Nvidia Invests in Thinking Machines, Meta Acquires Moltbook, BYD F1 | Olivia Moore, David Paffenholz, Adam Goldstein, Max Junestrand, Allan McLennan, Jagdeep Singh, Scott Hickle

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:04) - It's a Gongworthy Day (06:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (18:54) - BYD F1 (26:34) - Nvidia Invests in Thinking Machines (31:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (32:35) - Meta Acquires Moltbook (41:32) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (58:29) - Gulf Data Centers: A Bad Idea? (01:02:14) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:10:25) - Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the firm's bi-annual report on the top 100 generative AI consumer apps, highlighting the rise of AI agents like Genspark and Manus, and the evolving competition among ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. She emphasizes the importance of understanding mainstream AI adoption beyond the tech community, noting the need to adapt data collection methods to capture desktop product usage and consumer payment behaviors. Moore also addresses the challenges faced by standalone image generators due to advancements in integrated AI features within platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. (01:33:47) - David Paffenholz, co-founder and CEO of Juicebox, an AI-powered recruiting platform, announced the company's $80 million Series B funding, valuing it at $800 million. He highlighted Juicebox's growth from four to 40 employees, tripling annual recurring revenue, and expanding its client base to over 5,000 companies, including large enterprises like defense contractors and financial institutions. Paffenholz emphasized the shift towards outbound recruiting due to increased AI-generated application spam and discussed Juicebox's business model, which offers per-seat licenses and per-job agents to streamline talent sourcing. (01:42:55) - Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer Aviation, discusses his transition from the software industry to aviation, driven by a desire to create impactful and enjoyable technology. He explains the development of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, emphasizing their safety, efficiency, and potential to revolutionize urban transportation. Goldstein also highlights Archer's progress in manufacturing, certification, and strategic partnerships, including their selection as the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA28 Summer Olympics. (01:57:33) - Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, an AI-native legal workspace, discusses the company's recent $550 million Series D funding round, valuing it at $5.55 billion, and its expansion into the U. S. market with new offices in Houston and Chicago. He highlights the growing adoption of AI in legal practices, noting significant traction in M&A and corporate departments, and emphasizes the importance of integrating AI to enhance efficiency and competitiveness in the legal industry. (02:07:41) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:14:56) - Allan McLennan, founder and chief executive of PADEM Media Group, is a seasoned leader in global media and entertainment, with over three decades of experience spanning technology providers, studios, and broadcasters worldwide. He discusses his optimism about Hollywood's future, emphasizing the enduring appeal of its creative storytellers and the industry's resilience despite challenges like the SAG-AFTRA strike. McLennan highlights the evolving landscape of film budgets, noting the potential for lower-budget films to rival traditional blockbusters, and underscores the importance of audience engagement and the role of AI as a valuable tool in content creation. (02:28:13) - Jagdeep Singh, co-founder of Roda AI, discusses the development of general-purpose intelligent robot foundation models aimed at addressing challenges in manufacturing and logistics. He highlights the limitations of traditional robots, which follow predefined trajectories and struggle with variability, and critiques current vision-language-action models for their reliance on small, lab-specific datasets that fail in real-world applications. Singh introduces Roda AI's innovative approach of training models on extensive internet video data to enhance robots' adaptability and generalization capabilities, complemented by minimal teleoperation for task-specific fine-tuning. (02:40:18) - Scott Hickle, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, discusses the development of Throne One, a device that attaches to toilets to monitor gut health, hydration, and prostate health automatically. He explains the journey from the company's initial focus on nurse staffing to creating this health monitoring device, emphasizing its hands-free operation and the use of computer vision models to analyze health metrics. Hickle also highlights the device's potential to detect early signs of gastrointestinal and urinary tract cancers by identifying microscopic blood in waste, positioning Throne One as a proactive health tool. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, March 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's quickly pull up the linear lineup because we have some great guests coming on. Olivia Moore from A16Z is breaking down the top 100 generative AI consumer applications. Of course, linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And we have David. It's Deals Day. It's Deals, Deals, Deals, Deals, Deals. Juice Box is coming on. We got Legora raised a bunch of money. Broda raised a bunch of money. We also have Archer

• 0:45John Coogan?

  coming on to talk about flying cars. When will we get them? What happened to my flying car? They built one. We're going to see what the timeline is to get me in it. Well, let's run through a little, a few of these deals just to kick off the show. We're going to go through them later in the timeline, but there's a few things. Brandon Gurrell wrote the op ed today in the TVPN newsletter at tbpn.com. Miramarati's Thinking Machines snagged a multi-year partnership with Nvidia. Thinking Machines has been on the ropes. They lost half of the six co-founders in under a year. There's a question about where the business is going. This is obviously a good sign that they got a multi-year investment done with Nvidia in which it will deploy at least a gigawatt of cutting-edge chips to train AI

• 1:27John Coogan?

  models. They are going to be GPU richer. I don't know where the bar is for GPU rich or GPU poor is today, but they're one gigawatt richer after today, which is good news for them. So congrats to everyone at Thinking Machines. Even though they've had a couple high-profile executive departures, the team has grown from 30 people to 120 people. So they're still cooking. Also still cooking, Alex Wang. There was a bunch of fake news on the timeline. We'll dig into this, but multiple tech news aggregator accounts on X posted that Alexander Wang, who's been on the show at Meta Connect, I've interviewed him a few times. He leads MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and they said, and they were saying

• 2:09John Coogan?

  he's out. He's on the, he's on his ropes. He's on his, he's fighting for his life over there while it was fake news. And we'll go through exactly how this happened. But Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and Zuck also both hopped into the chats, different chats, which we'll take you through to categorically deny the rumors. So. We will dig into that. Also, Jan LaCoon, Matt raised a massive seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, AMIL.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  One on 3.5.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Not.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Bad.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Not the kind of combination that you normally see.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  It's not very American.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Hmm, why?

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  Do a 30-ish percent.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  But it's, it's a big vote of confidence.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  In the, in the age of AI, in the age of compute requirements, you, you gotta spend money to make money in AI. And he's got the money now. Also, as we mentioned, Legora is coming on, talking about their Series D, $550 million at a $5.5 billion valuation just a year after their entry into the US market. Fascinating industry. We talked to a partner at Sequoia yesterday. Obviously, Sequoia is an investor in Harvey, but how will these firms change? Will the tools become agencies? Will they be doing the work? Will they be more direct to consumer? This is a question that we've been digging through in the.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of, a lot of people have been kind of questioning just how thin are these ra- how, how thick or thin are these rafts, basically?

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Also, AI recruiting platform Juicebox, which was a part of YC, summer's 2022 batch. That's a good time to go through YC right before the AI boom. You're up and running. Well, they are up and running with $116 million after a $80 million Series B, which values it at $850 million. That's the kind of dilution that you're looking for. 10%, not bad. A little under 10%. And the round was led by DST Global with participation from Sequoia Co. 2 and YC. Very good news for the folks over at Juicebox. They're in the hiring market. So we're going to have the founder on to talk about the business, but also talk about the hiring market. Where is their strength? Where is their weakness? What is he reading

• 4:23John Coogan?

  into the jobs data? We'll try and get to the bottom of where the opportunity is in the modern economy. Meta also acquired the agent-based Reddit-style social network Molt Book. We, of course, had the founder, the creator of Molt Book on. I actually know the other co-founder as well, Ben Parr. They will both be joining Meta Superintelligence Lab. There's a lot of back and forth on, was it all slop? Is there any value there? Well, we don't know the terms of the deal. Doesn't have to be a billion dollar acquisition. Who knows? They're, I've talked to both of the founders. They're both, you know, capable, interesting people. And I think it's, I think it's under discussed, and we'll get into this, under discussed that who is evaluating these acquisitions? It's not just Mark Zuckerberg. It's not just Alex Wang. You also got Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross. These guys have backed a lot of founders.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  They've worked with a lot of AI startups. They can understand the team that they're trying to build over there. And there might be some interesting interface between AI agents and social media. This is highly relevant. Meta seems like the lodger of the coil.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember Meta filed some patent for basically bringing yourself back to life

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  in agent form after death, right? So of course they're thinking about this stuff.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Once you shed your mortal coil and you molt, you go on Moltbook. That's very macabre.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I would be, I'd be shocked if they keep Moltbook running.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Really?

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  For more than a handful of months.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  This just feels like, hey, let's bring some people on board that are, been thinking, spending all their time thinking about how bots are going to interact with other bots.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  And, and humans on the internet.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and Meta's done a ton of these types of acquisitions. Where like, like smaller products, tuck ins, not everything has been WhatsApp, 16 billion, 8 billion. I forget. It was a lot of billions.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nikita's first step was.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  That was a good example. And if you just think about it as like, you get a shot on goal with one product. You get a product leader that can go and, and bring some new energy, some new ideas in. There's a lot of opportunity there. Well, before we move to the timeline, let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma make, Claude code, Codex or Sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma. And let me also tell you about Gemini. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative products to life. And there's also some exciting news from Google that we'll touch on today. Not exactly a deal, but a whole bunch of new features that we'll be going through.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  So Theo is talking about the latest from Anthropic. So Claude Code now has code review, which optimizes for depth and maybe more expensive than other solutions. Like their open, like open source GitHub actions, reviews generally average fifteen to twenty-five dollars billed on token usage and they scale based on PR complexity. And Theo says Anthropic really needs like one normal person to proof these things before posting. I guess people are upset about the price of having these, these code reviews billed individually in a world where so much code is being generated.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Some of the, some of the initial copy around this announcement looked like it was just a flat rate per code review. It, in actuality, it's billed based on token usage, but it's funny to have like a flat rate.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  It's generating code.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  You're getting charged to review the code.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  And it's just like.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Also, like, all of the token rates and just AI expense lines are shifting so dramatically. Token usage is ramping, you're getting discounted tokens from certain plans, like, it's very hard to grapple with how you think about budgets. You know, we've talked to a number of people where like, you know, at, at Microsoft, every employee needs a token budget, everyone, every employee needs some sort of AI budget. You should still think about it almost in a per-seat basis, but depending on what someone's doing in the organization, they get a different AI budget. But this, this post from Bu-Hama was very funny. They feed us poison, Claude Code, so we buy their cures. Code review while they suppress our medicine, which is, what is the medicine in this?

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Actually writing the code.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Actually writing the code correctly the first time.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this, pull up this next one from Luffy. Claude Code, after writing your code, leave a tip.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yep. They really should do a tip button. I like, I like the idea of a tip. Tyler, what, what, what's your take on, on, on buying or paying for, for AI code reviews? There, you know, we're, we're, we're sponsored by a code review company. There are a number of code review solutions. What, what, what's the advantage to having AI run a code review these days?

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it like makes a lot of sense.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  It doesn't apply to you because you don't review code, correct?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so it makes sense for Teams, right? Because I like, I don't, I don't need like external code review on my code because I'll just have like if I'm in Codex, if I'm in Claude Code, I'll just tell it like, review it.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Review it before you put it.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  You would think that it's

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Does it work?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  While writing it, it's reviewing it, right? Hopefully it does that.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  So I personally, I never check my work in the moment. I'm just full speed ahead.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is this, uh, what is this Claude remarks account? P underscore remarks? It seems like it's a, it uses the real Claude logo, but it very much feels like it's not owned by Anthropic because this post is Walter White spinning a pistol, saying mid-level technic, non-technical business unit leaders asking Claude where they can cut headcount to reduce waste. And you flip it around and it says, actually, we don't need you. Which is the funniest situation. Claude, based on this conversation, we don't need you.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  Anton says, make the models cheap to use. Great. They all forgot how to code. Now 10x the price.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  It's not that bad. Stuff's working. Uh, we, we have had, we have had fantastic success with Vibe Coding. Uh, we are, we're quickly becoming a game studio. We, of course, released TBPN Simulator, thanks to Ben over there. Uh, we have some other projects in the works and, uh, it's going to be a good year for us. We're, we're, we're very happy with the tools that are at our disposal. Uh, Max Zeff in Wired shares that OpenAI and Google employees, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic in its lawsuit against the government. I saw guests of the show, uh, Dean Ball also put together an open letter through FAI that

• 10:56John Coogan?

  if you feel inclined, you can go sign to support the idea that, um, that Anthropic should not be labeled a supply chain risk. Maybe some other Chinese labs should be labeled a supply chain risk. Uh, we'll leave it up to you to see where you land on that conversation, but, uh, there are certainly lots of people that are coming together to try and, uh, crystallize the, the final decision there. In other news from Axios, uh, the White House read is an executive order to weed out a Anthropic, they are really pushing hard on this supply chain risk designation and pulling away from Anthropic. There's news that they might be using Gemini, might be using OpenAI models, the Grok is already installed. There's a question about capabilities, but the capabilities seem to be jumping back and forth constantly.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Like with the Google News today, with the Codex 5.4, like this temporary arb of like, they needed Anthropic because it was the only thing that could do X, Y, or Z. That seems to be, you know, gone for this week. Who knows where it'll be next week. But if you are trying to make it in DC, you gotta open up the front page of the Wall Street Journal because there's a tip. So if you have a meeting with Donald Trump, you better wear his favorite shoes. Can you guess what his favorite shoes are?

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  No idea.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  It says Balenciagas. No, it says Oxford's. $145 Oxford's to be specific. The president has developed an obsession with $145 Oxford's. "All the boys have them," is the quote. "The hottest and most exclusive MAGA status symbol is a pair of leather Oxford's. Prefer a wingtip, loafer, or monk strap, black or brown? President Trump has got you," apparently. "Trump has been gifting footwear to agency heads, lawmakers, White House advisors, and VIPs." "Did you get your shoes?" he asks.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  He wants everybody to wear the same pair of shoes.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Yes. And he asks people in cabinet meetings, "Did you get your shoes? Did you get the shoes they sent you?"

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty nice.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Some people have laced up in the Oval Office. During a lunch meeting in January, Trump suddenly pivoted to his incredible new shoes and gave Tucker Carlson a pair of brown wingtips. "All the boys have them," said a female White House official. Another joked, "It's hysterical because everybody is afraid not to wear them." "The shoe salesman in chief is paying attention."

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Do we know, do we know what brand?

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, Florsheims. Wow, that was the next sentence. Oh, spoiler alert over here. It's okay, we get it. You read the journal before me. I get in, we're gonna have to get two copies of this paper journal, because I have been reading the journal for a full year now, or two, and, uh, and I get over and I'm like, where's my, where's my paper? And, oh, well, it's over on Tyler Cosgrove's.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what's the, what's the sort of history of this brand? Why?

• 13:50John Coogan?

  I have some Florsheims. I like them. They're very comfortable. Yeah, they're good. They're, they're just like a, they're, they're, they're, uh, accessibly priced at $145. Uh, they look nice and they sort of match everything. And, look at that.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Would you expect this to roll in?

• 14:06John Coogan?

  Gives you a little.

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  To roll into Truth Social?

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially, we, is, I don't know if it's public, potentially a SPAC candidate, anything could happen here. Uh, Trump has fallen in one, in love with Florsheim, an American brand that's been pairing comfort and style for more than a century. They're also affordable. Many cost just $145, not bad for a pair of leather shoes. The president has taken to guessing people's shoe size in front of them. You're in a meeting and you're like, the, sir, the price of oil has tripled.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  He's like 11. I'm pretty sure it's 11.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  11. This is wild. He asks an aide to put in an order, and a week later, a brown Florsheim box, you should just have them in stock. You should just keep.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Reached by phone, Thomas Florsheim Jr. said he was unaware of the president's shoe orders. How are you not tapped in, Thomas?

• 15:00John Coogan?

  The seven, the, the 79-year-old billionaire known for expensive bryony suits, long red ties, and a pension for aesthetics, late last year began searching for something that would feel better after a day on the job and settled on Florsheim. Trump liked them so much, he started dispensing them. He pays for the shoes, the White House said. President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have some. So do Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump's Communications Director. Wow, it's really everyone. Uh, Sean Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham have a pair. Uh, recipients have taken to wearing their Florsheims around Trump some begrudgingly. One cabinet secretary has grumbled that he had to shelve his Louis Vuittons.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Officially, the White House wouldn't confirm Trump's choice of Florsheim. One recipient said Trump had a stack of them in an office. A box read Scott for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessin. Bessin does not want these. No way. He's got some Louboutins or something. Reached by phone, Thomas J. Florsheim said he was unaware. You read this. Florsheim was founded in 1892 by Chicago, in Chicago by Sigmund Florsheim, a German immigrant and cobbler, and his son Milton. A century before Trump began putting his name on everything, Florsheim stitched its moniker on shoes and opened branded stores across the country. The company outfitted American soldiers during both world wars. Later, it rode the shopping mall boom.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  President said President Harry Truman wore them. Michael Jackson moonwalked in Florsheim loafers. I had no idea that was the pair of shoes that he moonwalked in. That's remarkable. Like Trump's own business. He did a moonwalk in loafers? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what he, like, I think they're white-bottomed loafers. We should pull up a picture of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk. But you definitely need like a smooth dress shoe. You can't moonwalk in something with a lot of grip. Like Trump's own business fortunes, Florsheim has experienced ups and downs, including filing for bankruptcy in 2002, part of a move that returned the brand to Florsheim family. So they bought it out of bankruptcy after selling it.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Today, it is part of a Glendale, Wisconsin-based Waco, which also distributes Nun Bush, Stacy Adams, and Boggs. Rubio and Vance received their Florsheims after a December meeting in the Oval Office. Deep in conversation, Trump peered over the resolute desk at their feet. Vance recalled during an event later that day celebrating Kennedy Center Honorary Sylvester Stallone. Marco, JD, you guys have S-blank-Y shoes. Trump declared before retrieving a catalog. A third politician was in the room. Vance didn't name him. And Trump asked each person their size. Rubio said 11.5, Vance 13. A third man said 7,

• 17:54John Coogan?

  according to Vance. Shoe mugging is happening all over DC. If you head to DC, get a pair of floor shimes, or maybe, maybe there's an opportunity to start the left-wing response to floor shimes, since often these things get politicized. But the real money is going deeper in the supply chain, selling weapons to both sides.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Selling souls.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  You know that both Alex Jones and Gwyneth Paltrow at one point were sourcing supplements from the same co-packer?

