Le Chonk, Buffett Discovers YouTube, The Case Against AI Job Doom | Greg Fleming, TJ Parker, Joowon Kim, Rick Dungey, Dylan Field, Hardik Kabaria

(05:10) - "Digger" Review (06:42) - AI Mods Run into Copyright Law (16:26) - The Case Against AI Job Doom (28:29) - Warren Buffett Discovers YouTube (35:08) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (49:42) - Mistral Launches Le Chonk (55:19) - Greg Fleming discusses his career in financial services and his role as CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management, which provides comprehensive advice to wealthy families. He explains the firm’s growth, approach to private-market investing and diversification, and use of AI to improve advisor productivity while preserving personalized client relationships. (01:17:40) - TJ Parker discusses his return to operating as CEO of General Medicine after founding PillPack and spending several years investing. He outlines General Medicine’s mission to become a seamless, consumer-focused healthcare storefront by combining transparent pricing, medical records, pharmacy access, and AI-enabled infrastructure. He also reflects on lessons from PillPack and explains how his healthcare expertise and experienced team position the company to simplify interactions with the broader medical system. (01:32:04) - Joowon Kim discusses leaving Ramp to co-found Melius, an AI-powered creative platform that has raised $25 million. He outlines Melius’s tools for generating and editing media, its enterprise customers and integrations, and his vision of enabling anyone to turn their imagination into creative content. (01:43:24) - Rick Dungey, executive director of the National Christmas Tree Association, discusses the Christmas tree industry, including farming, demand planning, White House tree selection, and proper tree care. He also highlights the association’s advocacy work and Trees for Troops, a charitable program providing Christmas trees to military families. (02:00:31) - Dylan Field discusses Figma’s new Design Agent, emphasizing its ability to enhance designers’ creativity and productivity rather than replace them. The Figma co-founder and CEO also explores specialized AI models, human judgment, transparency around AI-generated work, and the importance of using AI to expand original thinking instead of automating it away. (02:20:02) - Hardik Kabaria discusses his background as Vinci’s co-founder and CEO, drawing on a Stanford PhD and eight years developing manufacturing software at 3D-printing company Carbon. He explains Vinci’s physics foundation model, which helps semiconductor companies automate thermal analysis, accelerate time to market, and improve product performance while preserving data privacy through on-premises deployment. He also outlines plans to expand into mechanical and electromagnetic physics following the company’s $250 million fundraise. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, October 6th, 2026. We're live from the TVP in Altria, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you dot rent dot com. Time is money, save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Also, Christmas. How many days until Christmas? That's the question you've been answered, asking.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  That's the question on everyone's minds.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  We have the answer today on the show. I believe it's 79 days until Christmas. Is this new? 79 days until Christmas.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Get ready.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Thank you to the graphics team.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  And the great thing about this whole bit.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Is it will never get old for us.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  It really doesn't.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  It's probably getting old for some of you.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  No.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  And we're sorry, but we just can't help but feel the Christmas spirit.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Also, you asked.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  You asked.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  You asked for more.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  We delivered.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  You asked for more Christmas content. We delivered. Today on the show, we have Rick Dungey from the National Christmas Tree Association.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Rick.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  He's the executive director. And he's going to break down the real Christmas tree industry, the official White House Christmas tree and trees for troops, all the different things that they're doing over at the National Christmas Tree Association.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  And how he's thinking about the road to Christmas broadly.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  And we're also going to ask.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Christmas really is his Super Bowl.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. Uh, no, great show, great show, P D F. I was, I was leafing through GQ this morning. Tom Cruise is on the cover. It's a, it's a good addition. There's a funny anecdote in here that I wanted to share. I need, I gotta find it. But they got the whole Tom Cruise spread, lots of photos, uh, but they did a little back and forth interview with him and.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  We recognize that we are having some audio difficulties.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Team is working on fixing it.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Let's test it with some soundboard.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Did that work?

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Did that fix it?

• 2:06John Coogan?

  What about this? Well, we'll talk through this and then we'll move on to other stories and hopefully the audio catches up by then. He's a course brow. He dropped a course, a private course, and we got to get access to this. The question from the GQ interviewer, you have mentored a lot of younger actors. Glenn Powell has talked about watching a six hour instructional video about screen acting that you made, right? And Tom Cruise says it was very basic. It was just something to have people understand, just to have a different concept of lenses and what the lens is and what the frame is, just the same way as an actor, as an actor on stage.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  Being a global superstar for dummies.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically, he made a, he made a six hour, that's a course. He made a six hour video, uh, just the same way as an actor on stage or in the development of cinema, where it started and what the, that frame means and how it. Great success.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  Audio syntax.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  That frame.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  Woo. Thank you, team.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Uh, there's just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also to understand certain things so that you can forget about it. Uh, what else do you tell younger people, other people in your business? I listen first. What do they want? It's not me. I'm more interested in what are their goals? What do they want? And it's not just younger people. This is me when I was a kid. I'm going, what are you interested in? They say, really? They said, yes. What is this movie about? What is this? There's a bunch of other fun things in here, but I thought it was funny that there's a secret six hour training video on how to be an actor from Tom Cruise. We got to get access to it. I feel like, uh, there's a lot of journalists that they get documents, they scoop things,

• 3:50John Coogan?

  they release things, uh, but I've never seen anyone just be like, I'm putting down 10 racks for whoever can bring me the six hour Tom Cruise video, you know?

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  I'm putting it behind a paywall. I'm going to monetize it, but there's a bounty out. Like, uh, Kevin Roos has the Dari Amade, uh, big blob of compute thesis from 2017, like this leaked PDF, sort of on the scaling law and the bitter lesson, basically. Uh, and I've never seen a journalist just be like, I know this document's out there. Like Eric Newcomer should just be like, bring me founders fund returns. I'll, I'll, I'll give you five grand if you got them, you know? Cause it's probably math's out at some point.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  Five million.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Maybe more, maybe more, yeah.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  To risk, to risk your allocation in the next.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I suppose that that would violate journalistic ethics to just put a bounty out for a document that you know exists.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  I will bribe you.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  For the truth.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  And it probably really, like, I was thinking about the, the, the, the various leaks that go out, like some of them violate NDAs, but if they're, if they're secretive enough and they're squirreled away, uh, via Signal, like they probably don't trace back, they probably don't really trigger anything. Also, some of them just don't really matter. They will, you know, for a company is, might not be that frustrated about a particular leak, uh, if it makes the company look good, but.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking, speaking of movies, the team saw a movie yesterday. Ben, could we get a review? Oh, you didn't go.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Ben didn't, wow, didn't come, yeah.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Tyler, review.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I saw it.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Who saw it?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  So we saw it bigger.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  Nick said that he was starting to look at his phone after like 40 minutes.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Nick did not enjoy it. I thought it was pretty good. And so, so basically the reviews are really bad, right?

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  And famously, well, not famously, but like the box office is really bad.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Not all the reviews are bad. I saw Mark Andreessen gave it a positive review.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  He did, yeah. And that was really one of the only like very positive reviews I saw. But yeah, I think the budget was like 160 million first weekend.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Tracking to like eight million.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Eight million, yeah. Pretty brutal. Uh, I thought it was, it was good. It was very cool. Um, like the, like the framing of the movie. I, it's, it's, it's hard to like reveal too much.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was very cool.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Film school, like this, this critique is so nuanced. It's remarkable.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  I don't want to spoil anything. I don't want to spoil anything.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  What was cool about it? The costumes?

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Give us, uh, give us like a, just give us like 30 seconds of spoilers. I'll bleep it out.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Okay, so basically.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  The bleep organ.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  We're still working, we're still working on that.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Um, wait, so can he talk over the bleep, basically? Okay.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we're working, we're working on a new feature.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Uh, the game decompilation thing is, is going strong. Uh, Ben Thompson was writing about it in Sir Techery today. Uh, there were some more knock on effects. He took it in a very interesting, like legal direction about the, the implications of, uh, taking a video game, uh, decompiling it, doing whatever you want with it. Obviously IP licensors don't like that, but there's not a lot that you can, that you can do to control that. And obviously open source models are coming. And there's a bunch of interesting knock on effects. I saw a really funny one. They're getting funnier, these mashups. I saw one where someone was playing NHL hockey in Resident Evil. Did you see this one? It was really, it was really such a good mashup because the guy's just like on ice skates and like flicking pucks at zombies.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  It was, it was pretty good. Uh, I was, I was into it. Again, probably not really something I want to play for five hours, but will I watch the 30 second video of it? Absolutely. But, uh, yeah, Polygon has been breaking this down. If you've been on Axe over the last few days, you've probably noticed that things have gotten very weird when it comes to modded video games. There are clips of Call of Duty operators doing kickflips and other tricks from Skate, people playing Black Ops 1 zombie mode in Skyrim, Miles Morales swinging through Gotham. Uh, here's another add to the list. Someone has gotten the Xbox version of Halo Combat Evolved running in a web browser with multiplayer and split screen support. And the other funny thing is that it's not, they didn't, like, apparently the Halo community

• 8:05John Coogan?

  doesn't like the PC release of Halo, so they ported the Xbox version to the cloud browser. It's like, you, you can really do anything you want now. Um, and, uh, and so Ben Thompson goes on to describe a little bit of what's going on. Uh, games are written in human readable languages, C, C++. Obviously there's scripting languages on top of that, but then they're compiled into machine code that's executable by the processor that they're intended for. Uh, for Halo, that's X86. You've always been able to disassemble machine code into assembly, uh, because assembly maps almost perfectly to this machine code. The difficult part, which takes humans years, is decompiling assembly to C or some human readable language that then you can actually modify.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  But LLMs are really good at that. And so is it legal? Is it legal? Uh, the story conflates two different AI capabilities. The Fallout project appears to be a new game. There's no Fallout New York, although using the name Fallout is likely a trademark violation. I think we were joking about, uh, the lawyers being really excited seeing all these going out because it means full employment. Uh, decompiling is not in and of itself illegal. Saga, uh, Sega versus Acolyte held that disassembling code is fair use if it is the only way to reach unprotected functional elements and there was a legitimate purpose. And Sony versus Connectix extended the same reasoning to reverse engineering the PlayStation's BIOS.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Uh, however, that is likely where protections end. Code that is derived from decompiling is by definition very similar, if not identical to the original code, which is covered by copyright. So even if you go and decompile a game and then you ship something that's like a mod, you're going to get a DMCA notice and this is already happening. Like something will go up, it'll get, it'll go viral and then they'll get hit with a, a takedown notice. This already happened. Two hours later. Is that me or is that?

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Getting hit with a copyright.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Two hours later, you'll get hit by, yeah, copyright. Uh, so you have to take it down. Um, there's, there's a couple of interesting things. So the actual value of these like decompiled games, mashups, pretty limited because you basically just get a viral video and you can't really monetize it because you're going to take down notice. But, uh, the, the, the, the training rollout for the AI labs, like the training data that comes from like having this fleet of like all these different game modders go and spend a bunch of tokens that they're basically paying for. Maybe it's a little subsidized, but like they're basically paying for all this decompilation. And then also the labs probably have RL environments for this type of work. And then there's tools for this as well.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Uh, means that I would expect like the next version of models that is trained on all the inference that's happening right now, because everyone right now in the game modding community is like, let me go point. GPT Astra and Opus 5.5 at whatever game binaries I can get. So it's like, oh, I like Skyrim. I like Minecraft. Let's go decompile those. But then they're also doing it with all the long tail. So all of that's going into the next set of training data. So you would imagine that the models get much better at video game development, which is, uh, which is cool. Uh, he also just talks about like how things will change over time, similar to, uh, uh, uh, just similar to what's happened in

• 11:24John Coogan?

  video. AI seems to exacerbate a lot of trends, including the shift to service-based games. So he talks about like, in a world where if you send someone a disk or you send someone a executable binary, like they're just going to decompile it and be able to do whatever they want with it. Maybe you want to stream that game. So you, uh, this was, uh, Google had an effort for this. I forget what that was called. It never really took off, but Google had the ability to basically stream you a 1080p.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  Google Stadia.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Stadia. That's right. So they would stream you the video output and you would stream them the controller input and the game would run on the server. So you never saw any code. You just saw video coming back.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  This is also how the Meta Quest Xbox edition worked. You were streaming the game in.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right. And I think, uh, I think Xbox has stayed with the cloud gaming a little bit longer, but gamers have always sort of pushed back on that. I don't like the latency. What if my wifi goes out? I'm just trying to play in a single player game, blah, blah, blah. And so, uh, it's possible that this is something where the game industry comes together and they're like, we really gotta fight these hackers. We gotta hide our code more behind more of a firewall, like that cloud streaming firewall. Uh, or it could be something that they just like embrace and go the, the IP protection route. Um, but, uh, yeah, to the extent it dooms AAA standalone games, that is only because it accelerates what was already happening. There's no reason to be sad.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  However, the real intrigue about AI is not the fact that it can recreate what was already made is that it can create entirely new worlds and do so for the individual. The real analogy might be video, but not Netflix, rather TikTok and Reels and the fact that everyone gets to choose their own adventure. So you get to make your own video games, uh, in the future. And then this is definitely happening. Uh, there's, whoa, they even actually even took down the video of this one GTA V in the browser for free. B-bomb posted this. Play GTA V.com got 8,600 likes and I have a screenshot of it running, but when we pull it up, we're now live. That's the actual tweet today. It says media not displayed. Not only did they take down the website, but they took down the images and

• 13:37John Coogan?

  the videos that were shared on X. That's pretty crazy.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Hardcore.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Uh, Tenebris gives some more context here. Uh, this got taken down within hours, but it's starting now within a few months. Instead of sketchy sites with pop-up ads hosting torrents of the latest AAA, AAA games, uh, a few days post-release, we're going to have sites hosting fully playable, free WASM? I forget what, WASM.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Web Assembly?

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Web Assembly versions. That's right. Uh, of AAA games, uh, whole libraries of them there. Just a click, zero download required, zero risk of viruses, zero effort or thought. I would call this an existential threat to the gaming industry if it weren't for the fact that every input to previously 100 million to $200 million AAA games is effectively dropping by orders of magnitude and cost and time. Instead, it's more of a Cambrian explosion. Uh, yeah, I, it's hard to think that, uh, this doesn't go the way of generated text where like people still care about the, the, the posts and where they come from, effectively intellectual property. The instantiation of the actual product is less relevant than the story around it and the, and

• 14:45John Coogan?

  the people behind it. Um, and the, and the shelling point of like, we're playing the same game. Of course, people will do their individual stuff as well. But anyway, um, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Stretch this out.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  What else we have going on, John?

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Well.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  I am so glad to be past that subject.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Cause you just don't like video games?

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I had enough. I had enough.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  You had enough?

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  I had enough. Two days, two days in a row.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Video game.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  That's the final frontier.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're gonna be able to race anywhere you want.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Mustafa is back.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Morning commute in a video game and try and get your lap time down to six minutes. Do you think you could make it from Malibu to the Ultra Dome in six minutes?

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Six minutes?

• 15:43John Coogan?

  In a hypercar, an LMP2.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  With the road cleared?

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it's, um, no, it would actually be, it would actually be.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  15?

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  It would probably.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  I assume you're going like 200 miles an hour on the street, right?

