is because there's more reasoning happening, but given the fact that the Gemini models are sort of stuffed all over the product surfaces, I'm not surprised that there's massive growth. That makes a lot of sense. On the core Gemini model, everyone was wondering, are we getting four? 3.5 launched, and there's a staged rollout with Flash going first. Andrew Curran had an interesting post here talking about the lack of vague posting. The DeepMind folks have not been vague posting about the new Gemini model, so he did some

• 12:39John Coogan?

  vague posting for them. He says, "At this point, everyone knows it's arriving tomorrow, along with their personal agent named Spark." This reticence, of course, can be interpreted in many ways. I'm choosing it to, I'm choosing to interpret it in accordance with my nature. I think they trained the largest model they've ever successfully trained, probably, possibly the largest one anyone ever has, and something unexpected emerged at scale. They had their Mythos moment, but not in the same way Anthropic did. Gemini has always been very, a very different model from Claude. The benchmarks will go out today, tonight, under embargo, they probably already are, but I don't think they will fully reflect what I'm talking about. I think they hit something even they weren't aiming for, something that surprised them. If I'm right, that surprise will be

• 13:22John Coogan?

  part of tomorrow's show. We shall find out together in the morning. I, I don't think tomorrow's show, because I O is a number of days and there's a whole host of different announcements that could, that could happen in the interim. There's a lot of other things going on.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Has anyone been vague posting around, will there be a 3.5 Pro?

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  This week?

• 13:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's going to happen over the course of the next few days. They just started with Flash.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay, starting with Flash. Cool. And then they also announced Bark.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is a personal agent that lives in anti-gravity.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  It's my understanding.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  And so, trying to make.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  When I hear personal agent, I think more like Gemini app, Google search, like Gmail, like the very, like the consumer product surfaces. I think, well, yes, I just think personal and I think consumer, but given how much people are using Codex Claude code for like personal like things, like just because writing code creates a more dynamic agentic surface, OpenClaw, we saw all of this. It's helpful to have something running on a MacBook Pro that can go around and find different stuff.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just some additional context. 3.5 Pro is coming out next month.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Next month?

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  So not this week.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  A little bit of a delay there. I wonder, I wonder what else is in the bag of like Mythos like surprises, because the cybersecurity one was like sort of predicted by the AI 2027. I feel like Bio is next. Like it feels like, okay, we tested a bunch of stuff and we talked to a bunch of scientists and like this thing can come up with like super viruses and it's really scary. So we got to give it to all the pharmaceutical companies in advance and like Moderna gets it and creates like anti-viruses or something like that. I don't know what else, but I'm sure there will be surprises. There always are in the AI era. So. From an investor perspective, obviously, I don't think Google I/O is necessarily the

• 15:13John Coogan?

  correct forum for discussion of a mythos-level breakthrough or surprising new emerging capabilities. I would just be surprised if that's where you stand on stage and you say, hey, we had this crazy breakthrough. It's a more serious thing if you're talking about new capabilities. But given the talent and resources of the DeepMind team, TPU, I think that there's just a lot of broad optimism about the next iteration of Gemini. They've hired a bunch of people. They have a bunch of surface areas to deploy this into. So no one's expecting the model to underperform. Agentic commerce will also be top of mind for investors since messaging around the Gemini app has sort of strayed away from advertising as an immediate monetization engine. I think Demis said that at Davos. Google has a lot of capabilities when it

• 15:58John Coogan?

  comes to closing the consumer shopping loop. They have Google Shopping. They have a bunch of hooks into all sorts of different e-commerce surfaces. They have massive product catalogs. People search for stuff on Google all the time to buy. But e-commerce customer behavior seems to be lagging expectations here generally. There's been a lot of announcements from companies around agentic shopping protocols. And the numbers, whenever we dig into them, we're always like, is it going to get to 1% this year? Are we going to see? And everyone's talking about the growth, which means we're growing from zero, obviously, because this didn't exist. But where is it going? Will Google have something to show here? Will they have some sort of demo of a new user experience, a new flow for agentic commerce

• 16:43John Coogan?

  that results in a faster takeoff of that adoption of that behavior? Personally, I've done a ton of research about products through LLMs, but I pretty much always hesitate to have AI fully process the checkout. And there's a few reasons. Like, Apple Pay is pretty good, pretty seamless. Shopify saves all my annoying info. Auto Fill is also not that bad. It's usually pretty good in whatever native, if I'm in Chrome on Mac or I'm on Safari on iPhone. It's usually pretty good. And then I feel like I still like reality checking carts before. Clicking pay. We talked to Joanna Stern about this too, where she was talking about having a having an AI agent assemble a cart of even like something like groceries, but then she will be

• 17:27John Coogan?

  the one to actually go to the hydrated final link with the cookie and then go and like validate everything before clicking pay. The last focus area for investors generally is TPU. There's been a lot of back and forth around are too many of the TPUs going to Anthropic? Are too many of them? Are they sitting idle at DeepMind? What's going on with the TPU? And how are, what are the margin structure? How is revenue booked around TPU? How is the backlog accounted for? These are questions that investors on Wall Street are asking. I don't think we'll get answers at I O, but investors will be watching for anything that sort of contextualizes the shape of Google's TPU business and their plans over the next few years. And so, as I mentioned yesterday on the show, we had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern

• 18:12John Coogan?

  from thenewthings.com and the author of I Am Not A Robot. And we had lots of fun takes about like the AI tools that I think most of us have interacted with. Everyone's used agents. Everyone's sort of felt what it's like to talk to a chatbot. But one place where she went deeper than I think most consumers and like AI fans have is in the wearables because she was wearing that recording device consistently. And she maintains that like, humanoids are farther away. You need a lot more training data. The AI chat apps are here. We already know they're diffused. Waymo is now boring. But the next big wave she's sort of predicting is in the next few years, wearables will have like a big moment and everyone will be sort of adopting these and contending with them.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  And it is interesting how, you know, we talk about a capability overhang in the enterprise with AI deployments. And that's why the big labs are partnering with consulting firms and private equity groups to get AI installed into large corporations. There's even more of a capability overhang in consumer hardware. Apple iterates extremely methodically. You know, they made a big story about Apple Intelligence. Was that just one year ago? I guess that was one year ago because WWDC is in a few weeks. But

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Feels like longer than that. They had, I just remember they did a global billboard campaign for Apple Intelligence.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  But anyway, like the actually changing anything in hardware takes Apple a long time. They still haven't launched a folding phone like they they they take their time to deliver a great product at the right time. And then if you're a challenger and you just want to manufacture new devices at scale, that takes years to ramp up. And then you also have to, you know, distribute, sell. It's not one click away. It's go to the store or wait and wait for the mail. And then hardware decisions that get made around certain AI workflows can potentially be obsolete in months as the underlying technology changes. So you could divide, you could build a device that assumes that, you know, L L M's are the end state and then reasoning models come and you're not set up for that potentially. On device compute could change.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  It's unclear. And so you you don't want to get walked locked in these things. And you were talking about the humane AI pin, how that maybe could have been successful at Apple. Even the R one, I think like.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, my my main point was that if that was an internal project at a bigger company just showing like a potential future state for consumer hardware.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  It would have been an amazing demo.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  And probably been able to receive more funding at, let's say, a hyperscaler.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  As a standalone company.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Sales come in, people don't like the product.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  And then nobody's willing to give them more money.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you look at how many shots on goal Mark Zuckerberg has taken with the Meta Ray Band displays and Meta Ray Bands like that was something that I I would be surprised if you look back at the R and D cost, the manufacturing cost, the early sales figures of the version one of the Meta Ray Bands and and it's off to the races. Like he clearly said, you know what? I'm going to double down on this for years. We're going to continue to invest in this, get this to a place where it can actually become known, become a product that people consider. When I show them another ad, they'll consider it because they've seen it, maybe they've tried it, maybe they've, I went skiing with someone who had a pair and they were talking, they're sending text messages. And so just familiar familiarity with the product takes time.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  And Google's had some fun swings at these like preview emerging hardware platforms. Google Glass, I mean, way ahead of it. It's time. We're now there with the Meta Ray-Ban displays, but even those are not selling by the millions and millions. They're very early stage. Google Cardboard, I don't know if you remember that one. This is, you put your phone in a cardboard box that they send you and then you can put it on your face and use it as a VR headset.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a tiny little, I think it was open source, just like a fun preview of like, how do we get more people to be able to watch 3D stereoscopic, you know, VR type content?

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  A little experiment of how can we strap someone's phone to their face?

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  And serve them at.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  And then they also did the Samsung Galaxy.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  At point blank range.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Which was, yeah, you'd slot it into like a piece of hardware, but much cheaper than buying an Oculus at the time. Fitbit also sort of fits in there. There were previews of the new Google Book and the Fitbit from last week. And I'm excited about the possibility of a new swing from Google, like being like the wild card headline that makes it out of I/O this year. So, anyway, are there any other Google I/O posts? I mean, like the, the, the actual conference is going on as we're doing the stream. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are announcements hitting the timeline right now.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, people are pulling some of the benchmarks, comparing it on the AI Artificial Analysis Coding Index.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Lisan Algaib says, 3.5 flash scores kind of low on coding index due to rough terminal bench hard scores. So I think the big question coming out of I/O today is how do developers respond to the updates to anti-gravity to 3.5 flash? The speed is amazing. We know how much people care about that in, in just like day-to-day coding. But the model has to be able to perform. So we'll see what people's reactions are and we'll see if, we'll see if Google can really start to ramp revenue on, on the Coogan side or still get exposure to that through Anthropic. It did come out yesterday that Demis is an angel in Anthropic himself.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  And I don't, not, not super surprising, although less pushback.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, when did they meet? I wonder what the story is there, how, how early he got in. He might be sitting on a bag.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Well, who else is going to Anthropic? Andre Karpathy has gone from OpenAI to Tesla to Anthropic. I think he went back to OpenAI at one point in there. And Andre, a different account, is pointing out this KMT general who defected and subsequently betrayed five different countries in Asia, ending in Japan, jumping around. He's seen it all. Certainly the world tour of AI labs. I guess Andre Karpathy was never inside of XAI because he was sort of the precursor at Tesla.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Elon, he was poached by Elon.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Did he work at Google at some point? I feel like he might have been at Google before OpenAI. I don't know. I know that there were some people that got, maybe it was Ilya.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  So he interned there.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  He interned there, so he's been everywhere.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  He was a PhD.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  He's got the Thanos rings.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  Huge pickup and excited to see what they do together. He's apparently, according to Alex Heath, going to be working on basically RSI.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  RSI, yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think he's continuing on his auto research project.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he's been doing RSI basically in the open source world. Auto research is open source, right?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you can read into this that it was effectively an acqui-hire of the company he was working on.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't, yeah.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  He said he was going to get back to the education project that he was working on.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Did he have, I thought he had raised for it.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  I don't think he did.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  It's always helpful.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  But that was a cool idea and I wonder how that fits in. It was always interesting to think about, like, you know, LLMs are really good at education. I mean, we're seeing that today with Gemini Omni. Like, it can generate a video for you. Now, we haven't really pushed it to the limit. Like, I wonder, if you give it a PhD-level problem, is it going to teach you as well as, you know, a great professor who has thought about all the different responses? Like, maybe it's not fully there, but it's like, education certainly seems on like the core path of the models. Whereas there are plenty of things that sit outside the core path in. Things with network effects and things that are touch the real world and physical world and all these different things, but just going to a computer and asking, teach

• 26:30John Coogan?

  me something felt something felt like something most of the AI models would get very, very good at because there's a lot of training data, there's a lot of open source educational materials, all the textbooks have been scanned, Wikipedia is in the is in the models, there's so much information that's readily available, it isn't tightly held secrets that are hard to bring to bear in the pre-training data, but we'll be

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  One, one more thing out of I O that we forgot to cover, Google's new synth ID framework that 11 Labs, OpenAI and Nvidia are joining forces, this is to help identify AI-generated content, basically creating a standard for it across platforms so that, yeah, when you generate an asset, 11 Labs, OpenAI, Gemini Omni, it'll, it should be auto detected by the different platforms.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen that on X recently, there's been a little tag that says like made with AI and but I feel like you can get around that if you screenshot it and

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Well, so I think the ones on X are just in the metadata, you can actually change it like fairly easily, I don't think it's actually using like, like on on banana banana images on GPT-2 that are like watermarks, you've seen these like weird patterns people posted.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, subtle changes to the to the saturation or

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they've just been, it's just been metadata so far.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but yeah, the trick with all of those is that like, it's in theory, pretty easy to like rip that out if you're running like an advanced AI, you know, slop avoidance detection system or something, but just to know, okay, you know, for the average, for the average poster, if this is an AI image, that's certainly helpful, but as you start bringing different assets in, you bring in some stock footage, you bring in some AI footage, you blend them together, you're doing a lot of different things, you'll probably lose a little bit of that AI detection ability, but hopefully people aren't too annoyed by it if it's used tastefully, I guess it shouldn't matter at the end of the day. Anyway, do you

• 28:24John Coogan?

  think Spotify used AI to create their new disco ball icon? This was burning up the timeline this weekend.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was shocked at all the negative reactions to this icon.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Seriously, if you don't like this?