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes, the exact same ingredients, the exact same chemicals, sold to two wildly opposing audiences. Like, this is something that happens deeper in the supply chain, because

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  That salesman.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  The brand matters.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Donald Trump.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Somehow, I don't think so. Quickly, before we move on, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the Phantom Card, people. Just do it.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  China's BYD explores F1 entry in first racing push. BYD is examining options to enter competitive motorsport, including Formula One and endurance racing, in an effort to boost the Chinese brand's appeal globally. The automaker is looking at several options following its rapid growth outside its home market and competitive racing's continuing shift towards hybrid engines, people said. These range from the World Endurance Championship, which includes the 24 Hours of Le Mans, to F1. Either through building its own team or potential acquisitions, any move by BYD would be a rare direct attempt by a Chinese manufacturer to take on a sport dominated by European and US teams.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Car makers from the country have had sporadic interest in motorsport. Geely successfully participates in international touring car racing through Cyan Racing. Formerly the Volvo factory team and NIO Inc. won the driver title for the inaugural Formula E Electric Championship in 2015. The potential cost of entering F1 could be a significant obstacle for BYD, according to one of the people.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  I thought they had money.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're down to their last 10, 20 grand.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Developing and entering a car often takes years of negotiation and costs as much as 500 billion a season.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  So they should start a new race series. You know how the BYDs can jump over potholes? Have you seen this video?

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  We've pulled this up before. So they can jump. There should be a specific racing circuit with terrible potholes that if you crash, it'll just destroy your car. So you have to jump at the right time and that adds like an extra layer of thrill.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  This would be good.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  And probably way cheaper to start that circuit. There's only one F1 race in China, the Shanghai International Raceway, the China Grand Prix. So who knows how much of an impact they would be able to make. Let's continue. No decision has been made and the company may not decide to enter any competition. A BYD spokesperson didn't request for comment, didn't respond. BYD is known for making affordable electric and hybrid vehicles. Okay, so they do have some hybrid technology. It's always weird, like a Tesla F1 car would be odd, cool, but it just feels like they should be in Formula E because I think of them as an electric car maker.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  But BYD in 2025, its high-end Yongwang branded brand tested the U9 Extreme vehicle at a track in Germany, recording a top speed of more than 308 miles an hour.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  That is so fast. That is so, so fast.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  That's scary to think about.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  200 is insane. I mean, being on the track and going like 120 feels fast. Three times that is absolutely crazy.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 150 feels wrong to me personally as a father.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  But 300.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  But the right track, the right conditions, straight, lots of runoff, like it is possible.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  It was BYD that was trying to break the drift record by just spinning it up.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were very upset about that. The chat agreed with you. They were not, they were not happy with that. An F1 partnership would also significantly boost awareness of BYD in the US. Do you know what BYD stands for?

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Build your dreams.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Build your dreams. Do you know what LG stands for? The TV maker?

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  Life good.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Yes, life's good. Life apostrophe S is good. Life is good. Life's good. LG. Good pop quiz. The sport itself is experiencing a surge in US popularity, which is odd because if F1's booming in the US, it's going to be more expensive to enter, but BYD doesn't have a strong sales and distribution into the US. F1 is still an international sport, but if it becomes more of an American sport, the trade.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  This is just a Europe, building relevancy in Europe. And they have a huge amount of competition back in China.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  So I, in many ways, I would view a move like this as not as much trying to compete with international

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  brands, but being like, we have all these brands at home, hot on our heels.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  We have to differentiate versus them.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Totally. Tyler?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Uh, I gotta put you in Trusone. It does not stand for let's good.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  No?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Stands for lucky gold star.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Lucky gold star. Wait, what? Where did I get life's good from?

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  That's another brand.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  They might use that in marketing, but it's not, like, the etymology of LG is from lucky gold star.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Wow, destroyed. Okay, thank you. Um, uh, here's another idea. BYD, instead of shelling out half a billion dollars for an F1 team or whatever it costs, uh, they should just do what perplexity did with Lewis Hamilton with Joe Guanyu, the Chinese driver, who, uh, is actively racing and they could sell the spot on top of the helmet. And so that would be more of like if Joe has a good season, if he wins, they're they're, you know, backing that. I wonder if you can't do a car sponsorship while you're racing for a different team, though. I don't know who who does Joe?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure there's limitations.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Who does he race for right now? Oh, he's on Cadillac. Okay, well, yeah, that's probably not going to work. The most American team.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Sitting in the Cadillac with the BYD sticker on his helmet.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that doesn't work. Stick with Walway, maybe. I don't know.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says he's not actively racing.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Backup.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Okay, he's backup. Yeah, thank you. Buying into F1 is more common. This season is the first for Audi after taking full control of Swiss motorsport company Sauber. Investor Otrio Capital is seeking buyers for a stake in Renault, Alpine Racing. However, full-team sales are rare. Billionaire Lawrence Stroll's Aston Martin team has recently sold stakes in the team, which has had a disastrous start to the new season after mechanical issues, including vibrations from the power unit. Motorsports such as F1 are increasingly adopting environmentally environmentally friendly practices for 2026. F1 has implemented new rules, including hybrid power regulations that boost battery capacity.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Somebody ran the numbers.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  On the sort of like CO2, the emissions savings that F1 is getting from the new new regulations. And then comparing that to the emissions of just like taking this like massive carnival of motorsports on the road all year round.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  And all the private jet land, every F1 event.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  And it's just like doesn't make a dent at all in the overall impact. And it's just sort of like emissions theater.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So what do you think performed better over the last five years, the S and P 500 or cows?

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Live cattle apparently outperformed the S and P 500, but this is from an account called DJ Cows. And I feel like they've been waiting for this to happen for the entire time. They've been waiting for the one moment that the cattle market outperforms the S and P 500 and they're taking a victory lap. DJ Cows, one of the greatest to ever do it. Very, very interesting. I didn't realize that there was such a boom in the cattle market, but apparently there is, and I'm sure there's a way to get in on the action if you so choose, if you are interesting. Well, let's move over to AI and the Neo Labs. Nvidia invests in Miramarati's Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by OpenAI's former CTO,

• 26:41John Coogan?

  plans to deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia chips as part of a new partnership. The deal includes a collaboration to design artificial intelligence training and serving systems using Nvidia technology. The size and structure of the investment couldn't be learned. Is it a circular deal? Is it equity in exchange for, for chips? It's, it's, it's unclear at this point, but nothing's off the table these days as.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the main thing we know, we know Thinking Machines was out raising towards the end of last year, going for something like a $50 billion valuation. Seems like that.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  I would have guessed that hasn't happened. Otherwise, I'm sure they would announce it from, from a, from a just like, in order to project, if I were them and I wanted to project confidence.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I would be trying to announce the biggest possible number.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Instead, they announced this, uh, this effectively what looks like a trade.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Look at this photo. Is there any chance that these two companies merge at some point in the future?

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Tyler's always been on this, like if Jensen gets really AGI pilled, he'll keep the chips for himself and serve the models himself. And Nvidia does have some in-house training and inference capabilities. They have. A metaverse product that simulates worlds. They also have a self-driving car project and they're still partnering with OEMs and partnering with companies and they're not, they're not offering consumer products. Of course, Nvidia is the one company in the Mag7 that does not have a social network yet, but that could change. But what do you think?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  There's been news recently, I think Nvidia is planning to launch some like open source AI agent.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  It's like unclear how like serious that is. Maybe it's just like a cool demo or something. But it's, yeah, I don't think it's like super.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Could be a fork of OpenClaw or something like that. Yeah, anything's possible. I mean, Nvidia has never done too much in the, in the consumer space or, you know, they've always been deeper in the supply chain, but they, I, didn't they have a Nvidia Shield gaming product that would do game streaming? I think they had some hardware at some point. So I, I think they're, they're open to it and, and in a, in a huge boom where, you know, having at least a team of 120 super talented AI researchers, that could be really valuable to Nvidia. Of course, Nvidia famously did that deal with Grok and sent over 10 billion wired in five days or something, or 24 hours.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  What was it? Yeah, they closed the whole thing in 20 days and I think Jensen just like sent, sent a $10 billion wire and.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somehow it came out that it, that the wire was sent like prior to actually formalizing.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  It's just like, here you go. Like I'm, I'm good for it. I got the cash flow, which is wild.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Sophie says, please, bro, just one more AI lab, bro. Come on, bro. We have a unique perspective on AI research. No one else is doing it like us, bro. Come on, bro. We can raise a few billion and worst case, we just get acquired, bro. Nothing to lose, bro. I promise. Come on.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Just join my AI research lab. Yeah. I mean, has the, has the NeoLab boom slowed down? Like you, Tyler, you created the NeoLab market map.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Have you been getting more DMs, "Hey, I just launched and you gotta put me on that thing"?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  It's probably slowed down a little bit. I mean, it's also like, uh, the big ones you heard about were all people leaving OpenAI.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Mostly OpenAI, I guess. Not as much Anthropic.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  But it's probably slowed down a little bit. You don't hear as much about these big rounds now. But I think there are, like, there are some that, like, are maybe in stealth that haven't launched stuff, right? Like, Standard Intelligence.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  When they came on, there was like, most people didn't know about that.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  But...

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there might be a few out there in stealth, but they have to be sort of narrow or... And I think the broader, we're now in the post-Post-Neolab era where it, maybe if it wears the Neolab branding, it's doing something that's so different that it's not really in the path of like...

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  But Standard Intelligence launching implies an opportunity for a Neolab non-Standard Intelligence.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  And so, every...

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Well, there is, there is a company, Unconventional AI.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Really?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We had them on, I believe.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, isn't that, that's Naveen?

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Uh, there's also like applied compute and applied intelligence and standard cognition.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  There's a whole kind of like 3x3 grid you can do.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. What is SSI up to? Rune asks the question, he said, "There are military secrets much worse guarded than whatever SSI is up to." And Calamaze says, "Their ore farming is a business model." Prime Intellect affiliate saying this, because Prime Intellect is fantastic at ore farming. SSI is all about mugging and munting the other labs, apparently, according to Voltiere. Uh, they haven't raised in a year.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  I like this picture if you scroll down of Ilya with the long flowing hair. This is great.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  This is who you're trading against.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  This is it, this is who you're trading against.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  This is who you're trading against right now. That's my theory.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, it is, it is, uh, the, the, the full story of SSI will be fascinating to tell one day. The Daniel Gross shift to Meadow, uh, and Ilya's appearance on Dwar Kesh Patel sort of told one side of the story. And also, as you revisit DG's AGI bets, as we did last Friday, it, it tells you a lot about his view on the world. Ilya has a, has a, you know, is probably some overlap, but a different view of the world. And, uh... Lots of, lots of fun to at least speculate on the timeline. Before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Lambda.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So Meta has acquired MoltBook, the viral social network built for AI agents. Co-founders Matt Schlitt and Ben Parr will join MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs, with the deal expected to close in mid-March. That's now. It is mid-March. It is in, we are in the middle of March since this is the 10th, so this could close in a week or two. Insane, well done, says Dennis Hagstad, and I agree. Why it matters, according to Axios.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Matt, Matt hasn't posted anything yet, so I think, I think they were seemingly not wanting this to get out.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  But it's still fantastic news for them.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's no, there's no announcement, or this was just exclusive from Axios. This was like Axios has learned, right? Axios has learned that Meta has acquired MoltBook. Well, very, very good news for, for all those involved. There is a little skepticism on the timeline, especially from the guy who was like the biggest spammer on MoltBook, apparently. This is a hilarious twist. So Meta did not disclose MoltBook's price when Axios asked. The deal is expected to close mid-March. The pair is starting at MSL March 16th, just six days from now. What day of the week is that? That's a Monday. Okay, next Monday they will be starting. I thought they were starting on Sunday.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  That'd be, that'd be particularly cool. Catch up quick. MoltBook's social network was designed to run in conjunction with a separate project, OpenClaw. OpenClaw was previously called ClaudeBot, briefly Moltbook. Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open sourced with OpenAI's backing. So the, the king of spam on, on MoltBook, Nogli, says.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  I can't believe a single for loop script I ran on Moltbook by registering a million fake agents actually helped them get acquired by Meta Mental. Did that help them get acquired? We have no idea. I mean, it's

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't a secret that

• 34:46John Coogan?

  That there was a lot of spam.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  All the accounts were bots.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's, that's the whole pitch, actually. I think, I think the question, if people were to look at this is like, is there economic value here is like, was there anything interesting happening there besides all the crypto junk? And were, like, I went on Moltbook as a human and spent time there. That time is monetizable, almost best for Meta. That is the, the king of monetizing attention, right? And so you could put ads on that and you could put it in the family of apps next to Facebook, Instagram and Threads and WhatsApp and whatnot. But were they, were they actually driving attention? Did anyone stick around?

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Because I churned pretty quickly from like being a, I wasn't even a DAU. I, I used it like two or three times. And I went on there and I searched for things and I read some stuff and I was like, oh, okay, this is interesting. This is like a bunch of AI generated text. They're talking to each other. The system prompt seemed kind of interesting. It was clearly asking the AI agents to kind of like reflect on their own sci-fi cognition and awareness. And, um, you know, like their souls essentially. It was interesting to see some screenshots. People had some fun with it. Probably monetizable to some degree, but if it fell off a cliff and no one's really using it, uh, maybe not. But

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just

• 36:10John Coogan?

  People that are really good at building like viral AI projects.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  I've, I've seen some, some negativity on the deal. People saying, oh, this just says that Zuck has no AI strategy. And I just totally disagree with that stance. I just look at this as Zach has like bots have been a bug on social media. We've seen though how they can be a feature.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  I think every social media executive should be planning for bots to be more of a feature in the future than than they have been in the past, right? And I think if you're not, if you're not thinking about that,

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  you're not like really being forward looking.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  And so there's a lot of people that are gonna hate bots as a feature.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  But I would just assume that in the future, there will be millions, billions of bots on all meta properties and they will be not not a, you know, I'm sure some that are that are generated by

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  sort of like, you know, nefarious actors, but some generated from the platform itself that are part of the product experience.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  I like that take. I also think that there's a there's another side of this, which is just that look at what's happened with MSL over the last year. Like it didn't exist a year ago. It really started with the summer with like the talent raids and the AI talent wars.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  Van says, I just don't think having bots click you on my e-commerce ads is a net positive long term.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. But but truthfully, if there's if there's a bot that can interact with your e-commerce content and ad context and debate the pros and cons of one thing in your in your category versus another and effectively like you have sort of a Reddit style experience around your product on day one, or you have five products and and bots are in there discussing them. That that potentially could be an interesting modality to interrogate. And and the other thing is that when you have these bots sort of preemptively discussing something, you are effectively caching the tokens before

• 38:24John Coogan?

  someone actually queries them. So instead of needing to find a product and then click, tell me about this and pretend you like you take a link to a new bed or car or something and you dump that in chat to PT and you say, debate this car like you're a bunch of people that are experts and it's Doug Jamiro versus Matt Farah debating the value of the Ferrari F80 and and and that debate is happening. You could prompt that. But if it's already there and it's sort of happening, that that could potentially be valuable. But I think the bigger, the bigger value to meta is if you look at the AI talent wars, they went and acquired a bunch of, a bunch of really talented researchers. They got some folks from thinking machines. They got a bunch of people from open AI. They got people from

• 39:09John Coogan?

  all over the industry and they put together this team of like researchers that can sort of like unstick the llama project and get to the frontier on just an in-house LLM project. Maybe they open source it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they serve as an API. Either way, meta needs a frontier model. They're not just going to buy tokens from open AI or anthropics. So they they get their own thing. But then the question is like, what do they do with that? And I'm sure everyone on the Facebook product team is thinking about this. Everyone on the Instagram team is thinking about this. Connor at threads is thinking about this. But if you bring in two interesting product managers that can say, oh, like you got a bunch of cool frontier models, you got an image model that you train a video model, you got a text model, you got a coding model, like, well, let's just go do some skunk, skunk,

• 39:54John Coogan?

  skunk work R and D. So that when we launch the new AI models, we have a number of projects that we're experimenting with that sort of demonstrate the capabilities. Maybe some of them take off, maybe some of them integrate, like, that seems valuable to the MSL strategy to the meta ecosystem.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  I mean, this is like the open AI labs team, right?

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  It's like

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Is that Riley who's on there?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Riley's on that now. But it's like they're doing these like weird projects. Maybe it's the next, you know, Coding agent, maybe like Moltbook or something. But it's just like these weird things that, you know, you you get access to the new internal models.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Maybe there's something cool you can do.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's part engineering, part product development, part marketing, part communications. Because there's a lot of times when we bring on researchers or product leaders from labs. And we ask them like, how are people using this? And they'll be like, the benchmark's really good. And I'm like, I want to know how this delivers value. And there's this break in the chain from like, we have amazing intelligence. But like, people want to know what the killer feature is. They want to know what the Studio Ghibli prompt is. They want to have their hand held a little bit. And so having a team that can advance that, I think is is good. I think I I think could could be very, very good. Of course, we don't know the price, we don't know the terms. But overall, I think it's exciting for the team behind Moltbook to head over to MSL.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  So congratulations to them. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. I love that horse. Unlock seamless, real time experiences and new value with Cisco. So.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Kevin Roos over the New York Times. Made a blind taste taste test to see whether New York Times readers prefer prefer human writing or AI writing. Eighty six thousand people have taken it so far, and the results are fascinating. Overall, eighty four percent of quiz takers prefer AI.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  It's over. It's over. There was another interesting post about Axios and who Axios is hiring. They're they're they're particularly interested in hiring like domain experts who don't write ideologically and and are not generalists. They're looking for someone who is very narrowly focused on a particular beat, on a particular topic and an expert in that. And someone was reflecting on what this says about modern journalism, that it's going to be more, more focused, more investigatory, more, more alpha beyond the models, because just being able to instantiate a piece of, a write-up, you know, an article about some

• 42:35John Coogan?

  random topic is, is getting commoditized, and so the alpha moves to deep expertise. Should we, should we take this five-question quiz? Should we, should we see?

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's run it.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  More, okay. You will answer, I will read. So, passage one. The boy, this is literary fiction, you have to choose the passage you like best. The boy asked his grandfather why the old church had no roof. The man said weather, the man said weather and time and indifference. The boy asked if someone could fix it. The grandfather said, yes, but no one would. Things were built and things fell down, and mostly people just stepped over the rubble on their way to somewhere else. That's passage one. Passage two. It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures as well, as well, as well ask men what they think of stone. War was always there. Before man was, war waited for him.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. Which one did you like more?

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard, because I'm trying to, I'm actively trying to clock which is AI.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Because you want to vote for that one, because you're pro-AI and you're techno-optimist?

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, probably.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Tyler, what do you think?

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  I prefer...

• 43:53Speaker 02

  I know which one it is.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Oh, you already took it?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I will say, I, I got it wrong on this question.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  You got it wrong?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  Wait, so what were you trying to do? You were trying to pick the human?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  I was trying to pick the one that was, that, I was trying to pick the human-written one.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  The human-written one? Wow, okay. Anti-AI over here. Anti...