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  And you could find a pretty, you could find a pretty straight line. Like there wouldn't be that many. You'd be able to be hauling.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should, we should, we should, we'll, we'll do this. This is, this is what super intelligence.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Cause your Nurburgring time is already in the impressive category. I think you got the raw skills to take it to the next level.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  The 10-minute commute.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  The 10-minute.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  Turning your, turn your hour commute into 10 minutes.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  It'd be pretty, yeah, that's a, that's a fun game. Uh, anyway.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Mustafa says, uh, coming in with a major white pill. AI won't take your job anytime soon. In 10 years, only 5% of what humans do will be replaced by AI. Let's see what he has to say about that.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  They're doing new media over at MAI. The Humanist Review of AI, they made a magazine and they have a number of articles and, uh, they tapped MIT economist and Nobel laureate, Nobel Prize winner in economics, Darren Asimoglu, uh, to write a piece about how AI will diffuse. And it's interesting because in this one, it's total white pill, but then he was on 60 Minutes and he's, and he's a little bit more black pilled. So we'll have to go back and forth. I think it's the same.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Wait, that's the same guy?

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's sort of an odd, we'll have to reconcile this. Okay. So let's see what Darren Asimoglu says in the Humanist, uh, Review. Um, he, it, it's a longer piece, but, uh, Mustafa Suleman, uh, summarized it here. He said, he argues that we need to stop building AI to replace people and start building it to make them better at their jobs. 52% of Americans are worried about AI's impact on their jobs. The fear is overblown and it's steering how we build AI. I, I, I like the 48% of just confident people. Like, good luck.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Good luck. I'd like to see, I'd like to see you try.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm not in the training data. I'm not, there's no R environment for what I do. Um, AI isn't in the productivity statistics yet. This was the famous line about the internet. It shows up everywhere except the productivity statistics. Most firms aren't, uh, are, most firms using AI aren't seeing real gains yet. Expect roughly 1.5% added to GDP over 10 years. Not a revolution. Electricity took decades to spread. There's so many.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  The problem is like, so, so the problem is like going back to our conversation, uh, with Sean Frank yesterday from Ridge. This is a company that's over 10 years old right now, growing 50% this year, using AI across the entire business from demand planning to creative to a number of other things. And the business is performing pretty much as well as it ever has. The thing is you, AI is impacting the whole business in different ways, in big ways and small ways. But you can't really pin it on, you can't give AI credit for the growth because there's so many

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  factors contributing, right? New products, pushing to retail, all these different things.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Um, but it's, but, but, and I think you can still say that maybe most firms aren't using it to see, see real gains. But when you say that electricity took decades to spread, I just don't view AI as the, it, it's not the kind of technology that, that takes a long time to spread when it works, right? And that's because we can use the internet, which pretty much everybody that's productive has access to, to spread AI. So, um, already, uh, just a few bullet points in and, and.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  But the Nobel Prize winning economist has another example to push back on you with. He says, if you don't like the electricity example, here's another one. Speech recognition. He said, turning speech into text has been an aspiration since the 1930s. And this is a harder one to grapple with than, than electricity because a lot of what was in place for AI is also in place, what, uh, a lot of the things that you're saying about why diffusion should be faster for AI was true for, uh, for speech recognition. So, uh, people have been trying to do speech recognition, you talk, the computer types since the 1930s, going on 100 years of pursuing this.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  It became a huge step closer to reality, thanks to the work by American, by, by the American husband and wife team, James and Janet Baker, starting in the 1980s, when they founded the iconic company Dragon Systems. Dragon truly revolutionized voice recognition and it would not be an exaggeration to say that everything else that has followed in voice recognition since then is thanks to the Bakers. Their breakthroughs, their breakthrough was to eschew previous attempts to build speech recognition systems based on syntax and meaning, and instead deploy machine learning techniques in order to build a pure prediction system, which would

• 21:08John Coogan?

  map speech onto the best match text. Already in 1997, the year Dragon launched Dragon Naturally Speaking, the first program that was capable of voice recognition from natural continuous speech. The most, the momentousness of this was obvious. So in previous software, uh, including the previous product from Dragon, Dragon Dictate, you had to pause in between each word to let it process the gap between words. You no longer needed to do that with Dragon Naturally Speaking. This was 1997. I can vouch for all of this because Darren Ismoglu, the writer, after developing repetitive strain injury in both arms in 97, he was an early user, even with the very slow processors

• 21:52John Coogan?

  of the time. Dragon, naturally speaking, was like magic. It would score close to 95% accuracy. I didn't know at the time that I would be a user of their products for the next 30 years. But what I immediately knew was that the processing power of computers improved. I could have access to much more powerful voice recognition software, enabling me to carry out my work despite a continued inability to type. By 2000, everything was going as I and others had predicted. The software had gotten better, and with better computer chips, accuracy and functionality were improving at a fast pace. What nobody could predict was that in the next two decades, despite advances in the underlying technology, consumers would see little of the gains, thanks to a series of corporate disasters.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Dragon was acquired in 2000 by a Belgian company, Learnout and Houspi, that went bankrupt within months of the purchase, with its co-founders later being found guilty of corporate fraud. You hate to see that. Let's hit him with the...

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Notty, notty.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  So Dragon was then purchased by Scansoft, rebranded as Nuance. I actually worked for a startup in college that got acquired by Nuance. Very, very talented team over there, which progressively deprioritized the consumer in favor of medical and enterprise markets. If you walk into a hospital today, you will see a lot of doctors and nurses dictating notes, even before the whisper revolution that just recently happened. Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2022 and continued the same model. The result, voice recognition software on PCs today is only marginally better than what was available in 2000, far less progress than the underlying technology would have led me to expect. This disappointing history lesson is one of the reasons why even greater curation is warranted when making predictions

• 23:38John Coogan?

  about the fast diffusion of AI models today. Breakthroughs in the infrastructure of a new technology need to go hand in hand with the right kinds of applications built on this infrastructure. And then, of course, you need the right marketing structure to reach potential customer base, as well as inputs from consumers to act as the impetus for modifications and improvements of the applications. This is what we are not seeing for AI. This is what was completely bungled for voice recognition. What do you think?

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Whole lot of mumbo jumbo, John.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's move over to 60 minutes because Darren Ismoglu takes the other side of his own argument, arguing against himself with Brendan Foody from McCrory.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Job category on LinkedIn. And just as machinists once replaced artisans, Brendan Foody insists he's creating a career of the future. Out of work? Fear not. Come train AI.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  Literally, all of the top 20 economists in America, they would say the exact same thing, which is that there's going to be more jobs in 10 years than there are today.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  You're a top economist in America. What say you? No.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  One of the greatest edits ever.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  What we are living through with AI is unprecedented. The first phase of the industrial revolution.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  You're positive this is the same guy that...

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  In this article that we...

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Wait, I don't think these two things are incompatible.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Break it down for us.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  So the article is...

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because he is saying 5%. 5% of the things humans do are at risk.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  No, he's saying that right now, if we keep building AI the same way, it will replace workers, but we need to build it a different way that empowers workers. That's what the headline of the article is, will AI replace workers? Not if we build it right. He's saying like, right now, on the course that we're doing right now, it's going to replace workers.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  So we need to shift courses.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Right? That's what I...

• 25:29John Coogan?

  And his argument from an economic perspective is like, that will actually increase productivity. That will be better, not just because higher employment is good, but also higher economic growth is good. So we should be trying to solve problems that cannot be solved by people right now with AI, as opposed to just...

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Just displacing, yeah, just moving stuff around versus like doing that new thing.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Okay, I like that.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I believe that's what he's saying.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  That's a pretty good position, but that is such a funny edit. You're a top economist? What do you say? No. One of the greatest. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  And here's the thing.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Top economists have never been wrong on anything. So, you know.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Literally 100%, 100% hit rate.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can find a take for anything. You can find the fast takeoff, the slow takeoff. Never better summarized than by, I believe it was the Financial Times, not The Economist, that had the chart, which was, either things are going to go completely asymptotic upwards, completely asymptotic downwards, or completely the same, which is the best analysis possible. I don't know. It does feel like it's a critical moment. There's been so many people building up to like, 2027 is going to be the crazy year, 2026 is going to be the last normal year. Like, something has to happen in 2027 that will answer a lot of the questions that have been being asked over the last five years, you know,

• 27:06John Coogan?

  since GPT-3, basically. Which is like RSI, superintelligence, serious move on GDP, serious like showing up in the statistics somewhere other than just debt. But, I mean, at the same time, you see like weird things happening in financial markets, like gold is spiking and like, it's hard to put that on AI, but there's still like, there's pockets of like, okay, there's something odd happening that you might, in retrospect, attribute to the AI boom. Anyway, what do you think of Jeremy's take? What agriculture did to our bodies, AI will do to our brains. Make us stronger and taller. I think he's being negative.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  I think he's being negative. Didn't it in some way make us like, you know, weaker because we're, you know, consuming more grains versus, you know?

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, some agriculture made us a lot taller and stronger, but then...

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Made us fatter, for sure.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Because we overconsume. And so, yeah, if you're overconsuming information, it's brain rot. Yeah. But a good encapsulation of the thesis. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents deployed. Web app servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Where do you want to go next, Jordy?

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  We got to talk about Warren Buffett, because he's just like you. He's just like you, folks. A viewer's guide to Warren Buffett's nightly trips down the YouTube rabbit hole. Glenn Close clips, 1950s commercials, Uzbekistan's version of America's Got Talent. The legendary investor can't resist the algorithm either. Feeling guilty about spending hours each day watching YouTube? Don't be. Warren Buffett is right there with you. Glenn Close clips, commercials from the 1950s. Paul Anka videos, the famed investor can't get enough. Buffett enjoys speeches by complete unknowns. He's a fan of Berkshire Hathaway's own content, too, proud of how it performs on the video platform. He watches it all nearly every evening,

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  usually from a recliner in his Omaha home. Warren's range is broad, says Sharon Osberg, a close friend and frequent viewing companion. It can be the silliest things. Buffett also goes down random rabbit holes, just like us. The next day, he'll come into his office gushing over a moving amateur rendition of My Way. In August, Osberg visited Buffett's home in Omaha. They spent hours on YouTube, grinding. We watched a really good documentary on Roy Cohn, she says, and the Uzbekistan version of America's Got Talent. That would be Uzbekistan Got Talent. It's unclear. Easy to remember. Easy to remember. Somewhat predictable.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  It's unclear if Buffett is one of the channel's 34,500 subscribers. Buffett, who recently turned 96 and stepped down as Berkshire's chairman, declined to comment on his YouTube habits. What's up with Sharon just blowing up, blowing up his whole routine? Like, if I invite you into my home to watch YouTube, like, if I invite a friend to my home...

• 30:20John Coogan?

  You're doing algo docs, son.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  If I invite a friend to my home to watch YouTube videos with me for hours and hours and hours and go down the YouTube rabbit hole, and then a week later, you're calling up the journal, spilling the truth about my video, my rabbit hole habits.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  I feel like Buffett had to be like, I want you to tell the journal.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  You think it's astroturf?

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think, I think, I think, I want you to take this.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  You think he's paying people to re-sweep this article?

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  I think he's trying to, I think he's as locked in as ever. I don't think he's doing anything for entertainment. He wants the other allocators to get comfortable, you know, I can spend a few hours on YouTube every night. Meanwhile, he's studying the blade every single night, and all of this is just...

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Giving him the benefit of 4D chess.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes. Occam's 4D razor.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is Occam's 4D razor. This is what he's doing. Makes sense. To your list time.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Should we do it? Do you want to rate it?

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Or do you want me to rate it?

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I want, I want you to rate it.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Okay. We got a tier list. First, Glenn Close clips. I'm kicking it off with C tier. Not that it's a little old for me, not into it. Commercials from the 1950s, though, I'm going A tier.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Commercials from the 1950s, you're going to learn a lot. It's going to be an interesting time capsule and they lend themselves very well to YouTube videos. Uh, Paul Anka videos, I'm not a huge Paul Anka fan. I would go D tier with that. Uh, Berkshire Hathaway videos, studying, he's watching game footage. So I go S tier with Berkshire Hathaway videos. Also deeply emotional. His, his business partner, it's a way to remember him, makes a ton of sense. Uh, amateur music, musical performances, including, see, I liked Frank Sinatra's My Way. An amateur cover needs to have a twist.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  It needs to be a heavy metal rendition of My Way for to get A tier for me.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Or some like if he's watching early Justin Bieber performances, you know, somebody that's about to go on a generational run.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  That's good too. Yeah, that's good too. Roy Cohn documentary, fascinating. If you haven't seen The Apprentice, it's a biopic about Roy Cohn. I would definitely watch that documentary. I'd go A tier with the Roy Cohn documentary. International talent shows, never really dipped my toe in that pool.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Don't knock it till you try it, John.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  I just, I need to put it in the C tier because I don't, I don't have an educated, uh, an educated, uh, opinion here. Railroad videos, on the other hand, fascinating, tons of, tons of, uh, lessons to be learned about the modern era.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Alpha.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  I'd go S tier. He also owns a railroad, so he's again studying game film effectively. Uh, big band era content, little dated, I would put it C tier. Uh, let's do Charlie Munger speeches. Of course, that's in the Berkshire video category that goes S tier.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Twelve Angry Men, I like that he was watching this on, uh, Turner Classic Movies, he was watching the whole film. So I'd put that A tier for TCM movies generally, but I noticed that when they mentioned Bill Murray movies and clips, lost in translation, I'm not a big clip movie watcher. I'd rather just watch the trailer and then the whole film. I don't really like the whole clip, although I do get sucked into them every once in a while. For movie clips, I would go B tier.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Do you agree with that roughly?

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  I think you nailed it.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  You one shot it.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  That's our tier list for today.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, at the end of this article, it goes into, I'll, I'll just read it. Lately Buffett has been turning to YouTube to remember Munger who died in 2023. He's been viewing Munger speeches, including a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan. Marveling at his wit and wisdom, colleagues and friends say, you feel the bond between the two of them as he watches Charlie. It's really quite something. Um, and when we were reading, uh, this earlier, we almost started shedding.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's emotional. Uh, truly one of the greatest.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  The greatest partnership.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  In history.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  Hands down, the greatest partnership.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  It's hard to think of anything else that even comes close, but, uh, fun that we're getting more, uh, more color commentary on the Warren Buffett life. Everyone knows the McDonald's habit and the house and the, the, the indefensible plane and stuff.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  This is a fun difference spin in the modern era. It shows you that he's not entirely a Philistine. There's a whole version of the lore that could have been, oh, he still only reads the newspaper. He doesn't use the computer at all, and that would have been somewhat predictable. So I like that this is like a left turn.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  For his brand.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  And good, good 4D chess too.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Yes. Good 4D chess, yes. Fooling. Well, yeah, we'll have to ask Greg.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  All right. Scott Stevenson.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  Been on the guest before, uh, been, been a guest on the show before.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  He's running Spellbook.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he is saying, speaking some truth that's going to be very controversial. I'm going to read it. He said, if you do hardcore knowledge work, you are likely severely underestimating how much sugar you need to sustain peak performance. Protein alone cannot sustain a full day of system to thinking. He follows it up and says, allowing myself to drink sweet drinks while working has been the most profound performance enhancement in the past five years for me. For the past two weeks, I've been outputting it 50%. Higher focus, longer, one power rate at my desk per day. I'm able to do 12 hour days the way I used to be able to when I was younger. I don't have any crash. I crashed much worse end of day when I was avoiding sugar. I'm not sure why this is the case.