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  I also at first it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Cause it's too dark.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Genius. I think it was genius. I opened up my phone and I was, and I was, I was drawn to it immediately. My eyes jumped because I was like, something's wrong with my phone. Something's wrong with my home screen. Things don't look the way they normally look. It drew my eye. I saw, oh, Spotify. Okay. Look a little bit deeper. The icon looks a little bit different. The color's a little bit deeper. Oh, there's something else going on there. Peel back the onion. You see that there's a disco ball. And then of course, that, uh, there is a meaning behind it. They didn't just, uh, there, there, there's a whole, there's a whole reason why they did this. It's, uh, the 20th anniversary of the company. And so lots of people complained, but, uh, party, your party of the year.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, it's so funny because, uh, I don't, I don't know. Prior to this, were people sitting around being like, wow, I really hope they never changed the Spotify logo, even for a few weeks. I just love it so much.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Right. Uh, I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, this flat minimalist logos that we've all grown accustomed to.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Keep it.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  So yeah, let's go through some of the reactions. So, uh, Dylan said, I thought this was fun. I'm sure the complainers thought so too, but when tapping an icon is second nature after being used to it.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Told my wife to cancel our subscription.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Uh, for so long, even the slightest change in appearance can make you double take when searching for it. And that's annoying when trying to open an app. Uh, Mass says that it's too, it's too, uh, dark. And so Matt's turned up.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  You're at the disco, John.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  A disco ball would never look that bright.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  In a nightclub.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. I mean, the black.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Real disco ball knowers. Yeah. That's way too, that's way too light.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  I like Notion played along. This is like really a testament to the the power of Gen AI imagery these days. Every brand could like jump on this meme very quickly and it's hard to

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny that that I guess, you know, this still went super viral, but even five years ago, if you could create an asset that was a 3D render, you almost automatically got attention because anybody could make them, but you needed to work with like a 3D

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Artist, yeah.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Artist to do it and it take it. It's not something you can do instantly. They have to figure, you know, actually render it can

• 31:15John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, this is probably like a couple hours of work in Cinema 4D. I mean, getting the lighting right too, and and making sure that you're not have the wrong reflections on there. There's a bunch of nuance to actually getting this to look good. I think it's fun when, I don't know, the the other brands like joining in on like a meme can be like done really poorly. This one seemed like it was fine.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Andy Masly had the best take. He said, everyone complains about minimalist design until the company tries some until the company tries something fun and everyone reels reveals why all the companies have been forced into minimalist.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  66,000 likes on this. People really, really agreed. This is how I feel when people complain about Cybertrucks being ugly. Like, yes, but it's different. Of course, not everyone is going to like it. Trying to get everyone to like things is how we wound up with all cars converging on the same colors and designs. Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. I like the disco ball. Someone Nathan Halberstrad said, had a very nice comment. He said, he said, this is this is TBPN inspired, which I don't, I don't think it is, but the arc may be long, but tech companies now appear to be universally bend to universally bend towards

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look at our, look at our, look at our

• 32:24John Coogan?

  So we do have the globe and it was funny because so you can, you can go a little bit further and I did this with our logo. I was like, turn our logo into a disco ball and it looked kind of the same like because we sort of have the globe in there already. And so for all of like, like this meme like sort of didn't work with us because I guess we have been taking that like 3D render aesthetic with the globe, although ours is pixelated, not not squares like on the disco ball. But there is a little bit of TBPN in the in the disco ball. What do you think of the TBPN disco ball logo? Should we run this for a while or has the trend already moved on?

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  I like the globe. I like being global.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think keep the globe with the pixelation, the dots. I think it works.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  The era of Disco-morphism has arrived, says Fichara, Fiacara. And this individual Disco-balledified all of their apps, including X, Claude, Slack. What's that one? The App Store, I guess? Google Calendar? I don't know. If you ran this, if you ran this full... People, do people know why Spotify was a disco ball?

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  This kind of loud maximalist design is coming back, whether you like it or not.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  These things go in waves.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, they go in waves.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  They're coming back.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Well, one story that we didn't get to yesterday that I want to discuss is the root cause of the fertility crisis. The Financial Times has a deep dive, why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. And I was going back and forth with Tyler on this, trying to understand, and we'll see where you stand on this, Jordy. So, "The demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed and terrain. In more than two-thirds of the world's 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1, that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is closer to 1 than 2. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is 0.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just five years ago, the UN predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50% overestimate. The real figure was 2,300,000, or 230,000, sorry. Not 2,300,000. While high and middle-income countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has markedly accelerated in the past 10 years. Analysts of data ranging from population records to Google searches indicate that, although many factors contribute to falling birth rates, the most recent plunge appears connected with our use of technology." And so, this is the question that the Financial Times is trying to answer.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Should you put the blame on the recent decline in fertility, on smartphones in particular? And so... Yeah, you can go through a whole bunch of the charts. It's a great article. But the the final image is this image where they took a whole bunch of different countries and they and they adjusted the charts to show when did smartphones actually take off in that particular country because America had the iPhone moment in 2007. But different countries got wide smartphone adoption or 4G or or actual rollout of of cell phones or smartphones at different times. And so they adjusted all the figures.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  And when you look at this chart that Luis Giancarlo is sharing, the screenshot from the Financial Times, you'll see all of the charts seem to be very, very closely aligned at the exact same time. And so Luis Giancarlo says, pushes back, though. He says, no smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics as the culprit. Yeah, there's the chart. It looks like a smoking gun. He says it's not, though. He says, in the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest. Birth rates were stable in the United States, UK, Australia until 2007, in France and Poland

• 36:36John Coogan?

  until 2009, Mexico and Indonesia until 2011, and Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2013, 2015. Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption. The younger the age group, the sharper the drop. In-person socializing among young adults is dropping in South Korea by 50% in 20 years. Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies, Middle East, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa. Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC and those who were not hit by the global financial crisis. And so it teases out a bunch of the other possible explanations and puts the blame firmly on smartphones. But people have been pushing back.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  So Ross Douthat says, on the latest round of fertility discourse, friends don't let friends share chart one without the important context of chart two, which is the child survival adjustment. And so if you look at the total fertility rate, if you click on that left graph, you will see that the baby boom is remarkably pronounced there. But in fact, birth rates had been declining since the 1800s and had been falling steadily throughout the 19th, is it the 19th century? Yes, and then in the 20th century, there was a brief baby boom in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and then the rate starts declining. I, I asked 5.5 Pro a bunch of questions about this, trying to dig in further,

• 38:04John Coogan?

  and it had a bunch of funny answers about how children used to be economically valuable, and so people would have a lot of them to like work the farm for them. And the economics of having a child flipped at a certain point where it became expensive and, and a net, sort of a net burden on the parent as opposed to before it would be, you had a kid, you didn't have to pay for college, you didn't have to pay for education or really anything, and they would work the fields for you. And so it was advantageous to have as many children as possible. Ralph Dowthett also chimed in saying, "By, by the way, another way to look at the second chart is that the baby boom was even more unexpected than generally understood. And also, if any major population repeated that kind of unexpectedness, now they would

• 38:48John Coogan?

  dominate the human future." Interesting. Opportunity for different societies out there.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you think children yearning for the mines is sort of like a survival mechanism? Right? They, they want to be, they want to be economically valuable. They want to be productive, right?

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  They're saying, they're saying, "We can, we can, we can carry our own weight."

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it would be, I, I look at all these charts and I just think, "It's over."

• 39:23John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  But then I remind myself to never black pill.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Never black pill, even if it's down.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Never black pill.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  Never black pill, even if it's down only. Yeah.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. It's really crazy to look at these charts, looking at.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Looks, I mean, if this were, you know, any animal in the wild, there'd be huge amounts of fundraising happening to try to save the species. But when it's us,

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  we just sort of like, you know, see the chart and just keep scrolling.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it demands investigation to go a level deeper to understand. Okay, so diffusion of smartphones appears correlated with declines in fertility, but there, within populations, there are groups that have higher than average fertility and lower than average fertility, of course, as any distribution suggests. And the question is like, what are the high fertility members of the population doing on their phones differently? Like, are they using social media less? Are they using dating apps less? Are they texting their friends to come and hang out? Are they, are they organizing?

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Because the smartphones have diffused so widely that you need to cut in and understand for the groups that are above fertility rate, what are they doing differently? Obviously, the Amish are an interesting case study because they do have a higher than replacement rate fertility.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  And they're not using technology.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  They actually have adopted some cell phones, but not smartphones. So they will use the, you know, like a dumb phone, a flip phone, to make phone calls occasionally. And I'm sure that, you know, these are all gradations. There's not, no smartphones whatsoever, but certainly the Amish have steered away from technology and the fertility rate has, has stayed high. But even within the, you know, more, you know, modern enclaves or smart, high, high smartphone adopters, I do wonder what else is going on? Because there's a bunch of other interesting factors going on with childcare and the relation with how people spend their time.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  Yes, specifically with the, also what else happened in, around the, the launch of the iPhone?

• 41:57John Coogan?

  What?

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Like massive economic disruption, right?

• 42:01John Coogan?

  They controlled for that, though. That's the point of the Financial Times article, is to control for the economic gyrations of different countries. So there were some countries that were unaffected by the financial crisis. There were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through economic contractions, and they were all sort of affected equally. Like, even China, China has the lowest replacement rate, one per family or something like that. Whereas we, America's at like 1.8, many societies, many modern societies at 1.6, all below replacement rate, but China's the lowest. But China's going through like an economic boom the entire time. Like GDP is up at 6, 7, 8, sometimes 10% a year. Like, they're not going through an economic contraction, certainly not from 2007 to today. And yet, although that is a little bit different because

• 42:46John Coogan?

  it's confounded by the one-child policy, which obviously resulted in exactly one child. So, they set their policy, then they got their result, and now they have to sort of contend with that, the aging population. There's an article that Derek Thompson shared, "Dad Books," which this article and some publishing insiders use to describe "serious nonfiction books" across biography, current affairs, and business and economics reportedly are reportedly in freefall with sales declining every year for the last years. "The trend couldn't be clearer," said Jonathan Karp, former chief executive at Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon 6 imprint. "When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts." Interesting. Saying podcasts are eating the

• 43:31John Coogan?

  dad book, serious nonfiction.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  We gotta figure out who's doing this.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  We're all looking for the guy who did this. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I still listen to audiobooks of serious nonfiction, but it is increasingly hard to find the time. Fed speak says it's not podcasts, it's kids, because the millennial generation, the Gen X generation, is spending basically twice as much time with kids based on their age. When you adjust for age, so this is a curve of time spent with children by age.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, every time on the weekend, you know, when I'm holding, you know, one or two of... My children and I just stare at, you know, the stack of books from Amazon that just pile up and I just look at them and think, okay, if I open one of those, I will get exactly three pages before I'm disrupted.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  What was the silent generation doing? What was the, what were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, kid, hit the mines, buddy? I, I gotta read. I gotta read some nonfiction. I don't know. I mean, the podcasts creep in, but it's.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  When I can't read.

• 44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Right? Maybe self-driving cars bullish for serious nonfiction. Cause oh, maybe people will get sick.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  Self-driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  They're bearish for the podcasts and, and long form mediums broadly.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  And the book and the serious nonfiction, the dead book. Anyway.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  Nothing can compete with the feed.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to black belt, but it's over.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  Uh, well, it's not over for our next guest because Jim Belosic from Send Cut Send is with us. He's in the waiting room and he has some exciting news about Send Cut Send. Welcome back to the show, Jim. How are you doing?

• 45:24Speaker 05

  Good, good. Thanks for having me.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on short notice. Congratulations. Uh, reintroduce the company and then I want to hear the news.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah. Send Cut Send is a on-demand manufacturer. Elastic capacity is what I was told. So, uh, we make, we make stuff.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  This guy has VCs now.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Buzzwords come, they come with the term sheet.

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  I can offer you capital and buzzwords.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  They're, they're good at both.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  But I like it. I like it. Elastic capacity.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, we do, um, sheet metal and CNC and, you know, whatever. People need something made, we make it for them.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the news today, what happened?

• 46:02Speaker 05

  I finally raised some money.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Hundred and 10 million.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Massive. Let's go, let's go. It's sort of bittersweet, bittersweet moment because Send Cut Send is a company, we've interviewed thousands of founders now and you have been, out of all the conversations we've had, at the top of our list in terms of like companies and cultures and teams that we're bullish on. And we always appreciated that you were doing it independently, but I'm sure you've raised for very good reasons and you have some excellent new partners and we're very excited for you.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk about the use of funds, the reasoning, but first, like, take me through the pitch that you received. Who did the round? How did you meet them? Take us through the kind of story of the deal.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  So I, just through X, I got introduced to Patrick Allison, which was awesome. And he's like, "Oh yeah, I've heard about your company. You guys sound really awesome. I'll invest." And I was like, "Well, shit, that's amazing. Thank you." I was like, "How does this work? Like, I don't know how investment works." And he was like, "Oh, I'll just introduce you to a couple other people."

