Netflix vs Youtube, Saudi Arabia’s liquidity crunch, Tether’s gold pivot | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  I wrote about Netflix. There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Stratechery interview. And they go back, the only mention of AI in like an hour-long interview or something, it's just two little exchanges. Ben Thompson says, is AI slop going to save you if it overwhelms the UGC platforms? And basically, it's like you're a refuge. So this is actual, this is real. And Greg Peters just says, I think it's credible. I don't know if that's the reality. So I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible possibility. It's like, maybe that's the bold case. It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been

• 0:44John Coogan?

  trading down over the last couple of months, but in general, it's up, I think it's 4X up since the launch of ChatGPT. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue, how will AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood. I mean, I was reflecting on the Avengers. I just remember seeing, maybe it was even in one of the first ones, the whole CGI process for Thanos. He has this like very distinct large chin. So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Is he a mogger?

• 1:16John Coogan?

  He is a mogger. He has this huge chin. It's actually like

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  He's kind of like the OG.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  I don't know. It looks like chin implants. It's kind of crazy, but it has these like cracks in it. It has this like very distinct look, Thanos. And normally, the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face. And then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face. It tracks all the points. So when you smile, like it sees that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling. And then that facial movement is transferred. So they're recording the lines, they're acting it out, they're giving their facial performance. And then that's transferred, all the little subtleties of how their eyebrows move, all of that is transferred to the CGI character. It can look a little flat, though. So what they

• 2:04John Coogan?

  did with this is they still have all the points on the face, but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face into a higher res model. Yes. Don't read that. Don't read that.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  But it is a good point. So all of those are tracking markers. And then the question is like, you have a much higher resolution CGI model. If you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like and the way it moves. And so Digital Domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight up machine learning pipeline, like they used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model. It wasn't, you know, an LLM. But they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots, to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018, the movies.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Obviously, you didn't see any of these movies, but I don't remember like AI backlash.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  But truly, like, I mean, people did make the, oh, it's too CGI. The explosions are too crazy. It's too over the top. But in general, people weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of two. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic. This is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie. Like, we're fine with all this. And there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of like AI tool. Now, obviously Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property. But the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry. And it will continue to be used. Interestingly, I talked to Jason Carmen about

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  The Carminator?

• 3:46John Coogan?

  The Carminator. About using AI tools in filmmaking, because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And I was like, certainly, if you need to rotoscope out a background. So rotoscoping is where you are basically using like, you're cutting out like a subject from the background and then just doing like a background replacement. That's an example of rotoscoping. But it's over motion, so it's moving. So you need to track the hand here, move it over here, track it again, track it again. And it can be very, very time consuming. Typically, this is offshore to like a BPO. And then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it. And they have some software that's used. But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one-shot. He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  He wanted to deliver in 4K. And so he went to a team. I think he paid them a fortune. They did it.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  And and when they when they rotoscope ahead, they actually like draw new hairs on to like kind of create this. It's very like artisanal still. But obviously, AI can rotoscope. You see it in the the CapCut edits.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Where's the rotoscoping NeoLab?

• 4:55John Coogan?

  It's it's actually Runway. We've had Cristobal on the show and pre ChatGPT, Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple of dots on what you wanted to keep and then add and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out. And it would sort of use that as like an intuition for the model to to drop out the background. And you could and you could do a really, really clear like cut this person out of this video just in Runway. And now that's available in CapCut and edits. And that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where, you know, you'll see the F1 driver like standing up and then it'll like it'll drop out the background and cut in a different background.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  And then the F1 driver drops out and it's like this very like skit. So it's a really cool technique. Yeah, you can see is this Runway is edit editing tool. So it basically draws a mask around it. You just highlight like, what do you want to actually rotoscope? This is an example of like motion, adding motion to video, but like you're you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste. So I don't think Netflix should take a hard line stance on AI broadly because they want to use AI tools. Obviously, they've been using AI for recommendations forever. The original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine learning models. And that's how you open up Netflix and says, we think this would be good for you based on what you watched. And it is much more nuanced than just if