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  It seems contrary to most of what I've read. Hypothesis one, I burn a lot of energy working at a computer and easy fuel gets burned off quickly like a runner. I was in a calorie deficit that was hurting my performance previously. Same reason chess players consume chocolate milk while playing. Hypothesis two, I have diabetes. Any other ideas? Sugar is a superfood.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  Get it through your head, John. Get it through your thick skull.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  I like sugar.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  I know you like sugar, but not enough.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Not enough.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Not enough. Uh, sugar is, um, you know, people have been told that it's evil and bad for you and all these different things, but, um, uh, for the listeners at home, if you haven't already, it's time to study Dr. Ray Pete. That's really all I'll say. Go down the Ray Pete rabbit hole, uh, tonight on YouTube, Warren Buffett style. Spend a few hours, uh, listening to Ray Pete talk about sugar and metabolism and a bunch of other topics in that whole orbit. I started, uh, I've probably talked about it on the show before, but I just started drinking a, uh, a classic Coca-Cola every day years ago.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  You still do that?

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  Still, almost a daily habit.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  I try to fit it in every afternoon.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Every afternoon.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Every afternoon. Has some caffeine in it, so I don't want to do it, do it too late, but, uh, it's tasty. You feel good before, during and after, and, uh, I can't recommend it enough. And a prediction, I'll say it on the show, I've, I've said it off air many times. I think in the same way that salt became one of the hot, sort of like supplements of the last few years. Sugar is the next one. Every single new drink brand.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Imagine getting those stick packs that are like L and T, but it's just sugar in the raw.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  No, that's the, I mean, it, it, I'm, I'm not going to go that far, but all we've, we've been through 10 years, 15 years now of like all these fake.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  What is in, what is in Liquid IV? Is that sugar?

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  That was pretty high sugar and they always got flamed for it.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  But the, but the truth is that like

• 38:13John Coogan?

  I like those.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Proper hydration requires some amount of, of sugar. Yeah. So anyways, uh, I'm glad, I'm glad that we are about to exit the slog that we've been through of, of all these different artificial sugars that one tastes inferior, don't give you energy.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and often are bad for your gut or, or have other negative long-term impacts. So sugar's coming back. You heard it here first.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  There's a really good source of sugar that literally comes from Mother Earth. Uh, it's, it comes from corn. It's, uh, like high fructose corn syrup. If you go and you go to 7-Eleven, you get a big gulp. Uh, it has literally like Mother Nature created the corn. They extract the syrup. It's syrup's like as American as it gets. You put it on pancakes and you just chug that down and you're good to go.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Well, I want to see you just with some high fructose, just a bottle of high fructose corn syrup.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Challenge accepted.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Chugging that. I'll have.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Superfood. You said it, not me.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Not quite, not quite. Stick to good old fashioned cane sugar, folks.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that are 70% of IT, HR and finance support. Giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  All right, John, uh, do you think, do you think, what, what's the right amount to spend on your office per employee? Because Castle Hook Partners, an $11 billion hedge fund, uh, is paying around $600,000 a year in rent per employee.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  That seems pretty cool.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  And that feels like.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Whoa, that's really a lot. Okay. That's, that's really, really high. Okay. Castle Hook Partners, the $11 billion hedge fund founded by former Soros fund management investor David Rogers, signed a New York City record of paying 350 to 400 a square foot. That's, yeah, uh, for in the top two floors of the new 625 Madison Tower. Castle Hook, which is backed by Stanley Druck and Miller, will pay 21.2 million for 53,000 square feet of penthouse space overlooking Central Park. Castle Hook has just 35 employees. Wait, are they expecting to, to, to scale up a lot and change that, you know?

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully not. I mean, you don't think this setup's going to deliver alpha? You're like.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  Beautiful space, yeah.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  You know, they need to scale AUM. They need to deliver returns. Otherwise they're going to be thrown out of the building.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  I mean, it's, uh, wait, it, it's 21 mil a year?

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I don't think it's, I don't think it's unreasonable, given their, given their, given their scale.

• 40:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it also, uh, probably makes sense for clients that want to come by.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  There's just not that.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  A lot of hedge fund thefts is over the fountain, like.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, given, given their fee base.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  No, they can clearly afford it, but the question is like, what are the knock on effects other than just like, when you go to work, you feel great? There are certain businesses where it's like, oh, well, like if you're a VC and entrepreneurs come and pitch you and they see a nice building, they're like, oh, this is a serious firm. I should work with them, but hedge funds oftentimes like the CEO isn't going by the hedge fund's office all that much. Um, and same thing for the clients, they, they might not actually be going and, and doing a pitch in person, although I'm sure that happens. So, um, it just depends. I don't know. Uh, pretty cool. I, I want to see a video tour. It looks like this, these windows are really, really big, but it feels like the, the, the top two floors. It looks a little lower than some of the, some of the renders that I've seen from, uh, taller skyscrapers in Manhattan.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Can you be too high in Manhattan?

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  I haven't been yet.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  No?

• 42:01John Coogan?

  No fear of heights or anything? I feel like if you have a clear view, like, I mean, I guess you always leave yourself open to a taller building popping up and blocking your view, and that's one of the advantages of being extra high. But I feel like a view like this looks a little bit lower, but maybe I just have the perspective all wrong. I don't know. Let me know. What do you think of the new passport?

• 42:23John Coogan?

  People were going back and forth on it. Paul McGregor was saying, if I was redesigning the cover of what is arguably the country's most important public document, I'd first hire both the best typographer and crest designer money can buy, then fiddle about with the layouts probably. And Joe Gebbia fires back, hi, when you're done finding, when you're done fiddling, please send me resume of top crest designer. Make sure they can do better than the 1782 official national anthem. It looks like a very-

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  National emblem.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  National emblem. Yeah, the redesign looks like a very tasteful and moderate iteration. Like, I think people are reacting to this, like, it's like, now it's all gold and it has like a bear and an eagle fighting on it and it features like the UFC octagon, which like, was sort of where people's expectations are for these types of things, but this feels like-

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm surprised that there's no UFC branding on the passport.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, no ads is a big step backwards. But, yeah, seems like a pretty, pretty moderate iteration here. I don't know.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they made the eagle a boulder.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  And also, I think the eagle is like the exact same design, right? It's just bigger. I think this is cool. And I like that the United States of America-

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  They just said, make the eagle bold. Bold the eagle.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  And, I mean, just, I'm no, I'm no like typography expert, but in the previous passport, passport was the biggest word, but everyone knows what a passport looks like, but they don't know what country it's from. So if you pull out a book at the airport, it's very obvious that you're pulling out a passport, but it's not obvious what country it's from. So putting the name of the country bigger makes more sense, right? Am I crazy? Or is this like-

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  I think you might be on to something.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Design 101.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  I think you might be on to something.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Okay, so I think the new iteration makes a lot of sense. It's just like, put the name and put the logo bigger, so that you can see that, and everyone knows that it's passports, so put passport smaller.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I will say that the passport text where it's kind of sans serif, all caps, and there's like spacing, that does look like AI slop, kind of.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  It does.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  This is like very common when you just have-

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Too much, too wide of kerning is your problem. Okay, the kerning needs some work. Yeah, it does read a little odd.

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty high stakes graphic design.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  It is.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Most stuff, you're like, yeah, we're gonna make this, you know, pamphlet for a conference and nobody's gonna read it. And if they do, they'll look at it for a second. The passports, like, we're gonna make hundred, you know, 100 million of these, and then they're gonna carry them for a decade.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  Representing the country globally.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  They will be inspected many times.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  I'm not, I'm not into passports. I don't, I don't want to leave America. It's like, not a good thing. They can just get rid of them. Just stay here. I don't need them.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  You would love that. If John hit the button that just like ended the US passport.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, just wind down the program. Just, just go to Alaska if you want it to be cold. Go to Arizona if you want it to be hot. Problem solved.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  Hawaii if you want to go to the tropics.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Why, why do you need to go to another country? We got everything you want right here. Mike Isaac, he's out of the New York Times.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  He went to the Atlantic.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  Trade deal.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Do you think there's anything to that rumor that he had amassed an immense amount of soft power and was considering a CEO coup?

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  I think he was making a run for it.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  He might have, and then he was ousted, defenestrated, for becoming too powerful.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  That seems like Occam's razor, Occam's warning razor in this scenario. It also could be that he just wanted to go to the Atlantic and write, you know, longer, different pieces and a different style, have a fresh, have a fresh, you know, look. But I do like that we, that we caught him via the paparazzi. It's very good. There's some, there's some drama at the Atlantic, though. We had the CEO of the Atlantic on our show. He has a podcast. This is Nicholas Thompson, Atlantic CEO. He was talking to the media, about the media business on Vox Channels podcast last month, when host Peter Kafka, what's, I did Peter Kafka's show, but I didn't know it was, I didn't think it was called Channels,

• 46:42John Coogan?

  maybe he has a second show. Peter Kafka asked him, how was the magazine's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, feeling about the growing success of Thompson's personal podcast? So he's the CEO, but his podcast is blowing up, blowing up, because he's getting really great guests. And then there's also a, there's a tension here. He says, we make a lot of money on the stuff I do. Okay. This doesn't seem controversial anymore. I don't know why they're great about this. Just giving him a victory lap. What is this? This is such a puff piece? This is insane. Insane puff piece in some before about, about Nicholas Thompson just printing on his podcast. Okay, we get it.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  That said-

• 47:22John Coogan?

  He says, Jeff likes it when we make money. Thompson's response ricocheted around the Atlantic's newsroom. Thompson's podcast, The Most Interesting Thing in AI, has emerged as a source of tension between the magazine's business and editorial teams. Journalists have complained that the lucrative and high-profile show is not subject to the Atlantic's editorial rules, input, or oversight, yet a casual listener could easily take it for an Atlantic editorial product. I, I did see some people going back and forth when he did the, the Boz interview. People were like, is this a sponsored podcast? Like, this was like, because he opens with like a pretty soft question, just being like,

• 48:03John Coogan?

  what are you launching today? And then he does ask a bunch of really hard questions later in the interview, but I think people just keyed off of the fact that, like, it was the moment when Meta was in the depths of like, they're screen recording everyone. And so that was the question you got to ask in that interview. They, he did ask it, but just later in the interview. And people were like, oh, he didn't ask it upfront. That's not enough. Anyway, Thompson's show is made by the magazine's business side, and like any number of contemporary podcasts, yes, features interviews with technologists and business leaders interspersed with sponsored content. When the, when the podcast launched in 2024, the newsroom raised no objections. But now that it's printing, they got an issue.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  The Atlantic has featured a robust paid content arm for years through its creative marketing studio and custom events business. They gotta go further. You know, if they're doing sponsored content, I think that they should be auctioning off the, the guest slots, but they should also be auctioning off the host slots. So it should just be like, okay, you can just, you can just post whatever you want on our channel if you pay enough.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Just like a pipe.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  But also sell ad slots. So it's like, okay, Boz wants to do some spawn con, but Alex Wang also wants to, they're gonna talk to each other on the, on the Atlantic podcast, but then there's gonna be ads in the feed too.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  But it's presented by Anthropic.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maximal, maximal financial thing. Anyway, they're going back and forth on that. We'll see where that goes. What else is going on?

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  What else we got? What else we got?

• 49:42John Coogan?

  Oh, Le Chaton Fat.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  It's time.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  From Mistral.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  Le Chonk. They're calling it Le Chonk.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Le Chonk, yes. They're leaning into the jokes, Mistral AI, the French Neo Lab. Is it fair to call them a Neo Lab? Or are they just a lab?

• 49:57Jordi Hays?

  They're just a lab.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  They're just a lab, right? They're pre-Neo Lab.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, yeah, I would say so. Because they're kind of like-

• 50:03John Coogan?

  You would call them pre-Neo, pre-Neo Lab specifically?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Let me actually consult our nomenclature.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, I think they were like National Lab or something like that, up there with Lawrence Livermore. But they launched Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk. One trillion parameters, natively made it multimodal, 49 billion active parameters. It is the best open weight model from US or Europe, or Europe on aggregated benchmarks, state of the art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing, and finance, and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding. Forged in Europe, end to end.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  Forged.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Deployable from Europe via our, our own Mistral cloud infrastructure available to all via API today, working with cybersecurity partners privately. Open weights release end of October. So presumably they'll release the open weights for like the cyber nerfed version, I would imagine, something like that. I don't know. Anyway, what is your review, Tyler? Do you have any other data to share about Mistral's progress?

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it looks very good. I think it's like very much on par with the kind of frontier of the open source. So like the Chinese labs, it's like very much a contender. It's not necessarily like destroying all of them on, on every benchmark, but it's like certainly, if people are worried about using Chinese open source models, because maybe downstream, there's gonna be some like legal ramification or whatever.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Like, this is a very good choice.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  It really does change the open source, closed source debate, because-

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Mistral and Reflection, which is kind of the, the American open source lab.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Like, we're now starting to see like, okay, these models are actually like quite, quite competent.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  And Reflection came out with, it's called Beam, yesterday?

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, not tapped in. They're like, sorry, sorry, I can't, I can't hear, I can't hear you, I can't hear you.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  It's called Beam, yes.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, we can come back to that, but uh, great, great to see them getting a, a new model out.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  And Leo has the, the, the funniest benchmark of them, says it's pretty funny that it seems the one thing Mr. All Large Four is actually leading on is a benchmark about regulation. Another EU banger, uh, Harvey, Harvey's legal agent benchmark, uh, is up to 15%, uh, whereas other models are down at between five and 13%. Uh, interesting, I, I wonder if that's, uh, intentional, I wonder if there's actually anything to read into that. I, I really have no idea, but, uh, it's certainly, certainly valuable. Uh, I'm sure Harvey and all the other, uh, legal companies will be excited because we, I mean, we read the whole thing about Harvey, uh, their margins being in a really rough spot for a minute

• 52:56John Coogan?

  when they were overly, uh, overly reliant on like the most expensive frontier models. Now there's a ton of price competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, and then obviously there's a bunch of pressure from, uh, open source models. So they, they like, it, it, it's the true, it's truly the, uh, create the benchmark that you want the, the labs to hill climb, and they just created the benchmark for like their exact workload. And then they're able to do it.

• 53:20Jordi Hays?

  Sushi Commander says, what are you talking about? Both Bean and Mr. All, Beam and Mr. All Large are a generation behind the latest Chinese leading model. So putting you in the true zone, Tyler.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  I mean, you can look at benchmarks, it's like, yeah, it's not leading them. It's like among one of the contenders, it's not the frontier.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like in, in line, but a lot of the, a lot of the, like, the most recent round of, of Chinese open source happened like a couple of months ago, which is always rough. Cause like you catch up to the frontier and then it's like, well, you're going to take another six months to get something out where they're going to only take another two months to get something out. So that window, but there's so many other geopolitical, uh, implications that, uh, lead companies to go one way or another. So we'll see, we'll see. Um, Olivia Moore has some data on what's happening in the battle for consumer AI dominance between ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Uh, A16Z pulled the data across web and mobile plus consumer revenue.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Uh, ChatGPT is at two X Gemini scale and six X scale on web and two and a half Gemini scale and 14 times Claude scale on mobile. Interesting, I mean, I guess that makes sense more consumer focused, you're, you're pulling there.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  The main thing here is just look at, look at the run from Claude.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we saw this in the App Store, right? Like you would open up the App Store and like Claude was at the top for a while and then, and then fell down and now, um, ChatGPT is back on top and they're just going back and forth. It, the, the war for the frontier is just trading shots back and forth, back and forth.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  Right now Muse still at number one, Vinted, who we're working on, is number two.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Vinted is still number two.