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  He's like, "We can just use the standard YC terms."

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. No. Well, I was like, "Hey, introduce me to someone who's super founder-friendly. I'm a bootstrapper. I want to retain control of my company, but I do want to go faster. So I need a little bit more money than I got now. So introduce me to Sequoia. Andrew Reed over there is awesome. Sean McGuire. And then Matt Huang from Paradigm as well." And so it became this kind of dream team and I was like, "Shit, if I don't do it now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to put this together again. So let's go for it. Let's see what happens."

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I also think you guys have such incredible, have had such incredible organic momentum and growth and we need to make stuff in America and it's somewhat your responsibility to go faster, like as like, just for the country, basically. And so from that lens too, I think it makes a ton of sense to bring in some more firepower.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're always capacity constrained. We have more work than we can produce and even if...

• 48:27Speaker 05

  Even if we had the right amount of machines, it's not fast enough. I want to go faster. You know, people are spoiled on Amazon. I want to do Amazon of manufacturing. You know, if you order today, you should have it in your hands tomorrow so that you can go do your project. And now that's on the horizon. We're getting really close.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, so what does the money actually go towards? Is buying more machines, hiring more people, both? Like, what are you pulling forward with this capital?

• 48:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'm trying to just use the capital towards stuff that I can't finance. So right now, like, we've been able to grow, like, you know, I can buy machines and get a loan on them from JP Morgan or whatever. So I'll keep doing that with machines, but the capital is going to be used for stuff that I can't get a loan on. So, you know, tripling the size of my software team, computational geometry engineers, hiring 200 or 300 people, just a down payment on a building. The first and last payment is like, I don't know, together it's like $600,000 on some of these big buildings. So that's where I'm going to light their money on fire in a good way, and we're going to grow, grow, grow. Yeah.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where's the current facility? Where do you see yourself expanding to? I want to talk about the actual footprint because, you know, if you're building elastic capacity, that feels like that needs to be distributed all over the United States at some point.

• 49:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, a million percent. My goal is like, I love Home Depot. And without a Home Depot in your town, you got to go to a plumbing store, an electrical store, and a lumberyard and whatever. So if we could have, you know, a send-cut send in a bunch of different metros that you can just walk into and get something made, that's the dream. So right now, we're in Reno, Nevada, Arlington, Texas, and Paris, Kentucky. The next one up, I'm hoping for a lease here, is going to be somewhere in Pennsylvania, potentially in Ohio, but we're trying to pit those two states against each other and negotiate some good incentives. So I can't really say which way we're going. After that, probably Indiana, Las Vegas, and then Atlanta.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Okay, I had I had sort of a hot take yesterday talking about the the pushback to building data centers and and my point was that obviously data centers are the least they're they're they're less popular than nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors at their worst, I think we're polling at like 63% disapproval for like, let's not build those. And of course, we stopped building them. Data centers are like 73%. So people really don't like them. But my point was that there's a lot of like, there's a lot of pushback against building anything, even like housing, roads, trains. Like, people are just like, I like the idea of it somewhere else, but I don't want it in my backyard. I don't want it over here. Like, if it actually interfaces with me. And I'm wondering if how how local

• 51:09John Coogan?

  communities are actually receptive or skeptical about having what is essentially a factory and could be noisy, or could have traffic, or could have a bunch of different things. And I imagine that you've had like one one millionth of the pushback, but you've still had to consider all these things. So how have you how have you communicated to the local communities that you build in and you're planning to build in?

• 51:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think some of the the loudest pushback is from, you know, people in these big coastal cities. And, you know, they're like, I don't want that in my backyard.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  What we find is, you know, in we're in a smaller city or a rural area, people love the jobs.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  They love the development. They love the the taxable revenue that comes with us. We're also, we're pretty damn quiet. We don't exhaust to sewer or air or anything. We're 50 state compliant. That's that's our goal. But what's really cool is, we can come into a community and provide a lot of good, high paying jobs. You know, it's it's a career path that they can grow into. There's more opportunities as we build more buildings. They can move out of their little town and go to a different metro or whatever. So we don't have any pushback. Also, we move so damn fast that we don't build our buildings. We go find a building that's already stood up and we just move in. That's the only way for us to go fast.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and there's plenty of and there's plenty of capacity there. As you look back on your career, how did you process the VC hype or just the memes around like the 3D printing revolution? And there was a moment where there was like, oh, like, there won't be any more factories because everyone just 3D print everything at home. How did you process it at the time? And I guess like, what, like, how do you see 3D printing fitting in, if at all, into like, the future of reindustrialization? Does that have a place whatsoever?

• 53:00Speaker 05

  It does, it does. In the world of metals, we're still far away from that. It's so much easier to get something cast or stamped or laser cut or whatever. I mean, when we've experimented with 3D additive in-house, like, there's laws against how much of that aluminum powder you can have because it's explosive. So there's massive hurdles to clear for that. However, 3D printing, it's actually really competitive with injection molding. And that's something that we're looking at. Injection molding is incredibly expensive to get the molds made. They're, almost all the molds are made offshore. But if you can 3D print really, really rapidly, then it is competitive, especially for small runs or startups or prototypes or whatever. So that's an area that we're experimenting in.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  What are some recent customers that you started working with that you're particularly excited about? They can be mom and pop, hackers, or big, big companies, but I wanted to give you a chance.

• 53:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, we actually, my comms team that I have now, just told me I have to be careful about who I name. We were pretty proud, though, like, it is, it is mom and pops, but then it's also, what, 85% of the top five primes and the tier one defense people use us. Neuro, Neuro is a huge customer, ZipLine is a huge customer. And then just guys in their garage making cool stuff and like, kids doing first robotics or whatever, they all use us. So very, very wide spectrum of customers.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  What, what, what is the entry level job at Suncut Sun look like these days?

• 54:35Speaker 05

  Anything. You're a generalist. We are moving so fast and doing so many different things. Like, we don't have a designated floor sweeper, but you might be sweeping floors. You know, we start somewhere between like 26 and 30 bucks an hour, and then it goes up from there. But yeah, you're gonna be maybe a laser operator one day, you're gonna be driving a forklift, you're gonna be cleaning out a dust collector, or you're gonna be doing some intense CAD programming, like, who knows? We don't know what we're gonna make that day. Things just come in and we have to do it. So everyone here is very, very flexible.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the crazy like AI buildout and data center buildout going on, we've heard and seen, like, you know, prices of copper spiking, like, there's all these weird knock-on effects from data center construction. Are you feeling squeezes anywhere in your supply chain? Do you feel like America is industrialized enough in your, in the rest of your supply chain? Or is there like a wish list of, oh, we gotta reshore that?

• 55:37Speaker 05

  We need to, we need as many like aluminum foundries and smelters as we can possibly get. I mean, those are way more electricity intensive than data centers. Actually, if you, if you tried to spin up a bunch of those, it would make a data center look really good in comparison. So that's interesting. If you want to build a data center, go pitch an aluminum foundry first. And then they'll want you to do like 10 data centers. So we need more of those. But we need nuclear.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  I saw that with the Strait of Hormuz closing, that Diet Coke was at risk of going out of stock, very, very harmful to my production function. But because there's some amount of aluminum smelting that happens in the Middle East and passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and so delays happen. And I think a lot of people are, they think it's either we have the capacity in the US, or maybe it went to China, but there's really nothing else. But we're in such a global economy that there's so much more going on.

• 56:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it affected us a little bit. You know, about 15% of aluminum comes from offshore. We actually source a lot of domestic aluminum, or at least it comes from North America. But you know, even if prices go up 15, 20%, raw materials are a small fraction of the overall end price. So 15 or 20% increase in raw materials is probably 3 or 4% to the customer. So our customers have been pretty cool about it.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Jordy asked about the customers, like specific examples, but I'm interested in like the broader funnel. Like, how much is, do you have an outbound sales force at this point? Are you going to conferences? I imagine that you show up on like Google results oftentimes. But what like, is the customer funnel like heavily diversified? Or is there a sweet spot that you're really doubling down on right now? What does acquisition look like these days?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  We've always been inbound. We have two or three sales guys right now, but they just, you know, answer the call and, you know, do special, special projects or whatever. We have no outbound sales guys. At one point, early on, we were spending about 100 grand a month on Google Ads, and I think right now we're spending about 1,500 bucks. So my message to anyone who wants to do this-

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Is that because if you were, if you were spending more, you hired more salespeople, you just wouldn't be able to fulfill the demands? You need to scale capacity first?

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we, my marketing team usually, I'm like, say nothing. Don't say anything this week because we have a machine go down or whatever. So I'm like, stop, everyone go quiet. So yeah, it's always chasing capacity. But my message to anyone who wants to do something like this, like just have a kick-ass product. Just make it good and fast and, you know, get it in their hands within, you know, a couple days or whatever, and people will come back and they'll tell their friends. So- But it's an overnight success takes 10 years.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  And when you guys are fast, when you guys are fast.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  You're gonna get punched in the face.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  When you guys are fast, your customers can build their products faster and have higher sales velocity themselves and generate more revenue and they end up spending more. And it's like this very, very virtuous flywheel. And I'm so glad you're well capitalized.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, this is a major white pill.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  I hope I don't have to do it again because fundraising is not fun. I hate finance.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  Get ready, get ready for Nicie, buddy.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's gonna be many more, many more in the future.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  It's your, it's your duty.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you, if you want, if you want to go fast and far, it makes sense. Last question, we were talking about the fall off of dad books because of podcasts and fertility and all this different stuff. And I'm interested if you have any examples or recommendations for father-son building activities that you've seen from the community or maybe you've done yourself even or employees have of a good first build for a, for a, for a parent and child to do that might use Sen Cut Send parts.

• 59:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's, there's a ton of little like push go-kart plans available. We may even have a couple on Marketplace. I'll have to check.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 59:40Speaker 05

  But you have to do something that the kid can enjoy. And there's nothing better than like getting pushed down a hill and scraping your knees or whatever. So have those experiences, something that's usable, like a birdhouse or whatever, that's fine. A go-kart or a scooter or something like that is, is pretty cool for the kids.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  So if I make a go-kart using Sen Cut Send parts and I want to throw a V12 in there, can you fabricate that for me too?

• 1:00:05Speaker 05

  Not yet.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  Not yet, okay. That's what the money's for. And we're gonna

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Go kart is such a smart recommendation too for you, you know, running a business because a bird feeder, you know, you make it once you put it up, it's good.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  My, my dad built me a go kart growing up and I, he would, he would, you know, he made it. I would drive the heck out of it. It would break. Then he'd be fixing it. So you're gonna, it's a recurring revenue stream for you guys to get a father, son duo into go karts.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  That's smart.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  A hundred percent. Yeah.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Playing the long game. Playing the long game. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Great to see you, Jim. Congrats to the whole team.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Excited to see you back on here soon.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic. White pill. White pill of the show.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Major white pill. We were black pilling. Now we're white pilling.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Never black pill.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Never black pill.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Uh, well, up next we have Aiden Doer from Nurish. He's the co-founder and CEO. He's been on the show before, but we're welcoming, welcoming him back with some huge news about the company that's grown faster than ever with a massive series C to announce. Aiden, how are you doing?

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  I think we might have some technical problems. Can you give us a hello? Can you say hello? We might need to come back to you. How are we doing?

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Using a Hey, you okay?

• 1:01:23Jordi Hays?

  Are you using a potato as a webcam?

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  It's not the potato. It's the wifi. It's for sure the wifi.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  Do a, do a check one, two.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do a check one, two. We'll kill some time.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  We'll kill some time because Dan Sondheim. Killing time with Dan Sondheim. So, wait, okay. So this is actually funny because I, I opened up the Wall Street Journal today and I had seen, I had seen the news from Take Him, who's coming on the show this week, uh, that in the Financial Times, uh, they had a report that, uh, Daniel Sondheim's D1 Capital Partners is another hedge fund that stands to make a killing when SpaceX goes public. D1 is sitting on paper gains of about nine billion on SpaceX stock that it acquired over several years for about 600 million. What a run of 15x. Not bad. Uh, and so now the, the stake might be worth 20 billion if the rocket maker is valued at the expected 1.75 trillion, a figure that could still change according to people familiar with the matter.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  But I opened up the Wall Street Journal and I'm and I'm and I everyone's familiar with Dan Sonheim and D1 is Dan Sonheim is not like someone who's obscure behind the scenes. He's done invest like the best. People know D1. They invest in a lot of companies that we know. But I thought this Wall Street Journal article was also about D1 and the title is obscure fund has a lot riding on SpaceX. And I was like, are they really painting D1 as an obscure fund? They weren't. They're talking about a different. Yes, yes. They're talking about a different, a different investment firm that's about to make a lot of money on the SpaceX investment. So SpaceX's planned initial public offering is expected to be a windfall for futurist investors and venture capitalists. If you got SpaceX shares and

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  you're you don't want to say I'm not a VC, say you're a futurist investor. A public a publicity shy hedge fund manager whose other investments. So you're a hedge fund, you're long SpaceX. What else are you buying to diversify your portfolio as a futurist investor? Dick's Sporting Goods and Wingstop are among the big positions at Darsana Capital Partners, which first invested in SpaceX in 2019 when Elon Musk's rocket maker was valued at around 30 billion and made several subsequent investments since then. Should SpaceX go public at a valuation around 1.5 trillion, Darsana paper Darsana's paper gains

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  on the investment could top $10 billion. So had you ever heard of Darsana before?