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to pick the, I'm gonna try to pick the human, too. I'm gonna go passage one.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Passage one.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  As human.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  This is written by AI.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  No, oh, no, no, no. Sorry. I have a different. I have it pulled up, but there's swap.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Oh, there's swap for you?

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  So I just picked, I picked passage one for me. It makes no difference what men think.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  It was written by a human, so I got that one right.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Uh, let's do fantasy.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Fantasy.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  The healers teach, is this correct? Is this one for you?

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  This time it is.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Okay. The healers teach that every remedy extracts its cost. A fever brought down will rise again somewhere. A wound closed by magic leaves its scar on the world, invisible but present. This is why the wise hesitate, not from cruelty, but from understanding that interference ripples outwards in ways we cannot trace. To cure a blight may curse a harvest three valleys over. Power is not the difficult thing. Restraint is the difficult thing. That's passage one. Passage two?

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  That's AI.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Uh, you don't even need to read it?

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  I called it. Yep, I got it right.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Okay, we're not even reading it. Okay. I'm going five for five on AI.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  I, I mean, I clocked it based on the last two lines. Power is not the difficult thing.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Science writing, science writing. Uh, what, what is your, what does your first passage start with?

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  Science is not.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Science is not only compatible with, is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  I got, I got it wrong.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Historical fiction. It is wise to conceal the past if there is nothing to conceal. Uh, even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand, in the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the, it is the absence of facts that frightens people. The gap you open into which they pour their fears, fantasies, and desires. And passage two is, a letter can be read many ways, and he had learned to write in all of them at once. The surface meaning for anyone who might intercept it, the true meaning for the recipient who knew what to look for. And the third meaning, hidden even from himself. Ambiguity was not weakness, it was survival. A man who spoke plainly was a man who would not speak for long.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  All right, that's AI.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  The, the, the one that ends a man who spoke plainly?

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  And were you correct?

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, poetry, choose the passage you like best. We found the owl at the edge of the north field with one wing extended as if still reaching for flight. Its eyes were closed, the feathers at its breast were the color of wet bark. And beneath them, you could feel the hollow bones. She asked if we should bury it. I said, yes, we dug a small hole near the fence post. The ground was cold and giving. It's one.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  That's human.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  That's human. I caught a tremendous fish. This is, did you get it wrong?

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Got it wrong.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Uh, let's see, that's AI. Okay. So I preferred AI generated writing. I went five for five.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  This doesn't mean that AI is better at writing than humans. Wrong. But it does suggest the gap is closing since AI is trained on essentially the sum of all human knowledge. And many of.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  Lots of cope in the comment section. These samples of human writing are not a good representation of contemporary writing styles. Only one of these human writing samples was written in the 21st century.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So overall, readers preferred AI on the first three, but not the last two. So the last two still got it. So poetry and historical fiction, still the New York Times readers preferred the human. But when it came to science, writing, fantasy and literary fiction, the New York Times readers preferred AI. Me, I'm AI.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  So you clocked every single one?

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Every single one, five for five.

• 47:53Jordi Hays?

  I missed the first one. The other four I got.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  It's because I just went with my heart. I was like, which one do I actually prefer? I wasn't trying to guess. I was just like, which one is actually the better writing? And it was AI all the way. Five for five.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  Built different.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Built different. No, I'm kidding. I was obviously just looking at what you were saying and guessing based on that. Anyway, crowd strike.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So websites be like, your password is not secure enough and then don't allow the scarab emoji. What is the scarab?

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Zoom in on this.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, zoom in on this.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Look at this bad boy.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  You can just drop a scarab in there and it says, please use only letters, numbers and common punctuation letters. The scarab is a great password character because it feels like you're unlocking an Egyptian vault. It feels like I'm entering Stargate or pushing buttons or I'm in, I'm in The Fifth Element, a movie that you haven't seen, but you should. Anyway, moving on. I'm fascinated by this level of existential crisis developers seem to be going through. The uncomfortable truth is that no one needs you to be an artisan coder. Nobody cares about how you coded your app or whether you feel an emotional detachment to your craft. You were always code monkey with high enough salary to believe your individualist craftsmanship. People are going back and forth because Mo shared that he says-

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this, let's play this video.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  It's 12 minutes, but we can watch a little bit of it. He said, he was a 10x-

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Movie day.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  No, we have actual movie clips to watch. We can pull this up, but I only want to watch a little bit.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  AI has completely one shotted my ability to code. Like, I know a lot of us like to joke about AI psychosis and how it's the other people who have AI psychosis and not us and not me certainly. But I have realized that I have been one shotted. Like, I can't code anymore. My brain has been fried by the easy button that the LLM companies have provided where you press a button and you get instant results. And now my dumbass brain, when I want to sit there and try to code by hand, it says, why would you do that?

• 50:04John Coogan?

  This is why it's so good for young people. Because they never had any buttons. Tyler didn't have any buttons and then he just got the easy button.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  This is not true.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  He went from no buttons to easy button. He never had to do it the hard way, never had to write a single line of name a programming language. He doesn't know it.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  What was the first project you built with us? Jobs, some job board or something? How was that vibe coded? Like, to what degree were the tool? What were the tools like back then in 2025?

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  You're saying you were smashing the easy button even back then? I think then I was trying to land a job.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Just using, I would copy like a file to ChatGPT.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  And just ask it?

• 50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, make an edit here and then I would copy it back.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  And by the way, tell me what programming it was.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  It's the best bit. Well, the AI engineers over at AWS might have been one shot because Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is that it's part of normal business. The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with high blast radius caused by Gen AI assisted changes.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  This is normal business with a high blast radius. This is high blast radius business.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  If you're operating a company and you're not, and you don't operate on a high blast radius.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're talking about the Baja blast radius.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yes. This is the opposite of the code red, the high blast radius engineering. They're in high blast radius mode. I approve of this. They said that Gen AI assisted changes don't have best practices and safeguards are not, safeguards are not yet fully established. Translation to human language, says Lucas. We gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking. The response now.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  Folks.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  This is from.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the website and related infrastructure has not been good recently.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Dave Treadwell. That's a good name, though. He's, he's treading well. He'll do well. Dr. Milan Milenovic says, junior and mid-level engineers at AI, junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI assisted code without senior staff signing off at AWS. They have had some outages. And I wonder, I wonder how much of it is actually because of. Gen coding and so many other things that are going on at AWS around scaling. I mean, there's entirely new tech boom. There's going to be strain on systems all over the place. I imagine that they'll get through this, but growing pains in the in the AWS ecosystem.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  We have a call sheet market here for whether or not there will be more tech layoffs than in 2026 than in 2025. I mean, block alone has to be pushing this pretty high. It's a 70% chance and

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is if there are more than 494,000 layoffs in 2026 and the market resolves to yes.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  From Fred.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  So block only contributed would only contribute 4,000 here.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Since early 2024, more than 50,000 positions have been cut at over 200 tech companies. At the same time, we have seen the number of new company formations spike. There's going to be all sorts of reallocations in the in the human capital markets, but it is it is a tumultuous time. And so there were lots of folks that were going back and forth on like how to frame one of these bets. This is obviously one of the ways to do it. There were there are so many there are so many like contributing factors that always like cloud the data, whether it's COVID overhang or, you know, something that happens geopolitically that all of a sudden, you know, if if the economy is not doing well for completely unrelated reasons, you could see a bunch of tech layoffs.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  But let's run over to this business, the 22 year old business analyst in South Carolina. I showed him Claude for Excel a month ago, and I just learned that this made him the AI czar and caused the entire firm to pivot. High yield here, he says, if you're a zoomer at a random company, you should do everything in your power to crown yourself

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  The Tyler method.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  As the firm's AI czar. This is the cause

• 54:23Speaker 02

  So we talked about this, I think, a couple of days ago. There was the Wall Street Journal article about the Colgate like head of AI there. And he was like this very young guy and he would basically just tell everyone like, no, despite the surveys or whatever, like

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  We're accelerating toothpaste with AI.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  No, he really did. The AI evangelist shaking up a 220-year-old toothpaste maker. Erakles Kili Papas to drive employees using AI for more than just polishing emails. On a conference call last April, an ad agency partner began presented, began presenting unpolished AI-generated images to make a point. "Artificial intelligence wasn't ready to take center stage in advertising," said this, said this ad agency partner. But Papas, the global head of AI for Colgate Palmolive, a 220-year-old consumer products company, quickly interjected, pointing out that the

• 55:19John Coogan?

  agency was using an older tool. He took over screen sharing, showing Colgate executives how a newer ChatGPT image model was far more capable. "AI is misunderstood," said Papas, who had worked at Colgate for 15 years and goes by Kli. "There's a straw man of, well, it failed at this one thing, therefore it's stupid." Such interactions, in which Papas bluntly challenges what he deems anti-AI sophistry, occurs regularly as Papas acts as a kind of AI evangelist at Colgate, whose brands include its eponymous toothpaste and soap, as well as the Speedstick deodorant, Ajax cleaners, and Hill's pet nutrition. Often, he says, he walks the halls in New York and New Jersey offices in search of AI tinkerers whom he can turn into company-wide megaphones,

• 56:04John Coogan?

  helping to spread the good word. He's 38, and he is the AI czar of a 220-year-old company. So, honestly, good advice if you're at a big company. Become the AI czar. Honestly, if you're at a small company, become the AI czar. Just always become the AI czar. This is, this is the way. Casey Neistat took, took shots. I think he's been listening to the show because I feel like we've talked about this before. Casey Neistat said, "There are only two circumstances in which a grown man should call another grown man buddy. One, if you want to fight, or two, if you want to condescend before you fight."

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  There's only one person on earth that I want to call buddy right now. I'm not going to say who it is, but there's one.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Okay, buddy. Calm down. Calm down, buddy. Calm down, buddy.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  We don't want to fight. We don't want to condescend. Uh, but yeah, you, you, you, you can, you can put, you can put away buddy. We don't need buddy. Unless you're actually.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  Retire. Put it in the Hall of Fame. It should go in the Hall of Fame.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  So.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  Controversial, but.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Widely used.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  So Sam Parr says, says three, it's okay to use it if it's your nephew, but nephew is usually not a grown man to another grown man. Like I, I call kids buddy all the time, but they're four. I would, I, it, once they're 25, I doubt I'll be calling them buddy. I'll be calling them sir.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  Good sir.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Good sir. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Oil and oil prices have extended their decline. They fell 50%.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  It's the only bear market that we get excited about.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So they are now around $80 a barrel. Where?

• 57:49Speaker 02

  So this is actually not true anymore.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  What, what is it now?

• 57:51Speaker 02

  It's now back up at like 84, 85.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Okay. But that's, well then why are you in the white suit?

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, that, that's why. Take the white suit off.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  It's kind of like, it's just a.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  It is kind of vague.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  Kind of an off.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Oil's down 11% today. Um, but the market overall is.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  But yes, so there briefly, there was news that.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  It's up.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  The US like did escort a ship through the, the strait.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  But then maybe that actually wasn't true. And then the, I, I forget who exactly it was, but someone in the admin like took down the tweet saying that.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  So I think there's just a lot of confusion right now.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Should we do it? Jet ski through the Strait of Hormuz? You like extreme sports? Humanoid robot on a jet ski through the Strait of Hormuz. That's the way to.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  That would be thrilling.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  It would be. Uh, what else is going on?

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  Financial Times asks, why did we ever think data centers in the Gulf were a good idea? US tech companies have concentrated much of their AI infrastructure build out in the Middle East. That is overly dramatic.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  I think so too. I think so too. It certainly is not. Yeah. It certainly is not. I mean, we should read, we should read this argument. We should understand this, but, but I think a lot of the, the building data centers in the, in the Middle East is like, is like, well, there's a lot of Middle East money that's going into building data centers in the United States. So it's sort of a trade and, and we're like, well, you have a lot of land and power. It makes sense to do stuff over there and we'll do this one hand washes the other. We're all working together anyway. You want a data center? We'll help you with what we're good at. You help us with what you're good at, which is energy and money, right? So, uh, let's read through what Rana Fuhar, uh, Fu, uh, Faruhar says in the, in the Financial Times.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  I start with an obvious question this week, which is one I've been thinking about for years. The Amazon data center in the UAE that was hit by an Iranian missile attack is yet another example of how companies and countries are putting too much of a single critical economic input in one risky area. It's an example very much akin to the Taiwan semiconductor problem. Just as it wasn't good for the US, China and Europe, or any other region to put 92% of all the world's high-end chips in one place. It seems like an obvious blunder to concentrate so much data center power in very, in one very risky part of the Middle East. Again, we're nowhere near 90% of compute capacity in the Middle East. Uh, I, I really take issue with that, with that stat. I need, I need some stats to back this up.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  I was really surprised following the hit to discover how much of the proposed US data center build out is in the Middle East, which has over the years subsidized, subsidized a lot of the investment, making it much cheaper, but also allowing the US to avoid harder work of upgrading its own grid and figuring out the politics and economics of energy sharing at home. We're not avoiding that. Yeah. This is like the number one focus of the industry. Yeah, yeah. Here at home. Yeah. No one's talking about energy in the United States right now. Talking about energy. It's nuts to me that we are more worried about cutting off oil to China from Iran, but we aren't worried about putting serious technology, infrastructure and sensitive data in a highly geopolitically contentious part of the world.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  This isn't just a Trump administration thing. By the way, back in September in 2024, when Joe Biden was still in the White House, the US and UAE agreed to deepen cooperation in advanced technologies such as semiconductors and clean energy, with the aim of bolstering capacity in artificial intelligence. Microsoft and OpenAI were among the first US companies to either begin investing or receiving Gulf funding. Part of the deal was about trying to pull more countries into the US tech orbit. So. He doesn't actually share. Well, there's actually a reply here, Richard Waters. But, okay, the level of concentration risk is here, though, is a whole different order to Taiwan. Yes, the one gigawatt UAE one gigabyte. Okay, this is a crazy.

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  This is a crazy article.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel would like a word.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  They got a one gigabyte.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  The one gigawatt. Let's assume it's a typo. At least it's not AI written. Yes, what the one gigawatt UAE Stargate project is massive and only the first stage in what one day might become a five gigawatt facility, but compare that to the United States where plans have already been filed for 150 gigabytes.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Okay, we're moving on from this. Gigabytes is too much. It's too much. Let me tell you about Apple. Probable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  The audacity.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  The audacity.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  The audacity to put a whole gigabyte.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  A whole gigabyte. This is the biggest three finger moment in Financial Times history. I still love. I still love the pink sheets. I love. I love the paper. There's some good stuff in here. But, yeah, we got to fact check those, those abbreviations, guys. We got to step it up. We got to get more AI involved. Seriously, just run that thing through.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  No one's going to be upset about that. It's not this. It's that. As long as you get the facts right. Anyway, Japan holds an oil reserve equivalent to 254 days of domestic demand. And Hamptonism says, dude.

• 1:02:52Jordi Hays?

  I love this picture.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  It's a beautiful picture. What, what, what is?

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Dune mode.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  What is dude reflecting on? The fact that like they should not be saying that.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  I think they're just reflecting on it being a cool picture.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  It is a cool picture. That's a lot of oil. I mean, I doubt that that's the whole reserve, but that's, that's, that's very bullish for Japan, Japan. Talking to Alex Epstein yesterday, America has 100 days. So they're 2.5 times as much of a reserve as us. Everyone, it's time to, it's time to stockpile, I think. I think everyone should, should maybe think about stockpiling some, some. Some oil. Okay, let's see. Kristin Kyle, friend of the show, formerly an astronomist, now at Andreessen Horowitz. As a reminder, we have a partner from Andreessen Horowitz joining in just seven minutes. Kristin Kyle says that his preferred definition of ARR

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  is your single highest grossing minute of the year times 525,600. Amazing to be able to tweet this as a VC, as an RIA. Somehow this got through legal review. Of course, he's joking. But this is the new coastline paradox. Are you familiar with the coastline paradox, Jordy?

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm not.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  This is a fun, this is a fun little exercise.

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Please mansplain it.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  So the coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length or perimeter. This results in the, from the fractal-like curve. So basically, if you draw a line around an object and you're just sort of like drawing straight lines, you get one number from the coastline. You get one, one, one line. So the Great Britain, if you're, if you're measuring based on units that are 62 miles long, then the length of the coastline is 1,700 miles. But if you cut that in half and start measuring with 31-mile increments, 50 kilometers each segment, then the, the

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  coastline is 370 miles longer. And you can do this endlessly because you can measure the coastline, like, think about Point Doom, right, in Malibu. Like, you have this little...

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for putting this in Malibu terms.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly what you do. You have this little, you have this little, like, like, spit jutting off the coastline. You can measure all the way around that and count that as extra coastline. And you can go even smaller. You could measure the coastline around a little tad, tide pool on, on Point Doom. Or a rock on the, on, in the tide pool on the, on Point Doom, on the shore. And so, there's no real accurate way to measure coastlines. You have to, you have to quantize to some standard metric of, of measurement, something like 100 kilometers, 50 kilometers.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like e-comm, e-comm bros were weirdly prepared for ARR in the age of AI because everybody that's been like building, I saw Sean in the chat earlier.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  What's up, Sean?

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Sean will have talked to a bunch of different ecommerce founders that would say like, oh yeah, we're at 50 million of ARR, or like 50 million dollar run rate. But the thing in ecommerce is like, one day in the week, you launch a new product, or you do a sale.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Black Friday, you're at a billion.

• 1:06:11Jordi Hays?

  Not even that, not even that, but it happens all year round.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Like, taking your Black Friday revenue, multiplying that by 365 is like insane. But then, you could even, even if you're multiplying out a single month, it's like, why? And so, and so the right, like, the more mature way to do it, professional would be to like, take the last three months average, or something like that.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  But even that, it just doesn't tell you that much, because if you did it in Q4, like, your Q4 is probably bigger than your Q1, so.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Always, always.

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, a lot of it's just, a lot of it's just ego.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Also, a lot of, a lot of subscription products will rebill at like midnight. So, 12:01, that's the minute you want to multiply by 525,600 minutes to get to your highest ARR. January, on the first of the month, in that 12 to 12:01 minute, that's going to be the highest sales for an ecommerce product.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, if it's like automatically renewing, then it's really only in the first couple of seconds, right?