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  So dominant.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  The folks over at Vinted are, are really doing a fantastic job. Well, uh, we should bring in our first guest. First, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. We have Greg Fleming from Rockefeller Capital Management.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. What's going on?

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, how are you doing?

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Well, good to see you, gentlemen.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh, since this is your first time on the show, I would love to, uh, in, uh, for you to introduce yourself for the audience and give us a little bit about, uh, your background and then your business today.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Great, uh, I'm the CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management, which we started in 2018. I spent most of my career in the financial services business. I was a management consultant at a company called Booz Allen and Hamilton in the late eighties, early nineties, uh, which, uh, was actually great training for learning about lots of different industries. I went from there to Merrill Lynch and I, uh, was an investment banker mostly in the financial services space. And note, or the deal that I did, I was, uh, the lead banker on the IPO of BlackRock in 1999 at $14 a share. Uh, so it's done quite well since then, and I actually just rejoined the board for the second time last year.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Uh, I was the president of Merrill Lynch during the credit crisis and I negotiated the sale to Bank America, which was, uh, uh, and I have said this before publicly, the, uh, most disappointing, uh, moment in my career. I was happy to keep the company out of bankruptcy, but it never should have had to be sold and having to sell it was, uh, very difficult. I then went to Morgan Stanley and I ran wealth and asset management and I left there in 2016 and I wanted to start something. Uh, and I, um, I found out that I could partner with the Rockefeller family by the family office that was started by John D Rockefeller way back in 1882. So the guy who made all the money.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  He guy.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  His wealth, by the way, gentlemen, at one time was 4% of GDP. So maybe still the wealthiest guy in history, that family. So we partnered with them, we started a business, I was backed by, um, uh, a, uh, investor Viking Global Investors. They've been a great partner. We started on March 1, 2018 and we built, uh, a firm that, uh, uh, is I think among the best, uh, serving wealthy American families. We call them high net worth and all dry net worth, and we provide comprehensive advice to these families.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have so many questions. Let's start with the process of actually building the firm. Um, wealth managers have lots of different products, lots of different relationships. How did you think about building out a portfolio of offerings quickly as an upstart firm to actually, uh, give a client who's coming along for the ride at the early stages, a full service experience? Was this, uh, like a hiring spree? Was this partnering with other, uh, banks and, and, uh, and, uh, firms to try and fill gaps? What was the secret to actually delivering a, you know, top tier level of service quickly?

• 58:07Speaker 04

  That is a great first question because the reality was we bought, uh, Rock and Co, which was the, originally the, the family office, there wasn't that much there, we had to build it.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  So, uh, it, you know, it was the classic J curve in the first couple of years. We were investing because you couldn't really onboard those families that have a complex set of needs. And so you had a broader set of capabilities. So, uh, the first few year, few years was a significant investment time for us. We started hiring, uh, uh, the private advisor teams to take the lead, working with these families in late 18, early 19, but we started building the capabilities right out of the gate. And it's really taken us, you know, we're, we have, uh, our ninth anniversary next March. We've been building, building during this time and only in the last few years did we have all the capabilities in place so we could provide comprehensive advice, generational tax, financial education.

• 59:00Speaker 04

  If the family owns a business, we give them advice on that. We have a boutique investment bank. It was only in the last few years that we really had all those capabilities come together so that we could really start to grow the firm.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  So obviously the brand is, is incredibly storied, but, and, and you had, you know, an incredible journey in your career, obviously tons of connections. But how did you think about the top of funnel? How did you think about onboarding clients? And then, once you'd on boarded that initial set of, you know, tapping your Rolodex, I imagine, uh, how did you think about growing that client base? What, what actually works in this particular market? I imagine it's not Super Bowl ads, but what, what, what, what does, what does move the needle in the modern era?

• 59:46Speaker 04

  You know, uh, the thing that we think is the secret sauce is providing advice across the full range of the family's needs. Because wealthy families have a complex set of needs. They're, they're trying to plan generational passage of wealth. We do that. We give them a lot of tax advice. We put them in the invest, investment solutions and those include the best alternative managers, also direct investments. You know, we put clients and, and a lot of the companies that you guys talk about, uh, that are earlier on. We provide, uh, advice on how to talk to the next generation about money. We have a next gen advisory council with some of the, you know, prominent wealthy American families represented on that next gen advisory council. We do philanthropic advisory. We find that most of our families, one of the greatest thing about the United States,

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  in addition to the whole entrepreneurial machine that you guys talk about all the time, is the philanthropy. $600 billion given away every year. Almost every single family that we work with wants us to help them put in place a philanthropy plan, including young wealthy people. Wealthy, you know, new, uh, you know, new people making new wealth at some of these AI startup companies. Even if they're on the younger side, young people want comprehensive advice right up front. They want to obviously, you know, spend some of the money, save some of the money, but they also want to start giving it away. So we do a lot of, we spend a lot of time on the philanthropy side. That comprehensive advice, nobody really did that in the way that we do it when we built, when we started building our company. That was, you know, what we really set out to do.

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  How is the, uh, how is the upper echelon of like family office and multifamily office business, uh, changing what you do? Uh, is that, or is there just a demand for a wider breadth of services for a longer period of time? Uh, is, uh, is, is, is there something where you need to react to the fact that some, uh, some ultra high net worth individuals are building whole trading desks and real estate teams? And they're doing like such complex management, uh, that you still want to partner with them in some meaningful way or advise them on their journey?

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  You know, John, for most of them, until you get to, you know, really significant wealth, you know, north of $10 billion.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  That's enough wealth to really have a fully staffed family office.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  But, you know, in the first, certainly hundreds of millions into the early billions, you know, we encourage families to think about using us because we'll do everything that they can build.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  We do it for lots of families.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  And it's easier for us to deliver that for them than it is for them to build it and manage it. There are headaches involved in building your own family office. So the very high end will, you know, do everything in-house. But really, everybody else is a potential client for us. And even the very wealthy families, we'll sometimes do some aspects of things for them.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  They'll have a lot of it internal, but they might be turning to us for advice on different kinds of investments.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  Or, you know, for help on some of the sophisticated tax and estate planning, they might turn to us for that. But, you know, right up to a couple billion dollars, that's a sweet spot for us.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  How is your, you know, private market strategy evolved over the last few years? So many of the world's most exciting companies have obviously stayed private for a long time. They're also quite high-profile, so I imagine some of that strategy ends up being led by the client base coming to you and various, you know, people on your team saying, "Get me into Andorol," or "Get me into XYZ," you know, name. And it feels like it's probably coming, you know, the ultimate strategy is being led in some way by both sides.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  It is, Jordy. And in fact, you know, Rockefeller Capital Management, we're in over 30 wealth centers over 50 cities across the country. And one of the reasons we do that is we want to be embedded in local communities with the clients, with the families. Because wealth is created in this country, you know, when I was younger, you had a certain set of cities, and they're still there, New York and Boston and Houston and Dallas. Now you've got Nashville and Charlotte, obviously, many places in Florida and in California, obviously Silicon Valley. So we're in these communities. So we'll often have people working at, you know, the companies that are getting built and build quickly, come to our advisors and look for help. So we get a lot of introductions that way because we're embedded in the community.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  And we do a lot of work with entrepreneurs across all different industries. And frankly, they benefit from our advice because they're really spending 24/7 building these companies. And they're not, they don't have the time, they don't really have the training to do the types of things that we do in terms of helping them start to think about, you know, more of a diversified approach to long-term investing, philanthropy, things like that. So it's been a great, you know, this whole growth in entrepreneurs. I mean, I think we have 6.2 million new companies being created in the United States this year, which will be a record. This entrepreneurial surge has been great for us in terms of creating clients all over the country.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the research, the research function at the firm. I imagine that clients want your house view on interest rates and inflation and whether AI is a bubble or not. How do you think about answering those questions? What team members do you have in place? How do you grapple with like the hot questions of the day to keep like a consistent view from a firm, but also tailor the advice to the specific client?

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a chief investment officer, Jimmy Chang, who takes the lead on pulling together a firm view. I have another colleague, Rashir Sharma, who writes every other week in the FT. He's our chairman of international. So we've got some great minds.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  You know, and I spend a lot of time on this myself because clients ask me all the time and I'll give them my own views. You know, I've been pretty clear that this technology is revolutionary. I'm in my 39th year in my professional career. I've seen a lot, but there's nothing like this technology in terms of its impact on every part of society. You know, you have the CapEx investment and all the data centers and everything that's happening there, which is driving the economy. But then you have the other side of it, which is every private and public company in the country trying to figure out what to do with these tools, how to use them, how to drive productivity in your firm, how to enhance the client experience.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  So, you know, we think this is a revolutionary technology and is beyond anything that's happened to this point, frankly, in human history.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  At the same time, so I completely agree with you, obviously, but at the same time, there are a number of Cassandras out there right now. And that is offset by a lot of investors, a lot of people in finance who have lived through the great financial crisis, or dot com, or both. And I'm wondering, from your experience, what are the canaries in the coal mine that you do look towards as useful signals for something maybe getting too far? Because even when the technology is real, there's always a risk of over-investing, right?

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Look, I mean, you know, and I lived through both of those times, dot com and the financial crisis. Not every dollar is going to get the return that it's looking for when you have a time like this with this kind of massive investment. That's clear. The question is, is the overall technology going to pull the economy and productivity forward in a way where it's going to have the kind of impact that we all hope for? I believe the latter is going to take place. I think that you're already starting to see some signs of productivity improvement. Now, you know, you've got different people arguing about that, but, you know, output per hour seems to be going up in some industries without employment going up.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  So, you know, as long as all of the investment leads to the kind of growth in the economy, the growth in productivity, this is obviously what the government's hoping for because, you know, one canary in the coal mine that we could talk about is the fiscal debt situation, which is unique in my history and is a problem and maybe driving some of the longer-term rates up.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  But from an AI standpoint, if the overall investment that's being made, trillions of dollars, leads to the effect on the economy and on productivity across thousands of companies and every part of society, then the return on the capital will be there. But it'll be differentiated. Not everybody will be a winner. There will be winners and losers.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  And, you know, even though we saw, and I lived through this, the dot com explode, you know, in 2000 and 2001, obviously, there were tremendous companies that ended up coming out of that.

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  And the same thing coming out of the credit crisis. So not everybody's going to be a winner when you're looking at investments and, you know, and the capital is chasing different companies now. Some of them will justify the capital investment, some won't. But from a macro standpoint, I'm optimistic that all of this capital that's behind this whole AI investment will have the impact on the economy, productivity, you know, people's incomes, you know, a lot of the positives that are in the dialogue, I think that that can come to pass.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the obvious bubble in the early-stage technology private markets? You know, where you have a company that goes from, you know, being worth, let's say, $0 to, you know, $2 billion a couple months later?

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  You're talking about like pre-revenue?

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, right now, there's all this NAV appreciation that you're seeing across, you know, the top early-stage funds because there's effectively multiple rounds happening in a very short period of time. There's so much excitement around these companies and these categories and the TAMS feel so big that it's easy to get around to justifying, "Hey, if we give this company $500 million and they're going after this hard problem and there's, you know, meaningful technology change, they're going to be able to figure something out." But at the same time, you know, we go through this every week where we'll have, multiple times a week, we'll have a company on the show we've never heard of and somehow they

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  have, you know, $500 million of fresh capital and, you know, pretty small revenue base at least and a lot of potential. But it's a little bit nerve-wracking having, you know, just gone through a similar investment cycle in 2020 and 2021, although we didn't have this sort of same technology shift.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, we didn't have the underlying technology shift, but yeah, there was that cycle. And remember, again, I did live the internet cycle. And John saying, while you were asking the question, Jordy, pre-revenue, that was, remember, clicks and different things that were looked at in 98 and 99.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  And now it's just like talent, it's talent density. It's like if you get five.

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  And so the investment thesis is just like, hey, we got five really smart people here, time to give them half a billion.

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. Look, I mean, you know, in 99, you get in a taxi and the taxi driver would ask you for three recommendations on, you know, stocks he could buy or companies he could invest in. So there's some of that going on now, no question. The way we deal with it, first of all, we do a lot of diligence on the private investment side as well. We try to only put things in front of our advisors and clients that we think, you know, look like they could pass the test of time here. But that's still a challenge, given the number and quantity that are coming out, Jordy. When you guys are seeing companies that you've never heard of and you live in this ecosystem, we're going to see companies that we've not heard of as well. Diversification is the way that we do it with our clients and also, not just diversification within the space, but only a certain amount of the capital goes into this part of their

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  capital allocation plan. So, you know, we have these families, you know, broadly diversified across alternatives, obviously some public market exposure on the equity end, even on the fixed income side with rates backing up. And then a certain amount of the capital into things that, you know, fit the bill with what you're describing, where, you know, some of them might work and some of them won't work, but the client is not exposed to more risk than they should be taking, given the fact that we're in a time like that. We're definitely in a time like that. What's different about this time, and that's always a dangerous phrase, and I've been around long enough to know that, but what's different about this time, and John was saying

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  this before, the underlying technology and the underlying, you know, business shift is real.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  But a lot of these companies are not going to get the valuations that they're being awarded now.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. One more.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one more.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how have you processed how success ends up clouding the judgment of otherwise really smart people?

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  That's a good question.

• 1:13:02Jordi Hays?

  And, and you even talked about a low point in your career with Merrill Lynch, which avoided, you know, the worst case scenario.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Jordi Hays?

  But when you have absolutely knocked it out of the park for long enough, you start, you know, otherwise, smart people start to not even be able to imagine the possibility of, of failure. And I'm, and I'm seeing this, you know, just in, in the private markets where we're spending most of our time.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Some of these managers have put up such unbelievable results for the past few years that, that, that, and, and, and at a certain point, you start feeling like you're, you're playing with like house money to some degree too, which is, which is another dynamic.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Um, but, but having seen a bunch, all sorts of managers across, across your career, like

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  when, when do you feel like, um, what are the signs that you look for to, to think like, okay, maybe this person's overplaying their hand?

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  Well, you know, part of it is, is what you described, it's even generational. Have they been through the cycles? Is this the only cycle that they're seeing? Um, part of it is back to the diversification, you know, I was talking about before, but you know, you're, what you're describing is an incredible, uh, is, uh, spot on in terms of what's going on right now. I mean, you know, you have clients that everybody's kind of expecting, you know, anybody who got into SpaceX early, you know, that, that's kind of the vision they have for every private investment, you know? Am I going to be up 30, 40, 50 times?