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  I actually had not, but I have heard of Wingstop. It's good, good stock. Several billion of that would be gains since.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Stock is down 50% year to date.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Rough. The sore evaluation. Anand aside, launched New York based Darsana, which comes from a Sanskrit word that means seeing the true nature of reality. Chicken wings and Dick's Sporting Goods. In 2014, 1.4 billion.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  I hate to cut you off.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Under cap, under management. Let's bring in our.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  S8 is back on a new device.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Hey, crystal clear. Thanks so much.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  We're on mobile now, guys. Apologies. We were at our company offsite. So we got weak wifi.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well, you sound crystal clear now. Why don't you reintroduce the company? Tell us the news.

• 1:04:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. So I'm Aiden. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Nourish. Nourish is a dietitian-led metabolic clinic. So we pair the largest network of registered dietitians in the country, over 10,000 dietitians, with virtual metal cook care. So the ability for physicians to order into their labs, to prescribe and manage medications. And we've delivered some really amazing results for patients that we're excited to talk about today.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Walk me through dietitian, the different degrees that might be involved, the certifications. I know with a lot of telehealth, there's state-by-state regulations. Like, what was the process of building out that network of 10,000 dietitians?

• 1:05:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, good question. So dietitian is a protected term. So you might hear some people use nutritionist or dietitian interchangeably, but nutritionist is actually not protected. So you or I could get on Instagram and call ourselves a nutritionist, but dietitian requires a master's degree, a certain number of hours, and so on. And so we only employ dietitians. Those are the providers that are able to work with health insurance and get it covered, which is a big part of our model, is expanding access to this type of care. And of course, working with health plans, getting it covered by insurance is a big part of that.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Okay. What is the value add? I mean, there's so much boom in peptides, GLP-1s, metabolic health. It feels like there's a lot of these companies where the demand is already there. You're just the landing page that gives the customer what they already want. But I imagine that there's a lot more.

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  I'll pitch it.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Okay, pitch it, Jordy.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  It seems super important to combine diet with GLP-1s. Just saying like, hey, we created this magical drug for weight loss, and then just doing the drug versus actually fixing the underlying... Sort of cause or maybe the original issue, you know, is sort of a temporary solution. And if you want like lasting positive change with your health, you're going to have to factor.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  So if I go to a dietitian and say, I've been blasting.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Did I botch it?

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Is that roughly correct?

• 1:06:49Speaker 06

  No, no, you said it well. I mean, I think the way we think about the root cause of kind of the problem of explosion and chronic conditions and cost is that people are living on unhealthy lifestyles in the modern world. It's very hard in the modern world to eat well, to sleep well, to move your body, to manage your stress. And maybe 75 years ago, when these conditions were much rarer and costs were much lower, just kind of living your life in the day to day, it was much easier to be healthy. And so while these medications are a very useful tool in the toolkit and, you know, with our network now, we're able to prescribe and manage those medications. To your point, you know, if you, if you don't pair that with behavior change, you don't get kind of sustainable results, which of course is, is worse for the patient, but it's also worse for the system because now we've spent all this money

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  for, for medications and then had rebound weight gain or falling off medication or so on.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  What's happening on the supply side of the market with, with GLP-1s? And how is that impacting pricing? We know there's an incredible amount of demand, overwhelming demand, but what's happening on the other side?

• 1:07:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. So it's nice to see. I think slowly but surely we'll see access increase, costs come down. I think over time, as these drugs become generic, expect them to get much, much cheaper. You know, you mentioned Reta, you know, I think that'll, you know, get approved in the, in the coming years and that'll maybe start higher price. And then these kind of, you know, first gen, second gen meds will come down in price and eventually goes generic, which I think is really exciting because ultimately, like I said, they are a valuable tool in the toolkit, but cost is prohibitive in many cases today. And so where I think, you know, we play and where I think the value will ultimately be created as, as the price of these medications comes down is exactly in that behavior and lifestyle change that we, we talked about. It's kind of that, that wraparound care of how do you have, you know,

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  not just medication, but integrated care team, virtually covered by insurance, as well as of course, you know, technology, especially AI, which can be kind of that 24 seven behavior change agent as, as part of the equation. And that's, you know, the, a big part of the, the round we just raised was to invest in all of that and accelerate that.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:08:51Speaker 06

  Raised a hundred million Series C, yes.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  I love the gong. I love the gong. That's why I came on. We need a gong for our office.

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  You do, you do. Yeah, we should make TBPN branded gongs, something to everyone.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Wraparound care, does that also mean meal delivery at some point? I feel like there's a number of companies throughout history that have sort of vertically integrated to that degree, incredibly operationally complex. Is it on the roadmap? Is it something you're interested in?

• 1:09:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, great question. We reached out by a number of kind of meal delivery companies, as you expect, about partnering. We haven't prioritized it yet, but I do think ultimately, you know, we'll do something there at some point. I mean, the way I think about it kind of more broadly, the problem of lifestyle being, lifestyle change being difficult and therefore the mission of being, how do you make lifestyle change easy is you're trying to remove as many barriers? And of course, the food being kind of one of those. And so how do you, when you make a recommendation, make it very easy to act and fulfill that recommendation? I think being able to prescribe and fulfill prescriptions of food in the same way you can of medication, I think will be something we do eventually. And I think there's a lot of movement among health plans to potentially even reimburse for that in some cases eventually. But I haven't prioritized that yet, but I think at some point we will.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  And then on the GLP-1 side, is there still an opportunity in compounding? I know some telehealth providers like went down that path, others partnered. Like, do you have a firm view? Are you flexible here? How have you been interpreting the different ways to vertically integrate on that side of the business?

• 1:10:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we do not compound. We work with the name brand medications and have partnerships with the, you know, the players that you all know and work to get those covered by insurance. You know, I think if you've probably seen, you know, in the last few years, there's been kind of this cash pay and compounding market. We think that was a bit of kind of just a short-term solution for when there were access constraints and cost constraints that you were speaking about earlier. And where kind of the market heads is, you know, the inverse of cash pain compounding, which is insurance covered and name brand, and that's kind of, you know... Bread and butter of the company, pun intended, is working with kind of those those health plans to to get things like that covered. And then, again, because the drug as cost comes down, especially it becomes a commodity, I think where the value is created

• 1:11:11Speaker 06

  is in that wraparound care we we talked about. And and that's kind of the the hard work. But I think the the important work that ultimately delivers, you know, lasting outcomes.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Okay, last question from the chat. Are you on a boat?

• 1:11:24Speaker 06

  No, I've been in I I'm in this random conference room at our company offsite. Like I said,

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  I think it's the phone. I think the phone is like rocking at just the right oscillations.

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm pretty convinced it's a boat.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  It might be.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  You're not beating the boat allegations.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  He denies. He denies the boat.

• 1:11:40Speaker 06

  It does have kind of boat.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  It does have wood paneling. It looks nice.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  It's that it's that texture of wood.

• 1:11:46Speaker 06

  We got a boring, boring conference room.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Wow, it's a huge boat.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a massive boat.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  But I I I don't have a problem with a company offsite of a boat. That seems like a great strategy. If that's what you did, I'm not going to critique it. Enjoy the boat.

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Great. Great to see you, Aiden. Congrats to the whole team on the milestone and keep up the great work.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  Thanks. I gotta I gotta go talk to the captain to stay in this.

• 1:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Have him reset the Starlink too for your for your computer.

• 1:12:17Speaker 06

  Sorry about that, guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, goodbye.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  I'm glad we got to the boat question.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  The important question.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  I don't think it was a boat. It it looked it looked a little bit too big and and things weren't like buckled down. You know, usually on a boat, even if you're in a palatial conference room, there's ways to, you know, bolt down certain certain items. Anyway, um, our next guest is from Status here, raising a series. A massive round. Welcome to the show.

• 1:12:49Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. Nice to nice to finally be on the show.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  We we got to kick it off with the first question. Are you on a boat?

• 1:12:56Speaker 07

  No, unfortunately, I'm in a regular.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Okay, our last, our last guest.

• 1:13:00Speaker 07

  A very nice, a very nice courtroom.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Our last guest denied the allegations of being a boat, but he looked like he was on a boat. It's hard to believe. We have to ask everyone now, but that's not what we're here, we're here to talk about. Uh, we're here to talk about you and your company. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:13:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm Phi. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Status. Status is essentially a social entertainment app where users can live out their dream lives and play as anyone through the lens of a social network. So for example, I could be a famous singer, I could be an actor, I could live inside the world of like my favorite book, something like Harry Potter. I could be, you know, the host of one of the most famous, you know, technology news shows on X, like.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Simulators. This is the thing.

• 1:13:43Speaker 07

  You can do anything.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Speaker 07

  Everything's simulation.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, walk us through the actual customer experience. It feels like there's an element of social media here. There's also an element of like a massively multiplayer online RPG. Uh, are you pulling ideas from both places? What are the big inspiration points?

• 1:14:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, so essentially when you go on Status, the first thing that you do is you craft your persona, like who you're going to be. So I want to be a famous singer. I want to be a live streamer. Um, I can choose who my first follower is going to be. I could choose someone from real life. All of our, all of our, um, characters on the app, all of the worlds on the app are created by users. We have over five million characters on, on the app, over 10 million worlds. Um, and you, it looks like social media. It looks like X. Uh, and I think this is why it's really struck a chord with people and why we've grown so fast. Since we launched, uh, last year, or when we launched last year, we went from zero to a million users in 19 days.

• 1:14:41Speaker 07

  And it kind of just shows like the, the virality of, of what we're doing. I think this product really, it resonates with our user base, which is pretty young, um, predominantly young women, um, in the US and all across the world.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  How gamified is it? What is the goal of the players? Is there currency or something that they win?

• 1:15:05Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:06John Coogan?

  So how does that work?

• 1:15:07Speaker 07

  We basically made social media into a game, right? So, you know, when you post on on social media now you get like, obviously you get followers, you get likes. The same thing happens on status. You gain followers, you gain likes, but you also know everything you do has an outcome that will help you gain skill points, which helps you level up. We took a lot of inspiration from like life simulator games like The Sims and also, you know, our own background. My co-founder built, you know, games on Roblox and Minecraft. And so we, it's really a mix of like life simulator and role play and like fandom related stuff and really that like gamified world.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about monetization long term? I'm sure it's early, you're venture capital backed, you don't need to charge an arm and a leg for this, but is subscriptions more aligned with the with the current customer experience or is like social media, I think, advertising?

• 1:16:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we actually have already started monetizing the product when we basically, oh, hell, yeah.

• 1:16:10Speaker 07

  I was not expecting that. Yeah, we already started monetizing. We operate similarly to a game, right? We have a, we have in-app purchases where you can buy power ups, things like that. You know, we also have subscriptions with like, you know, weekly, weekly subscriptions and annual subscriptions. And we have millions in ARR. We 10x revenue this first quarter of 2026, so we're ripping right now.

• 1:16:35Jordi Hays?

  What is it? Like, what do you want people to? What is, what is the, the business is ripping? You have a ton of users. What, what are you hoping that users get out of it? Is it, is it?

• 1:16:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, what is, what is the sort of like our overarching vision of, of outside of just fun and playing a game? What you want users to get out of this?

• 1:17:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that what status really represents is this, we're moving into like a new, I think, phase of entertainment. So, you know, since like the beginning of time, you've always had to just, you know, sit and like read a story or watch a story. I think what we can do now with LLMs and AI is that now you can really immerse yourselves into these like incredible like role-playing, engagement, engaging experiences. I think that's what our users are doing. You know, when you watch a TV show and you get like really obsessed with it, maybe you go to Reddit and read like theories about what people are saying about it, you know, connect with fans and talk, talk about the show with them. You might go to TikTok and watch edits of that show. Then you also,

• 1:17:46Speaker 07

  and I think this is what the, this next phase of what we're seeing people do is that they're going on status and they're honestly like immersing themselves in, into, in thinking like, well, what if I was a character in that show? Who would I interact with? You know, what would that look like? And we're doing it through, you know, this lens of social media, which is so familiar to people because, you know, everyone is on the same, the same types of social media platforms.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  How, how does intellectual property work in this world? I mean, I, anyone can go draw a picture of Harry Potter and post it on their Instagram, but if you're intermediating this and you're the one generating, a lot of the models will refuse. Some of them have partnerships and there's a whole bunch of different solutions there, but what does that look like?