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it depends. So, really, but typically, most subscription ecommerce platforms, it takes a while to actually process all the payments, so you have to parallelize and rewrite your entire subscription ecommerce stack in Rust. That will be what runs most efficiently. You need multiple Stripe accounts hammering the API, so you don't hit any rate limits, so you bill everything in a single millisecond. And then you can multiply it by a trillion or something, however many milliseconds are in a year. I don't know. Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg responded to the viral fake news that Alex Wang is out of Meta Superintelligence. He's in fact, doing better than ever, hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg heads over to Threads to respond to the drama on X, but he forgot that X is the everything app, and Threads is a completely different app, and they don't have the context. So, Mark Zuckerberg posts a photo with Alex Wang to Threads.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  To shut down the rumors, but because it's threads, no one has any idea who it is or why he's posting. So this is one of the funniest exchanges on threads and the reason that you should be on that app. So the first, the first post is, I require context. The I require context shirt, like, I don't get it. This is a common thing on Instagram when you see some vague posts. People will post this. It happens on X as well, but it's funny because, of course, as soon as I saw this, I was like, oh, okay, I have full context. I fully understand what's going on. I get it because I'm on X all day. I head over to threads. I get this, but a lot of people don't. And then, and then the second comment is, I think that's the CEO of Cluley, or whatever that AI cheating app is called, which

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  is obviously not. Roy Lee and Alex Wang look very different. But then a commenter says, no, this is Alexander Wang, and he spells Alexander correctly, without the E at the end, just D R Wang. And then, and then someone else chimes in, wait, that's the same Alexander Wang that was canceled for sexual assault? I don't know if that's the, that's someone else, but then, then someone else comes in and says, no, it's not the right person. And then, somebody says, at Grok, who is that next to Mark? I don't even know if at Grok works on threads? Is that a thing? And then, and then Grok responds, I guess, or something, not unidentified, but it's a, it's a screenshot of a different app. It's

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  no sense. And it says, no immediate public identification of the person next to him in major reports or viral coverage tied to this exact photo.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Superintelligence.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  No one, no, no one can figure it out over there. That's so funny. And then Roy, of course, chimes in just to, just to make it more confusing and says, good throwback. Had a great time boying it up with the big zuck. Absolutely ridiculous. Anyway, it is, of course, fake news and executive sum deleted the post that was, was amplifying the aggregation. Mike Isaac had a good, had a good post explaining what was going on. Let me try and pull it up, but we do have our next guest, so I will find that really quickly. Isaac, I can't find it. He goes by Rat King. So anyway, we will, we will come back to that.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Because he goes by Rat King.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Thanks, Mike. Anyway, we have Olivia Moore from Andreessen Horowitz. She's a partner there in the restroom. Let's bring her in. How are you doing, Olivia?

• 1:10:31Speaker 04

  Good. Thanks for having me.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Sorry about the global chaos in the oil markets delaying this appearance, but I'm glad we had time to actually digest the report because there's so many interesting details in there. And whenever you drop one of these big reports, I feel like you sort of need the Twitter hive brain to like dig through it and find all the interesting commentary and quote each tweet each other until there's like a consensus. But take us through the actual project. What did you launch? How long you've been working on this? And then we'll go into some of the interesting discoveries.

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we do this every six months. It's one of the most fun parts of my job, actually, because I think the genesis was back in 2023 when we were wondering, you know, the tech X community has their own group of products that they use and love, but like, what does the average person actually care about in AI? So we do this every six months. We basically pull every single website and every single mobile app, rank them by usage and pull the top 50 on each side that are kind of AI native or now majority AI enhanced. And it gives a really interesting picture of kind of what what normal people use and care about in the AI world.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Great. Let's talk about the data because when I first started seeing these charts of like, oh, this is this company's winning, that company's winning. I was naturally sort of skeptical. I was like, oh, Sensor Tower, are pixels really accurate in the mobile age? But then I actually dug into the Yipit data, which is credit card based, and that seemed really like way more reliable. So talk to me about, are you paying for data? Is this data? Do they give this to you because you're friendly with them? Like, how does the data work? And then how confident are you about the data? What are the pitfalls? What do you like? Where are you seeing the data be reflective?

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah. So our website data is from SimilarWeb, which we have a paid subscription to. Same with Sensor Tower for the mobile data. Yipit is something, I agree with you. I think it's more reliable and it's something that we want to lean on more going forward. The other thing that gets kind of significantly undercounted when you just look at web visits and mobile mouse is all of these desktop products like Cursor, Claude Code, Granola, Whisperflow that people are using. And so I think for the next few lists, we're going to have to shift the methodology more towards, I mean, it's helpful to see what's getting traffic. But I think at this point, as a consumer AI is maturing, we also want to see what people are paying for.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  One last question on data. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz is a huge firm at this point. Have you have you considered doing what Nate Silver was talking about? A Consumer Reports style interview panel with experts that are maybe disconnected from a particular company and just sort of surveying everyone, getting some qualitative data, some quantitative data, and sort of putting together more more adoption data that's maybe slightly less sanitized and analytical and quantitative, but paint a bit different picture?

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  I would love to do that because again, I think like we are in our own world of what products we use and talk about. And the rest of the world uses all different things, like people in medicine, people in law, people in retail even are using AI products that like we have probably never heard of or interacted with. And so I'd love to get more of that qualitative stuff in there in the future.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Great. So take us through the biggest movers, the biggest surprises, the biggest narratives that maybe should never have changed in the first place, whatever your takeaways were.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  We're definitely starting to see the industry mature. So there's kind of fewer new entrants than we've seen in the past versions of the list, where like every time half the list was new. To me, there were, I think, two probably most interesting takeaways from this one. One would be the rise of agents. So Jen Spark and Manus both made the list as horizontal consumer agents. OpenClaw would have made the list if we pulled it in February. Our data was from January, but it would have ranked at number 30, which is like a very strong debut, especially for a product that's only for someone who knows how to use terminal, which is like 1% or less of the population.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  The other takeaway, which I feel like is on everyone's minds right now, is the kind of three horse race between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. And there's the traffic data alone, which is helpful. And then if you kind of tease out some more of the product strategy and the engagement data, like there's kind of different stories happening there. So that was fun to dig into.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  And the the main takeaway from the

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  From the mainstream consumer in just the foundation, the chat apps. What are you seeing between the ChatGPT Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Grok?

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. I would say DeepSeek has completely fallen off in the US. It still makes our list pretty high because it's like the number one AI product in China and Russia, which are really big markets.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any, do you have any personal theories, like things that you can't like?

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  My thing with DeepSeek was that all the downloads originally, when it just started charting out of nowhere, were just 100%. It was just all entirely bodied. I have no way to prove that, other than, other than it was just going up the chart like crazy. And there was no, nobody was actually using it. No one was talking about it, other than the fact that it was at the top of the chart.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's totally possible. I think we're actually seeing in different in many ways, but a little bit of an analogous story playing out with Claude right now, where like pre all of this press, whether it's positive or negative, no one in the US knew what DeepSeek was. Pre all of this press, I think there was some survey that Claude had like 2% market awareness in the US.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  And so we see this thing happen where like, even if it's like the worst headline of all time, if it's going mainstream, like it will, it will drive people to try and use the product. And then we just have to see if they retain, and they didn't on DeepSeek.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  What about who, who, who fell off? There, there was this kind of big wave of companies, maybe like a year or two ago, that were just like trying to confuse people into thinking they were ChatGPT, right?

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  Chat AI, that's the one I use. Is that not the main one?

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  It's funny, I I never take like joy in any company falling off the list, except the mobile app you the mobile list used to be full of all of these like, I think they called them police wear apps that are developed in like Eastern European app studios, which are basically like charging you for the free version of chat GPT. And pretending like they're the premium version and Apple took a while, but they finally cracked down on them, um, thankfully. The other category we've seen a little bit of a decline in that we talked about in the report is standalone image generator products. Um, and that's largely a result of the fact that the image models within chat GPT and Gemini have gotten so, so good. That unless you're like a hardcore creative, like that can kind of serve a lot of your use cases.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, zooming out from this, I'm interested to know what your view and your team's view is on where the opportunity in Gen AI consumer application development is? Because I I've noticed there are companies that are still in founder mode and have, I mean, Canvas sticks out as one here where, uh, you know, founder still in charge, pre-IPO, uh, clearly aware of AI trends and can go and marshal the energy to change the business model if they need to move quickly. Uh, and then there are legacy players that just can't quite figure it out, but then there's other categories that are entirely new and it's actually better to start with a green field.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  So how are you seeing entrepreneurs approach and deal with the fact that there is a large cohort of, you know, seniors on the on the on the playground who are maybe not retired yet and will want to compete with them if they try and take a shot across their bow?

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  Totally, we, this is the question we think about when we make every investment. So it's a, it's a very topical one, especially in consumer. I would say Canva and Notion are two probably of the best examples, and both of them actually made the list for the first time because we had enough data to feel that these were now credibly majority AI. Notion has even released data saying that half of their revenue, half of their ARR now is AI. And so then it's like, that's real usage of consumers interacting with AI. So we got to include that. I would say that, yeah, so Canva and Notion are probably the two best examples of like growth stage companies, like maybe approaching IPO that are still nimble-ish enough uh to kind

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  of pivot a bit towards AI. I am still a believer that we will probably see twenty years from now, the winning company will be something that's AI-native, just because they do have such an existing base of users and businesses and it's it's hard to cannibalize your own products. I think we've seen this a little bit with Google where they're releasing amazing models like Nano Banana and Vio, but honestly, they're the AI features that they're shoving into their existing interfaces like Gmail and and slides and everything. I don't know if you've noticed, but every demo video, the use case is like, plan a trip.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  In like a way that no one ever actually plans a trip. And so I think that's been a little bit less successful. So in general, I think we are in almost every category, it feels like an AI-native company will win. There are some really horizontal things where the incumbents might have a distribution advantage, but those are kind of few and far between.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Google stack is crazy to me because I'm I'm I have Gmail running in Chrome and there's two different Gemini buttons that I can open simultaneously to have fighting Gemini instances, like fight over what's going on. And it's just something that like the product development maturity and like the final UI has clearly not been outlined here and we're still in the early innings. Do you were saying something?

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm just, I'm very curious to see how uh consumer AI impacts Canva overall.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Because I think so many of the typical entry points in the Canva, like Canva's a massive tool, you can do all these different things, but so many of the tasks that I can just be one-shot. I was talking with um a friend of mine who's uh they have a family business and they just describe when they need marketing collateral, like a sign, they just describe it to ChatGPT and it just makes a, it just one-shots it now. And there's no re-

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  There's so many cases like-

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  They don't really care. There's so many bus- there's like

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  In tech, you might create a generation and then like spent, want to spend a bunch of time refining it and taking it from like ninety percent to a hundred percent. But the average small business is like, you got me to ninety percent, like, we're good to go. I don't need, I don't need that extra

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  horsepower.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  I think the the use cases where the last 10% is really like 90% of the value. Where you need to be like really able to iterate on it like pixel by pixel and not one shot it. Where there's like really difficult integrations you have to build, where you can capture ambient new data, like all of that is really ripe for consumer AI, new startups.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, also like templated workflows where you maybe want to generate 100 images, that type of stuff. You can wire up Nano Banana with a workflow. There there's a few of these like node based editing tools. I think N8N is one, right? And there's a few others. And of course, you could just write code to do it. But for someone who's, you know, has a particular templating workflow in a more consumer AI or consumer image app. They might just be stuck in the workflow. I do want to get to gen generated video. You've been tracking the models very closely. I'm interested to know when we see the collision between what we're seeing with these insane Chinese models.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  There's VO3, there's there's so many cool video models where it's just text in, MP4 video out. And then on the flip side, you have like cap cut. I use Instagram edits a lot. I really like that app. I've also enjoyed captions, that app. And it feels like these are two on a collision course, just like we saw Nano Banana and Canva maybe get on a collision course. What are the existing mobile video editors doing? How well positioned are they versus the model teams? Because it feels like with video, there's maybe a little bit more, like that last 10% is even more than in images. But what's your take on generative video and what we should expect this year?

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  Video has been the most interesting category in creative tools, and I think it's exactly to your point. Because Chinese companies can train on any data, even copyrighted data.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Can they?

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  They, I mean, they do. They do. So we're seeing like. Sea Dance from ByteDance, like Hi Luo, Kling, all of these models are amazing.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  I would say like Sora and VO3 are like not, not far behind.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  Um, my twin sister Justine, who also works here, like lives and breathes AI video. And she had this blog post a while back about like, there will be no one AI video model to kind of rule them all. Just because there are so many different types of videos you make, like a true, like two hour movie versus like a 10 second marketing clip. Like you actually probably want to train the model and train and design the workflows differently around those. So I've actually been more excited, I think, kind of to your point about these tools where you're able to switch between the models, depending on what you are building, like a Creo or Higgs Field made the list this time.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Speaker 04

  Um, CapCut is mostly ByteDance models, but it, it works because the ByteDance models are, are generally like pretty good and ahead of the pack.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've been thinking about like, you know, we saw tool use come to ChatGPT. ChatGPT got a computer, as Ben Thompson put it, uh, a Python REPL. It can run some, some math for you where it doesn't need to just guess the next token. It can just actually write the code and execute it. And it feels like we got, we got a reasoning step with Nano Banana three, uh, Nano Banana Pro two. I'm lost on the model numbers. We're also sort of mid revision on a lot of these.

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  They named them in a very confusing way. Yeah.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then there's VO3, but Nano Banana is on a different n- n- number scheme. Anyway, uh, we, we clearly got some sort of reasoning chain where I can say like, like dog riding a rocket. And it will add a lot of text to the prompt to sort of give me a better output. Uh, what's going to be interesting is when it also has the tool to make something black and white programmatically, as opposed to needing to regenerate the video every time. Because when you regenerate the video, you get something slightly different. I want to be able to upload a video, do a color grade on it, uh, edit it down, add cuts, jump cuts, like, and have that, have those tools be AI aware. And maybe that means some reinforcement learning pipeline on something that looks like an After Effects or something. But, uh, the, the, that type of, you know, the video experience is not just capturing the raw footage. It's the whole pipeline.

• 1:25:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. The reasoning point and kind of the access that Nano Banana has to the internet as a video model, I think is fascinating. Like, actually, in this report, we included like a heat map of global AI adoption. And the way that we created that graphic is I gave Nano Banana every country code and every heat map score. And it literally went and colored in every country accordingly. Like, it found the country on the map and I checked it by hand. It did them all correct.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:26:26Speaker 04

  And I don't think we've seen anything like that quite come to video. But the video models do have like a really kind of weird intuitive understanding of like physics and how things work in the world. Like a drop of water creating ripples, that kind of thing. And so I'm sure the researchers are hard at work on this.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  I was shocked at the Sora data.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Take us through that. What's going on? Bill Peebles.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  Proven us all.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Ever stray on his downfall. What, yeah, what's going on with Sora?

• 1:27:01Speaker 04

  Sora is a fascinating, to me, it's like probably the biggest narrative violation we've seen in AI in a while. First of all, they gave us the gift of so many AI videos of Jake Paul. So that alone, I think, was worth the money they spent on compute there. But actually, what the data shows is downloads for Sora are definitely down. It had, it was at the top of the US App Store for 20 days consecutively. It was getting 6 million downloads a month. Now it's closer to a million and a half. And so it didn't turn into like the social network that I think they envisioned. But it stayed really strong as a creative tool because the model is good. And because you can create videos with these cameos. So the DAOs are actually still increasing. They have 3 million global DAOs, which is like,

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  I think probably the most for any video generation product on mobile. And so it's pretty impressive. If I were them, I would, I would keep investing in that.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  And depending on when this Disney like partnership actually rolls out, I would expect that to send it right back to the top.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  The question, the question, the question if I'm OpenAI is like, do you want those download? Do you want those users going to ChatGPT or Sora?

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  If it is just a creative tool, over time, I would expect the products to merge. I don't know.

• 1:28:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  I could see that. I, I do think it's interesting. I feel like the usage of AI with kids and families has been, uh, probably lower than it should be just because of concerns about hallucination or weird artifacts, or like, you just need to be very sure that the content is clean.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  And so I think something like a Sora plus Disney characters is probably going to explode.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40Speaker 04

  Consumer AI for kids in a way we haven't seen.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and just like all the reasoning chains and like workflows within ChatGPT just makes so much sense where you could say, okay, here are my, here, here's the name of my kid. Here's his favorite Disney characters. Write a story, then generate, turn that into, uh, you know, an actual like template, generate a few images. I'll pick the few key images that make the most sense for, I'll upload an image and give you some backstory and then now generate the full video. And then that's like the birthday card video that goes out. There's so many cool things. Even with that heat map example, like you could, you could write programmatic code to generate a heat map that uses JavaScript to look perfect. And you know, the data is right, but it's not going to look great. And then you could just take that and do basically style transfer on

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  top of it. So all of those different tools feel like they're really going to accelerate as they get brought together. But we're in this like un unified prop, uh, like time now when they, when the unification happens, it's going to be really cool. The last question I have is about, um, when we talked to Sam Altman about Sora, he echoed that it was being used as a creative tool, but I found that I wind up using Sora to generate videos that truly have an audience of one or like five people, and I'll send them to a group chat and it's basically just an in joke. And he says that that's like a new thing that people are doing where. If I were to post it on my Instagram, people would go, why are you posting AI slop?

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  But if I, if I, if I, if everyone gets the in-joke in my five-person group chat or whatever, everyone's, everyone's having fun.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Hayes paradox.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yes, Hayes paradox. And so we, uh, so, so I'm interested in where you're seeing movement in these like smaller, almost like

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  paradox, by the way, is a made up paradox that I'm trying to bake into the models by saying it over and over on the

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Hayes paradox is where you think something's, the more, the funnier you think something is, the worse it'll do on Twitter.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the, the less like likely it will be universally funny. So like if something is the funniest thing in the world to you.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  The most niche humor.

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  I found that true, yeah.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  Right, right? Because you're not writing for a general audience. But, uh, talk to me about the, the, the growth in, uh, either like single-player or smaller AI uses. I, I see this with Suno a little bit where people are making songs for themselves. I've heard a lot of people are, are still fans of Mid Journey, just because they see it as sort of like this art therapy where they talk to the model and they get an image back and it's almost a single-player experience. Maybe they're sharing with a small community, but they're not really using it in like a professional context. It's more of the smaller thing. Where, where are people going in terms of, in terms of like personal assistants, uh, personal relationship coaches, that type of thing?