• 6:24John Coogan?

  you like, you know, K-pop demon hunters, we're going to recommend Squid Game next. And so many of these rote tasks will be AI enabled and they already are. And there's not going to be, I don't think there'll be a crazy pushback here, although it's possible that there's some sort of, you know, comms mishap, especially if a director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI. But there's a VFX house that when the motion capture stage. Did use AI to upres, motion capture data. Like, you could see AI being used in matte painting for the background and the director doesn't even know because they just said like, yeah, the background, just make the forest a little bit bushier. And they think that they're hand painting it. After that, they were using CGI and 3D modeling it.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  Now they're using AI and that sneaks in and then all of a sudden they face some backlash. I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that big of a deal. The bigger question is like, how does Netflix position itself against YouTube and the UGC platform? So Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI. And I liked his stance. He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything. We're going to let you use AI tools right in the shorts creator. We have VO3, we're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this and the algorithm will sort out if you like it. And if you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff. But for the people that like that, they will be served it.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  It is sort of a balancing act and there's definitely this like stated preference for like, I don't want any AI on my platform. Now, how real is that? We'll see.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and what we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision. The decision that's bigger than just like, are we going to sort of lean into AI or not? Will just really be, do we, does Netflix ever lean into UGC, right? They've been signing some bigger podcasts and they obviously work with independent media companies. But there's a very big difference between just allowing people to, like, will they ever have an upload button? It feels like no. And I feel like that could end up being their advantage. Where part of what has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody could go and put YouTube, you know, upload a video, anybody could be a creator. And I think like, as the amount of content that gets created, 10, 100 X's, 1,000 X's because of AI,

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Netflix could be this like refuge where you're like, okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free for all.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than like AI on Netflix.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  That's, I think that's a very good thesis. YouTube has been on an absolute tear. In terms of watch time on TVs, according to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the US for nearly three years. And so this has been the backbone of the case for like, let Netflix buy Warner Brothers, even though they'll get HBO Max. Like, you're merging two. Seemingly big streaming platforms, but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube. So, but the bigger question is like the, there's this gap between Netflix and YouTube. And at the start back in, I mean Netflix is almost 30 years old, YouTube's over 20 at this point. Back in 2005, like these were seen as like wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail and the other one was like a video of a guy going to the zoo on his, on his like VHS camera.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  They felt extremely separate and they felt extremely separate for, for years and years and years. Now they are starting to converge, especially around, um, around video podcasts. I feel like, I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting. Podcast was, I think invented by Apple.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When I started doing any work with YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, there wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly like this, these were just different types of creators.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  And then there was a big shift. Yeah. It was like, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table. And I'm not uploading to YouTube and that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. There was the pivot to video and then Spotify went really big into video podcasting. They went on, I, I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Ek really did around podcasting. So seven years ago in 2019, they acquired three companies, Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast. Anchor's more of like a product, Parcast had a bunch of.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  They knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast, wanted to distribute it everywhere. But they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well. So that did very well. And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, the timing, apparently there was, uh, somebody sent me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. You saw that chart.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy shared this with us.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  That is a crazy chart.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  It actually fully retraced to now there's like sub. Sub fifty thousand a year. That feels like you'd really have to, maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is. But either way, there was, if you look at the chart, it looks like there was like an insane bull market in podcasts and then a huge correction.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like there was a twenty twenty boom during covid. I mean, we talked to the folks at acquired about that and they said that during covid, they saw a huge spike in people just going for walks, throwing on AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time. AirPods were getting to like mass adoption. So we were just throwing on podcasts constantly and it really, really grew. There is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough of YouTube getting sloppier by the day, then Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two. So I think of Netflix and YouTube as starting out extremely separate, then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  And I mean, Portnoy and, and Bill Simmons, both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Isn't there deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix and the audio is still elsewhere?