• 1:18:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, so everything on the platform, all the characters, all of the worlds are user-generated. So similar, so we like to think of it as like, you know, similar to how someone would, you know, can upload like a YouTube video talking about a TV show or an artist. Yeah, it's, it's the same thing, except now with, you know, LLMs and with AI, you can create these AI-generated worlds based off of that, based off of that show or book or whatever it is.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Has there been pushback to this? I mean, obviously your, your core fan base loves it. They're paying for it. They're using the product, but AI is getting booed on stage. People are worried about brain rot and the infinite jest. Like what has the pushback been like? Is it, is it just you're off in your own little world and it's not, it's not actually confronting? Or have you had to grapple with any of the big questions about AI, social media, brain rot, et cetera?

• 1:19:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think with our user base especially and what we've kind of seen with with AI is that the pushback that you see with like younger people who don't like AI, it's because they feel like AI is like replacing experiences that, you know, they like, you know, things like art, things like, you know, music, things, things like that. Status isn't really replacing anything. We, you know, are a completely new experience that has, that can really only exist with AI. And I think that's why, you know, our users are are young, but they love status and and they're really excited, you know, about the product. And in terms of like working with with, you know, these like entertainment companies and streamers, we've already started kind of, you know,

• 1:20:00Speaker 07

  we already started having conversations with some of them. And there is a real appetite of, you know, I'm sure you you you've seen this like now with Netflix shows or Amazon shows like HBO, whatever it is, there's a long wait between seasons, right? Like you watch a show and then you wait like two years for the next season to come out. A lot of these streamers are thinking about, okay, how do I keep my audience engaged while we produce and make the next, you know, the next season of that show?

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, let them go and create a million plot holes that they'll never resolve now.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you, what do you think Meta's plans are around agents and bots and and this sort of, you know, simulated social media? They acquired Maltbook.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  They experimented with celebrity personas in the past. I feel like, you know, if you guys, if your metrics keep looking the way they're looking up into the right, stock will eventually come in. He will try to clone you. It'll be a rite of passage. But but generally, how are you thinking about,

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  you know, these sort of scaled social platforms and and how they're thinking about integrating experiences like this?

• 1:21:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that a lot of, definitely, I think there's, there's a lot of interest from from these big, big companies. And I think that what they're trying to do, and I, and I, it is, and it's exciting with what they're doing with, you know, you know, acquiring Maltbook, they acquired Gizmo as well. Like, they're really interested in these AI-first experiences.

• 1:21:29Speaker 07

  But of course, like, we kind of just focus on what we're we're doing and, you know. Just, you know, if they copy us, they can try, but like, I think with

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 1:21:39Speaker 07

  Like status, exactly. Good luck. And I think that, you know, our users, and I think this is what makes us so sticky and why our retention is so good. They've created these, these worlds and stuff that they are, they put a lot of work in and and I, and I think that, um, that really shows in, in our engagement and retention. So.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, tell us about the fundraising to date. You've got some new capital. Let's hear it.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Did you raise?

• 1:22:02Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we have raised 17 million in seed and seed today. Yeah.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  Funding. Congratulations.

• 1:22:10Speaker 07

  Thank you, guys. We're backed by Abstract.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:22:13Speaker 07

  General Catalyst, Union Square Ventures, um, also Lightshed Ventures, Y C, a bunch of guys. Um, so shout out to them.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Great lineup. Great lineup. Where, where are you guys based?

• 1:22:25Speaker 07

  We're based in New York. So consumer in New York, guys.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 07

  We have a team of nine, um, in the city. I'm actually in SF right now, so but don't tell anyone.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  We want, we want, uh, well, great to meet you. I'm sure, I'm sure we'll, uh, I'm sure we'll have you back on soon. And yeah, congrats on all the progress.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:22:44Speaker 07

  Thank you guys so much for having me.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have Tanay Tandon from Camor.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  He's back.

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Raising seven billion at a $700 billion valuation.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Not, not too far from it. I'm sure he'll be there soon. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:23:05Speaker 08

  How are you guys? Thanks for having me.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  Good, good entrance. Drinking casually. Thought you were distracted.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Oh, dial.

• 1:23:13Speaker 08

  Oh, hey, guys. Didn't see you there.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Didn't see you there. I'm just live. Uh, anyway, welcome back to the show. Uh, please, but, uh, reintroduce the company. Tell us the news. I want to hit the gong and hear all the greatest, the latest and greatest.

• 1:23:27Speaker 08

  Awesome. I'm Tanay, CEO of Camor. We just announced a raise of $70 million at a $7 billion valuation with

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  This guy hates dilution. He hates dilution.

• 1:23:39Speaker 08

  Only 1%. With G C Sequoia, Oregon Stanley, Kirkland House.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, how do you get to this? Is this more of a strategic round? Did you give it a name? Is this this particular letter? Or was this more opportunistic? And you have a particular goal in mind to take it to the next level? Like, what's on the horizon for the next year?

• 1:24:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, one, it's an extension. It's like, I think we called it officially a Series E1 or E2 or something like that. The goal, I mean, one, it was, we didn't need the cash. We thought it would be a good time to market the company at a fair price for all the work that's been put in over the last 18 months. And then on top of that, take some cash, put it on balance sheet to really accelerate R and D around some of our investments on air, which is our language model powered E M R platform, ambient and voice agents. Hire a group of 40, 50 elite engineers and just hit the pavement.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  There we go. How much of the, I mean, it sounds like you're already expanding outside of like revenue cycle management, like more back office workflows. I'd be interested to know the shape of the business, some of the different products, how healthcare providers are actually integrating with you.

• 1:24:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we see the problem as this trillion dollar administrative work tax on the American economy. You have four or five trillion that you spend on healthcare, but the fact that 20% of that is spent on labor that pushes documents, submits claims, writes documentation is a travesty. And our belief is that language models can handle all of those tasks. So the core product lines, as you mentioned, is revenue cycle, which is an engine that takes claims, automates the submissions, appeals, denials, prior authorization process. Ambient documentation, which takes the workflow around actually writing notes that a provider might do with the patient and completely eliminates all the work tax around that. And then voice agents and back office agents, tools that automate scheduling, tools that

• 1:25:32Speaker 08

  automate the task of, you know, putting someone on a calendar, putting someone on a prior author appeal schedule and just doing that with voice models. So those are the key areas and that's where we're going to continue to invest in more.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Every healthcare CEO historically will complain at different points about how slow-moving adoption can be at times. Has that changed over the last two months? Are different groups adopting new products and services much faster than they would have historically, just because there are these pretty dramatic advancements?

• 1:26:09Speaker 08

  I think healthcare has been one of the areas alongside legal and I would say coding, like software engineering, where we've seen the fastest adoption of language models because it's just such a hammer-on-nail situation for the work that these providers are doing. And post-COVID, I think we burnt our providers out. Most of these providers were working 15, 20-hour days and just not getting much sleep. Many of them wanted to leave the health system and go work in tech or finance or something easier. And language models were the gift that arrived at the right time to keep them in the workforce, that we need them in so much.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about invisible AI? I'm wondering how much of your product sort of reveals itself to be AI-powered to the end user, the customer, the person actually receiving healthcare? Because I think there's maybe some sort of transition happening where members of a healthcare organization are using AI, seeing speed-ups, but the actual end user, the customer, the patient, might not even be aware that AI is involved at all.

• 1:27:16Speaker 08

  I think the beauty of language models is you can truly sell the outcome. There's like a big Twitter thought piece right now, but we live it in the sense that we sell the outcome of more revenue for a practice or a health system, or better documentation for a practice or a health system. And the way to do that isn't necessarily brand and market yourself as an AI-enabled this or that, it's just deliver the amazing result for a price that's a hell of a lot lower than the rest of the market. And I think for revenue cycle, for example, it's been an end-to-end service that's been provided with offshore labor in India or Bangladesh for 20, 30, 40 years now. And we're taking that model and instead deploying agents on that same task and delivering a better product at a lower price.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Are you already seeing evidence of like agent on agent conflict or collaboration? I guess I'm imagining that like, you know, a commure powered revenue cycle management tool winds up sending me a bill or a customer bill and then their open clause debating it. And like, what does that future look like in your opinion?

• 1:28:17Speaker 08

  I think there's the collaborative piece that you alluded to, which is super exciting, where you see models literally coaching other models, creating better prompts, creating iterative versions of the same, you know, task execution methodology. And we have a lot of investments in that. We've seen overnight generation across hundreds of thousands of claims. The same model performs 10, 20 times better than it did when it started. And then there's the kind of combative models where you have insurance companies putting up their own nonsense models, trying to deny claims. And then our models are fighting those models and it really will turn into, in some ways, a war of attrition. I think the final end state there is you have models talking to models. You eliminate the labor costs and you take healthcare from this 14, 15% cost to collect

• 1:28:59Speaker 08

  business and turn it into a Visa MasterCard like business where there's, you know, 2%, 3% interchange fees and it's, you know, returns billions, if not trillions to the health system.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Sure. Are you, because of the, maybe you can give a brief overview of like the structure of the healthcare system, because I think people sometimes misunderstand how consolidated the insurance side is versus how diversified the provider side is. But then I'm interested to know, are you permanently in a lane or do you have business to do with all sides of the, of the market in the limit?

• 1:29:31Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, first, first of all, we are like a provider first and provider only company. I think the provider is the only protagonist in our story and we think of ourselves at times as an arms dealer for the provider. Give them the tools to go nuke the payers and really get their margin back. In, in the context of, you know, the broader like payer ecosystem, I think one of the concerning trends is this, like, like you mentioned, this is the sheer volume of consolidation. You have payers that are essentially monopolizing and dictating how much providers get paid for every little thing. And then on top of that, denying, denying, denying, which makes it way harder for provider to earn a living. Compare that to the 90s where providers were making money hand over fist and living good lives.

• 1:30:14Speaker 08

  And I think the quality of care in America was better back then, too.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you? Is there a reason to be generally in favor of provider consolidation? Sort of paradoxically because the payer ecosystem is so consolidated that the providers can't push back at their current scale? And maybe some of the rollups and mergers that we're seeing on the provider side could actually create sort of a strength that might actually benefit the end consumer?

• 1:30:47Speaker 08

  We see both sides of that coin. And one, we're partnered with HCA, which is literally the largest health system in the country. Bills over $100 billion in revenue a year. But on the flip side, we think AI and language models create this opportunity for more independent practices and more physicians starting their own businesses. Now, the reason why I think both of those are interesting, if you have a tech layer that lives on top of both, that almost becomes the GPO or group negotiating organization that can lower or that can improve pricing and negotiate better rates against payers, kind of like the flip side of the whole ramp vendor management tool. Or one of these other like software spend management tools where you consolidate and add price transparency and then you return margin back to the entity that used the tool.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Are you seeing any evidence of like an uptick in individual practices? Or is it too soon? I mean, we're seeing like a lot of solo entrepreneurs. Every entrepreneur wants to like build the $1 billion, one person tech company. But it's usually like a vibe coded piece.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Pretty soon, we will see the one doctor, $1 billion hospital.

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  Hey, maybe if they save the right person's life, you know, willingness to pay.

• 1:31:58Speaker 08

  I think the thing that we are seeing for sure is the practices that have been independent are becoming higher margin and becoming more profitable when they adopt AI tools. And that's, I think, the first step and a necessary precursor to the creation of more independent practice because, one, you're going to have them begin to invest in other practices or potentially roll up practices. You're also probably going to see this concept of the AI first practice, like a truly online behavioral health practice that uses LLMs for everything except for the care. You're definitely seeing this in the pharmacy world where there is like the recent New York Times article about the GLP-1 business that had scaled to a couple hundred million in run rate. And I think you're going to see more and more of that across the ecosystem because of language models.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the new round. Thank you so much. Yeah, amazing progress. Jordi, anything else? Great to see you. You good? Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Good to see you too. We'll talk soon. Thanks, appreciate it. Goodbye. Up next, Ajeya Cotra from Meter, joining the show to talk about their new Frontier Risk Report, which came out today. How are you doing?

• 1:33:08Speaker 09

  Good. Thanks for having me on. Great to be here.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me on. Why don't you start with a little bit of your background, maybe an introduction on how you fit into Meter as an organization? And maybe even just reset on like, an introduction of Meter and what the purpose of the firm is, the structure of the firm?