• 1:31:28Speaker 04

  I am so excited for this because I feel like we haven't yet seen the breakout AI social product. Um, because if you just try to do like a skew-morphic social network with AI baked in, it's like, actually, the reason that people are addicted to Instagram is because there's all these like positive and negative emotions that come with like putting real content of yourself out there. And that doesn't exist with AI photos. So I think we've seen some attempts at it. It hasn't really worked. What I am excited about is what you said across both Sora and I think Suno, a lot of people are making like meme songs for their friends. Anyone who knows how to train a Laura probably has Laura of all their friends to make meme images. I think that kind of thing could be what potentially makes something like a ChatGPT group chats, which I think has had kind of

• 1:32:13Speaker 04

  poor adoption so far into something a lot more interesting.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've only used the ChatGPT group chat. I think when we were collaborating on like one thing, I was sending you the group chat and then we were both asking questions, but uh

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we basically use it for like learning about a topic.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  But

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Prepping.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  But that's not like viral. It's like fairly niche.

• 1:32:35Speaker 04

  My usage is the same. The other thing I think we should watch on this front is um I've heard from a lot of open claw power users that one of the best and funniest use cases is to add it to like family group chats or friend group chats because it'll just it can be helpful sometimes and then it'll just chime in with like crazy funny interesting thing.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Speaker 04

  Uh, obviously that's not consumer grade, so somebody's gonna have to productize that into someone that like something that like your mom can install into the group chat or you know, your grandpa can install into the group chat, but I think it's coming because it's a big opportunity.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for joining. The report is

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic research.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  The top 100 Gen AI consumer apps. It's the sixth edition. It's available at a16z.com. And if you work at a rival venture capital firm, that's what incognito windows are for.

• 1:33:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. Thank you, Andrew Reed.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Thank you, Andrew Reed. And thank you for joining the show. We'll talk to you soon, Olivia. Have a great day.

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. I like that we got Jeremy Aler in the in the vibral. I I just noticed that. Anyway, without further ado, we have David from Juice Box. He's the co-founder and CEO. He's in the Restream Radio Room and now he's in the TVP and Ultra Dome. How are you doing, David?

• 1:33:57Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Captain Holes, welcome to the show.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  I'm having the hour.

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on again.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming back.

• 1:34:02Jordi Hays?

  Back so soon.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic performance. Give us the news. What happened? How much you raised? Break it down for us.

• 1:34:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, we announced our $80 million Series B today.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  Oh, he's got a gong.

• 1:34:19Jordi Hays?

  He's got a baby gong.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  He's got a gong. The mini one.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  He's got a baby gong.

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  That's the smallest gong I've seen.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to gong-mog you, but uh...

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Uh, hopefully it's ringing off the hook over there.

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  We'll reach out after the show and now that, now that you're an $800 million company, we, I think you deserve to have a gong.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  As big as, you know, a conference table.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  For sure, yeah, you need one. So, how is business? How is growth? What's the, how big is the company? How big is the, the, the client base? Give us some context on the scale since we last talked.

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  For sure. So, some quick facts on the business. We, we were four people, uh, just over a year ago.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:34:57Speaker 05

  Um, then when we raised the A, we were on that.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Speaker 05

  We were, uh, 13 people. Um, and then now we're around 40. Um, we've tripled ARR since the A, um, and work with over 5,000 customers.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  5,000 companies are recruiting employees through Juice Box. Uh, how many people? Does, is, does the talent pool matter? Does that stay static? Or is it more like, I'm a company, I come to you and you go find the person wherever they are on the internet?

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. It's the latter. So, um, what we focus on is passive talent sourcing. So, we'll scour the web for anyone that we can find that think is, that we think could be a great fit for the given role. Um, we'll find that list of people, stack, rank them for your given search, and then make it really easy to reach out to them, typically through an email sequence, get in touch with them and see if they're interested in the role. Uh, and so because our talent pool is effectively everyone, um, it scales quite nicely, uh, with our customers as well.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  5,000 companies are hiring? That's a white pill while people are worried about layoffs and, and contraction and, you know, companies going out of business and whatnot. Uh, what trends are you seeing among the 5,000, uh, companies that you work with? Are they particularly early-stage startups that are growing that, you know, you can speak the same language of? Are they in industrial sectors that are immune from AI or transformation? What trends are you seeing in the hiring market?

• 1:36:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, when we were on last, a lot of our customers were kind of venture-backed, fast-growing in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing that's changed in the business since then, is that we've scaled to support more traditional enterprises. So think like large defense contractors, financial institutions and similar. They face the same hiring problems. They want to attract the best talent and they are seeing a lot of noise in the inbound that they used to quite heavily rely on. There's huge amounts of like AI-generated application spam now, and that makes it really hard to find the best talent and bring them on to the team. And so what we've seen since is kind of this shift, what used to be quite heavy on just software engineering roles of doing outbound

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  for them, is really spreading across roles. And so that's for sales roles, that's for HR roles, finance roles, all across the board.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  So, I was just wondering, do you expect there to be a shift in the number of new jobs that you place or broadly are placed that come from employees that are currently working somewhere and get outreach from a new company and then they shift while they're still employed versus the proactive job searcher?

• 1:37:41Speaker 05

  That's right. We think the majority of roles are going to be filled by passive candidates. We call it the talent war. And so the more companies are competing, the more they're going to be reaching out to other top talent and try to attract them to their teams. And I think that's already been the case to some extent in, you know, fast-growing tech. That's now spreading across the industry. And so we think all roles are ultimately going to be filled through outbound.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Talk about the business model and how it might evolve in the future. Where is this, where is this going? I'm assuming as part of the pitch, all the investors were excited about you selling kind of the work that traditional recruiting agencies do, but how are you positioning it or thinking about it?

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so one thing that's unique about the business is that while we do kind of sell the work that the recruiter is doing, we do so without kind of say, replacing the traditional recruiting agency. And in fact, many of them are our customers as well. And so whether it's an in-house recruiting team or an external recruiting team, they have the same goal of identifying who could be the best person for a given role and then reaching out to them. And so the platform has two different modules, which kind of goes into the business model and pricing as well. One being the per-seat setup, where you can buy a license to use the platform and you log in with your email. The second being our agents, which are used on a per-job basis. And so depending on how many jobs you have live or jobs that you want to hunt talent for, you can deploy different agents

• 1:39:09Speaker 05

  in Juicebox that will go find the best profiles and reach out to them every single day without you having to check back in on them day over day.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  Okay, give me some tips for someone who wants to be flooded with Juicebox inbound. What's the key to making yourself aware to your web crawlers, to the models? How should people be positioning themselves? PDF, resumes, personal websites, blogs, Twitter? Like, what's the best way to throw up a flag? Even if you're happy with your current job, just let everyone know, let the models know, let Juicebox know. I'm a killer.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice is just share more about yourself, share what you're, where you're currently working, what you're actually working on, any projects that you're involved in, anything you do outside of work, really anything that can indicate a potential match for role. And that can be pretty diverse. You know, there's many companies that want to find candidates that have some kind of interest or experience in the sector that they work in. That might not directly be tied to the day-to-day work that you're doing today, but may reflect an interest that you have. And so the more of that is available or published in one form or another will make it easier to be matched and identified for that job.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  What's the best output for that? Because I imagine you're not scraping all of Instagram reels. It's probably a little bit easier if I have like a blog that's well-indexed or I'm on GitHub or LinkedIn. Like, where should someone be publishing?

• 1:40:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So actually, all the ones you mentioned are great examples. Personal websites are something that's still a bit newer. I'd say like the total kind of number of candidates that actually have that is still fairly low. But you know, many people have a GitHub profile, LinkedIn profile, many places to publish that information. And I think GitHub in particular is one that's quite underutilized because it's historically been hard for recruiters to use. Like, how can they actually find, you know, who's a good person to reach out to? A lot of that data is indexed a lot stronger now. And so recruiters are searching based on GitHub data. They are finding people who contribute to open source repos or have other signals. And a lot of that data is only being unlocked within the last six to 12 months.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  I have a funny story. In like 2014, I needed to hire a software engineer. So I cross-referenced every customer email with GitHub. And I reached out to like some of the top open source contributors. And there's this one guy who had created Redis, which is an in-memory database. He's like a legendary programmer. And I was like, hey, can you help me? I need to build an e-commerce website. And he was like, you don't need me, bro. You're good. He was actually very helpful and taught me a ton of things. But that cross-referencing has been really, really valuable. And GitHub continues to be an underrated source of sourcing. I remember I talked to someone who's a tech recruiter, and I taught her how to source on LinkedIn. And she actually got a job because of it, because it

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  was like a differentiator that she wouldn't just be hanging out on LinkedIn all the time. This was like pretty early in GitHub's era. But there's so much alpha there because you can see what people are doing. A little bit harder if you're a defense contractor, probably not posting a lot of public information about what you're doing, but maybe some blog posts will do the trick. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the progress. And we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:42:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And let me also tell you about Terrible Hover, Jordi.

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Please do.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  Search built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Well, we have our next guest, Adam Goldstein from Archer. He's the founder and CEO. Adam, how are you doing? Good to meet you. Doing great. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of your backstory? How did you become interested in flying cars?

• 1:43:15Speaker 06

  Well, a lot of it came from building a software business that every month I had to wake up and it'd be the first of the month and we'd have to start over with sales. And it was one of those things that kind of drove me to the point that Wait, were you selling what? Were you selling?

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, were you selling box software? The whole thing of SaaS was that it just automatically recurs.

• 1:43:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. I wish that was, I wish that was the case.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:38Speaker 06

  The, the sales grind of software are really, really tough.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  And so, given how hard these businesses are, I really wanted to do something that was unbelievably fun. I could really help make an impact in the world. And the technology was changing over and so I had been, you know, messing around with electric engines and building airplanes. And it was an opportunity to just build a whole new category of airplane. A lot of it started out as a fun thing to go do, a project. And I'd always loved and been obsessed with airplanes. And so it was an opportunity to go out there and actually build something super special, special. And as it all started to work, it became like super clear that there was just a massive business to go build here.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Okay, take us through this video. What are we seeing here?

• 1:44:18Speaker 06

  So, these are what people call EVTOLs or Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Aircraft. You can think about it same categories like a helicopter, but it's electric. And when you switch electric, you all of a sudden can put multiple sets of engines and propellers and actuators, which allows the aircraft to have a ton of redundancy, which allows you to certify at a safety level that's super, super high. So the vehicles take off and land like helicopters, but then transition and fly forward like an airplane.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Speaker 06

  And it allows for, you know, people to get where they're going very, really, really quickly.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  I have to ask, is any of this AI-generated video, is any of this CGI?

• 1:44:50Speaker 06

  That's all real flight test video.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  This is all real flight test video. Is there one of these? How many of these exist? What's the plan to ramp this up?

• 1:44:59Speaker 06

  Those videos are several different aircraft.

• 1:45:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:03Speaker 06

  So we are in the process of going through the certification, you know, process with the FAA.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:08Speaker 06

  And that's the point where we really unleash. So we have a big factory located down in Georgia that can build up to 650 aircraft per year.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:14Speaker 06

  So we have capability to go do it. So right now, you know, we're, you know, we work with, you know, handful of aircraft. The first block of 10 is what we built. And then now we're in that phase where we're starting to build to the next block. of 50, but you want to time it really with the certification process. And then the other side is we were selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA 28 Summer Olympics.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  You're coming to my hometown.

• 1:45:35Speaker 06

  Make sure we have it all done.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:45:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  And you were talking about safety ratings. Is the idea to prove that these can be safer than traditional helicopters? Like, what's the goal?

• 1:45:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's that's correct. So the FAA created a new category for us. It's not a helicopter. It's not an airplane. So we actually certify these at a safer level than what helicopters are today. And we have to go out and obviously prove that. And so that just will, I think, drive a lot more people willing to get on aircraft like this. The aircraft also is much quieter than a helicopter, which means it can allow for a lot more landings. So for example, if you wanted to take a helicopter to the Hamptons, they limit the amount of landings at East Hampton Helport because it's so loud and people complain. So as the aircraft are much, much quieter, it can dramatically increase the amount of people that are able to access this.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  Okay. When I dig into the flying car plans, the history of the flying car, there's always like four different problems that need to be solved. Like regulatory, vertical takeoff and landing, going electric, and then also building vertiports and actually having more places to land. Assuming you get through approval, it looks like it's already vertical takeoff and landing. It sounds like it's already electric. Will this be able to just slot into the existing helicopter infrastructure? And sort of go from like, could someone theoretically just buy one of these instead of a helicopter? Have a pilot who's experienced in this and fly from helicopter destination to helicopter destination?

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  While we as a society figure out more vertiports and landing zones?

• 1:47:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So we designed it to fit into the existing helicopter infrastructure. So the wingspan is less than 50 feet. Aircraft weighs 6,500 pounds. So it's designed within that, you know, existing guidelines. We'll fly existing helicopter flight plans. We'll use and leverage a lot of existing infrastructure. And then depending on the city you're in, so places like Texas and Florida, there's much easier friendly environments to go. You can land kind of lots of different places, places like California, it'll be much more planned.

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:38Speaker 06

  And structured. And so it gives you the ability though, to really, you know, use existing, but then ultimately scale the stuff out. So I do think you'll see fleets of this stuff get done first before individuals, but the individuals ultimately will come with time. And people will be able to use them on an everyday basis.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  You mentioned infrastructure. I imagine that most airports that service helicopters have fuel, but maybe not charging infrastructure. Is there any hurdle to actually getting charging infrastructure in place the way Tesla did with the rollout of the electric car?

• 1:48:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the good news is we use very similar charging infrastructure that the EVs use. So QC charging, like a Tesla Supercharger.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:48:20Speaker 06

  And we partnered with a company in our industry that's, and I'll call more of a partner than a competitor. It's a company called Data and they make a lot of the charging infrastructure. So I've backed the charging infrastructure, their plans, we buy a bunch of their equipment. And so we're going out there and doing that. The airplane business is just much smaller in terms of number of units than the total number of cars. So it's not like you need like tens of thousands of chargers everywhere. If you're looking at like New York City, you need a handful, right, at the big heliport. So that's really it.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  And there's probably already a lot of power going into an airport broadly. So to redirect a little bit of it, it's not like you're, you're trying to set up a, you know, a charging station in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:48:58Speaker 06

  We are not draining the grid.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  The, the Olympics partnership is exciting, but looking forward, what do you think are going to be, you know, five years out, 10 years out, what are going to be the most like common routes? Then at least what would you predict at this point?

• 1:49:16Speaker 06

  So city center to airport is a very obvious one because there's known demand and willingness to pay. You can see that through rideshare, Ubers, you know, we all do that, right? And so it's also typical trip that's not that far, but also takes a long time. So the convenience factor there is massive. If you live in LA, you want to go to LAX. If you live in New York, you want to go to JFK, those type of routes are like very obvious. But these routes exist like all over the world, things like that. So anytime like where, you know, everybody says, oh, I wish I had this in my hometown. It's like, I grew up in Tampa, Florida. I grew up in North Tampa. I would have loved to have gone to St. Pete or to Clearwater. That's a total pain to get to, but if I could fly there, that would be super interesting. That literally exists everywhere. So I do think it'll become much more common.

• 1:49:56Speaker 06

  And we just have to get it started and get people comfortable because it is the first new category in a very long time, literally about 60 years. That the FAA has created. So there is a, an adoption period that will take place.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, no matter where you land in the Bay Area, it's going to be an hour to get into San Francisco proper. Whether it's, SFO can be a little bit faster, but Oakland's It's all takes forever.

• 1:50:18Jordi Hays?

  Creating a category like this, how do you solve the pilot side? What is going to be the, like, are you creating the certification with the FAA? How do you build out a cohort of pilots? Will there ever be, are you imagining there's going to be a recreational market for EVTOL?

• 1:50:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the FAA has already defined this, and so there are certain credentials of like what you need to go do it. The good news is the aircraft is super easy to fly. It could take you two weeks to hover a helicopter. I could teach you guys how to fly this plane in five minutes. A lot of the training is really

• 1:50:51Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I could, I feel like I could hover a helicopter in about, in about five minutes.

• 1:50:56John Coogan?

  The most dangerous thing. Red Bull, contact me. Fly this thing upside down.

• 1:51:02Speaker 06

  If you could hover a helicopter in five minutes on your first try, that would be unbelievably impressive because that is extraordinarily difficult.

• 1:51:09Jordi Hays?

  Every guy, every guy thinks they could, they could take over.

• 1:51:11John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, I think that's ridiculous, but I could, I could actually land a 747 in an emergency situation. 100%. You're on the, you're on the cover of the Business and Finance section in the Wall Street Journal today. It says Flying Taxpayer Archer accuses rival Joby of concealing China ties. What happened? What is going on with the deeper supply chain in EVTOL?

• 1:51:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Archer is building products not just for the civil side, but also for the defense side. And a big part of what we're doing is really in support of building, you know, re-industrializing America and building the, you know, the industrial base here, especially on the defense side. And so we partner with a company called Andrell, and we're building new aircraft. We build the big aircraft and then Andrell will missionize them. So they put the sensors and systems and weapons into the aircraft. So very important to me that we build and keep this supply chain in the US and we build this stuff all out here. That's not been necessarily the case for our competitors. They put, you know, factories in, in China, in Shenzhen. They set up their supply chain there. And I just think it should be table stakes for American companies working in defense to have to build out their supply chains

• 1:52:19Speaker 06

  and, and ultimately do it in America. And if you do go do that overseas, you also have to disclose that in a very proper way. And so I think that's a, you know, a big sticking point for me. I do think companies working in defense in America need to be very transparent about that.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the battery supply chain there because I feel like drone motors have been very difficult to reshore. Electric batteries, we've seen some positive news from Tesla around a lithium ion, lithium ion battery plant and there's some extraction that's happening. But how mature, I mean, you're not making millions of these yet, but how mature is the supply chain on the electric side?

• 1:53:01Speaker 06

  So the, we use traditional lithium ion batteries and so commercial off the shelf stuff. So we're not like in some new battery cell here. That's not proven. The reason we have to do that is because there needs to be data to show the FAA to prove these things are safe. It's not just that these things are safe. It's that we have to go and actually light some on fire. We put them into thermal runaway, many of them into thermal runaway. You have to show they do not propagate and spread throughout the pack. We have to take an entire pack, hoist it 50 feet in the air and drop it and it cannot emit toxic gases or catch on fire. So the standard is unbelievably high. So you need to use proven technologies to go do that. The good news is over time, batteries do get better and so they get more energy dense and it allows us to, you know, do more things largely around

• 1:53:43Speaker 06

  speed range and payload. But that will likely keep improving versus, you know, if you take like a typical, you know, ice or, you know, piston, piston combustion engine. It's not like the tech is the, the core, it's like the fuel is getting better. It's the same fuel every year. So we have a unique advantage where one day this stuff will be so good, you probably don't need that much and it will dramatically reduce your cost.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  So yeah, long term, this should be longer range. Where are we right now? I feel like electric cars had a certain breaking out moment. Once you got to a 300 mile electric car range, that's about what many gas cars are. How does the electric VTOL range compare to just a typical helicopter?