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Why, why, why do you remember that? Because Portnoy drilled into your head. He said, if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. Video, Netflix. Netflix. Barstool video, Netflix. And, and it's true. Like that. And so I would think of Barstool, like if I'm trying to watch a Barstool YouTube video or a podcast, I would just go to YouTube. Now Netflix is getting into that. So, so the gap between Netflix and YouTube is getting like pretty narrow, like they're, they're becoming competitors. But there's this question on the AI issue. Do they diverge more and is that valuable? The pure AI feeds like Sora and Meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. The struggle will be to create like unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  I still feel like the K-pop demon hunters moment, the squid game moment, the Alex Honnold Taipei one on one moment. These live events, these like key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the Warner Brothers acquisition. People still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place there, that's way easier than, well, I did, I, I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a T-shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that? AI Slop Man? I'm not a fan of that. I like Batman. It's almost better to think about Netflix less as being AI free and more about being UGC

• 13:49John Coogan?

  free. They're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on 30 years in the business. The AI tools will come, some fully AI-generated content will come, but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think that that's important for a lot of viewers.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yes. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on in the Middle East?

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the Crown Prince's economic overhaul. I saw this headline and was deeply concerned. I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole build out? Like, we were kind of counting on you guys to be, you know, quite liquid.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  While the rest of us are over here in America are levering up. So seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. They're also raising from, they've been raising, tried to raise money from the Qataris.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  They apparently asked for something like 10 billion from the Qataris and the UAE. Qataris threw in 10B.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Allegedly, the UAE did not. And there's frustration around that.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say, the Qataris threw in 10B and Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Time to re-up. So as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1 trillion Wealth Fund called for more collaboration on deals. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses. Local families are being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money. To the Kingdom.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf nation's ability to bankroll expansive projects planned under the $2 trillion Vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the 2029 Asian Winter Games and the government had previously pared back spending on other elements of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a Winter Games. That seems extremely expensive to host a Winter Games in Saudi Arabia, if that's what's going on.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Don't they have some mountains?

• 16:15John Coogan?

  They have mountains there? I don't know. Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now, a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The number of family offices in the Middle East in 2019, 250. 2024, 290. Now, we're up to 310, and the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices. There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable. These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy, and close to 95% of private businesses in the Kingdom are family-owned. Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Of these,

• 16:57John Coogan?

  many groups are only just starting to form family offices as they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations. That makes both established and new family offices a prime target for more investment. They're naturally looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface. In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices. That includes private credit, an industry in its infancy in the Kingdom, as over-stretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment. Not expansive, not expanding, exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses, and government entities, looking to drive investment into

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Saudi diversification agenda, but they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  You're bearish on the US dollar, the token used to buy AKI products? Bold.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  That's really good.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yes, the US dollar is all over the place. Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal hoard. I did not see this. This is interesting. There are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. So many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used. One of them, though, is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high-security vault owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings SA, which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  The embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds, whose shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above 5,200 now. It was 5,000 yesterday on the cover of the Journal. Gold is on an absolute tear. And yet relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC Holdings last year, the industry was abuzz about gossip whether about where they would head next. Few guessed that the answer was Tether. Chief executive Paolo Adorno described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative to the dollar.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative, right? E-Gold, even before Bitcoin?

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Was E-Gold actually gold-backed?

• 19:46John Coogan?

  I think that was the whole pitch was, yeah, it was trying to be digital gold. And I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was very early, late 90s, early 1000s.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tether has a scale now. They also launched their US-focused stablecoin this week to compete with USDC.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  The new token is known by its ticker USAT. Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tether's mainstay, 186 billion USDT stablecoin, will do the same for the new coin as its designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. So USAT is already available for trading as of yesterday. It'd be interesting if like, at what point does USDT... De-peg upward if gold keeps ripping, right?

• 20:30John Coogan?