• 1:33:25Speaker 09

  Yeah. So my name is Ajeya. I actually joined Meter pretty recently to lead the writing of this Frontier Risk Report in January.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Speaker 09

  Before that, I'd spent about a decade in AI safety in a couple of different capacities, all at Coefficient Giving, which is a big funder of AI safety work.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:45Speaker 09

  A lot of my work had been kind of bigger picture forecasting, longer term, like, when are we going to get super powerful AI? What's going to happen with the world? What kind of risks might it pose? And at Meter, I really like that METR's mission is to kind of take that stuff seriously, but then try to make it measurable.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 09

  Like, try to make risks from misaligned AI something that we can track and do the best possible job as civilization, like, getting on the same page about.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 09

  So I see that as having two parts. One is developing the measurement tools, so that the telescopes and the microscopes and the instruments we need to understand what are systems capabilities? What are their motivations or inclinations? What are the incidents we've seen of them, of things going wrong? And where is that all heading with the trends?

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Speaker 09

  And then the other side of that is to actually apply that To real frontier deployments and try to understand the risks posed by a particular system in partnership with companies.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 09

  And the frontier risk report is is sort of that half of it where Meter, for the first time, has done a sort of cohort thing with a bunch of different companies, working with Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Speaker 09

  Where they gave us access to their best internal models, sort of on our terms, and answered a long questionnaire we sent them about, you know, how they align these systems and what incidents they saw with them and how they use them.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Speaker 09

  Also that we could kind of pull together, almost like a State of the Union of like, what's the deal with misalignment risk.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:27Speaker 09

  Inside these companies.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, how are you trying to quantify the actual findings? Is it like a number of incidents or magnitude of incidents? It feels like it can be very abstract, but the whole purpose of Meter is to sort of quantify, narrow down, contextualize.

• 1:35:43Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  And so, what were the goals or were the goals, you know, after you actually get access to the models, you get these questionnaires back, you see the internal reasoning chains, are then you starting to construct benchmarks around those? Or is it important that you come in with your sort of metrics pre-baked so that the access doesn't change what you're measuring?

• 1:36:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's a good question, and it's definitely a mix. I think we had, I would say, basically three big goals. The first one was really to just do a dry run of a process for what good auditing of risks could look like.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:21Speaker 09

  So, most third-party evaluators, including Meter in the past, they sort of, you know, a company is about to release a model in two weeks, and they call you up and they say, can you run some evals on this model? You kind of scramble to do two or three evals.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Speaker 09

  They put out the model, and they put your evals in the system card.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Speaker 09

  And we wanted to do something that was both deeper and kind of driven by us as opposed to tied to launch schedules.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so, really quickly, going back to like evaluating the older models, like, what does that actually look like in practice? Is that like, you know, give me the, you know, give me instructions for how to build a bioweapon? And that's like just the prompt, and then you're just seeing if it rejects that properly? Like, what are some examples of evaluations that you would do prior?

• 1:37:08Speaker 09

  So yeah, so you're talking about red teaming, Yep. which the UK AI Security Institute does a lot of this. Where, yeah, the company will be like, will this model tell you how to make a bioweapon? Yep. You have a week or two, you try a bunch of jailbreaks. Yep. You generally just get output access to the model. Sure. So you can't necessarily go super deep. Yep. And what Meter used to do is dangerous capability evaluation. So it's not even the jailbreaking piece per se. It's just what can this model do autonomously on its own? Yep. So we're best known for our time horizon chart, which is plotting models that with the X axis being their release date

• 1:37:50Speaker 09

  and the Y axis being how complex of a task can they do by themselves, measured by how long it would take a human to do the task. So we released this in spring 2025. Models were like a time horizon of less than an hour. And now the best models have a time horizon of more than two full-time equivalent days. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the time, they can do software tasks that a human would take days to do. So that was our lane, is like capability evaluations. With this report, we're trying to expand into two different verticals at the same time as we're kind of expanding into deeper access. So we're calling it means, motive, and opportunity.

• 1:38:32Speaker 09

  So means is the capability piece of it, which Meter has the longest history with. Motive is understanding, based on how these systems are trained and based on what we've seen of things that can go wrong in real deployments, what are their tendencies? Like, under what circumstances would they misbehave? And can we get better at predicting that? And then opportunity is the whole system surrounding the agent in terms of what are the operating conditions? How are they used? How are they overseen? Are they subject to monitoring? Are they subject to security? And therefore, like, could they get away with certain harmful actions? Or would they be stopped? And

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  As you, I mean, I'm interested in more of like, yeah, the actual findings, like the state of the union on like, like, what are the capabilities? Where are we on actually mitigating misalignment? And then, so let's talk about that. And then I want to know downstream where, where all this goes. And yeah, where you'd like to see standards sort of emerge.

• 1:39:39Speaker 09

  Yeah. And so that kind of goes back to your question of, you know, did you kind of come in with, with the framework all baked? Or did you kind of discover it as you did the report? And I think it's very much the latter. We knew what types of information we wanted to gather. We knew we'd want to know about incidents and how they train the system. And we kind of prepped this whole questionnaire before the process even started. But then, as we were writing the report, this framework emerged of basically a two dimensional scale of AI misalignment incidents.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Speaker 09

  Where one scale is what we're calling overreach, which is how far past the bounds of where this AI was supposed to stay, did it blow past? So we have three buckets of this.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:24Speaker 09

  One is it just violates user instructions and goes and like, does something it's not supposed to do. But there was no actual like, hard barrier that it had to hack through or anything like that. So an example of this is in one of our tasks, Opus 4.6 ran out of API credits in the account we gave it to do a task. So it just like, went and found Free Compute Online, like against explicit task instructions.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 09

  But, but we didn't like, have a security barrier, just kind of like, went on the internet and found something and set it up.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 09

  Um, and the next level of overreach is when an agent actually hacks past something.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Speaker 09

  Uh, like, like an actual security perimeter.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:06Speaker 09

  Um, and we find that on some of our tasks, agents are constantly trying to like, break out of their sandbox and find the file where we Like put the test so they can get the answer key.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Speaker 09

  So, so on our, we're, um, we have some of the hardest evaluations around. So most people evaluate models on like pretty short tasks that are pretty easy for them. Um, and we have tasks that are, you know, eight, 10, 20 hours long. And on tasks longer than eight hours, models cheat more than one in six of the time. So imagine an employee that like,

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:40Speaker 09

  you know, one time in six, just like flagrantly tries to like,

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:44Speaker 09

  uh, steal from you.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  People take the shortcuts on the longest tasks.

• 1:41:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  They don't bother to take shortcuts if they're just going to block.

• 1:41:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. So, and so on our shorter tasks that are like 30 minutes, we find the cheating rate is half a percent.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:41:56Speaker 09

  Which is similar to what companies report in their system cards. But on these longer tasks, it's one in six. And on some distributions, um, we have this data set called mirror code, which is basically having AI systems re-implement

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:11Speaker 09

  big pieces of software.

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 09

  Um, and OPUS 4.6 on hard tasks in mirror code attempts to cheat 80% of the time. So they're just desperate.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  They're just desperate to cheat.

• 1:42:22Speaker 09

  They know that the test cases are there. They want to overfit.

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  I think I'm thinking of the wrong, uh, of a different benchmark, but Meta put out a, uh, uh, it sounded like a somewhat similar benchmark of like rebuild a full complex software repo.

• 1:42:36Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  And, and, uh, and, and I think all of the models were like half a percent, like basically again, back at zero, sort of like an Arc AGIV 3 or some of the meter tasks that you have that are not, not passing at all. And for that, I, you know, I'm, I'm like, even intuitively, I'm like, I would just clone the repo and start there. But of course that's cheating.

• 1:42:55Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  Uh, and so it's very intuitive that if your boss comes to you and says like, I need you to rebuild Chrome, you'd be like, okay, well, I'm starting with Chromium and then I'll add some features. Like this is a very logical path. And I, so I, I sort of empathize with the models that they cheat in this way.

• 1:43:10Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  But, uh, let's move on to like where this goes because I think that there is an immense, I mean, you've seen the, you know, Eric Schmidt getting booed offstage for talking about AI. There's a lot of AI anxiety. Data centers are being opposed. There's, there's a bunch of calls. For like an AI FDA or some sort of, I think a lot of the model providers, maybe not all the ones that you've worked with, have signed on to let the government review models. Like, where do you think this goes? How do you, do you want this to remain in the private sector, formalized further? Build Meter as an international organization? Where is the energy going? Where is there demand from the folks that you talk to?

• 1:43:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, so Meter is very interested in, and our partner companies are interested in, setting up basically a sensible auditing regime that is technically literate for these catastrophic risks. So, you know, you don't want like a box checking auditor that has like sort of 17 arbitrary things you're supposed to do.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  The AI model is gonna find those boxes and check them. The AI model is gonna find that auditor, hack into their checklist and check everything. We know what, we know what happens here.

• 1:44:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're in this like weird situation where the science is like extremely nascent and fast moving. But then also the risks might be kind of imminent. So we need like a flexible system. And, and my best guess is that it's gonna look like, something like what happens in the financial sector in some cases, where you have embedded auditors. You have other folks who are, who are experts in finance, who, you know, sit and eat lunch with the employees and see all the books and know everything and have a lot of flexibility to investigate what they need to investigate. And we actually released details on an embedded auditing exercise

• 1:45:04Speaker 09

  we did with Anthropic as part of this report, where a Meter employee went in for three weeks and just tried to break Anthropic's monitoring systems. So he just sort of played the role of a rogue AI and tried to wreak havoc and tried to break things. And he found several ways to jailbreak and disable and evade the monitors. And that's not something you can get just from. You know, sending out a form and having them fill it out.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:33Speaker 09

  So we're really hoping to move more and more in the like embedded direction. So in that embedded auditing of the monitoring system.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:41Speaker 09

  Like we did with Anthropic, potentially even embedded auditing of training. So like getting getting samples of what the system was trained on, analyzing the training incentives that might have been created, trying to figure out if the training data could have been poisoned even.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Does this, you know, when you say auditor, I think, you know, potentially like for profit business, would there be a possibility that?

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the financial audit.

• 1:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  This is like not a joke, all the financial auditor companies are huge.

• 1:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So is there a possibility that?

• 1:46:10Speaker 09

  I could be wild, by the way.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Is there?

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but maybe it makes sense. Maybe it's actually a better.

• 1:46:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm saying, is there a possibility in the future where Meter has a for profit, you know, auditing arm that you maybe you guys spin out?

• 1:46:23Speaker 09

  So I don't, I don't know what the future might hold, but Meter does not take money for our engagements with companies, and that's very important to us because we want to have our scientific independence.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Speaker 09

  Although you're right.

• 1:46:35Jordi Hays?

  But in a.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, Bryce Waterhouse Cooper's is like a successful.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, in a.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Deloitte.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  If you want auditors that are technically competent, that have been working with the models for a really long time, there's not a lot of organizations outside of Meter that would be qualified to do this kind of work. So you might, you might be.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  It's the final alignment problem for you. Good luck.

• 1:46:57Speaker 09

  Well, you might want to, you might want to maybe like split the auditing from the scientific judgment, maybe like one thing I like from the nuclear space is that the nuclear power plants actually rate each other's safety.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:10Speaker 09

  Which is like an interesting, I could imagine Meter kind of like digging up information and then like OpenAI rates Anthropic, rates OpenAI and GDM.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I'm sure everyone would love to do that.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  Much more drama. Just fired shots. It's over. I'm sure the post will go viral every time. Well, thank you so much. Coming on the show, you can go find the report on meters X account, M E T R underscore evals is the account and M E T R dot org is the website. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:43Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Our next guest is live with us in person. We have one post we need to pull up first. There's some news from Micron Technologies. The stock's been on absolute run, but recently it traded down eight and a half percent. It's just $664 a share and talent chimes in and says, I knew this was going to happen. That's why I sold at $120. Very silly. Wild times in the semiconductor stock world, but we are moving on. We're going to be talking to our next guest about advertising and a lot of other stuff. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:48:18Speaker 10

  I'm doing well.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Please introduce yourself for everyone who's watching.

• 1:48:23Speaker 10

  Sure thing. So my name is Philippe Ingelrekt. My accent is Belgium. I'm a recently crowned American, very proud of.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:48:31Speaker 10

  Thank you. And I'm the CEO of a company called Tataris. We are in short technology for TV advertising. So that means that anybody who uses our product can manage their creatives. They can plan their TV campaigns. They can execute the campaigns or buy the inventory, measure it, optimize, rinse, repeat over and over. We do so not just for streaming TV. I think there's a lot of talk about it, but also linear, yeah, cable and broadcast, kind of the old fashioned TV and

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  OTA, over the air, right?

• 1:49:04Speaker 10

  Yes, yes. Yeah, that's somewhat going away.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Oh, that's going away?

• 1:49:08Speaker 10

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll get into all that.

• 1:49:10Speaker 10

  We'll get into that.

• 1:49:10John Coogan?

  Take us back first. Want to hear where you grew up, what you studied, your first company. I want to hear the journey.