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  It's like, look, this is, you know, not something that is, you know, recurs on a regular basis. You know, I was looking at the scale of companies now. Apple was the first trillion dollar company, I think it was 2018 or 2019. There are now 15 or 16.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  I mean, it is, there, there's a momentum here. And, you know, look, this is what, what our advisors do. They've been around a long time. They've been working with wealthy families. They say, you know, let's stick with the plan. We can put this much capital in these types of investments. You know, we like these vehicles here for these, for this reason. We think this vehicle might be too speculative. We think these people, they've done well, but they've really only seen one cycle. So we want to be careful there. Our advisors are providing that kind of advice and we're constantly reminding, you know, people throughout the firm, because I've lived these cycles and, uh, and this one, you know, is taking on some of those characteristics. Again, having said that, the underlying driver is real.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  But there will be winners and losers. We look at diversification and we'd say to clients, just a portion of the capital, be careful and let's look for managers that have actually seen something go wrong because things go right and they go wrong.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Last question from me. How have you grappled with or implemented AI at the firm level? Not as an investment strategy, but just, you can imagine, you know, every email getting passed through AI, but wealth management is a luxury product. Some clients might want a handcrafted email, even if it's, takes a little bit longer. Where have you seen it integrate usefully versus, okay, maybe we're going to sit that one out?

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  Well, you know, one of the great things about our business, because the clients, there's so much complexity around taking care of these families, the interface stays human beings.

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  So the advisor is going to stay on front, out front, and we think that's the case for decades and decades. The family will come in and they will meet with the advisor and the team. We use AI as a growth enabler. We're, and, and, you know, we've got, you know, partnerships with some of the top firms. We're building things ourselves. We're trying to make, um, uh, the advisor teams more efficient in dealing with clients. So a lot of things that used to be more manual or semi-manual will be done by agents.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  And we're working on that. So I'll give you an example of that. Advisors spend a lot of time getting ready for the meeting with the family. They have the meeting and they have the follow-up.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  And, you know, making sure the follow-up occurs and the investments occur. We're trying to automate that meeting prep, you know, and have an agent really help pull that string all the way through.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  So that's the type of thing that we're, we're, we're investing in so that the advisor teams become more productive, gives them more time with clients, they can work with more clients, uh, and, and, and we think the tools will be very efficacious there.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Removing the drudgery from just piecing together a portfolio, understanding what's happening. It makes so much sense. Uh, thank you for coming on the show.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very cool.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Uh, we'd love to have you back and talk more soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do it again soon.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  You too.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We got TJ Parker back on the show, four-timer club. He's joining the four-timer club. This is his fourth time on the show. TJ Parker.

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Welcome to DBPN. How are you doing?

• 1:17:49TJ Parker?

  Good, how are you?

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  So you really, you really said, you really said, take this job and shove it. Is that what you said?

• 1:17:55TJ Parker?

  You know, I think I'd focus more on what I'm excited to go do now.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:01TJ Parker?

  Which is general medicine.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Which is the Nikita beer of healthcare.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Is that it?

• 1:18:06TJ Parker?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that kind of fair? I mean, in some ways it feels like going, going, obviously going back to your roots and taking another crack at a similar problem in some ways.

• 1:18:18TJ Parker?

  Yeah. And you probably know this, but ironically Nikita and I shared desks at Techstars in Boston in 2013, so it's particularly apropos.

• 1:18:28Jordi Hays?

  We gotta find that desk. We gotta put it in the museum of business.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  The most powerful desk.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  That's a billion dollar desk right there.

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  That's a great desk, yeah.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  I, I had, actually had no idea.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Um, but yes, restate the mission, then we'll go into the decision to step in, what you're planning to do, where the company is now, but walk us through it.

• 1:18:47TJ Parker?

  Yeah. I mean, I think our vision is super simple. We want to make it just as easy to shop in healthcare as it is to shop for anything else in your life. You know, I think today it's super convoluted. You have no idea what the price is for things. You don't really know what makes sense for you. And so we're trying to follow all the modalities in retail that we know works super well and apply those to healthcare. And so you can come to general medicine for anything, could be as simple as just need a renewal of a prescription or as complex as you've got this thing, you can't figure out what's going on and you want advice, you want to go see an offline specialist. We just want to be the one stop shop for healthcare.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, the front door. Uh, is, how, uh, is there a, uh, like a secular trend here around, uh, consumers taking more initiative with their healthcare and actually knowing what paths they want to go down versus an annual checkup or just being responsive to, there's a problem and my doctor handled it from start to finish? Has like the pattern of engaging with the medical system changed or is it changing right now?

• 1:19:57TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think there's two trends there that make sense. The first is that obviously in certain pockets of healthcare, consumers have gotten very accustomed to a much more seamless CX, right? So it could be GLP-1s, it could be your annual wellness test. Like there are these kind of very specific categories where consumers have gotten used to this and they've started to expect it across the spectrum of healthcare. And then the other obvious trend is that with the advent of LLMs, consumers are just far more, uh, they far better understand what they might need at any given time. And so it's gotten them much farther down that curve. And the challenge right now is that the output of an LLM is still just giving them advice. It's saying like, you probably should call the doctor and ask them this question, or

• 1:20:41TJ Parker?

  you should get someone to write you this prescription, or you should go get this x-ray or this MRI or these labs.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48TJ Parker?

  And you're back to dealing with the health system as it's always been, which is, that's a super complicated process. And so I think that trend is, is really important here where we're trying to close that gap from, I know what I want to do to actually being able to immediately execute that.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  What is your view on the AI models, the agents, like just, you know, cloning your voice and setting up a Twilio account and calling the doctor for you and like basically just interfacing with the old system just as an AI?

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Creating, you're describing creating a deep fake of.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  Basically, I mean, that, that's kind of what's happening in some pockets of commerce. We're talking about a few million people testing this stuff out right now. It's pretty niche, but, uh, is, is that something where you think it's, uh, it's like, that's going to be slower to take off, more early adopter niche, or you still have a plan and that will actually be acceleratory for you?

• 1:21:44TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think AI and LLMs and agents are like very good at replicating things humans already do. I don't think there's a single human that would tell you this is a particularly good experience and it's just administratively annoying, right? And so I think even if you take the AI doctor side of this or the agent booking side of this, like I think that output results in replicating the current system, which I don't think anyone thinks is particularly good. And so, and I think if you compare this category to all the other retail categories, like we've had two decades of building marketplaces and infrastructure and booking experiences. None of that exists in healthcare. And so to actually make this work as elegantly as other categories, that's the thing you actually have to go build,

• 1:22:26TJ Parker?

  is what is this interface between digital and the traditional healthcare system?

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  Is it going to be harder to scale the top of funnel without a hero killer product? I'm just thinking about the, the, the previous companies that were like known as like the hair loss company. And then they did a couple of other things or like the ED company and then they did a bunch of, or the peptide company and they did a bunch of that other things. Do you need like a beachhead offering to onboard people? Or is there a message that's resonating that's more broad?

• 1:23:02TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think if you asked me a decade ago, and I think if you asked most people in the ecosystem, everyone assumed that these very vertical focused companies would eventually just chip away at category by category. And also when they go horizontal, it's like Amazon starting with books and then just like, like increasing selection.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it has to be in every of the early stage decks of like Hims, Roman, all those companies. They all probably will, will eventually be the Amazon of healthcare, right? I would imagine that was there.

• 1:23:26TJ Parker?

  That obviously hasn't happened, right? And so part of the theory here is that you actually have to be horizontal from day one. So customers can come to you for anything.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:23:35TJ Parker?

  And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. Like if you just take the current version of offline care with a GP, like a primary care provider, like they serve everything, right? Like you don't have to go to 12 different places to get everything you need. Like you have, like you're used to going to one place for whatever you need. And I think the other vector that's relevant is that oftentimes customers like don't actually know what's going on. And like if you take ED drugs in particular, probably half the customers on those meds should be on something else treating the underlying issue. And so you end up with kind of a hammer nail problem versus being able to actually get customers to exactly what's most effective for them at that moment.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  At what level of abstraction can you interface with the healthcare system as a relatively new company? Like if you're building a fintech company, like you'll just use Stripe for a lot of the, you know, card processing and whatnot. And then you do something fancy on top, right? If you're building like an ecommerce site. And with healthcare, there are, there are companies that help with booking doctors and there's, you know, healthcare record systems. Like there has been a V, like a, like a first generation, if not like a first and second generation of like med tech, healthcare tech companies. And I'm wondering like, are those natural integration points?

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  Or is the technology at a point where you can go deeper and interface directly with doctors or directly with insurance companies and you don't need to aggregate aggregators?

• 1:25:08TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think probably an unpopular opinion is that the dude is actually out there now and the healthcare in many ways has the most open data because it's been federally mandated. And so as an example, when a customer signs up for general medicine, on average, we're getting 11 years worth of medical records and they don't have to go log into 12 different health systems and go find everything. We just, we get it automatically.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30TJ Parker?

  And the other thing that's happened is the federal government mandated open, open pricing files a handful of years ago. And so providers have to contribute what their reimbursement rates are to this central repository. And so when you combine these things, we can effectively give customers a clear cash and insurance price for any procedure or service with any provider. And that doesn't require us having gone and done a bunch of deals with a bunch of offline systems. We can do that on our own. I think then if you take the, like the pharmacy side of this is a good, good example. We just launched our pharmacy experience. You can check out on general medicine, like you're on Instacart or Uber Eats at 50,000 pharmacies across the country.

• 1:26:12TJ Parker?

  So you can see like, what is exactly my price going to be and just click buy like you do everywhere else and get the prescription at whatever pharmacy you want. And so we've, you know, we've really accelerated our ability to allow you to interact with anybody in the system. And I do think a lot of that is a byproduct of regulatory work that's been going on for a decade, coupled with the, like the capabilities of LLMs. And so I just don't think this would have been possible to build five years ago.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  What are your strengths and weaknesses as a CEO?

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  Job interview.

• 1:26:45TJ Parker?

  Really good at tweeting. I had a really good day on the, on the timeline today. So that's, that's my biggest strength for sure.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Important these days.

• 1:26:53TJ Parker?

  Yeah, weaknesses, I don't know. I try not to talk about those too much. I mean, I think like for me, like I was so excited to get back to building partially because it's a bunch of people I've worked with for 10, 15 years. And like we've built an amazing team across the org. And so, yeah, in many ways, building an amazing team and getting to work with that team to, to build stuff.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Where do you see yourself in five years?

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I'm curious, like what, uh, you know, from, from PillPack, there's certainly like 10 massive mistakes that you made. And then you did probably like a thousand things right and that worked out to an amazing outcome.

• 1:27:35TJ Parker?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Are there, like this time around, is it really, you're just sharper, more knowledgeable? You probably know that you can actually go way bigger this time than the last time. Cause why, what's the point of, of, you know, running it back with the team if you're, if you're not going to reach even higher highs? But is there any, any, anything that, that stands out as like, we're definitely not going to do that? Even from like a, you know, hiring standpoint, mistakes that you made building the team the first time around.

• 1:28:06TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the thing that I definitely wouldn't replicate that we did at PillPack is we were just fundamentally misaligned with other partners and participants in the ecosystem, right? We had this big battle with incumbents. That was just being young and naive and obviously it worked out in our favor. I think that there's a big difference with general medicine, which is I think we are ultimately trying to refactor the system around the consumer. And in many ways that solves a bunch of problems for other participants in the ecosystem. So it's probably the biggest strategic difference. I think tactically, like we've spent 15 years like in the guts of the healthcare system, like deeply understanding all the underlying rails, like what's truly possible and not possible.

• 1:28:48TJ Parker?

  And so in many ways it's, that is probably the biggest difference is that you've got a decade and a half of understanding of what you can really do in healthcare and then coupling that like really niche expertise with how does that manifest as like a differentiated customer experience? I think is what we're, we're uniquely good at is sort of being in the weeds over here, but then abstracting it away so that for the customer it's just, it was super simple and they don't really need to understand like how hard it was to make it that simple.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  The Jaguar Type O1 has leaked. Is this a good car for the modern healthcare CEO?

• 1:29:27TJ Parker?

  I think I'm out. I'm going to stick with my Raptor R, which is probably the right healthcare CEO car.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like that. Is there any type of, is there any type of like interesting why now? Because people are spending, like it is such a better experience using an LLM to understand like a health issue you might be having versus historically like, you know, Google to WebMD to Reddit. And you're like trying to find somebody else who's had like a similar experience or, or whatever it is. And now you can have a conversation about it. Now you can involve, you know, whatever it is, like images. Now it even has like memory so it can, it can sort of tie things together. But it feels like that, like you, you're, it feels like you're exactly the kind of business that should be advertising in LLMs,

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  which is like, because it can be done in a way that's not even personalized, which I think people are going to be a little bit wary of. But you can just like, if somebody's using a free version of, of ChatGPT, you could just slot in and say like, hey, like we know you're kind of like, you can, here's how you actually solve your issue versus just staying in the sort of digital realm learning.

• 1:30:38TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I mean, I think obviously the first iteration of this product is our storefront on generalmedicine.co. I think we assume that there's going to be all sorts of different ways consumers get access to these products and services. And going back to the retail example, like, we know exactly what that looks like, right? A Shopify SKU pops up in an LLM, you can immediately add to cart and purchase in one click. Like, there's no reason that same CX shouldn't exist in healthcare. Once you have this infrastructure layer built. And I, so I think consumers are gonna, whether it's an agent and they're literally never really interacting with us. Or it's like Shopify and it's a SKU that pops a modal like. We're, I think we're building the hard part of that CX, which is the underlying infrastructure to make that work.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Amazing news. Well, congrats on the new.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Glad to see you back in the game. You had, you had, you had a good few years as a capital allocator, just, just hanging out. Begging people to let you give them money, but you're back, back in the driver's seat.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37TJ Parker?

  The problem is I wasn't a good enough golfer. It's pretty depressing to play golf like three days a week and still sucks. So I had to get back to operating.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Back at it. Awesome. Super, super excited for you and, and the whole, and the whole band.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a, a great run.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Thanks guys.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  So much for coming. Great to see you.

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about public. Investing for those who take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bond, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Up next, we have Juwan Kim, Melius, the co-founder.

• 1:32:06Jordi Hays?

  You know him.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  You know him.

• 1:32:08Jordi Hays?

  He may have triggered you. Live for the first time.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  He used to work at Ramp. Now he's building his own company. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:32:17Speaker 05

  How's it going, guys? Yo, congrats on the success and becoming rich.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  You too. Thank you. And.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Always, always crude in your ways.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  You're always, and always consistent.

• 1:32:29John Coogan?

  But you got some funding. Speaking of money, how much did you get? How much did you raise?

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, we raised 25 million. Uh, we actually raised this.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  I can't hear you. I can't hear you over the sound of the gong.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:32:44Speaker 05

  No, I appreciate you.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  General Catalyst, CRV, back to back.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  Genius.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  Genius.

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Ben, Adam, the whole gang.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  But.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great lineup. Yeah, great lineup. What are you building? And, and.

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  We're building the.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 1:32:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, what's up?

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I was gonna say like, you've, you've, it feels like you've been in, have you been like, building for a couple of years now? Is it more like a year?

• 1:33:07Speaker 05

  I don't know. Dude, I left Ramp back in September of last year, which is crazy to think. Uh, it's been a wild ride. It's been a wild ride. Uh, we raised, uh, you know, from General Callis back in November. Uh, we actually started on a different idea and like performance marketing, and then we decided to pivot away from that back in March. And then we landed on building the agent's lab for creative work, uh, in April. And then, uh, we raised our Series A in July.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. What does that mean?