  I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of Tether? I think that's not what the product is. I think, I think like the Tether stock would own the treasury.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Sure. But historically, when you, when you saw a stablecoin like de-peg, it was based on concerns around the reserves.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I think that the contract is that they will, they'll never give you more than a dollar.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  So it would. No, I know, I know. But I'm just saying like stranger things have happened in crypto where.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  No, it's always been a very profitable company. Uh, so certainly, certainly bullish for them. So Tether makes its money from its dollar stablecoin that is the giant of the sector with 186 billion in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest and trading profits. Processing the physical metal is crucial, so much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker in Switzerland, guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says, it's a James Bond kind of place. It's crazy. That's a great quote to give.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy. The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold, with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than 150, uh, 1,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market? Do you think, uh, you know, a, uh, the, the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold?

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  We'll see. I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  Because of the tariffs.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  2020, 2021 era. I mean, you gotta be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Gold watches and other precious metals, just given that, uh, your input costs are, are going. You know, I'm sure they have like one or, you could imagine one or two years worth of, of, of supply. So they're not, they, they can be somewhat insulated, but, uh. Price, prices will go up, or at least costs will go up.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. I heard a very funny, very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex. And he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you?

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  And he's saying that like.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  This was Army Hammer.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  I think it's Army Hammer. And he's saying.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  It's like obscure situation.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Such a funny situation, but he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of a building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you. Someone shows up with a helicopter and they're gonna save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is and they know that that's valuable, but if you're like.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna have time to be like, no.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  It's an FPJ. It's a, it's a Patek. Like, let me explain high horology.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Here's the Turbion.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Aftermarket prices.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always gonna trade and now it's probably gonna trade even higher.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Paula says SF escape room called the permanent underclass and it's just a room with a laptop and Claude Code installed.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  There's something here. That's funny. Have you ever done an escape room?

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  No, I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun. Nor thought that, this is how I wanna kill time.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster, right?

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Have you, are you in?

• 24:11John Coogan?

  I'm not into them, but I've done them and they're fun. Sometimes it depends on like if it's a well structured one, but I like puzzles. Like, it's fun. It's like fun puzzle, like figure out. But you can very quickly get caught in like just like overthinking what's going on. And being like, oh, it must be some like complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like, like press this lever. Instead of like analyze the situation or something.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? I imagine there's only.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Take a picture.

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  Probably only, is it like a series, is it a series of rooms?

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, usually you, you start in one room. They're all different, but oftentimes you'll start in one room. And then you'll, there'll be a series of puzzles, locks and keys and whatnot. And then oftentimes like you'll unlock something and then you'll progress to another room. And then you'll progress to a third room and then you'll finally get out of like a series of rooms. Cause it's a lot of like, they're pretty easy to set up in sort of like a defunct office space or like, you know, storefront that's just kind of like, you know, going in between. It's like the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate. Anyone can come in and just say like, oh, we'll be in there for like a couple of months. It's not super permanent. The build that's pretty simple. It's mostly just like some, some walls and decorations and like some creativity on, on the puzzle side.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Trey says, can you guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends?

• 25:30John Coogan?

  I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room. I think most of them, they aim for like 45 minutes.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe we need to make one.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Have you done one Tyler?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  I've not.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Are you interested in it? You're a speed cuber. So, you know.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it could be fun. I don't know. Yeah. I'm kind of in the Jordi camp.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  When they came out, there was definitely like a boom in like, uh, in the, in escape.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Bobby in the chat says, escape room would be a good benchmark for AI. Certainly, certainly a humanoid.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Let's, uh, click over to re-watching the interview with the Claude bot creator, Peter Steinberger.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  So in November.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  I, I don't know. You know, I, I wake up every day. I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then there was like, okay, I, I want to check this my computer on WhatsApp. Because, because if my agents are not running, it's running and then I go to the kitchen. I want to check up on them and I go on like two little prompts.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  So I, I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls Cloud Code and then returns what Cloud Code returns. One shot.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  And it took like one hour and it worked. I was like, oh, okay. That's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image. Those images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I had to get our images. And then I I was on a trip in Marrakech with like a weekend birthday trip. And I I found myself using this like way more than I than I thought, but not for not for programming. It's more like, hey, there like there's like restaurants. Um, because it it it had Google in it and it it could figure out stuff.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it's like super useful. And then and I wasn't thinking, I was just sending it a voice message, you know? But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So so the reading indicator came and I'm like, I'm really curious what's what's happening now. And after ten seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like,