• 1:49:17Speaker 10

  Ah, yes. And this is where I'm going to age myself. So as I mentioned, grew up in Belgium, but got called by Silicon Valley in the dot com boom.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:28Speaker 10

  And that's also where I started my first company, December 17, 99. Shazam.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  1999?

• 1:49:34Speaker 10

  Wow. Were you born?

• 1:49:35Jordi Hays?

  What a, what a time.

• 1:49:37Speaker 10

  Just checking.

• 1:49:38Jordi Hays?

  I was just a boy.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  I was barely a doctor, although I don't know if I was using it in the 90s. Was it

• 1:49:43Jordi Hays?

  What was the product when you actually started it?

• 1:49:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, it was very

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  And I guess like, had you done any kind of scrappy startups back in Belgium or this was your first?

• 1:49:52Speaker 10

  Let me answer that in first. My parents had a small grocery store supermarket and I just worked hard. But I don't think I was an entrepreneur as we would define it today back then.

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  It was in the blood.

• 1:50:05Speaker 10

  Yes, that's where I learned what hardworking meant and what it can deliver. Shazam was very different. So, I mean, look, we put it together before, you know, even the iPhone existed or the iTunes store. So, the first version, which launched in August of 2002, is when you heard the song, you actually had to take your phone and then dial a short code on your handset, 2580. You didn't have to remember the number because if you can look on any telephone handset, 2580 are the four digits right in the middle. We then would listen to the song as if you were speaking into your handset, do the recognition and then send a text message back with the name of the track and the artist.

• 1:50:49Speaker 10

  To receive that text message, it goes one step further, there would be what is called a reverse SMS charge. By dialing that short code, you accepted to be charged to receive that SMS. And then just to top it off, because we were not a nonprofit, we had to make money, but also cut a rev share with the mobile operators on the back of that. It sounds great, but it didn't really go anywhere.

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  Also, you started, so it takes you two years to build the product.

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on from 99 to launching the product? There's a massive market sell-off in that time, like, did you?

• 1:51:23Speaker 10

  We had a lot of fun, no kidding. No, I mean, like, timing is everything. My timing is everything. And if I look at Shazam, there's kind of what I would call good timing and bad timing. The good timing is industry transformation. And that applies to any startups. The industry transformation for Shazam was evident. And between 2000 and 2002, the recording industry in the United States shrank from about $15 billion to $7, $8 billion annually. Everybody claimed or blamed Napster and piracy for that. I somewhat disagree. I think it was Steve Jobs who unbundled the CD and allowed individual downloads. Right? But an industry in peril is good for a startup. So, or timing there, good. The bad part is, well, the...

• 1:52:08Speaker 10

  The technology wasn't ready for it. Sure, we had the algorithm, but the experience to Shazama's song was just

• 1:52:14Jordi Hays?

  Did you have the algorithm or was it people on the other end recording it?

• 1:52:17Speaker 10

  No, no, no, no, no, the algorithm was real.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:23Speaker 10

  But the experience was just clunky. I mean, like, right? And it wasn't till the iPhone came along, right? Where you had that beautiful experience with a touch collar screen. You hold your phone to it and and it comes back with rich information. And that changed everything, not to mention the distribution with the iTunes Store.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but so you start the company in 99, but the iPhone doesn't come out till 2007?

• 1:52:44Speaker 10

  Yeah, 6, 7, yeah, whatever. Yeah, either way, yeah.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  So you're just chewing a glass the whole time? Or was there any, was there signs of life?

• 1:52:54Speaker 10

  No, no signs of life.

• 1:52:57Speaker 10

  I mean, I can show you a chart, you know, time with music, Shazams, right? And so we were flatlining. And when we were running the consumer business, we were bleeding cash.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  So you had raised some money?

• 1:53:11Speaker 10

  We raised some money. The truth or the unknown story about Shazam is that around 2002 or 2003, I realized that there were big companies that actually needed music recognition for royalty tracking. I think of companies like BMI or ASCAP. And so I started cutting multimillion dollar licenses with them. And so while we were raking in money on the business side, we were kind of quickly losing it on the consumer side.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:40Speaker 10

  And then the iPhone came along.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  Wait, so, yeah, walk me through the anatomy of one of those BMI deals. Where are they identifying music? Are they going to a bar and seeing that a song is being played and then they hit the bar up for a payment? Like, how does that actually work?

• 1:53:55Speaker 10

  Yeah, or just radio, right? So rewind the clock back 20 years and you're an artist, you get paid on to the extent that your song is being played on the radio.

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:03Speaker 10

  And the way that was done back then was sampling literally pen and paper. You put a few college students in a warehouse and you let them sample to a few hours of music, you write it down.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Speaker 10

  So sampling unfortunately doesn't work well if you're a small time artist, because you're never going to show up in the artist. So they had a lot of complaints. They had to go from a sample survey to a consensus survey. That's what Shazam did in an industrial setting for them. Now, every single song

• 1:54:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Speaker 10

  air waved on, say, the 2,000 radio stations in the United States was accounted for and royalties could be paid out.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  Did you have a direct link to the radio stations or were you receiving the radio waves?

• 1:54:38Speaker 10

  You take it from the radio.

• 1:54:39John Coogan?

  So you

• 1:54:39Speaker 10

  We still do that today for Atari, by the way.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Wow, okay, so you had to set up radio antennas in every market then as well? And then encode that into a database that you could access over the Internet? Was that what was going on?

• 1:54:52Speaker 10

  Sure, we didn't place the antenna. This is kind of like

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Speaker 10

  equipment that you can lease.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:57Speaker 10

  But, but

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  So you say, I want to track Boston. Let me go lease an antenna in Boston. I will get a feed that then I can

• 1:55:05Speaker 10

  There you go.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  run through the system on the server.

• 1:55:06Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, that part is easy. It's, it's

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:09Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't really sound that easy to say.

• 1:55:12Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13Speaker 10

  Here's a, here's a part I actually quickly want to share since we talked a little bit about Shazam. I'll quickly share is that Shazam is a company that never should have existed.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:20Speaker 10

  Because ultimately it was a coming together of four concepts, each improbable in their own right. We had to build the largest database of music in digital format to have the reference track.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:30Speaker 10

  In the year 2000. We had to invent the algorithm. Music recognition like we do for Shazam didn't exist yet. When we had the algorithm, we, right, we had to find a computer cluster to run it on. There wasn't a Google Cloud or AWS. So we had to, we came into the office, we were littered with screws and bolts and equipment on the floor. And then four, like I just alluded to, we had to get all the mobile operators on board to get this thing going.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Speaker 10

  So even if I'm generous, I'm giving each of those four 10% probability. You compound them together, I'm probably going to drop a decimal here, but the chance of Shazam surviving and existing today is, what, 0.001%?

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 1:56:08Speaker 10

  Crazy story.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Nothing.

• 1:56:09Speaker 10

  Atari was a whole lot easier.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Okay. Interesting. Well, to close the Shazam story, talk about the decision to work with Apple.

• 1:56:18Speaker 10

  Um, we, the company was sold to Apple.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Speaker 10

  Right?

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Um, and. But why? What was the motivation? What was the, what was the potential?

• 1:56:25Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Why was it the right time?

• 1:56:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I always say that Apple bought Shazam for a song. Um, but I think, you know, at that time, Apple wanted to build, to build its own Apple Music subscription uh, service, uh, and um, uh, uh, Shazam is incredibly legion to that. You recognize the song, instead of buying or downloading the song, subscribe to Apple Music. Uh, and so that was, you know, in the, in the business of music streaming, your true, how should I say? Licensing the content is, is always a variable to your revenue, and that's not a true cost of goods sold.

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:00Speaker 10

  Your true cost is, is user acquisition. And so, um, Shazam gave, uh, uh, Apple that Trojan horse to get in there.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the, what were the secrets to user acquisition at Shazam? I mean, I, I feel like I must have found out about it from some tech blog, talking about the coolest new apps or something. But what was the funnel?

• 1:57:19Speaker 10

  Three words, blood, sweat and tears. No kidding.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 1:57:23Speaker 10

  It was, it was, it was difficult, uh, right? As I mentioned, those first few years, we flatlined because nobody figured out about it and, and, and it was a clunky experience. When the iPhone launched.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33Speaker 10

  And they made, right, uh, they had to showcase the power of that device. Not to mention when the iTunes Store launched.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:40Speaker 10

  And they needed to fill it with great apps.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:43Speaker 10

  We were front and center.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 10

  That, that was our launching.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  And it was such a differentiated app. There were so many apps for games and so many apps for the 10 different calculator, flashlight, pass tracking apps. Uh, it was only Shazam.

• 1:57:54Speaker 10

  Yeah, and I, I make it sound like as if we got incredibly lucky, but let's be realistic. We had to eat five years.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:01Speaker 10

  And the dark alleys for that to happen. So I feel like we earned it.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's fun. We had Roger Lynn Sean, who was the CEO of Pandora last week. And, uh, for me, as a kid, Shazam and Pandora were the two magical technology experiences. Like so memorable, going from. You know, you hear, you're listening to the radio, you hear a song. Google, even Googling lyrics back then didn't work very well. You could, nowadays you can string together three or four, five words and probably get the track.

• 1:58:31Speaker 10

  Oh yeah.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  But that, and you have a phone right there. But back then, if you would do three or four words together, it wouldn't find the right song. Um, and so just like going from having those moments where you, you hear a song, you love it. And then it's just gone forever. Or maybe you hope you hear it on the radio again and you kind of catch something about uh, who the artist is.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  I remember at one point it got so good, there was an auto mode that you could, you could turn on, leave it in your pocket. If you're at a bar or something and it would, at the end of the night, show you the full playlist, every song that it detected.

• 1:59:02Speaker 10

  And you also had noticed that at the end of the night, you would have a depleted battery in your phone. We've gotten better at those things.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  But there were some fantastic memories and some of those songs live on in playlists that I would listen to to this day.

• 1:59:14Speaker 10

  And to me, it's more than just knowing what the song is. It's about creating your playlist.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:18Speaker 10

  Knowing what to listen to.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 10

  Right? At the time, not, yeah.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, talk about your, did you spend a lot of time at Apple? Were you there at all or did you move on immediately?

• 1:59:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, no. So I left kind of the company operationally around 2004.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:33Speaker 10

  Uh, I joined Google. I was one of the early people at YouTube.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Speaker 10

  Uh, incredible ride, incredible experience. Uh, I then left and um, uh, launched a product called TrueCar, actually here in LA.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:46Speaker 10

  So I lived here.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  TrueCar.

• 1:59:47Speaker 10

  Um, I did that for a few years, uh, then moved back up north.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:52Speaker 10

  Uh, was at another startup. We got acquired by Yahoo. Eventually in 2016, I started my current company, uh, Tattari, which we kind of started this whole conversation with.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So tell us.

• 2:00:03Speaker 10

  It's been nine years now.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Tell us about the idea for Tattari, the, the timing, the blood, sweat and tears.

• 2:00:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Or lack thereof.

• 2:00:10Speaker 10

  Yeah. I think the, the kind of the, the, the idea for most startups comes from personal experiences.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:15Speaker 10

  Right? Chazan, not knowing what the song is.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:18Speaker 10

  Uh, TrueCar, being afraid of going to the dealership.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:21Speaker 10

  Um, uh, Tataris was actually the TV advertising experience which I witnessed at TrueCar.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:27Speaker 10

  Not great, right?

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:29Speaker 10

  And so I knew we could do better. We started with TV measurement, right? Because if you can measure TV campaigns and its effectiveness better, then we can optimize and make it run better.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:41Speaker 10

  We quickly realized that there was an opportunity for injecting technology and data science in the buying process as well. You put the two together, buying and measurement, it makes for what Tataris is today. So we are 300 people strong. We're a US company. We're doing well over $100 million in net revenue, right? And that's not media, right? That would be in order of much, much higher.

• 2:01:06Speaker 10

  We've been profitable from day number one and been mostly self-funded.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:01:11Speaker 10

  Can I get the gong for that?

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hit it yourself, hit it yourself, you're here.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  All right, thank you. There we go, it's actually gone.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  That is great.

• 2:01:24Jordi Hays?

  So you mentioned something about Shazam, which is like starting, starting a business in a sort of a troubled industry during the time of the, the music industry was struggling. Tataris looks very obvious in hindsight, but maybe some entrepreneurs wouldn't go into that because they're like, TV's dead, right?

• 2:01:43Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Jordi Hays?

  This idea, and you, and you were probably looking at sort of the global TV advertising spend and, and to my knowledge, it's still growing, right?

• 2:01:53Speaker 10

  It, it is all the modestly.

• 2:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Modestly.

• 2:01:56Speaker 10

  Modest, unlike, you know, certain other media.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  But everyone, I mean, if you just ask a random tech person, they'll be like, it's down 20% every year and it's gonna be zero in two years. Like, that's the default assumption.