• 1:33:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I believe, well, one, I, I'll give a little bit of backstory. I, uh, I used to want to be like Nigahiga back in the day. If you guys know that Asian YouTuber that hit the 1 million subscribers for the first time. And then I, I kept telling myself like, oh, I need to do this. And my dad used to be like a wedding photographer, like a videographer. So I wanted to do, um, I just, I, I wanted to learn Final Cut Pro and I just couldn't. My team is like going to over the computer. But anyways, yeah, I just figured, you know, with the era of generative AI and, uh, people being able to build software like they've never been able to before, like that shouldn't be the case for creative work either and creative assets, videos. The coolest motion graphics animations are bringing your imagination to life.

• 1:34:17Speaker 05

  And, you know, with general media models making it much cheaper than ever to create like, but it hasn't been easier. And, you know, Melius is going to be the harness to actually close that gap. Uh, by building a suite, a creative suite of tools like the node based canvas, the agentic timeline editors, uh, even one off generations all the way to being first to the MCP and CLI.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. So, so who are you guys? What kind of companies are you working with today? What's the focus? Are you focused on like certain types of assets? Like it could be landing pages?

• 1:34:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, we were primarily catering to a lot of businesses like, uh, in fashion, CPG, uh, e-commerce for sure. Um, some notable customers are doors.com, uh, show media, a shout out to the marketing agency in New York. And, um, and skinny dipped as well. Uh, we also provide, um. Yeah, we also provide services for companies doing even more than 5 billion in AR. So super grateful to be working with the, uh, group of, group of, uh, customers that we are today.

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  More than 5 billion. It's time to start guessing, John.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  I want to know about, uh, 25 million. I mean, huge congrats, but it feels like you're going a sort of inference light model. If you're going to be doing generations, you'll probably pass that cost through to the, to the user and rely on other inference providers. Is that the thesis? Or do you see, yeah, at some point we're going to be training our own models? We're going to be doing crazy stuff, building hardware, racking servers.

• 1:35:47Speaker 05

  I love that you asked that. Um, I don't know if you guys had a chance to check out some of the press release stuff, but the theme of the fundraise is that we're building this so that anyone can make anything.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:58Speaker 05

  And we want to kind of leave an open ended message there. Like, we're going to start in general media for sure, but eventually this can be a play where, you know, like I hope 10, 20 years down the line, people have like, this is a crazy thing to say, but maybe they have a microchip in their brain. And then they just think of this something that they want to make and just materializes in front of their head. But that is the kind of thing that we want to strive to build and we're not going to make any promises, but like, you know, as long as we have a goal that says, you know, we're going to build this company so that anyone can make anything. That is the right strategy, I believe. And this is just the first start, first.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, it seems like at this point, a lot of the, a lot of the customer bases is like essentially like sales driven or, you know, landing page driven, news driven. Um, are you optimistic about, uh, any of the like, uh, foundation model plugging ecosystem driving? Like being the tool of choice for agents at some point, being a growth vector? I've seen a couple of companies sort of like go really, really vertical off of that. But of course there's always like some trickiness to the relationship there. But how are you negotiating like, uh, AI discoverability or AI, uh, top of funnel?

• 1:37:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually, I actually think that we were pretty, uh, I guess everyone would say this, but we were pretty early to that take, especially in the general media space. If you, if you go back to March, uh, we were still in stealth and our first post was that we built the first MCP to interact with generative media models on a canvas. And no one had done that before. And we positioned ourselves as the creative canvas for agents.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  And, you know, that had its own kind of like bipolar, uh, reaction from the market, I guess. But yeah, I mean, I, I totally agree that that is going to be, uh, where the trend goes. Um, that is definitely where, you know, creative work is trending. Uh, most of our customers, um, are using Claude uh, and chat GPT plugins with, uh, the MCP at Melius.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:53Speaker 05

  Um, in addition to that, even the self-service market, uh, it's growing at a very rapid pace.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  What is demand for computer use? Like if somebody has successfully learned Final Cut and they want to stay there? Uh, do, do you think it's important for you to offer an integration point there so they can sort of like watch the cursor? Do some of the work and then they can still jump in with the tool that they know and love. Uh, you can also edit the underlying files and then just vend them a, a project file.

• 1:38:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, that, that's actually.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  What, what, what's the? Do you want to do it all? Or do you have a particular pattern that works?

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're never going to be that walled garden that never lets people like do parts of things on different platforms. You know, I think plugins are really great, especially in this era of like, you know, multimodal like computer use. You know, we're going to build the plugins for maybe After Effects or Adobe Premiere and whatever it may be. Um, and we're also going to support all those features on our platform. It, the thing is, the, the reason to stay on Melius is that we built business conducive and long-term creator conducive workflows. That means like proactive agents, reactive agents, um, the timeline editor, the node based canvas and the digital asset manager. These are all things that like, maybe people don't have out of the box on their computer.

• 1:39:06Speaker 05

  But if they don't need it, that's fine. They can actually go and use our MCP coupled with their plugins on their own computer when they are using agents with, uh, computer use. And so, you know, there, there's some value to using Melius, uh, on the platform. But we definitely are going to capture a ton of usage off platform through MCPs, through plugins and, and, and tools of that nature.

• 1:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys have a, like an agent or a workflow that can do this yet? Uh, which is, uh, I think it would be very powerful if a brand could, could, you know, let's say pick five to 10 companies that they, that they look up to or they like their creative approach and say anytime, uh, this company has a new ad in their meta ads library. Make, you know, five variations of, you know, basically clone it, uh, for my brand, uh, which is something.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  Slap it up.

• 1:39:54Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't, I don't think it's, this is exactly what happens.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's what brands say.

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like skinny dipped might see another company that, you know, in a different category with a, with new creative and, and marketers today are just going and looking at what their competitors are, or, or, or other companies are, are spending and just cloning it.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's actually a common workflow, especially with the Claude MCP right now.

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:17Speaker 05

  What people are doing is they're having the TikTok MCP or TikTok ads library hooked up. And then every morning they set up a Claude project or an automation to go look at the top trending ads. And they'll just go dump the script and, uh, the transcript and all the key frames into Melius and then just, you know, reverse engineer everything. And so, yeah, I definitely think that we're, we are conducive to that workflow and it's kind of, it's kind of scary, uh, what you can do with, uh, the tooling of today. But yeah, a hundred percent we can support that right now.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Interesting. Last question. What's your stance on taste?

• 1:40:48Speaker 05

  Taste? Oh, this is a hot take, actually. I I don't think there is a, there is taste when it comes to uh like UX. I think UX is like, obviously, you have to make it conducive to how a user perceives like the screen and like what the user experience should look like. But I don't think there's such thing as slop in terms of creative content. You know, there's a reason why Tum Tum Tum Sahar has billions of views on the internet. Yeah, maybe it's like considered AI slop, but like people find it entertaining and like who's to say that? You decide what good creatives are. If people find entertaining and they want to watch it and they find joy in it. Then like who who are we to stop that? And which is why we want to say like? Hey, you know, we don't want to bottleneck you on these like workflow constraints or these resources. If you have imagination, you think it's funny and you want to make it, go do it on Melius.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, taste, like if something is tasteful or performant, like they they can sometimes be the same thing, but very often they're not.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, some of these AI slop projects are tasteful in the sense that like the person that he created them or or had the idea for a particular character. Actually, uh they expose their taste in coming up with the concept. And then, yes, it is, you know, slop generated AI video that might have uh odd, you know, bugs in the and and hallucinations. But they are expressing their taste and like I think people want to see this cat dance or whatever.

• 1:42:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course. Do you guys uh do you guys uh do the hotel lobby? Um, trend a a couple of weeks ago?

• 1:42:20Jordi Hays?

  Offset and Quavo.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Rapping.

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  I mean, do you think that was tasteful? I thought that was fucking hilarious.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I I thought a lot of that stuff was was funny in that.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Wait, what did you just say?

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  Sorry, I I asked you guys before. I was like in the email, I was like, hey, guys, is there something I shouldn't say? And I didn't.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Anyway.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations to you and the team.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the fundraiser.

• 1:42:52Speaker 05

  Congratulations to you guys too.

• 1:42:53Jordi Hays?

  Only, only, you know, only maybe ten more raises to eclipse your former employer, but uh, you know.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  You're on the path.

• 1:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Just, just two X every month forever and you'll you'll be there soon.

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:43:06Speaker 05

  Right, no, I respect them. They did an amazing job. I look up to them for sure.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day. Congratulations and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. We have Rick Dungey from the National Christmas Tree Association. The executive director coming on TV. Hi, Rick. Welcome to the show. There are seventy-nine days till Christmas. And around here, we absolutely love Christmas and we wanted to talk to an expert. And so I would love for you, thank you for taking the time. I would love for you to introduce yourself and the organization. Uh, and then I'm sure we'll have a ton of questions, but let's start with an introduction on yourself.

• 1:43:54Speaker 07

  Uh, Rick Dungey, so I've actually started working with Christmas tree farmers in nineteen ninety-eight.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:44:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, I know. Um, so I've I've been around, I can remember going to my very first um conference of tree farmers and did a lot of farm tours, you know. It's a steep learning curve. I didn't know anything about it. I was a I was a PR nonprofit management guy, but um, once you start going to tree farms and you hear them talk about what they got to do to actually grow trees that you put in your living room. You know, it's kind of cool. There's guys out there swinging big knives and they got tractors and they got uh trees growing in places you wouldn't think they could actually grow a crop. So uh, yeah, it's been a steep learning curve, but I've been around them a long time and and it's quite a fascinating thing to grow Christmas trees.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  What are the different categories of like growers? I'm I'm well, well aware, I I grew up going to a Christmas tree farm that was half a mile from my house and they grew all the trees there. And then I moved to the big city and I started going to places that sold Christmas trees and I was like, wait. I felt like Buddy the Elf. I was like, wait, you guys, you guys aren't growing Christmas trees here? What's going on? Shipping them in from, I'm sure, all over North America, but but I would love to understand the shape of the the market.

• 1:45:14Speaker 07

  Uh, so according to the USDA, there actually are Christmas tree farms in all fifty states, including Hawaii. Um, now, a lot of those are going to be small. Um, many farms are what we call cut your own or choose and cut, like you described, where you actually go to a local farm and cut down your own tree. Um, that accounts for about eighteen percent of all the trees sold in the US. All the rest of them are pre-cut. So they're grown in larger systems, larger farms on more acreage. Um, and they're cut and sent to other retail markets and sold um as pre-cut trees. We call that wholesale. So there's either wholesale or cut your own. Those are really the two main types of farms that you can do.

• 1:45:53Jordi Hays?

  And for the the pre-cut, where, what states or regions are are those most commonly grown? Like, is there a place where we could fly a plane and and just see Christmas trees for?

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  As far as the eye can see.

• 1:46:07Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, Oregon, uh, the Northwest Oregon is the number one producer. They they harvest about six million trees annually. In the state of Oregon. Uh, North Carolina, the Western Mountains of North Carolina, once you get up uh over about a thousand feet of elevation, they have big farms. So the Appalachian areas of Western North Carolina, Western Virginia, and in all the Great Lakes states. Uh, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, New York, all the way up through New England and Maine. Those are the main big production areas. That's where you're going to find most of your bigger wholesale farms that are selling pre-cut trees.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  And and what type of work do uh growers need to do around like demand planning and and forecasting? I know it feels like there's, in the same way that you see trends in in fashion, there's trends in in uh Christmas trees. But I don't know how much it, I don't know how much it fluctuates, like.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  There was a war on Christmas recently, so that probably affected.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  But I think we won the war.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  We won.

• 1:47:08Speaker 07

  In in in some people's minds, I suppose that's true, but um, yeah, so the the thing is that um, trees are grown like as any other crop, you know, you plant them in the spring and you harvest them in the fall. Um, really, the main difference is you don't get an annual yield. So what you plant in the spring is not ready for harvest for anywhere from four to twelve years, depending on um how big you want it, where where you're growing. Um, what species you're growing. Some species of conifers simply grow faster than others. Um, in the south, some of the southern Christmas tree farms, they can get a tree up to six foot in like four years. But on average, it takes about six to eight years to get one up to six, seven foot, which is the most common size. Um, so that's really the main difference. And so as a farmer,

• 1:47:51Speaker 07

  um, in addition to all the other things that every farmer has to be an expert on soil chemistry, um, entomology, you got to be a bug expert, a soil expert, you got to understand nutrient levels. Um, all these sorts of things, but you also have to be really good at managing your inventory. Because what you put in the ground is not going to be ready to sell until six, seven, eight years down the road. And so you got to be thinking about what does the market look like eight years from now?

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's like an insane.

• 1:48:20Speaker 07

  Trees I'm putting in the ground.

• 1:48:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can imagine. Uh, I don't I don't know when it happened, but uh at some point, these these Christmas trees that are that are sort of like sparse, you know, they're like leveled out. I forget, I forget the exact name. Became a lot more popular, it feels like, in the last couple of years.

• 1:48:37John Coogan?

  Do you remember Douglas Spurs?

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  I don't know. Anyway.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  I'll I'll try to, I'll try to, I'll try to find the exact name. But but either way, it's very, a demand planning process where you're having to predict out seven or eight years in the future is almost impossible.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  American households will be buying Christmas trees, but also which ones they will be leaning towards.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's their demand.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  And then how lean are these farming operations? Like, I imagine if you're making a product that effectively, you know, you're only selling one eighth of your crop every single year.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they have to be staffed in a pretty like lean way.

• 1:49:17Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, so most of the smaller farms that are going to sell trees, you know, one at a time, cut your own style. Um, many of them have also supplemented revenue with other types of revenue streams. Agretainment is sort of a catch-all phrase, so um, you know, they sell pumpkins in the fall, they sell hay rides, they got all these other things and activities. Um, so it's really more of an all-day-long entertainment kind of a thing. The tree is just also you happen to get while you're there. So those types of farms have really been able to maximize profits by finding other revenue streams. For a wholesaler, it's about scale.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:49:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, so, you know, and and shipping is going to impact, you know, your margins, of course. Um, because you have to get trees from where you're growing them to where your retail customers are. Um, and some of them sell trees just on the, now you might know the right term. So if you have a scanning system, you put a barcode on there, the retail outlet will scan a tree as they sell it at POS. Um, but they only pay for the ones that actually sell. So any trees that don't sell, the farmer doesn't get any any revenue for. So that can be tough also. So it's really a matter of scale for most wholesale farmers. Um, finding the right retail buyers that have the right type of market, that are going to be able to effectively sell the trees that you're growing and you're sending to that retail customer.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  For many, many decades, your organization has supplied the Christmas tree for the White House Blue Room. What goes into that selection process? I imagine it's one of the highest stakes, highest pressure kind of moments of the year presenting that tree. There's a lot on the line going in, going into that, you know, selection.

• 1:51:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, interesting timing because we just had a Zoom meeting this morning with the staff from the visitors office at the White House about what when it has to be there and all the process you got to go through and anything. Yeah, so I try to make sure and point out that not to put too fine of a point on it, but it is really good for our industry, for our growers to be able to tell people, hundreds of millions of people every year, that at the White House, at the people's house, their decorations center around a farm grown real Christmas tree, not a plastic toilet bowl brush from China. I think that's a really important thing to point out.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  I'm taking shots.

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  That's fire.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that we we had an enemy here. There is a war on the plastic toilet brush.