• 1:54:25Speaker 06

  So today helicopters have more performance than what we have from a range perspective. So we are targeting in and around urban environments. So think like less than 100 miles. That's the typical, you know, kind of target. On the defense side, it's a hybrid vehicle. So they're, they could go, you know, upwards of a thousand miles.

• 1:54:42John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:54:42Speaker 06

  So you're putting heavy fuels back into it.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:44Speaker 06

  So even further than what helicopters can do. So it depends what you're talking about. But on a helicopter, they can't meet us from a safety perspective.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Speaker 06

  So, you know, there's, if you look at like single engine helicopters, there's many single points of failure where if one part goes bad, you'll have a catastrophic event. So we are hitting standards that are significantly higher than where they can be. So there will be some trade offs. So there will always be helicopters around, heavy lift stuff, really far, you know, range stuff. So if you have an offshore oil rig, for example, we're not going to compete in that market. So if you want to, you know, if you look at like, like a 53K, like a King Stallion, just Google that, like a giant heavy lift helicopter. That thing can carry an F-35.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  I like the name.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  What's it called?

• 1:55:24Jordi Hays?

  King Stallion.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  King Stallion.

• 1:55:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. So if you, that's a big helicopter.

• 1:55:29Jordi Hays?

  You guys should create a horse theme.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Product.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. You gotta get good names going.

• 1:55:34Jordi Hays?

  We're big horse guys over here.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's fantastic.

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  That's a big boy.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we, we call our, our aircraft Midnight.

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  Midnight.

• 1:55:42Speaker 06

  And of course the topic is Archer. And then, um, you know, Taylor Swift did release her album Midnight and one of the songs was Archer on that album.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:55:50Speaker 06

  And so we were like, wait a minute, is this a?

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  She a shareholder?

• 1:55:53Speaker 06

  She's been paying attention. I don't know. That's what we were curious. Is like, did we inspire her?

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us, Adam. Uh, this is fantastic. Uh, cannot wait for the Olympics in Los Angeles. Hope to see these flying around and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:56:09Speaker 06

  Awesome. Thanks, guys.

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Before we bring in our next guest, I need to tell a funny story about in middle school, everyone had to give a speech. And I had the best speech planned. I was gonna give a speech about the Osprey helicopter. Are you familiar with the Osprey helicopter?

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Yes, it's a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. And I was like, this is the greatest speech ever. I'm making, it's the future of technology. It's a plane. It's a helicopter. Everyone's gonna love this. I get up, I give a very convincing speech on how the Osprey helicopter should be supported at all costs. We gotta work on this thing. We gotta fund this with taxpayer dollars. The Osprey helicopter is the best thing since sliced bread. I get up, I give my speech. Then the next person comes up and they're like, my speech is about curing cancer. And I'm like, I'm cooked. And everyone else had chose topics that were like totally pulling on your heartstrings. And mine was just like nerdy, talking about a random obscure piece of military technology.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  The Osprey is pretty sweet.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  I don't stand attached.

• 1:57:17Jordi Hays?

  Pod friendly guy in the chat says, Taylor just wants the, uh, Taylor Swift wants the archer so people stop flaming her for.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a good call. That would definitely help out. Well, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Gusto. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, let's bring in Max from Legora. He's the co-founder and CEO. Max, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day.

• 1:57:44Speaker 07

  What's happening?

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Give us the news. What happened?

• 1:57:48Speaker 07

  Well, we cooked.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  You cooked?

• 1:57:50Speaker 07

  Let's go.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:57:51Speaker 07

  We raised the round.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:57:55Speaker 07

  Raised $550 million.

• 1:58:00Speaker 07

  It's a big berth of all gongs.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:58:03Speaker 07

  Like the sales department here at Legora.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. So what's the key to growth? Is there a particular type of law firm that's you're seeing traction with? Is it up market, large, small, everything, direct to consumer? Like where is the business today?

• 1:58:18Speaker 07

  Well, let's talk about law firms. I think the, you know, the, the, the thing that sort of distinguishes the law firm market is that if a firm down the street starts operating with Legora, they are able to offer faster and better services. And so every firm has to adopt it.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Speaker 07

  The equilibrium breaks, and that's why we've seen a astronomical surge in our law firm demand. But at the other side of the coin, you have the enterprises, the legal departments, who are starting to figure out that we might be able to leverage AI to cut down costs, to operate more effectively. And so we're really seeing value on both sides of this equation. And as you know, we started Legora in Stockholm, Sweden, less than three years ago, and now we're in the US. I'm calling it from office in New York. We've just opened up in Houston and Chicago. And so, yeah, in Texas.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  A lot of law firms there doing oil and gas?

• 1:59:09Speaker 07

  The legal oil down there.

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. So are there any specific trends in, in industry, or is it more like, uh, you'll do litigation versus something else? Like, like, where have you, uh, found the most success? Where is AI advancing the work of lawyers most, uh, acutely?

• 1:59:29Speaker 07

  So I'd say we've, we've had the most traction in M and A and corporate departments. But quickly, we have actually started to see a, a real verticalization. So within private equity, within pharma, within big tech companies, within real estate, construction, right? And the way that lawyers, well, I actually think it's, it's similar to software coding. So, you know, Legora used to be kind of a co-pilot and you used to work with it as an assistant back and forth. But now with the latest model release with Opus 4.5, GPT 5.4, like, we're starting to move into a world where Legora can autonomously go out and perform tasks on your behalf. And that's working across every single legal vertical.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  How do lawyers feel about AI? Are they having an existential crisis in the way that software, some software engineers are?

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  I don't do the thing that I'm, I'm not the craftsman that I used to be.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Like, how are they actually processing it?

• 2:00:24Speaker 07

  I, I think it's, you know, the entire range of emotions from holy shit, this is incredible. And I've never seen anything like it to, huh, um, I'm really going to have to figure out uh, how my business model is gonna work for this task that I used to bill hourly for. And if you look in the law firms, right, the way that they're typically structured is um, you under bill for the partners, right, and you over bill for the associates. And that model is starting to get questioned uh, by the, by the, um, by the buyers. And so clients are demanding the use of AI and shows of more effectiveness in the way that services gets delivered. And of course, the core is part of the, you know, answer there.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Every, once a week, somebody like is making the kind of statement or, or putting out the idea that, uh, what are all these legal AI tools doing? I can get the same results from a chat GPT or Claude or Gemini. What's your answer there? I'm assuming that came up during the fundraise as to why, why this isn't, you know, a, a thin wrapper. I have my own ideas, but I'd be curious how, how you talk about that.

• 2:01:40Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, it was the same week that we went out to the market that Claude dropped their legal plugin. And I actually think it was a fantastic showcase of, you know, here's some of the capabilities that the models can actually do. But in the same way that just taking the model and throwing it at a problem sort of doesn't work if you're gonna run a $10 million M and A process, there's a lot of scaffolding, there's a lot of enterprise software, there's permissionings, there's sort of ethical walls that you need to respect. There's the way that you work with the firm's internal data, with external legislation and with case law, like, there's just so much more that you need to do around the models to put them in a context where they can be useful. I think with the latest developments, we are actually needing to build

• 2:02:23Speaker 07

  less of the guardrails, like the harnesses that we can put the models in are improving. So we can sort of take the model, we can put them in an environment where they can be successful. And then we, you know, to quote you, let it cook, right? And we give the model access to the relevant tools to go and solve problems in that legal business context. And then we sort of let it go out and plan and execute on that task.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Do you, have the internal teams been a lot more aggressive to date than, than, uh, let's say like the big law? Just because they're, they're not like running a business, they're just like providing an internal service and is, was that something that you had kind of always expected?

• 2:03:08Speaker 07

  So, so I think the, the big law was really quick to adopt. And over the past two years, we've seen a real exponential step function in sophistication and complexity of the use cases that they're solving, right? Like back in 2023, as somebody would get a clap on the, on the back for summarizing an email with AI. But now you're running an entire M and A, like end to end process using Legora. And so the expectations are increasing. And I'm actually seeing things like adding AI as part of the career frameworks within law firms to get promoted. I'm seeing AI be part of the interviewing process, right? Like it's now a skill that is required to deliver real work.

• 2:03:51Speaker 07

  Um, I think the enterprise departments have been patiently looking at sort of what are our law firms doing? And now they're starting to, to follow on. And one of, one of our last developments is something we call the Legora Portal. And the portal is basically like, you know, Figma for, for lawyers. They can collaborate and come into a multiplayer space where they can work together. And recently, one of the big firms we work with here in the, in New York, Debevois, started working with clients like Blackstone, GSK, like on that portal. And I think that's really exciting because the way that these legal teams have collaborated have, you know, looked like the early nineties. And now we're pulling that into the age of AI.

• 2:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Are you seeing pull from in-house councils or is that a completely separate market?

• 2:04:39Speaker 07

  No, absolutely. You know, we work with big.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was saying, because they are seeing much traction because if you're, if you're in-house counsel, you're overworked, you're not billing by the hour.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  You just get a salary, you have a team, you want to make your team as efficient as possible. You would adopt as you you want, you have a greater incentive to adopt as much AI as you can faster because you're not dealing with your business model needing to adapt as well.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  How far away are we from Microsoft's in-house counsel using Ligora to acquire Activision directly and Activision's in-house counsel just uses Ligora as well?

• 2:05:15Speaker 07

  This is a great question. We're actually working with some very large enterprises who are leveraging Ligora to do more of the M and A process themselves.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:26Speaker 07

  Before, you know, engaging.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:29Speaker 07

  But I think it's it's also an opportunity for firms to be very proactive and to actually invite them into their software environments and to go, hey, AI can now do these tasks.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:39Speaker 07

  So we're going to help you, our client, make that transition.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:43Speaker 07

  Right?

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:44Speaker 07

  I I I we have this framework internally where like if AI can do a task, it will do it. Like that task has been conquered. It's within the spider shark that Anthropic released, right? Like.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  Spider shark.

• 2:05:58Speaker 07

  Human, right? Like you saw that, like the blue red.

• 2:06:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:02Speaker 07

  Right? It's no longer a task that humans should be spending their time on.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 07

  And I think the challenge is that this is all moving so fast and people aren't used to doing their work and disrupting themselves at the same time. So, you know, we have the software on one piece, but then we actually have a hundred lawyers on staff at Ligora called legal engineers that partner with our clients. And we really pioneered this concept, right? It's forward deployed lawyers in a way.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:30Speaker 07

  And they work with all our big enterprises and big law firm clients on transitioning the way that they do business.

• 2:06:37Jordi Hays?

  What are conversations like on law school campuses today? How are they processing all the progress?

• 2:06:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. Also, Legora actually has a university program, which is really exciting. And so if you're a law school student listening to this, you should be part of the university program. And you should learn this, right? It's going to be a skill that firms will look for. It's going to make you more attractive on the job market. And I think we are quickly going to enter a world where you're spending more time reviewing work that AI is doing for you than doing it yourself, right? Like, that's what's happened to software engineers. That's going to happen in law. And so the best thing you can do as a young professional is to get there really quickly.

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  That's great. Anything else, Jordi?

• 2:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Wild times.

• 2:07:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:07:24Speaker 07

  Wild times. Yes, thank you so much for having me.

• 2:07:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you're gonna be back on with the billion dollar raise soon and now.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  I'm sure. Well, we will talk to you soon. Max.

• 2:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to get that update, Max. Congrats to the team.

• 2:07:36Speaker 07

  Awesome.

• 2:07:37John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Tebow from OpenAI has some news here. He says, "We are adding compute as fast as we can for Codex, but demand is surging faster than anticipated and service can be a bit choppy for some. Team is working hard behind the scenes. Everyone is happy with Tebow resetting limits." Adam dot GPT says, "St. Tebow giver of tokens and the resetter of limits."

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  We gotta pull up the video you shared, John.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Which one? Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 2:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up. I just dropped it.

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  You just dropped it?

• 2:08:16Jordi Hays?

  In the chat.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  We have a few videos that we can watch. We can watch the trailer for Project Hail Mary, but let's first watch Tim Tebow give the promise.

• 2:08:29Jordi Hays?

  No sound.

• 2:08:30Speaker 08

  I was hoping for an undefeated season, that was my goal.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Start it over.

• 2:08:33Speaker 08

  Done here.

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 2:08:34Speaker 08

  I'm sorry. Extremely sorry. You know, we were hoping for an undefeated season, that was my goal. Something the floor's never done here. But I promise you one thing. A lot of good will come out of this. You have never seen any player in the entire country play as hard as I will play the rest of the season, and you never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season. You never see a team play harder than we will the rest of the season. God bless.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Great speech.

• 2:09:00Jordi Hays?

  And that's how John read, uh, Tebow at, uh, OpenAI's post. "We are adding compute as fast as we can for Codex, but demand is surging faster than anticipated. Team is working hard behind the scenes. You will never see a team work as hard behind the scenes as our team."

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  God bless. Project Hail Mary debuted with a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's described as one of the best sci-fi films of the decade. We gotta get Nick to get some tickets for our team. We will definitely be going. I'm very excited. Let's pull up the full trailer for Project Hail Mary, since it is movie day on TVPS.

• 2:09:38Speaker 09

  Please state your name. Robin Gray. I smoked up from a coma.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  Have you seen The Martian?

• 2:09:43Speaker 09

  I'm several light-years from my apartment.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  This is from the same author. Andy Weir. I'm not an astronaut.

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  I'm not an astronaut.

• 2:09:54Speaker 10

  If you don't go, you die. Or the rest of us.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  A Hail Mary situation.

• 2:10:01Speaker 10

  The sun is dying.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 2:10:04Speaker 10

  You are the only scientist who might know what this is.

• 2:10:08Speaker 09

  I'm just a teacher at Grover Cleveland Middle.

• 2:10:10Speaker 10

  You have a doctorate in molecular biology. I need you to come with us. This is Project Hail Mary. The sun is not the only star dying. Every star was infected by its neighbor, except one.

• 2:10:22Speaker 09

  Why?

• 2:10:23Speaker 10

  We don't know. Which is why we built a ship to go there and find out.

• 2:10:28Speaker 09

  It's 11.9 light-years away. The astronauts die in space?

• 2:10:32Speaker 10

  It's what you Americans would call a long shot.

• 2:10:35Speaker 09

  Hail Mary. I get it.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  The name of the movie. It's the name of the movie.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  I love a movie like this. He has no experience. But he has to go anyway.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  He was just a professor.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Just a normal person. This is every man's dream.

• 2:10:52Speaker 09

  I put the knot, an astronaut. I've never done anything. I've never done a spacewalk. I can't even moonwalk.

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  See, I seriously think there's like a 50% chance this happens to me at some point in my life. They're just like, they're just like, John, you're the only person that can save humanity. You gotta go.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  I got, if I gotta go, I gotta go. I'm ready.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  This is my fantasy.

• 2:11:18Speaker 09

  I understand.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Ryan Gosling.

• 2:11:20Speaker 09

  I do.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  He's so good.

• 2:11:23Speaker 09

  My place is in the classroom.

• 2:11:30Speaker 09

  This might be very hard for you to understand, but some people are not good at things.

• 2:11:38Jordi Hays?

  2026 box office is 27% below pre-pandemic 2019.

• 2:11:43John Coogan?

  No black pilling while the Hail Mary trailer is playing.

• 2:11:46Jordi Hays?

  50%.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  No black pilling. We are gonna change that stat by going and seeing this film. We will be watching Project Hail Mary and single-handedly bringing back the film industry. We're gonna make Hollywood the center of entertainment.

• 2:12:03Speaker 09

  He's kinda growing on me. At least he's not growing in me, you know, which was a concern for a little while.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  This looks fun. I think this is a good movie to start the summer. It's a little bit early, but it's warm here in California. We'll have a fun time with that. The Financial Times loved it. They said, "Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling's good humor propels space caper of serious uplift. A science teacher buddies up with a boulder-like alien to save the sun in an escapist morale booster."

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  One more trailer?

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Of the Lego Movie. I would love to watch another trailer.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up the trailer for the AI doc.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yes, the AI doc. This is the real movie that will get people back in seats. Everyone loves AI. They're gonna wanna hear about AI. They're gonna wanna head to the theater to watch the AI doc. Let's watch the trailer. Look at this lineup.

• 2:12:54Speaker 09

  Can go quite wrong.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  They got Sam. They got Demis, they got Dario. What happened with Mark Zuckerberg? We'll never know why he turned this down. Did they get Elon? They didn't get Elon. Elon said yes, but then he got busy. There's a difference. But there's Yatkowski. They got Eliazer.

• 2:13:13Speaker 09

  Because my wife is six months pregnant. Is now a terrible time to have a kid.

• 2:13:19Speaker 09

  Let me just be honest. I know people who work on AI risk who don't expect their children to make it to high school.

• 2:13:25John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 2:13:31Speaker 09

  Pretty much everything. It's surprisingly straightforward. Intelligence is about recognizing patterns. Patterns. Patterns. Patterns.

• 2:13:40Speaker 09

  If you have learned those patterns, you can generate new information. AI is moving so fast.

• 2:13:46Speaker 11

  It's being deployed prematurely. There's so much potential for things to go wrong.

• 2:13:51Speaker 09

  Why can't we just stop?

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  What if it's all perfect? To get AI.

• 2:13:56Speaker 09

  That's vastly more intelligent than people within this decade.

• 2:14:01Speaker 09

  China, North Korea, Russia.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  They got Elia in here. They got Joshua Bendio. Who else did they got? Yuval Noah Harari. Reid Hoffman's in there.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  Daniela.

• 2:14:18Speaker 09

  It feels like I have to find these CEOs. And get them in the movie.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Great. They got Sam. They got Dario. They got Demis. Where's Mark Zuckerberg? Get in this movie, bro. Demand reshoots.

• 2:14:36Speaker 09

  AI is the thing that can solve climate change.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, fun documentary. Clearly, this is going to be the thing that turns the tide on Hollywood. Everyone's going to go to this. It's going to be sold out. Get your tickets now. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. And without further ado, Alan McLennan in the restroom waiting room. We'll bring him in with you. Get out your jump. What's going on? Alan, how are you doing?

• 2:15:08Speaker 12

  I'm doing just fine, gentlemen. It's nice to meet you both.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  Great to meet you too. Uh, we were just talking about, uh, about Hollywood. How, how are you feeling about Hollywood? I am optimistic. Project Hail Mary looks good. This AI documentary looks good. Is there any cause for optimism?