• 2:02:05Speaker 10

  Let's say unlike Print and Radio, it's holding up nicely in the United States at about $90 billion per year. What's happening inside is this massive transformation out of, you know, cable or and broadcast TV into streaming. I mean, you experience this yourself every day. That is again, the good timing component. Yes, for sure. I did see that, right? I love your one liner, TV is dead, you know, starting this company in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Cisco for whom TV was a big no-no. I mean, like, I had to hear this many, many times.

• 2:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:37Speaker 10

  It's actually one of the reasons why I actually didn't really raise money for this company.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, nobody.

• 2:02:41Speaker 10

  I don't think I signed Hill would have given me those, you know, the valuations we just heard.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Speaker 10

  So, so sometimes it'd be better lucky than good, you know?

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but it creates an opportunity too, because you know that you're not gonna get the fifty other ultra-talent

• 2:02:57Speaker 10

  True that.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Teams going after the same problem.

• 2:02:59Speaker 10

  That has changed since then, but yeah.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Speaker 10

  But that's good. Competition is good. Competition keeps you sharp.

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:04Speaker 10

  Keeps you going, gets the best out of you. That's all cool.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  So, talk about the early measurement struggles. Like, if I'm running a TV ad campaign for the Super Bowl or NBC Sports or something like, why can't I just call them and say, tell me exactly what happened? Why don't they have the data? Is it a trust issue? Is it a measurement issue? Like, what was the market opportunity?

• 2:03:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, let's unpack those because you're kind of referring to measurement and then the buying process.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:03:32Speaker 10

  So, let's talk about the measurement. The way in which TV advertising has always been measured traditionally was via Nielsen.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  Nielsen ratings.

• 2:03:39Speaker 10

  Right, yeah. The success of my campaign is defined by the extent to which I reach an audience.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44Speaker 10

  Now, as newer brands came to TV with digital experience, they want more. They wanna know the effectiveness, right? To what extent has my campaign driven sign-ups or installs of my apps or downloads of my products? Whichever it is.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  LTV?

• 2:04:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, or LTV.

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  Do they get good customers that's stuck around for a long time?

• 2:04:03Speaker 10

  Right, and so that was actually one of the first things we did.

• 2:04:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:06Speaker 10

  Right, the first thing we did was bring about a different type of measurement for TV.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:10Speaker 10

  Uh, that outcome measurement.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 10

  Not the, not the kind of the audience measurement.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  How'd you do it?

• 2:04:17Speaker 10

  Built, invent from scratch.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:20Speaker 10

  My co-founder, um, yeah, just, you know, look at the, as many data sets that we can find and try to make the most out of it. And then, you know, there's, there's both deterministic and probabilistic approaches to this. A whole lot of algorithms that match to it. It's never-ending. It's a little bit, I refer to it like the large language models or the Google search algorithm, every month or two or three, we find a little tweak and then we release that and update. And so it definitely has spoken to the smaller brands. Because when we now bring a smaller brand to TV, I don't, like Spot and Tangle, I don't know what their marketing campaigns are, but they're definitely heavy and digital. When they first get into TV, they would like to see a measurement that they compare on an apples to apples basis to. Cocktail TV. Exactly, right?

• 2:05:05Speaker 10

  And then once they get in and they grow and they gain confidence, then they can switch to that Nielsen recipe, which isn't necessarily bad, but it's more destined for the bigger brands. Yeah. Do I create my reach and awareness? And so we'll do both. We'll do both continuously. The name of the game in the world of TV advertising is scaling up. Some of our brands start with, actually, sorry, most of our brands start with as little as $50,000, $100,000. Last year, we placed four, five brands in the Super Bowl, right? Those are $15 million plus tickets. And these are all brands that we kind of took through that journey. So that's the, maybe it's a good dovetail then into the buying experience. Yeah, look, there's still of, what do you say, analog practices in TV, the Super Bowl. Emails and phone calls.

• 2:05:50Speaker 10

  Yep, yep, that's how you buy it. There's obviously an incredible drive for this concept of programmatic in TV advertising. I will say this, and I'm not sure if I'm opening a can of worms here, I don't think it's the right model, right? Programmatic, ultimately, the TV advertising market and the supply of ad inventory is very concentrated. 90% of all the impressions, of the ad impressions typically come from the top 10 publishers. The three of us watch on TV, the big names, Disney, Peacock, Analog. Sure. Right? And so if you have such concentration and supply, it really doesn't make sense to apply digital principles and technology, i.e. programmatic, to get into it. You're much better off with direct integrations.

• 2:06:34Speaker 10

  And so that's where we will differ a lot from the industry. Again, it works better for the publishers, it works better for the brands, you don't have the intermediaries, you don't have the taxes. So just to repeat that back to you, basically, if I'm a...

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  ESPN or one of the platforms, I want to know that a certain brand is allocating $5 million a year to my

• 2:06:58Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 2:06:59Jordi Hays?

  To spend with me and then you're just sort of like allocating that it's not like they want to sell each individual slot for, you know, $10,000 here, $20,000 here, that kind of thing.

• 2:07:10Speaker 10

  That's the ideal, but that's, that's not always feasible.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  How is, how is AI changing the, the TV ad buying space? And what I'm, what I'm interested in particularly is as the cost of generating new creative comes down.

• 2:07:30Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  That feels like that could be a tailwind to more programmatic ad buying on TV.

• 2:07:37Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 2:07:37John Coogan?

  At the same time, there's something about if Matthew McConaughey is in the Salesforce ad or Mr. Beast is in the Salesforce ad at the Super Bowl, everyone saw the same ad. And so the fact that it's not personalized actually ads is a little kicker on top.

• 2:07:54Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 2:07:54John Coogan?

  Is that a mitigating factor? How, how are you, how are you assessing the tensions?

• 2:07:58Speaker 10

  Yeah, let me answer that part first and then I'll get to AI.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:08:02Speaker 10

  Ultimately, you refer to targeting.

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Speaker 10

  Targeting is good, but always realize it's a double edged sword.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:07Speaker 10

  Because the more you target, the smaller your audience become.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:11Speaker 10

  Right? And then you just find one person. Ultimately, what you want to achieve with TV is finding people who've never heard about your product and service. Right? It's actually sometimes less about targeting, but it's, it's about driving reach and awareness.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:27Speaker 10

  Right? And generating demand, not so much harvesting through targeting.

• 2:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:32Speaker 10

  Right? And so targeting is good, but it's not, it's more of a kind of like a feature. It's not the core strategy of, of finding a new audience. So, so I would say that. AI, I mean, like, gosh, you know, like, Attic is, is, was primed for AI.

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:48Speaker 10

  Right? Because it, it lives on data.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51Speaker 10

  And, and look, I'll, yeah, I'll, I'll be honest, I think we got a little lucky when it comes to AI as a company. This is like three, four years ago, as we grew so fast, we had to completely kind of like move out of a backend technology called Redshift into Databricks.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:09:07Speaker 10

  Monstrous. But what it meant is that by the time the large language models became available, we were running hot. We were so ready for it.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:09:16Speaker 10

  So in plain English, what does it mean as a Atari client? Well, we can plan campaigns with technology and AI built on data sets and rich history in seconds with deadly accuracy across way more buying entities than a human being ever could do, right? If you're a human buyer and you've got to choose out of forty thousand linear network rotation entities and ten thousand streaming opportunities, you can't compute this in your head for a computer. This is easy, right? And so AI and media planning, this is how we operate today. We actually, we announced this about a year ago, we pretty much doubled our revenue with the same amount of people with tools like that.

• 2:10:01Speaker 10

  We're kind of wondering, can we go to a four-day work week now on the back of AI? The next thing out there is really leveraging AI in the media execution process, right? Rather than running auctions, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of auctions in seconds to get the best impressions, maybe we don't run auctions, but we use AI to pick the ones that we believe are most fitting based on the data and the knowledge in the data.

• 2:10:27John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:10:28Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Do you have any interaction or opportunity with some of the newer first-party advertisers? We talked to the president of advertising at Netflix and they, at one point, were partnering with an ad buyer. Now it feels very homegrown. Is there an opportunity for these other platforms as time and attention shifts onto the Youtubes of the world, the metas of the world? Is there a world where you play into that?

• 2:10:56Speaker 10

  Those companies, I think you're referring to the walled gardens?

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, the walled garden.

• 2:11:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got a name.

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  You have a good drill?

• 2:11:04Speaker 10

  We've got a name for them.

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  Do you have a drill that can drill through the wall of the walled garden?

• 2:11:09Speaker 10

  Look, I mean, ultimately, like, you know, there are certain, I think they're ten, fifteen percent of all kind of viewership today. And of course, we have, we have, we have products and services that lean into it. What's missing, and it's less for us, but it's more for the brands, is the data that allows us to bring that measurement about, close the loop as we refer to it. And so...

• 2:11:32Speaker 10

  What we've seen over the years is that many of the new or larger publishers, they manifest themselves as a walled garden, but then they see that, hey, if I show a little bit of data that enables the measurement, then I get more advertisers, it drives more media, and I get the flywheel going. So we're hopeful that will change over the years.

• 2:11:52Speaker 10

  As brands, you know, YouTube is no longer a website or an app. It's a TV channel. So you've got to be there, even if certain components aren't as fully built out as we would want it to be.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordi?

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Are there any very odd, random question? Are there any TV, are there any TV networks that are effectively just an infinite feed of short videos that people scroll through? Like a vertical video feed? Because I can imagine you could make some pretty compelling television, just.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw someone screen shared their TikTok or Instagram reels in a theater, and people showed up to watch them, mostly a prank, mostly a stunt, but a very funny social experiment.

• 2:12:37Speaker 10

  Look, when Twitch was first explained to me, and you know, like, I thought that was the silliest thing ever.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  Video games on the internet.

• 2:12:44Speaker 10

  Maybe not such an odd question. I mean, there's been said that TikTok would go to TV, that all makes a lot of sense. What is TV? It really is, is as an advertiser. What is TV for an advertiser? It's the ability to show your company, right? In a rich media, audio, visual, not with a few characters, but 15 to 30 seconds, above all, to a consumer who is in a laid back experience, most likely accepting of the ads, right? And then, not to mention the last but most important piece, the largest audience possible, spending the most time. The reach of TV is bigger of that than, say, Instagram. But when people spend an average of 30 minutes per day on Instagram,

• 2:13:25Speaker 10

  they will spend three and a half or hours and growing on TV every day.

• 2:13:31John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:13:32Speaker 10

  As an advertiser.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is fascinating that the.

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  The debate around phone addiction has completely given TV air cover. You know, because when I was, you know, 10, 10 years ago was the average American spends X amount of time watching TV.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  Bumper stickers in the 80s and 90s, TV rots your brain.

• 2:13:55Speaker 10

  Oh yeah, my parents would give me hell for watching MTV. That would be the best thing if I could only convince my teenage daughter to watch MTV instead of TikTok. And I'd be so much happier.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  You just don't like it because it's a wall.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  You just want the more.

• 2:14:08Speaker 10

  I want more inventory.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  It's not about the brain rot.

• 2:14:13Speaker 10

  It's a grassroots movement.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Where do you, where do you see the business going? You said that you're lightly capitalized, haven't raised a lot of money. Where do you see this?

• 2:14:22Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  Where do you see taking the business financially?

• 2:14:24Speaker 10

  Yeah, financially, I mean, look, we, I mean, I can share this. We have a very clear plan to more than double the business in the next two and a half years. We started this plan actually like six months ago, actually, actually, kind of exceeding the plan right now.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:14:43Speaker 10

  We got to work it out. If I look back at my other businesses, Shazam or TrueCar, sometimes we would sit there at the beginning of the year, you know, planning product and we'd stare at each other, not necessarily knowing what to do or what would stick. Tatar is a little bit the opposite. We got more that we can chew off and we know we can monetize it all. So, so we, we are working very hard. And so, yeah, I think we know exactly what we're doing. Maybe somewhat related outside Tatar, which could be interesting for the viewer or the listener to hear is that I do believe that there is, it's not a collision, but a true conversion of influencer media and TV on the horizon.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Stupid fly.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Fly is terrorizing us. One fly.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  That's so brutal.

• 2:15:34Jordi Hays?

  You're doing a great job.

• 2:15:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, I was ready for that.

• 2:15:40Speaker 10

  But right, because look, as little as 10 years ago, when you launched a TV advertising campaign, you had one creative, 30 seconds, you would spend a lot of time on that and emotional capital, what is that best creative? And nowadays, you'll launch with 10 creatives and you see which performs best. If you look at influencer media, while they create 100 videos, toss them all out, find out which one is best, and that's the winner. Well, you can easily see how these 100 influencer videos will now, you know, proliferate into TV. So I think there is an incredible moment on the horizon for us in terms of conversions of TV.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, thank you for coming on down.

• 2:16:21Speaker 10

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  That's our show, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp.

• 2:16:32Speaker 03

  Love you.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Goodbye.