• 1:51:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  Tree. We can't be doing that. I like this. This is great.

• 1:51:51Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, we like to promote the actual real thing that farmers grow.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:56Speaker 07

  So yeah, to win to win that contest is hard. It's a national tree contest. We hold it every other year. Growers actually bring a tree from their farm that is the best example of a tree that they can grow. They have to win their state contest first to qualify for the national contest. The national contest has a two-stage scoring system. It's hard. It's really difficult to win. By the time, if you become a grand champion and get to supply and present the official White House Christmas tree, since 1966, so we're on a 60-year tradition now, if you get to that level, what you can do is you can tell people, I am an expert at what I do, and there's no question about it. It really is sort of

• 1:52:38Speaker 07

  the pinnacle of being in having the knowledge, skills, and abilities to grow a really good Christmas tree.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Do, how early is a grower get in the sense that they might have a championship tree on their hands? Like by year three or four, are they kind of feeling like, hey, this thing's on the right trajectory? I might have, you know, a real contender here?

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  Go the distance.

• 1:52:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, you get you get a wide variety of answers, but a lot of the growers that I've talked to that do compete will say that they pick out about 15 or 20 potential trees on their farm. Once they're at about four or five feet tall, once they're that tall, they start sharing, you know, and trimming the branch of the tree, making it grow the way that they want it to. But also by that time, by the time it's about five foot tall, it starts exhibiting the characteristics, the traits that you're looking for. Straight branching, fast upward growth, good, good needle coverage around all sides. So yeah, a lot of them will start identifying potential contest trees as early as four or five years before. The trees that are into the contest have to be between six and eight feet tall.

• 1:53:42Speaker 07

  So yeah, two, three years out, they start identifying potential contest winners that they can take.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I figured. What is how, you know, we're headed into the Christmas season for us here on our show. We started our Christmas countdown, you know, weeks ago. But when is like the the optimal time to head to the farm to get your Christmas tree, whether you're going for a pre-cut or your local farm? Like I imagine, I imagine there's a window where supply is starting to arrive, or they're they're kind of opening up the good stuff.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  I feel like the whole, the whole, don't get your tree until after Thanksgiving is kind of maybe fake news. I don't know.

• 1:54:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, the real Christmas, the real Christmas enjoyers know that that but but too early, I think, could be a bad thing.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Okay, well, let's hear it from the expert.

• 1:54:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a wide range of time that a cut harvested tree can maintain its moisture level and it's look good and not drop a bunch of needles once it's inside of a home. Part of it is where it's grown. You know, trees that come from the north are hardened off. They go into a state of dormancy long before they're harvested. And so they can absorb a lot of moisture. I mean, I've had people constantly tell me that their trees, their tree stays fresh all the way through February. I would probably stick to four, maybe five weeks at the most for most people. And that's even if they're taking really good trees.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  We got to put it to the test. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to keep it alive.

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking of going this, I was thinking of going this weekend. We've been having, we've been having too much fun with it. Tree, tree, actual tree care, once the tree's installed in your house. I I've never known if it works that much. I feel like just respecting the tree, giving the tree some love, that feels like it goes a long way. But how much should you be supplementing the tree, the water, all that stuff?

• 1:55:42Speaker 07

  Two, two basic things, really. It really boils down to two simple, basic things. One, you want to cut a small piece off, off the trunk before you get it in water. Quarter inch, half inch. It doesn't have to be that much. And the reason that you do that is it opens up the plant tissue that absorbs water molecules. Okay. If it's exposed to air for long periods of time, it won't be able to absorb water. And then just simply add water to it every single day. Water, simple water. You don't have to add anything else. Just simple water.

• 1:56:15John Coogan?

  Okay. My team just reminded me that it's October 6. We're maybe a little bit ahead of the curve here. But I do, I do want to ask you about what you, Jordy just had to leave. I do want to ask you, like, what, what, what, what questions are you getting from farmers as the head of the National Tree, Christmas Tree Association? Like, are they pushing you to, to negotiate tariffs on imported plastic trees? Like, what, at what level can they engage with you as a liaison to the government, to other businesses,

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  to each other even? What, what, what else is top of mind for your organization? What value do you bring to the community?

• 1:57:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, so our, our main mission for the members and for the industry is a role of protection and advocacy.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:10Speaker 07

  And sometimes that does actually involve, we work on issues like ag wage rate, you know, how much you got to pay laborers on the farms. We do work on tariff issues occasionally. Recently, the, the two main importers of fake plastic green toilet bowl brushes asked, asked for an exemption on their product from the US Trade Rip.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  I feel like nobody's getting the exception. I feel like everyone's paying crazy tariffs now. That's ridiculous.

• 1:57:43Speaker 07

  Well, what was crazy is their reasoning for it. They said there's no alternative American product, so they have to import them from China. And our, and our answer to the US Trade Rip was, well, actually, there is an American alternative. It's a real tree.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a real tree. Yeah, come on. Yeah, that's a great response. Okay.

• 1:57:59Speaker 07

  And we were successful in that. They did not get an exemption from the Section 308 tariffs. Yeah, so lots of those issues. And I would tell you, you mentioned growers communicating with others. I, I've been involved with other ag industries throughout my career also. And one thing I can tell you about Christmas tree farmers is they are really, really good at communicating with each other, at sharing knowledge, sharing expertise, sharing experiences. They don't, even though they're technically competing against each other, you know, they're all selling trees and they all want to sell trees.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  But it's more like vocal, right?

• 1:58:32Speaker 07

  They get together at meetings and they're very open about telling each other, here's what worked at my farm, here's what didn't work.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 07

  They're very good about sharing knowledge so that they all become better growers.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  That's really cool. It sounds like a fantastic community. I know we're having fun because it's October and we're very excited.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  How can, how can people, how can people help? Is there, like, is it all funded by industry?

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Buy a real Christmas tree. That's number one.

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that's obviously number one, but our, our audience doesn't need to hear that. But is there, is it all funded by industry or can people donate? How can people help?

• 1:59:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we're a C6 organization. So we're a membership association. Members pay dues to belong. The other thing that I would mention, if I can get a shameless plug in here.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Please, plug away.

• 1:59:16Speaker 07

  The Tree Association, back in 2005, started a charity called the Christmas Spirit Foundation. And the main program that that foundation runs is called Trees for Troops, where we donate Christmas trees every year to military bases to give out to families in the armed forces. TreesforTroops.org, you can donate to that charity. That's a C3 charity. We are now entering our 22nd consecutive year. In 21 years, that program has given out more than 347,000 free Christmas trees to military bases all over the world.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  TreesforTroops.org. Go make a donation today.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Donation as individuals.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  We will be getting matching donations from employers. These are more popular than ever in tech. So do everything you can. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Rick.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Come chat with us, having fun.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  And we will be, we're keeping the Christmas spirit alive in technology. And thank you for breaking this down for us.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  We want record Christmas tree sales in Silicon Valley this, this holiday season, across the country, but everywhere, really. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you, Rick.

• 2:00:20Speaker 07

  That's what I like to hear. All right.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got Dylan Field, the CEO of a public company, coming on.

• 2:00:33Jordi Hays?

  We've been keeping him waiting.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  We've been keeping him waiting. We're very excited to have Dylan Field. Of course, welcome back to the show.

• 2:00:41Dylan Field?

  Here you go.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  We were having a lot of fun with the head of the National Christmas Trees.

• 2:00:46Dylan Field?

  I heard part of it. And it was funny because I was just thinking that Christmas came early. We launched a Figma Design Agent today. So pretty exciting.

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Thank you. That was fantastic.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  On that, I think that's appropriate to add.

• 2:01:01Dylan Field?

  We can just stop.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  So I was going to add.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  The presents are under the tree.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Okay, I think we have enough, we have enough Christmas nonsense. Tell us more about the product launch, take us a click deeper, please.

• 2:01:15Dylan Field?

  I mean, it's been awesome. We've been working on this for a while. We've had the beta going and just been hill climbing. The team has done an incredible job of not just working with our own first party models, frontier models, but also really thinking about how do we make this great for our users? And so much more to do, but at today's launch, you'll see that the Figma agent's faster, higher quality. It has better ability to deal with context across your files and more overall agentic capability. I would say it's improved quite a bit on design systems. We still have more room to go on all the dimensions, definitely design systems too.

• 2:01:57Dylan Field?

  But really broad of the launch and finding myself really enjoying using the Figma agent on the canvas. And I think as we think about just kind of where it all goes, there's so much that you can do in the canvas. It's not the case that, you know, the non-developers, the designers, the PMs feel at home in the terminal and the IDE. I don't think text is the final representation of everything. I love text. I don't think that that's it. And I believe that we're going to find more ways to go build software and use these amazing reasoning models to be part of that process, not the entire thing. It's humans, agents together.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Are you generally, through this process, yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're building an agent that is going to excel at one discipline and not be a AGI model, right? And so I'm wondering if you have a broader philosophy around, around ensembles of models? I mean, we've seen the decisions API, Jev, there's like smaller models for different purposes. And you can imagine this future where you're actually using more models, more models. I, I've been, for a long time, I was like, actually, let's get rid of the model picker. Just give me one thing, but, and maybe that happens and there's an abstraction layer on top of some of these tools, but it does feel like there's a ton of value in having a team,

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  research scientists, AI researchers focused on a particular discipline, shine the eye of Sauron on something and go and deliver a great product that then can be the right tool for the job. But are you, are you in a world where you're applying your lessons here to like the shape of, of AI as a tool broadly? Or is this a unique design thing?

• 2:03:48Dylan Field?

  Superintelligence, it's, you know, it's the goal. No, I'm joking. No, and we're, we're trying to make like the best design agent to empower designers. We are not trying to replace designers. We're trying to make it so they are maximally empowered in their work, which does mean helping them make PRs, helping them go even further with their work, helping them get all the context they need to go make decisions. And it does so happen that like after all this time building Figma, the team really does understand the needs of designers and what we need to do to go achieve that.

• 2:04:29Dylan Field?

  And I think that is just as much a part of the special sauce over time. And so, yeah, I'm very, very excited about what we can do here and also how the loops that we have in the product and the data available to be able to work with. In addition to just kind of like this very, you know, singular focus of how to make the best thing for design and the best thing for designers to use every day and make them more efficient. Like, I think that is really nice to have that focusing power. And also, you know, you don't want to be in this mindset of you're fighting against bitter lesson.

• 2:05:10Dylan Field?

  You want to get the advantages of the general models, the ways that they've been trained on all sorts of things, associations they've made, and you want to make it so that you're really good at design.

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense.

• 2:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like part of the challenge as a design company is, is you don't have the luxury of being able to produce slop even at, at anywhere this, at the same rate as some of these other companies where like they might be offering a bunch of things and they're not like, their whole brand is not built around like design quality and, and taste and, and, you know, precision. And so they can just make something that like only 5% of the time it's actually like decent and, and that's enough. Whereas I think for, so I guess like, do you feel like, do you feel like you have to hold the team to a higher bar on, in terms of what products are shippable?

• 2:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Because like a new YC company can be like, hey, we made a design agent, like you should try it. And if people even have like an okay time with it, they'll be like more excited about it, whereas your community again has like much higher than average taste level capabilities, all these different things.

• 2:06:26Dylan Field?

  I think there's a bunch of points in there and it's like, they're all interesting. The, maybe we'll start with just the overall setup that we have and what we're really caring about for this product, which is we don't, again, we're not trying to replace designers, we're trying to empower them. And as we think about that, what does that mean? Well, it means that as you're trying to get something in your head onto the canvas, we've talked about this before, you might be aided by prompting. And also it might be the case that that's just a starting point. You might have to do more work and that requires more integration with a global system of Figma.

• 2:07:07Dylan Field?

  And so you kind of have to teach the models Figma first and make it so that they can understand how to go and work with Figma as well as do good design work. But I think that right now you'll probably see, you know, just as much on the slop side across all products and, you know, in AI. I hope you'll see less in Figma. We are working to make it so that there's less and less and less and better and higher quality results. But also it's, it's tastes is a wild thing in that different people in, in different domains have different definitions. And so the ultimate is how do we make sure that we can understand what you're going

• 2:07:52Dylan Field?

  for and give it to you?

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about interfacing with AI as a top of funnel? I think everyone saw the Blender moment when everyone was modeling everything in their world in Blender and, you know, the AI community and, and AI enthusiast community was downloading and installing Blender. And it, and it feels like there's, there's immense value if you can be, you know, a button there or even just the, the top of funnel agent says, hey, you, you've been working on this business idea? I did a first draft of a logo, but you should take this much further. Why don't I hand off to Figma, get you set up there, even pass along credit card details?

• 2:08:36John Coogan?

  Like there could be a really deep integration, but then there's always difficulties on where the value accrues and whatnot. How have you been, how have you been dealing with those potential trade offs in like an increasingly AI agentic top of funnel world?

• 2:08:52Dylan Field?

  Well, first and foremost, we want to always be learning from the ecosystem. And I think that's essential. The ecosystem sometimes in these moments evolves so quickly that when you start to see everything come in, it's like, wow, there are so many ways that we can work with other companies or other models or different setups here. You know, sometimes it's the case you're like, wow, yeah, I predicted that like five years ago. And other times it's more of, I did not predict this at all. This is a second or third or effect, whoa. And I think that if you don't understand what people are trying to do, you can't build for them.

• 2:09:32Dylan Field?

  And also you need to work well with the ecosystem in order to make all these new routes possible. And there's complex questions that like you've mentioned around where does value live? Where does it accrue? I think that some of those, there's a category of questions where it's, there are not clear answers and it's not clear there will be clear answers. There's other categories where I think that actually the way this space evolves, will evolve is more clear. And so you also have to have, I think, some macro bets about like the way things will play out over time, but not get stuck in your head.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  How are you thinking, how are you thinking about motion graphics? I feel like we've seen some cool like one shotted demos. I've done enough motion graphics and After Effects to know that like it does need to be pixel perfect and sometimes you need to like make small changes and doing that via text would be extremely cumbersome. And so it feels like there's an increasing opportunity there for web-based, node-based, AI-enabled, MCP-enabled tooling. What's the current state of the strategy there? How do you see the motion graphics discipline evolving?

• 2:10:44Dylan Field?

  I think that the way that we'll see motion graphics evolving is parallel to all these other areas too, which is when you're facing a blank canvas or a blank page, it is hard to get started. The sooner that you can kind of build to think, get something out onto the canvas, whether that's through design and or it's even in a sketchbook or you're doing something with a coding model, that is good. It helps you get over that initial hurdle and then from there you can react to it and go, okay, what do I want to tweak? What do I want to change? How do I make this mine? And how do I make this my vision? And software ultimately is just amazing creative medium. And we don't want the center of the distribution for everything.

• 2:11:28Dylan Field?

  We don't want everything to converge to the mean. Rio, who was previously a cursor and recently left after they were bought by SpaceX, he had this amazing post recently where he talked about some of these ideas. And I think that we've is another area for Figma where we're really trying to figure out how to help people do this. Both use models, get all the power from them, but still apply their own judgment, creativity, taste, and really shape it, the model outputs like clay rather than just trying to go for the one shot. The one shot's rarely where you want to land and end up.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Give us your design review of the new American passport. Do you like the previous version or the current version more? Which passport speaks to you?

• 2:12:17Dylan Field?