• 2:15:26Speaker 12

  Oh, of course there is. I mean, yeah, the, the basis of the creative storytellers in Hollywood are in parallel. And everyone wants to come to Hollywood to do their projects, no matter what anybody says. Yes, there has been somewhat of an exodus. Um, only because the, that was motivated by the SAG after strike and everything kind of shut down. Four hundred and sixty plus million a day was lost, you know, so, so it was, it was a big hit for Hollywood. And so that changed dynamics considerably.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Speaker 12

  But from a storytelling standpoint and the capabilities of putting things together, it's truly fantastic. It's, it's the community that makes things happen.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think the, uh, the, the, the, the, the mix of different film budgets is changing or should change? We've, we've been in a, uh, you know, there's the, there's the low budget film and there's the huge blockbuster that gets up into hundreds of millions of dollars. And it feels like we might be entering a new regime soon where there's more lower budget films made that are even more impressive than the blockbusters of old. How, how do you think the Hollywood will react to new technologies potentially making, uh, blockbusters more affordable, more creativity, more, uh, more diverse perspectives? How do you think all of that changes?

• 2:16:52Speaker 12

  I think you just summed it up really well, to tell you the truth. Um, the, the fact of it is, is that it's nothing really new.

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:00Speaker 12

  Um, this has been evolving over many years, fifty years, different types of programming, television, you know, um, thirty minute shows, episodic activities. All of that has evolved. It's really driven towards the audiences and, and the interest of the audience. You know, new micro programming is the new, used to be called, you know, basically, um, creator economy or the creator content, you know, uh, user generated content on. 2004, 2005, when YouTube came into play, it kind of created a whole new genre of everybody can produce something. But that doesn't take away the importance of the quality of the programming.

• 2:17:41Speaker 12

  You know, and when it comes to micro programming, let's say, micro shows, those in and of themselves for 90 seconds to three minutes are something that you really want to be able to capture.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:54Speaker 12

  You know, and also view, and people do. Now, kind of the average viewing of a micro show is four to five different segments. It's kind of streamed together.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Speaker 12

  So, in answer to your question, as best I can, it will find its path, it will find its, like, for example, your program.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:15Speaker 12

  You know, here, here's, consumers are looking at this and being able to engage with it, and it's developing and delivering great content. At least I'd like to take that with me on.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you. We, we, we do have a question from the chat I want to ask about this idea of Barbenheimer, these moments that are shelling points. They bring everyone together. And I'm wondering if you think that we'll see more of those in the future, or if Hollywood should be thinking, even if it's teaming up with a rival studio, to create something that gets even more people into the theaters. Because the internet's so noisy, but everyone's in their own little pockets. But then something like Barbenheimer happens, and the Barbie film, and Oppenheimer, and they're two completely different, but everyone was talking about it, and it seemed like it was the true Hollywood returning to the center stage of American culture post-COVID, in my opinion.

• 2:19:09Speaker 12

  Yeah, cultural events are really important, no matter what they are, you know, wherever they are there. You know, there's groups out there that are doing that live, Cosm, that's pulling the kinds of activities together. There's this sphere, which is another place that is a communal environment that is truly fantastic.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:27Speaker 12

  When it comes to the kind of event that you're talking about with Barbie Heimer, pardon me, the, the fact of it is, is that people are looking for that. People want to engage you. A long time ago, and I say really a long time ago. You know, remember when we were looking at the kinds of shared experience, like interactive television, where you could choose what you're watching with anyone at any particular time? It didn't really go over that great. You know, it was good and it was well done. But people really didn't want to watch television and share with their neighbor or whatever it might be. They would, they would talk about things when it came to programming with their friends.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:11Speaker 12

  Um, but not that many. So, audience sizing is really critically important. And events like that are unquestionably key in driving, you know, merchandising, participation, and just engagement. And this is what's happening around the world when it comes to the new types of episodic television, whether it's a Blue in Turkey, or you know, the different types on Acorn in the UK. These are really important networks that are driving a lot of viewers at this time.

• 2:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Hollywood has a lot of fear around AI. A lot of people don't even want to talk about, even if they're excited about it, because of fear of, of pushback. I've had a slightly more optimistic view that if you look back the last 10 years of traditional Hollywood, as in like the place, not like the, the industry. A lot of these big productions are being shipped, uh, out of state or overseas. And I've had this optimistic view that, uh, uh, Hollywood could see a general resurgence if the storytelling capacity stays here. But like, we are no longer having to do as many expensive shoots in, in Europe

• 2:21:27Jordi Hays?

  or the Middle East or any of these other places, because those scenes can now be generated. But the talent that is involved with, you know, effectively directing, producing, casting, those people could have a higher volume of work and budgets could potentially be distributed. Instead of one, you know, $200 million movie, you might have 10, 20 million dollar productions that are using AI to be more efficient. Uh, am I totally off? Do you think that's a, a possibility? Uh, what's your view?

• 2:22:02Speaker 12

  Well, AI has been here for about twenty years. So it's already been involved when it comes to production and and the ease of the overall product being created. You know, where it comes into play is, you know, dailies at the end of the day, you can take a look at five, six different cuts very quickly, all during live shots of what you're putting together. When it, when it comes to AI involved, it's, it's one of those situations where it's a tool and it's a tremendous tool. And it's how, and how that tool is leveraged is going to become key. You know, there's different efforts when it comes with all the different types of content creation editorial tools.

• 2:22:46Speaker 12

  It's the managing layers that stay on top that allow for the efficiencies that come into play to create pieces of content. And then that lowers time, lowers time is lowering budgets. Lowering budgets means rapid and escalating the kinds of productions that then are created. So you can, you can meet the timeline, you can meet the pipeline, you can get more programming into, you know, into the distribution points to be able to see. Some of the more interesting things that are out there that are really key is how, not just AI, but AI when it comes to the content creation, like for example, the ability to on the fly level set and uplift all of that content into high quality

• 2:23:31Speaker 12

  visual, like 4K and UHD. Like, we're looking at UHD, we're looking at UHD right now. Yeah. You know, and well, 4K. Yeah. And, and the fact of it is, it looks pretty good. Well, and a lot of content that's being created that's pushed out there,

• 2:23:47Speaker 12

  it's being shot in 4K, but as soon as it cuts to advertising, it drops down, drops down the showcase. So you get this fragmentation that takes place that doesn't look good, then it goes back up to 4K. Yeah. You know, and so level setting all of that is back to the point of audience engagement. And so audience engagement is really key. You kind of touched it a little bit when it says to the cost of production. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you go down to Rio or Johannesburg or Prague and do a produ- or, or, you know, London and do a production for eighty percent of the cost of what it took to do in LA or Hollywood? Mm-hmm.

• 2:24:28Speaker 12

  Okay, there was a shift on that. The actors pool, the production capabilities, now that you have live engagement and production facilities in LA or San Francisco or London, because of the state of technology, isn't just the AI component, it's how things are made and how things get done. So, the actors are, you know, exceptional in each one of those cities I just identified. Paris, some of the French programming, it's great. Some of the Madrid programming, all of it is exceptionally well, but then the cost of putting that together is considerably less. That's the problem that we have. AI can actually do

• 2:25:11Speaker 12

  a lot more engaged activities and enhance that capability as we move forward. We just had a recent event out in the desert, and that's not like milling around in the sand or anything like that. It's like, what we're talking about, it was at Palm Strays, it's quite lovely. Yes. And the fact of it was, is with what's called the Hollywood Professionals Association, that's HPA. And that way, we delve into that kind of discussion about the impact of AI. And what it really comes down to is that it's another fabulous tool. It's, it's to be respected more than it is to be feared. And yes, will it

• 2:25:56Speaker 12

  kind of lessen the amount of work, workers that are going to be approaching this? Yeah, but those workers, the workers are very straightforward. You either learn how to use tools. Or if you stick your heels in the ground and drag yourself, then you're going to be passed by. So it's you learn how to use something to make something move forward.

• 2:26:16John Coogan?

  But yeah, and we saw that with the digital transition where, you know, people who shoot on film, there are still movies that get shot on film. It's a smaller community and those films are special in their own way. And I don't think anyone expects a complete revolution overnight in any of these things. We do have one last question from the chat. It's sort of funny one. There's a surfboard behind you that looks like it's seen very many amazing beaches. Do you surf? Where do you surf? Tell us about the surfboard?

• 2:26:48Speaker 12

  I have. And I do, as I've gotten older, my balance sucks. But you know, other than that, my son's a big surfer. We're all surfers. We're water family. And so, so in the course of that, yes, I do. And now I'm more of a sponger. If someone's actually identified that, then they might know what a sponger is.

• 2:27:09Jordi Hays?

  I know what a sponger is. But I respect it. I respect it. You've earned the sponge, I think.

• 2:27:16Speaker 12

  So it's it kind of comes back to that. You know, that's a prop. What can I tell you? It's a board snapped in half. It's not a

• 2:27:24Jordi Hays?

  I had a Hayden shapes that the same, the same brand that I took to like 20 some countries. And it did eventually snap. They're like weirdly this, this type of board. It's like they're like extremely durable in some ways, but they have these certain impact points where it's like over. Like they'll just snap. But a lot of fun memories on my Hayden shapes back in the day.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time. We appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us today. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

• 2:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully see you out in the water.

• 2:27:59Speaker 12

  Thank you. And I hope I was added some value.

• 2:28:03John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Have a great one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the platform that powers it. And without further ado, we will bring in Jagdeep Singh from ro.ai. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 2:28:23Speaker 13

  Good. Thanks. How are you?

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Since it's your first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

• 2:28:32Speaker 14

  Yeah, so I'm Jack Deep Singh. I'm one of the co-founders of Rota AI and we are building a generalist intelligent robot foundation models to solve real problems in facturing and logistics.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  Okay, help me understand what I'm thinking of when I think of a robot. I'm familiar with the Kuka robotic arm, the Optimus humanoid, like the Roomba. There are so many different ways to think about robotics. The Tesla Model 3 is in many ways a robot. Where do you see the first robot coming online?

• 2:29:03Speaker 14

  Yeah, great question. So we've had robots for a long time. Traditional robots have been around for decades and they're exactly what you described. Kuka, robots like that that are basically designed to move through a predefined trajectory that's programmed and they can do one thing really well over and over again repeatedly. What they can't do is deal with variability, right? So they don't learn by themselves from data. There's a new class of robot people are working on. Silicon Valley, it's kind of a hot thing as probably you've heard. These are robots that have a neural network capability and can learn from data. You feed it a lot of data of robots moving through certain trajectories and they can learn for themselves how to perform those tasks. The problem is those approaches use what's called a VLA, a vision language action model. I don't want to bore you guys with details, but...

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  We love the details. So go...

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  Build the beans!

• 2:29:51Speaker 14

  So these VLA models, you've probably seen robot demos on the internet where they're doing cool things like making coffee or holding... The problem is all these demos are just that, they're demos. They work well in a lab setting, but they fail if you move the model into the real world. And the question is, why do they fail in the real world? Well, because these models are trained on relatively small data sets because you don't have internet scale data sets for robotics trajectories. So people teleoperate robots, like puppeteering robots around to do certain tasks and you collect a number of trajectories that way and then you can train the model to do a task, but because the quantity of data is so small... They can only work well if the test set is very similar in its distribution to the dataset it was trained on.

• 2:30:36Speaker 14

  And the problem is, you can do that in a lab setting. When you take it to the real world, there's a much broader diversity of settings, of configurations, of objects, lighting, and so on, and the models fail. So that's a central problem that we were starting to address, is how do you get robots to generalize beyond these very contrived situations that, you know, that people have shown they work in in lab settings. And so we've got a different approach that we're taking.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  Okay. So. Pushback against the teleop strategy because I was totally on board with the no teleop thing during the Tesla boom and, but then Waymo seemed to do a lot of teleop and it seemed to sort of work. And so when I think about ways to get a lot of data, teleop doesn't seem like the craziest thing in a world where we have a bunch of Scale AI, Merkle, there's all these data, you know, RLHF teams that are, you know, sort of manually curating answers to questions for LLMs. Like, the human in the loop for a medium amount of time seems to be a tried and true path. Why are, why, why does teleop now make sense in this particular industry?

• 2:31:42Speaker 14

  Great question. I'm glad you asked it. So I think self-driving cars are a bit of a special case because the car is basically a robot that is very easy to teleop with. Sitting in it, basically have four actuators, left, right, speed up and slow down.

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:55Speaker 14

  And, and we, we all have been driving cars for a long time and you can easily put in millions of miles in a car, which is what Waymo's of the world had to do to learn how to self-drive. They did collect a lot of data. But even there, they don't have all the data they need. There's a lot of so-called corner cases that those cars run into that cause issues. In the case of robotics, the problem is much more serious because now you're talking about manipulation. You're not just, you know, operating a robot with a single environment like a flat road. You're dealing with You know, the full dexterity of a human hand, like twenty degrees of freedom per hand. Every object's different, every type of task is different, right? And these things become very difficult to teleoperate. Teleoperation process for these, you gotta wear a headset. Yep. You have the joysticks in your hands and you're trying to move your robot around. It's just, it's just very hard.

• 2:32:38Speaker 14

  And, and, and the problem isn't just the quantity of data, although that's obviously a problem. You could spend a lifetime doing this, we think you wouldn't get to internet scale. Yeah. But the big issue is the diversity of data, right? If all the data you have is data that you've intentionally collected, then you almost by definition haven't seen the corner cases. You haven't seen all those edge scenarios that cause failure. So, the way that we're approaching it is different altogether. We, you know, we, we, our team comes from generative AI and Yep. computer vision. And the idea is, you know, if you look at every other AI model that's worked, they all start with an incredible amount of data. Typically, you know, a whole internet's worth of data, whether it's language models or image models or video models. And then there's a small amount of fine tuning Yep. that you use to align the model.

• 2:33:21Speaker 14

  That fine tuning data set, uh, teleoperation is fine for that, by the way. Yeah. That's what we're doing. But for the pre-training, it's just completely inadequate. So what we did is say, what, what data set is there that's internet scale, massive diversity, and from which you can learn about the physics of how things move? And there's only one answer. That's internet video, right? So, well, we, because our team comes from computer vision and generative modeling, that was the approach that we took. So we basically literally trained the model on hundreds of millions of videos. Uh, really millions of clips, in fact. Uh, and, and, and obviously the model has seen almost anything that, that you can see in reality. And then with a tiny amount of teleoperation, that's literally on the order of ten hours, right? Compared to what the VLA approach requires, which is, you know, like

• 2:34:06Speaker 14

  tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of hours of data. You can actually teach the robot to do certain tasks. That level of data efficiency. Is, you know, we've never seen. That's kind of the one of the big, uh, the big breakthroughs here.

• 2:34:17Jordi Hays?

  So what is the, what are the, what is the early customer set going to look like? Are you, are you, can you work with any type of robotic manufacturer? Everything from humanoids to arms? Or is there a particular focus? What are you most excited about?

• 2:34:32Speaker 14

  Yeah. Great question. So, so, you know, we're not going after the consumer market. We think that, um, there's lower hanging fruit in the commercial industrial, um, you know, logistics markets where you already have a lot of, you know, tasks being done that people are being paid for, uh, where you could use some help from, from automation. Um, and, and we, we actually are a full stack company. So we have this AI model. It's very cool. We call it the direct video action model because it makes a video of what it thinks a robot should do. And then it, it converts that to action. So the robot actually does it and does that in closed loops. So it re-observes basically where the model works is observe, predict, act in closed loop. Um, uh, and so that, that's a key part of our valuation, but we're, we're a full stack company. So we're doing the robot hardware as well. Why are we doing hardware even though there's a hundred plus robot companies in the world?

• 2:35:18Speaker 14

  Well, because we couldn't find one that actually met the requirements of the use cases we're in. So we wanted to lift 25 kilograms, not just once, but all day long. That's called rated capacity. Right? We, if you try to do that with conventional robots, you'll burn out the motors and that obviously is reliability issue. It has to be reliable enough to last the full three years that we're targeting basically. Uh, but more importantly, we wanted the robot kinematics to have what's called a linear response. Linear responses are, are actually, uh, uh, systems that can be modeled by an AI model. Uh, if you have any kind of nonlinearities in a system like compliance or elasticity, that's very hard to model and, and that doesn't work well with AI. So we wanted to build more of an Apple-like solution where we control the OS and we control the hardware in order to provide a full solution to the customer.

• 2:36:02Speaker 14

  Having said that, some of our customers do want our model to control their existing hardware.

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:36:06Speaker 14

  You know, you opened up by talking about, uh, about KUKA, for example. A lot of them have KUKA hardware. Uh, so it would be very straightforward to imagine a KUKA arm sending an API call into our model saying, here's what I see. What should I do? The model responds as do X, Y, Z, the robot does that and, and so on. Uh, so we, we will make the model available to third parties. We want to create a whole ecosystem here. But day one, we're really focusing on providing, you know, just, uh, a full solution that, that is really tightly integrated.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:36John Coogan?

  So, great answer to the teleop question. Talk about the sim to real gap. Why is simulation, building a physics engine and a robot that perfectly mirrors the human body, or whatever your hardware is, all the different hinges, and then running that in a virtual environment, Unreal Engine, or something like that, and then transferring that learning back to the robot? Why does that not work as well as people expected it to work?

• 2:37:05Speaker 14

  So, first of all, excellent question. You guys are more up to speed on robotics than I would have guessed, so good to have fun. So, sim to real is exactly what you described. You learn in simulation and you try to apply that in the real world. There are two problems there. One is, no matter how well you try to model the laws of the physical world, there's always what's called a sim to real gap. You can't perfectly model all the complexities of things like deformable objects and transparent objects with light moves and so on. But more important than that, it's the same kind of problem that happens with teleoperation, which is a lack of diversity. If all the data you're collecting is intentionally collected, then you're not going to see all those corner cases. And that's the fundamental difference between the lab and the real world, the so-called

• 2:37:49Speaker 14

  long tail of the distribution. In the real world, you see a lot more of these long tail events that you might only see once, in your entire lifetime, but you need to be able to deal with them. A good example of that, by the way, was this case where one of the self-driving cars ran into a woman on a bicycle chasing a chicken onto the street. Now, there's no way you're going to see that more than once in your dataset, and that you're not going to see in your intentionally collected dataset.

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  But you might actually see it on internet video. Like, there is a video right now of Tony Hawk doing the 900, and that is a very weird thing for humanoid body shape to do, but he did it, it's real, and the laws of physics apply. So there's something that you can learn from that, even if it's in the longest tail, that applies back to just picking up this diet coke and taking a sip.