• 27:45Speaker 03

  how did you have to do that?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  And it replied, yeah, you sent me, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file. There's no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's open, so I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to to WAV. And then I wanted to use this, but but didn't have it installed and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, um, got the translation back and then I unresponded. And that was like the moment where like,

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like

• 28:21Speaker 03

  damn smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure. The reason that I feel I feel like that is such a powerful moment, and I'm glad that he shared it, is if you're talking with a model and you give it a task and then it just hits a dead end. It's just incredibly like that's sort of like people are very used to that right now.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  It's not that it needs to be that way, but it's just kind of like the steady state.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are used to like, okay, I I know what the models can do.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  That's effectively the agent having real agency. That makes it an agent.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  It's saying like, oh, I didn't know how to do this or I was confused. And I tried a number of things until I did, I did what you wanted, right? And that's like what you want out of, it's what you want out of a team member, right? If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task, they don't just try one thing and come back and or just say like, I actually can't handle this because the file type is wrong. It's like, convert it, figure it out.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was your reaction to that?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like pretty insane. Definitely, it definitely raised my, uh, you know, chance of permanent underclass.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  I, you know, it's making me a little worried.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  So where do we move the goalposts now?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm so, I'm so.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  What, what, what are you unhappy about? I know you're unhappy, I, I know there's gonna be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like you can't be satisfied.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Me?

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Me?

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, permanently dissatisfied.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Well, well, part of it's a bit.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, I know.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Obviously, I have to provide like an alternative.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Opinion, but of course, we have the goalposts here.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Yes, and we need to move them.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  They have been sitting in one place, but I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product, an entire, you know, this novel.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Experience.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  That is taking the world by storm and how much, how much did, we know they only spent, you know, a few months on it.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  How much did they actually, how many people actually worked on it?

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  And what was their total, how much did they spend in total on tokens, right?

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Cause they're spending some with Kodak.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  You can sort of see that from the GitHub commits, right?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I mean.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  For some sort of average.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can do that. But then. I mean, just based off that it's like, okay, fifty one thousand dollars on two and fifty billion tokens.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  And a lot of those tokens are probably using Claude Bot to do things, right? Not just, not just building it, right?

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that was over how many months, like all those tokens were not just on Claude Bot.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions, like it's, it's, it's pretty accessible. I don't know, we need to, we need to find a new AGI benchmark.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Okay, so I, I think, um, one of the main takeaways I have from this is just that, um, big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing, right?

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Mag some companies are not gonna like talk to each other, they're not gonna, you're not gonna get OpenAI in, in WhatsApp, stuff like this.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  So it really reiterates the idea of.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  But do you think they would go so far as to say, we are not gonna allow you to navigate our applications using something like?

• 31:07John Coogan?

  I mean, that's literally happening with like the New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bot.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  But, but it's different having your local device being effectively used by.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  No, it, it is, but at the same time.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  Using itself.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  At the same time, if OpenAI has the ChatGPT app, right now, if you go to the ChatGPT website and you say, hey, uh, I, I'm a subscriber to the New York Times and, uh, there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link, can you open the link and, uh, turn it into some bullet points for me? It'll just say like, no, no, I can't go over there. Like they, they said, don't go, I'm not going. Now, if I download the ChatGPT app and it's able to run that and maybe the New York Times can't. Block it. The New York Times still has the ability to like sue OpenAI and like be a headache.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Users are basically going to demand, I

• 32:00John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  If my data, I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  I want to be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  Even if I'm not physically present with the device.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 32:11John Coogan?

  I, I, I agree.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  And so I just, I just think it's going to be a really, really, really tough argument for some of these larger companies.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  To say, you can't, you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself. I don't know, like, how, how do you actually enforce this? Is, is Google Drive going to say, you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  If you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only, only real solution is to have like actual, I think, deals between these like different companies.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. TBN.com for the newsletter.