  The new version I really like. I think that, you know, beautiful cover and then I love the way that as you flip through it, the eagle animates.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  We didn't even get to that. Yeah, there's a flip book involved, which is interesting.

• 2:12:33Dylan Field?

  I hope I'm not blowing something.

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  No, no, I did. I did see that, but we didn't. We were just looking at the front and the front seemed like a very, a very moderate iteration. There was some debate on our team about the kerning on the word passport. Tyler's not a fan of it.

• 2:12:48Dylan Field?

  This is too controversial for me. Let's go back to AI.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Where do you, feels like people on the timeline have been doing Figma's marketing for you in some ways where every other day there's somebody like, if you send me an AI-generated slide deck, I won't even take the meeting.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I think you said that.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I've been saying that for a long time. I've been saying that for a long time, just because I think you should be thinking about, you know, if there's a sea of just sameness, being able to prove to people that you can think differently, stand out, have a unique point of view, opinion, all these different things, you know, I would, in a sea of AI-generated decks, I would almost rather see like a Google's clear, obvious Google slides template because that is signaling, hey, I don't, I don't actually care about design at this very moment, but I care about showing that I communicated, you know, words very clearly what I'm trying to do. And the problem with AI-generated decks is that every single slide, I'm second guessing

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  how deeply did you think about what you're communicating? Because I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to spend time trying to process and evaluate somebody and their thinking if it's possible they weren't thinking at all.

• 2:14:09Dylan Field?

  I, I think that's a great way to put it and have really been kind of on this thread myself with our team, you know, I'm, at some point recently, I kind of gave some guidance to the team around AI writing, for example. And I thought about it a lot. It was a post that I kind of had queued for, I don't know, three weeks or something. I kept rewriting it ironically, because I thought this is really important to communicate. Like, we can't just ban AI writing in the company. Then we're not empathizing with like everyone else that's in tech and everyone else that's like using our software. At the same time, I think that there's degradation of trust that can happen as you have all

• 2:14:54Dylan Field?

  these folks interacting across the company and people are second guessing, did you even read what you're asking me to read? Did you think through this? And because of that, I came up with this old sort of rule for Figma, which is let's just have it be that you put written with AI at the top of messages, where there's AI writing of any kind. And, you know, if you're using AI to like spell check essentially, proofread, and you change a word, I don't care. If you write the whole thing with AI or there's like good paragraph in there, yeah, just put it right with AI, it's easy. No big deal. And that way we can trust that if you're sending something, you care about it and you've thought through it.

• 2:15:37Dylan Field?

  And I think that in general, people should not give up on their own thinking. They cannot give that to the model. And I see so many people that are essentially looking for the shortcut, trying to make it so that they can have maybe less than Figma, more outside of Figma, but folks are eager for the model to automate for them, for them, the model to think for them. And I think that the more important thing you can do is to actually use the model to learn, to try things you wouldn't have tried before, to be more daring, and to kind of expand possibilities rather than contract them.

• 2:16:20Dylan Field?

  And I don't think, I think it's good to have default skepticism, not because there's, models are all bad or something, that's not what I'm saying, but rather because if you're default skeptical, then you will understand better how models work, what to use them for and what not to use them for, and you'll get better results. So, yeah, I'm all about thinking.

• 2:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, I've noticed in the process of making decks, like my best decks, always the outline took like 20 minutes max, where I just like actually had clarified, like you want to, there's, there's increased clarity that comes from trying to communicate an idea or a company or a product or a launch or a campaign. Like, you're going to naturally get more clarity on the topic as you explain it in a way that is sort of logical and has a consistent narrative. And then there's times that I've opened this sort of my like deck outline in Figma that I've shared at this point with like over probably a hundred founders, right?

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Because I spend so much time on this, I have example slides for each slide and, you know, structuring and all this stuff. And there's been times I've landed in that and I've just, I'm just wrestling with it for hours and hours and hours, not making progress. And two things are usually happening. One is just a bad idea, or two, I don't understand it. I just don't understand it well enough, or there's just like something fundamentally broken. And so when people go to AI first for something as important as like communicating your company, like you're, you're robbing yourself of like, one, that, that sort of check and balance of, do I actually understand this deeply?

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Does the thing that I'm presenting make sense? And you're sort of accelerating to the next step, which is pitching the thing. And the last thing you want to go do is pitch an idea to a bunch of smart people that is not well thought through, that doesn't make sense. And, and so you're like saving that time of like wrestling with the idea, but then wasting all this, wasting even more time and wasting other people's time trying to communicate something that doesn't make sense. And so.

• 2:18:31Dylan Field?

  I mean, you can't explain something you don't know it yet. I think is the basic rule I always have gone by and that's pre-AI too.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Well, I don't know it, but my assistant knows it. You can just talk to the model now. You don't even need to talk to me.

• 2:18:46Dylan Field?

  There's also the flip side of like, there's also the flip side of, of not just the, do you understand this? Can you explain it? But also like, one of the things that no one knows yet that we all need to explore and, you know, that can't be fully understood. And I think that mystery in the world and sort of like the, the ways that you feel just when you encounter something that's, that's really novel, new, or, or as a angle on something that exists, but just is, it's fresh. Those are magic moments and, and I think that in general, there's an opportunity right

• 2:19:29Dylan Field?

  now to lean more into mystery in a time when everything's becoming a bit less mysterious.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:19:37Jordi Hays?

  Mic drop.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  I love it. Thank you so much.

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  That's a good place to end because I have follow-up questions to that encouragement of mystery, but you can just leave it in this sort of dramatic pause.

• 2:19:49Dylan Field?

  Yeah, leave it mysterious.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Yes, stay mysterious. Thank you so much.

• 2:19:52Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to see you, Dylan. Always good to see you. Congrats to the team on the launch.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. We have the founder of Vinci and the CEO, founder and CEO, Hardik Kabaria is in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  It's time.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Hey, hey, how are you guys doing? I'm doing well.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 2:20:17Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great. We've had a wide-ranging show today. Nice conversation with Dylan, head of the National Christmas Tree Foundation as well. It's been all over the place.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Did you make it through that interview?

• 2:20:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  You actually broke.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  I, I, it broke, it took, it took me to deep water.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  One of us is a professional and the other one's an amateur.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  You can go watch, as it gets closer to Christmas, go watch our interview with the, with Rick, the head of the National Christmas Tree Foundation. But today we're, we're here to talk about your business, but why don't, why don't you introduce yourself and then we'll get into the company?

• 2:20:51Speaker 09

  Sure. Yeah, my name is Hardik. I co-founder CEO of Vinci. My background is technical, physics and geometry software. Been in that space for some time and started Vinci three years ago.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  Cool. Yeah, PhD at Stanford and eight years at Carbon. What were you doing at Carbon? What, what, what, I actually, I'm not, there's a few businesses I wanted to know more about Carbon specifically and how it set you up.

• 2:21:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, Carbon's a 3D printing company. Um, I was a Sequoia, Silicon Lake back company. I, after my PhD, I was looking for something that can use geometry, but was also less closer to the real parts.

• 2:21:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:26Speaker 09

  But joined as a software engineer, I was there for eight years. I was VP of Software for the last couple of years. So shipped software on manufacturing type, uh, manufacturing flows. In, in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in US, Mexico. So it gave me a lot of perspective on how software can help hardware.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, narrow in on the current mission. Uh, semiconductor design, semiconductor engineering. I noticed you're expanding into like vehicles, aircraft, satellites, memory. Those are similar problems, but

• 2:22:01Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  It feels like there's enough money being made like narrowly in, in semiconductor. So I'm interested in the overall strategy and the level of abstraction you're operating at.

• 2:22:11Speaker 09

  So I'll start with something very basic, which is physics.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:15Speaker 09

  Everything that is around us, whether that is human made parts, nature made parts. It'll be governed by laws of physics. Laws of physics are universal. Something as simple as energy will always be energy out. Momentum balance and so on. Any part we design, we care about physics because ultimately the parts we start behaving in the real world. And if they don't perform the way you expect it to perform, all goes to hell. Right? What are we building is a foundation model for physics.

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:44Speaker 09

  And how it's meaningful. Let's say you create thousands of design ideas. If you cannot grade them with physics, it'll be very hard to pick which ones right.

• 2:22:55Speaker 09

  So physics is the compilation layer for hardware.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:58Speaker 09

  It's been manual. With our product, we are making it automatic and scalable.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:02Speaker 09

  Now this applies to semiconductor, high bandwidth memory. It also applies to satellite.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:23:08Speaker 09

  But when the scope is this big, you're going to start extremely focused somewhere.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:12Speaker 09

  So we said, why don't we pick thermal problems in semiconductor and electronics? And we build a software that allows our users to do it and ship it.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:21Speaker 09

  And, you know, make it true and then we expand. So that's where we are.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  What is the sales process for semiconductor company these days? Because I feel like they have something that's working so well. Uh, I thought the only job they had was make more of the thing that everyone wants and raise prices. But they have time to implement new software solutions from third party vendors?

• 2:23:43Speaker 09

  That's a good question. Right. Um, so you're asking, so first it's top down sets. You know, you cannot go to these large, large companies and say, I changed one engineer's mind. I mean, I would say good freaking luck. Okay. Um, you will have to convince a VP saying that, hey, this is something you should try. And it's working for us. So now to the second question, do they have time to try out like, who are we? I'm not even from semiconductor.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:06Speaker 09

  Why would they even give me a time of the day? I've never worked in semiconductor industry before. The problem is so acute that if you can really help them, it matters. So we start our sales process with asking, what matters to you? And answer is consistently the same thing. Time to market and performance. I do not want to miss my time to market. I have to launch a new chip, new product at CES end of the year. And it better be performing. And we work with the most complex parts people are making.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:35Speaker 09

  I went with memory.

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:37Speaker 09

  CPU, GPU, right? And their thermal problems are so acute that the existing tooling doesn't take them there. So if you can really be more accurate, higher fidelity, automatic, they are definitely interested in trying it.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So maybe a month ago at this point, we had the Navier-Stokes moment. Uh, and, uh, it was very cool for, for people within the, the tech space. There was a lot of excitement, but average people, like if you tell them we use a computer to solve a math problem. You know, they're not going to be super, uh, it didn't like, it didn't feel like it moved the market is another way to put it.

• 2:25:14Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  My question for you is like, how, how, are there a bunch of other moments like that happening at like a micro level within businesses where they're using models and they're having breakthroughs, but they're not raising their hand and saying, like, basically just publishing that? Because it actually is like, can become IP?

• 2:25:34Speaker 09

  Yes. So I would say that it's, we have been deployed commercially for some time. So I'm going to ask you a question from, I'm going to start answering a question from there. So they would, in, in this company is the IP sensitivity, who they work with. They are extremely private and secure about it. So they get start using a new vendor, new tool, new method, and they want to keep it to themselves. And that's the style of the industry, which, um, it helps us, it hurts us, but I would say we are part of the ecosystem. So I like to go and meet customers where they are. So I would go far as to say, I even, it's embedded in our deployment. We do on-prem deployment and we make our product work with zero forward deployed engineers.

• 2:26:18Speaker 09

  Extreme data privacy. We'll meet you where you are. Make sure our software is useful to you. And then sort of doesn't matter. What helps us is the industry is so small that everybody talks to each other, wink, wink, works, that's fine by me.

• 2:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  Uh, on the data side, uh, simultaneously, the laws of physics are completely open source. But the actual design, the actual design of semiconductors

• 2:26:45Speaker 09

  Is not.

• 2:26:46John Coogan?

  Is extremely well guarded.

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  I personally discovered physics with my PhD, but I haven't, you know.

• 2:26:52John Coogan?

  But now it's in the training data, but, but, but you see what I'm saying? Like, like you have, you have the most easy to implement widely, look it up in any physics textbook. And then you have the stuff that, you know, is, is sent from Nvidia to TSMC and is not making it to the open web. It's not in the pre-training data. So, uh, is there a gap to close? Are you hiring semiconductor designers to do, to, to build RL environments for you? Like what, what actually moves the needle or is just the laws of physics, is that enough?

• 2:27:25Speaker 09

  So the laws of physics is enough, actually. Because the laws of physics inside the firewall of TSMC is exactly the same as outside of the firewall of TSMC. I am yet to meet a company that invented physics and I don't think I'll meet them. And we have trained a model on the laws of physics and time of usage, it will, it will produce an answer that abides by it. So if that's the case, we don't need to know the designs that Nvidia, Micron, TSMC, Samsung are working on. That's why we deploy and we make it work out of the box.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:28:00Speaker 09

  Does it mean we have to, so we are today training on petabyte of data.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04Speaker 09

  And we will go to 10x, 100x over the next couple of quarters. So what is the expansion? So the expansion is, oh, from thermal to thermal mechanical to electromagnetic. So basically cover every physics modality that people can write equations about. So to, to the point earlier made, there is something new physics that somebody is going to discover. We haven't embedded that, but the discoverable physics is a freaking fair game.

• 2:28:28John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming.

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. Massive fundraiser, 250.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Came into the round. Quarter bill.

• 2:28:38Speaker 09

  Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

• 2:28:41Jordi Hays?

  To Masek and others.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, amazing progress.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Coastal Ventures, AMD.

• 2:28:47Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Only three years in.

• 2:28:48Speaker 09

  AMD and Applied, Applied Deals as well. Two, AMD and Applied, two corporate ventures. Yeah.

• 2:28:54John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations and thank you so much.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you and congrats to the team on the milestone.

• 2:28:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Have a good one.

• 2:29:00Speaker 09

  Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

• 2:29:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  Well, I think it was a massive, successful show.

• 2:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  That was a hilarious interview. I learned a lot genuinely.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  And not, not, uh, Vinci.

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. I'm going back to the Christmas tree one.

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, I, uh, yeah, that was, that was one of the tougher moments on the show for me. I was, you know, trying to look at the monitor.

• 2:29:28John Coogan?

  The team was not helping.

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Trying to look at Rick.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  The team was.

• 2:29:31Jordi Hays?

  The team was, was making my life. I was, I was in a, I was in a dark place and I couldn't keep it together and I had to run off the set.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  The team sent also.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  And, and then Nick ran out behind me. He was, he was.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  And the team sent this meme of the sitting forward. And that was just the death of me at the time. It was rough. It was a good time, but we learned a lot and that's not the end of our Christmas programming, folks. We got more Christmas related guests coming on the show.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  You didn't ask, we didn't listen.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got some good stuff.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  No, it's actually fascinating.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  No, it's so interesting. It's genuinely like.

• 2:30:13Jordi Hays?

  Being in a business where you're making something that you're going to sell in eight years is like an incredible challenge.

• 2:30:18John Coogan?

  Yo, totally. Yeah. And, uh, yeah.

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  And competing in a market where there's a, there's a war on your industry.

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  It's true. Yeah. I mean, there really is. Well, well, once he kind of broke down the tariff perspective, it makes a lot more sense.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, the only thing I didn't get to ask is, do you still hear the bells? But I already knew the answer. Of course he does.

• 2:30:38John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Of course he does. We're going to be making a, a meaningful donation to their foundation. And, uh, we encourage you to as well.

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  Remember that is treesfortroops.org.

• 2:30:51Jordi Hays?

  This is financial advice.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  This is financial advice. Do it now. Thank you for tuning into TVPN today.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:30:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic show. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific.

• 2:31:01Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Goodbye.