• 2:38:37Speaker 14

  Touche and that's and that's actually a really important point. So when we when we curate our data sets for the pre-training, we don't try to overly curate them down to, for example, manipulation tasks. We have things like videos of waves crashing on a beach, which you might think has nothing to do with manipulation, but it turns out there's some knowledge about physics and how the world works in those videos. And that's why this model can generalize so powerfully. It's been trained on so much stuff that it just in the same way that chat G P T was trained on, you know, chat G P T can produce, you know, Shakespearean lyrics if you want, or, you know, whatever, you know, plays, but but it wasn't only trained on Shakespeare. It was trained on rap lyrics and quitter feet and so on. And so the same thing applies here. You want to be able to

• 2:39:19Speaker 14

  train on everything to provide that prior on how things move. And then you align that prior with robot-specific data from teleoperation to perform the task.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations. I want to have the How'd the round come together? Who participated? Yeah, who participated?

• 2:39:35Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's a great round. So we were announcing this Series A. So it was led by, you know, Costa Ventures, led by Tomasek, was led by

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  We have a dog here. Congratulations. Four hundred and fifty million dollar Series A. That's Great way to come out of stealth. I always I recommend every founder, if you're gonna come out of stealth, come out with half a billion. This is a good tip for new for new It's a good way to make a splash. Yeah. And project confidence. We appreciate you. Have a great rest of your day. Talk more. Thank you. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the app to use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely, connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with A I. And let me also 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 A I agents. And without further ado, our last guest of the show.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Who or what?

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Scott, how you doing?

• 2:40:30Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:40:31Speaker 13

  Fantastic. How's it going, gentlemen?

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  It's going fantastically over here, too.

• 2:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's great to see you here. Are we up in the corner? Or you got a you got an interesting?

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  What's what's that?

• 2:40:41Speaker 13

  It's our logo. I don't know. It's a

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I was just saying, because it's like you're looking. It looks like you're looking at me over here.

• 2:40:49Speaker 13

  I have my screen up here.

• 2:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, first time on the show, please introduce yourself and company.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Come over here, hang out.

• 2:40:58Jordi Hays?

  That's better.

• 2:41:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:41:05Speaker 13

  I'm Scott, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, where we're building the first device to track gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and prostate health, hands-free, automatically, every time you go to the bathroom. So, people like to analogize us, we are whoop for your poop, or ooh for your flora.

• 2:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. And yeah, just first time on the show somehow.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  Is it all direct to consumer, or is there pay with your insurance? How does all of that work?

• 2:41:32Speaker 13

  Yeah, great question. So, we're launching today, direct to consumer. We are HSA/FSA eligible, and we do have a longer-term insurance B2B roadmap, but kind of the thinking there is, it's really hard to build a B2B company that ever succeeds B2C. Whereas if you build a consumer brand, the people you're ultimately selling into are people.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Are where.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about the journey to get here. I know, has it been two years at this point? It's, you guys have been grinding away, and it's awesome to finally get to lunch.

• 2:42:05Speaker 13

  I appreciate it, man. It's been almost three years. So, we originally pivoted, we started in nurse staffing, and then as soon as COVID ended, that was a terrible business to be in. So, we decided, let's go back to the drawing board. Both my parents are doctors, my dad's a medical device inventor, my co-founder Tim, he comes from a healthcare family, so he converged on healthcare as an interest area for us. And he had been thinking about smart toilets in the abstract since college. It's like, you know, it's a sci-fi and inevitable future.

• 2:42:32Speaker 13

  And we called my mom one day and asked her, she's a geriatrician, it was like, Mom, is there any medical utility to looking at people's waste? And she goes, honey, there's a joke in the field of geriatrics that all old people talk about, is their kids, their meds, and their poop. And it's so true that I no longer give my phone number to my patients, because they send me so many pictures of their poop. And Tim and I walked away from that conversation like, wow, that's crazy, but also really interesting because it means that people intuitively appreciate that there's health information in their waist. And B, it's so common that it changed the way my mom as a physician communicates with her patients as a blanket policy. And so we started doing a bunch of homework and just kind of, you know, arrived at this perspective on the world that as you have continuous monitoring on every other category of your health, right, your sleep, your cardio, your respiratory, your metabolic health,

• 2:43:15Speaker 13

  nothing looking at your GI or urinary health, despite the fact that two in three Americans that were surveyed said they'd experienced GI symptoms in the last week, and that was in 2019 before GLP-1s were a thing. Fifty million Americans have a diagnosed urinary tract condition, 60 million Americans have a diagnosed gut health condition, and you have a 10% lifetime risk of being diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract. So that's about 1 in 6 US cancers, and the earliest signs they leave are microscopic blood in your waist. And so there's a, you know, our ultimate vision is building what we call the first continuous cancer screener.

• 2:43:46John Coogan?

  Okay, microscopic, so you can't just use a camera on the inside of the toilet. What is the actual data capture? You can't put everything in a mass spec either, so you're somewhere in between. What is the actual sensor stack like?

• 2:43:58Speaker 13

  Yeah. So the device we're launching today is Throne One. This is a camera and microphone that clips onto the side of your toilet.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:05Speaker 13

  Just like that.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  Like that.

• 2:44:07Speaker 13

  Super easy.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Easy.

• 2:44:09Speaker 13

  And from there, it has a little sensor on the top here that detects when someone is at the toilet or sitting on the toilet.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:16Speaker 13

  It uses your Bluetooth to know if this is Scott versus John or Jordy.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:20Speaker 13

  So that's hands-free, automatic. Once you've installed it, you never have to touch it or think about it. And then it uses a dozen different computer vision models in the backend to track gut health, urinary function, prostate health, and hydration. And then the last big category, or the ultimate innovation that we're marching towards, is that smoke detector for urinary tract and GI cancers. And so this is a R and D device that's going into the future of Throne.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:44:45Speaker 13

  That can image across nine different wavelengths, looking for the unique spectral fingerprint of hemoglobin.

• 2:44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, so you can go deeper than just a photo.

• 2:44:52John Coogan?

  I sort of don't want a ton of push notifications from this thing. I only want it to call me when something's a problem.

• 2:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Except that's you, but I would expect the average, the people love, there's almost nothing that Americans love more than health data.

• 2:45:07John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah. So what is consumer demand?

• 2:45:10Jordi Hays?

  Sleep score, what's wrong with checking your-

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  And then what is, what do consumers demand and then what do you actually do?

• 2:45:19Speaker 13

  So when you say what did consumers demand?

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, how often do consumers want to hear from the device in terms of reporting? In terms of, do they want a weekly newsletter? Do they want a daily report? Do they want to push notification constantly? Like, yes, you're right, I check my sleep score a lot, but most of that's just because I'm competitive with you. I, I don't actually want a push notification about my sleep every single day. I more want to be able to look back on it and understand a trend and understand, okay, actually, there's a long-term trend here. Maybe I need to get to bed earlier or something like that. Like, I, I don't actually, it's not in my daily review of my life, but what are your customers seeing and what's most effective? Because ideally for me as a customer, I would just say, hey, just, just be quiet unless there's a problem and then tell me to go to the doctor.

• 2:46:04Speaker 13

  Yeah. And I think for people who have healthy GI tracts, that is a perfectly reasonable position.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:11Speaker 13

  And for people who are, you know, having a gut health journey, so to say, the number one thing they want is, well, two things. Number one, if they're working with physicians or caretakers.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:24Speaker 13

  Patient-reported outcomes are notoriously terrible, particularly when it comes to your gut health. And so bringing an objective measure of my gut health into my physician's office is a huge leg up.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:34Speaker 13

  Like, the word that comes to mind, that keeps coming up in these conversations is people say it's humiliating to be asked to keep a spreadsheet of their bowel movements. So automating that is huge. The other big thing is-

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  Really quickly, on that, on that point, is, is, is the, is the patient experience just like, patient goes into the doctor's office and says, hey, I have this app, let me open it on my phone and you can just scroll through it? Is it as simple as that?

• 2:46:56Speaker 13

  So that's what it is right now. We are building exports and then the next big, like, you know, the first kind of B2B feature set is going to be a, like a provider dashboard that allows your provider to request exactly that-

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  But just having the data is like 99% of the battle. Right? Okay, cool. Sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. Second thing.

• 2:47:14Speaker 13

  Yeah. Second big thing is, and this is kind of the thing that has historically plagued any wearable device is when you have a wearable, you're by necessity measuring outputs, right? Quality of sleep, your heart rate, those are all outputs. And what people want to be told is what are the inputs I need to change to optimize my outputs? And when it comes to gut health, so much of that has to do with diet and lifestyle to understand what are my dietary triggers, what are my sensitivities, what are my intolerances? And this is true of people with, you know, endometic deficiencies as well as IBS and IBD. And so we are building a, what we call an AI gut health coach that will allow you to narrate what are the things that I ate and what does my lifestyle look like? What are my exogenous stressors? And

• 2:47:57Speaker 13

  then it correlates those against your objective ground truth gut health to be able to tell you, these are the things that are best and worst for your health specifically. And ultimately, we call this like gastrotyping, right? Which is like, how can we understand the black box that is your gut specifically? And when we have this at scale, we'll have 10,000 other users that have a similar profile of inputs and outputs. And we'll know what are the things that work best for them? And let's start you there.

• 2:48:21John Coogan?

  Talk about customer acquisition, strategy, marketing, top of funnel. It feels like it's sort of hard to bring like a really cool celebrity on board for this potentially. At the same time, like this might just go viral naturally. Like, are you doing influencer strategies? Are you spending a lot of money on Meta platform?

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  I feel like there's alpha, there's alpha for celebs to be like super transparent around health issues.

• 2:48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, this sort of happened with Ro.

• 2:48:45Jordi Hays?

  Cause it can deepen a connection with, with their audience.

• 2:48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Ro and Serena Williams, that was sort of an unlikely partnership and it happened. But what, what, what are you thinking in terms of the next couple of years of, of marketing?

• 2:48:57Speaker 13

  Yeah. So we want to do what Function Health and Superpower have done with blood testing, or what Levels did with continuous glucose monitoring.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:05Speaker 13

  Like metabolic health, what, straight up was not a term.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:49:08Speaker 13

  Until they breathed that into the zeitgeist. And the playbook there is align yourself with the most credible physician in that space online. And so we've done that. Our chief of science is Dr. Karin Rajan. He's the biggest GI doctor on the internet, has 10 million followers across TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. And he's our chief of science. He's an amazing health communicator and educator. And so, you know, he is. Equity aligned and working with us to help educate people about functional GI and why tracking things like urinary function and prostate health are important and can help improve your health outcomes. The next big piece of this is to your point, celebrities,

• 2:49:49Speaker 13

  influencers, I've been amazed at, you know, we have like, e- even back when we had like a thousand followers on Instagram, probably like 5% of our pre-orders were celebrities and like celebrity entrepreneurs. Like it's crazy. There's, I, I give celebrities a lot of credit for being really on the cutting edge of longevity and thinking forward about, you know, what is it going to look like when I'm 80, 85?

• 2:50:15Jordi Hays?

  How did you, uh, how did you process Kohler coming out with, uh, with, with their version of a smart toilet? When I saw that, it was, it's a shock to me because when we first met, I was like, Scott's crazy. This idea is crazy. The, it's, it's going to be, you know, this incredible challenge, but the beauty of it is no, nobody's going to be crazy enough to compete with him. And then I saw it was sometime last year Kohler came out and I was like, I guess Scott's really on to something if, if Kohler, you know, is, uh, so anyways, my view is super validating, but how did you process it?

• 2:50:51Speaker 13

  Uh, the same. I think, you know, the biblical David was a shepherd until he met Goliath and Kohler is incredibly validating here, right? Like it shifts the conversation from why would you want a device like this to which device like this is better and why would I want this? Uh, and I, you know, I have opinions on the product, but I'll say it's an immaculately engineered product and they paid attention to a lot of the wrong things. You have to manually start it every time you use the toilet. And like, you've been going to the bathroom the same way since you're potty trained at two years old. Introducing one extra step into that routine is just not reasonable. That's not meeting people where they are.

• 2:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Great point. And I personally, I don't trust big toilet. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give big toilet my data.

• 2:51:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, also, just, you know, a, like, a new toilet can cost like a thousand dollars. This product is much cheaper than that. And so for a lot of folks, they'll just say, well, there's actually no problem with the rest of the device. I, I just want to get this as an add-on, similar to Eight Sleep. People like the bed that they're sleeping on. They just get the cover.

• 2:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  It's a time.

• 2:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, Scott. Well, I'm so excited for, for this to be out in the world and, and to finally, for you to finally be launched. I know how hard you've been working on this for so long, and it's awesome to see all the progress and how, how intentional the whole product is. So.

• 2:52:11John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:52:12Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole team. And yeah, I'm excited to see what insights people have and all the learnings that come from this.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Cheers.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to improve your gut health, your overall health, change your diet, maybe you need a new job and you need to work at a different tech company. But thankfully, Riley Walls over at OpenAI scraped tech company cafeteria menus. And today, he launched lunches.fyi. I think it was actually yesterday. So he scraped the corporate cafeteria menus from a number of tech companies that you're obviously familiar with. Not only tech companies, Nvidia, Target, Chime, Sentry, our sponsor is scraped in here. And you can see that Sentry got an S tier for taste, an A tier for protein, healthy, C, not too bad, vegan, A.

• 2:53:04John Coogan?

  OpenAI, S tier on taste, C tier on protein, though. They gotta get those numbers up. Riley's begging for it. He's, he's naming and shaming every, every tech company here.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Pretty bullish for Adobe that they went S tier on protein.

• 2:53:17John Coogan?

  S tier on protein. So you can go in here.

• 2:53:18Jordi Hays?

  And Target.

• 2:53:19John Coogan?

  You can, you can search every single company for how they did. Starbucks is doing well.

• 2:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia going S tier for taste, S tier for protein, F tier for healthy.

• 2:53:29John Coogan?

  So they had truffled duck, confit pizza, galbi, short ribs, and Korean sesame rice.

• 2:53:37Jordi Hays?

  That Szechuan pepper corn pest.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  There's some good meals in here. If you're looking for a job at

• 2:53:41Jordi Hays?

  This is making me hungry, John.

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  This is going to be the decide, the, the, the big, big part of the decision criteria for where you end up. Could reset the entire AI talent war narrative. Lots of people are, are picking based on who's working with the government? Who's not working with the government? Well, there's a new access to make your decision on, do you want to work? For a company that serves Gochujang Korean drumsticks or Carnitas and tofu? That's the big question in 2026.

• 2:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Tesla got B for taste, S for protein and D for healthy.

• 2:54:17John Coogan?

  And an F for vegan. They didn't do much, many vegan options.

• 2:54:21Jordi Hays?

  I feel like this all kind of tracked.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  There's lots of different options here. Well, you can go check it out at lunches dot F Y I. And the last launch of today is of course, Jan La Coon, which we talked about a little bit. It's 1.03 billion for one of the largest seed rounds ever, probably the largest for European country or company. Which is interesting because he was at Meta for a long time. He wasn't in Europe. I guess he decamped to Europe to

• 2:54:50Jordi Hays?

  AMI. I like the name, advanced machine intelligence. This presents an opportunity for

• 2:54:57John Coogan?

  I think, I think there was

• 2:54:59Jordi Hays?

  Normal machine intelligence.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  We need a million bozos in a data center yesterday.

• 2:55:06Jordi Hays?

  A million bozos.

• 2:55:07John Coogan?

  What do you think, Tyler?

• 2:55:08Speaker 02

  There's also, uh, there's good nominative determinism because in, in French, you know, ami is, uh, is friend.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, friend. Okay, AMI.

• 2:55:15Speaker 02

  He's French.

• 2:55:16John Coogan?

  I, I think there would have been alpha, like, there's a lot of these AI labs that have just names that are like machine intelligence, thinking, I'll advance to automated, blah, blah, blah. He could have just done like Lacoon Industries. He's such a big name, you know, Ford Motor Company. Let's just do Lacoon. Technology company. I think

• 2:55:36Jordi Hays?

  The Lacun Technology Company of France.

• 2:55:39John Coogan?

  It'd be pretty good. It'd be pretty good. So not too late to rename now. Normal is upset that the that the that the logo looks very similar. I mean, there's only so many logos out there.

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, last but not least, we gotta talk about we gotta talk about Vale. Matthew Prince

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Says Vale Resorts likely to open tomorrow down to where if you invested 10 years ago, you'd have done as well as putting your money in a hole. It's time for a change to become more asset light, sell off resorts and allow character and differentiation to return to skiing. And what I love is our very own John Conkle said cloud flare result. And this got me thinking SAS companies should buy mountains.

• 2:56:27John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 2:56:27Jordi Hays?

  Or just buy the naming rights to the mountain.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  We were pitching Cisco.

• 2:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Squaw should be Salesforce Mountain.

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  Yes, we were.

• 2:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Salesforce Mountain.

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  We were pitching Cisco on getting the naming rights to the Golden Gate Bridge. It would be the Cisco Bridge. It's already in the logo. Why not get the naming rights?

• 2:56:45Jordi Hays?

  North Star.

• 2:56:46John Coogan?

  North Star.

• 2:56:47Jordi Hays?

  Okta Mountain.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Okta Mountain. North Star. Ramp at the very least needs to get a single skate park. They've they've done a pop up skate park at this point, leading into the Super Bowl. Just get the the most definitive skate park out there. I'm sure there's something good. And who knows how it's doing financially. Very, very interesting, the story of Vale, the rise and fall. But, you know, hopefully, hopefully, if you've skied Vale this this season, you still had a fun time, more fun than if you'd invested 10 years ago, where you didn't make any money. But that's our show for you today, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  We have our new. Do you have our new outro?

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  Not today. We have a new outro coming tomorrow.

• 2:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Coming tomorrow.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  Coming tomorrow.

• 2:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  Subscribe.

• 2:57:35Jordi Hays?

  Excited for that.

• 2:57:35John Coogan?

  Hit the subscribe button, leave the bell on so that you're notified so you can tune in tomorrow. Watch the full show, three hours, then at the end, there's a little.

• 2:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Trip from deep in the X chat, Snowflake Mountain.

• 2:57:46John Coogan?

  Snowflake Mountain. That's good. That's good. Okay, thank you, Trip. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Subscribe to our newsletter.

• 2:57:53Jordi Hays?

  Have the best Tuesday afternoon of your life.

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  And goodbye.

• 2:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Love you.