OpenAI Responds to Meta Offers, Meta's Secret List, Apple Scores Big With 'F1' | Will Brown, Will O'Brien, Kylie Robison, Joshua Meier, John Glasgow, Tom Lee

(01:28:55) - Will Brown discusses Meta's recent aggressive recruitment of top AI talent, including former OpenAI researchers, to bolster its AI capabilities. He highlights Meta's strategic investments, such as the $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI, and the formation of the 'Superintelligence' team led by Alexandr Wang, aiming to advance artificial general intelligence (AGI). Brown also touches on the competitive landscape, noting Meta's substantial financial incentives to attract leading AI researchers and the broader implications for the AI industry. (01:59:25) - Will O'Brien, co-founder of Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering, discusses his company's development of autonomous surface and underwater vehicles designed to perform critical ocean tasks, such as seagrass restoration, at a fraction of the traditional cost. He explains how these vehicles can autonomously plant seagrass seeds, significantly accelerating restoration efforts compared to manual methods. O'Brien also highlights the broader applications of their technology, including maritime security and infrastructure projects, emphasizing the need for affordable, scalable solutions to address various challenges in ocean operations. (02:21:13) - Kylie Robison is a senior correspondent at WIRED, covering the business of artificial intelligence; she previously reported for The Verge, Fortune, and Business Insider. In the conversation, she discusses her recent reporting on OpenAI's decision not to release a research paper defining AGI, allegedly due to concerns over its Microsoft partnership, and the tension surrounding Meta's recruitment of OpenAI researchers, including a memo from OpenAI executive Mark Chen accusing Meta of "robbing our home." (02:31:32) - Joshua Meier, a leader in AI-driven drug discovery, discusses Chai Discovery's new foundation model, Chi2, which significantly improves antibody sequence generation, achieving success rates of up to 20%, thereby reducing the need for extensive lab testing. He highlights the potential of Chi2 to expedite drug development and enable the creation of novel therapies, emphasizing the importance of agility in the rapidly evolving biotech landscape. Meier also envisions a future where AI models can design personalized medicines, though he acknowledges the challenges in predicting the pace of technological advancements. (02:40:09) - John Glasgow, CEO and Founder of Campfire, discusses his journey from experiencing the limitations of legacy ERP systems firsthand to founding Campfire, an AI-native ERP platform designed to modernize finance and accounting processes. He highlights the company's recent $35 million Series A funding led by Accel, emphasizing plans to enhance product development and expand market reach. Glasgow also elaborates on Campfire's innovative use of AI to automate tasks, improve financial insights, and streamline operations for businesses of various sizes. (02:51:37) - 02:55:35 Tom Lee, founder of Fundstrat and Chief Investment Officer of Fundstrat Capital, has been appointed Chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies. In this role, he discusses BitMine's $250 million private placement aimed at adopting Ethereum (ETH) as its primary treasury reserve asset, highlighting the strategic importance of Ethereum's ecosystem, particularly in relation to the growth of stablecoins. Lee emphasizes that this move positions BitMine to leverage Ethereum's protocol-level activities, such as staking and decentralized finance mechanisms, to enhance the company's treasury operations. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, June 30th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. We got a great show for you today, folks. It's summer. Every venture capitalist is on vacation.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  They're celebrating the Fourth in France.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yes, literally everyone is abroad, but we're here in Hollywood, California, the future center of media and entertainment. If we play our cards right, we're going to take you through the five most important stories in technology and business from our perspective. Kicking it off with a dramat- yeah, get that gasp ready because there's a dramatic story in Wired. OpenAI leadership responds to Meta's offers. Someone has broken into our home. That's the title of the article.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  You could hear it was written, but you could hear the pain in Mark Chen's voice.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Friend of the show. I would call him a personal friend. He's a great guy.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  We've had people try to poach our team members.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  With, I wouldn't say similarly sized offers, but meaningful offers.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Meaningful offers. But yeah, I mean, certainly, certainly a high stakes situation. People think of OpenAI as a $350 billion juggernaut, 90% market share in consumer AI. They're doing great. They are, they are the steamroller.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  But you forget that Zuck's built different. He has $100 billion in free cash flow every year to play with.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  And the vibe shift from two weeks ago where everyone was like, oh, okay, Zuck acquired Scale.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  And then, oh, he's got Nat and oh, he's got DG.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  And, and then Sam's like, well, they're, they don't have any of our, they're not recruiting any of, they're not able to get any of our best people to. It feels like somebody has broken into our house and stolen something is very significant.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  So Bill Gurley has the post that defined the story. He says, the company that was already planning to lose $7 billion this year, that's OpenAI. Is reevaluating comp to be more aggressive? Put that in perspective and he's got the yee-haw cowboy hat emoji on. I love it.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love post, post, you know, retirement bill. He was just like, before he would be much more concerned about this. Now he's got the cowboy hat on. He's just.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  He's just watching.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Riding into the sunset.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  He's podcasting, riding in the sunset, talking about the drama.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have him on soon.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll be fun.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  I saw there was, there was someone else posted that, and I thought this was accurate. People forget that Zuck yeeted like $20 billion. You know, he's willing to lose tens of billions of dollars and he can lose.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  On this, on this, the Meta Quest 3S Xbox edition?

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, what do we have here?

• 2:49John Coogan?

  I don't think he yeeted 20 billion on this. I think it was worth every penny. We're gonna be putting this to the test on the show today. Stay tuned. Tyler Cosgrove, our intern, is gonna be trying to beat the first level of Halo in virtual reality.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but OpenAI has incredible access to capital.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  But they're losing.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  An obscene amount of money. Meta has incredible access to capital and can deploy it and still generate tens of billions of dollars of net income.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yes, and uniquely, Zuck has incredible control over the board and shareholders. And, and, and so he controls enough of the vote that he can't, that he can't be. He's also just so big, but he can't be the subject of activist shareholder attacks saying, "Hey, we want earnings per share to go up by a little bit more. We'd like our dividends to be a little bit bigger." He's in that early Bezos era where he has the full faith of the shareholders and also the legal control to actually go and spend, you know, tens of billions of dollars on a project that might prevent disruption, which is absolutely in the long-term best interest of.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  He's not thinking quarter by quarter.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Exactly. He's, he's fulfilling his fiduciary duty, just on a different timeline. And so the only reason that an investor would be upset if they're like, "Yeah, well, I just want the stock to pop this quarter." But he can tell those people that, ah, I'm not, I'm not building with you in mind. So yeah, it's, it's, it's getting spicy. It's some mark on mark violence.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  How is the stock doing today?

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Pull it up.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Half a point. The market loves it.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, uh, clearly.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  What is that, five billion?

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, five billion, that'll pay for, what, 50 researchers? That's exactly how many you need, right?

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  The, the, the, who, who is telling us the pod?

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Perfectly priced in.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, perfectly priced in. Um, Nikita Beer, we got a trade deal, baby.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Trade deal.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Nikita Beer has joined X as the head of product. You probably know him from his viral social apps. Uh, he's, he's, he's been, he sold one to Discord. He sold one to Facebook back in the day. Now, he didn't even have to sell one. He just going directly to X.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  He's going direct.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  He's joining as the head of product.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  He's cutting out the middleman, which were his startups.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  Basically. Uh, he says X is the most important social network in the world. Fully agree. Fantastic app. I'm, I'm obsessed. It's where we built this company. Uh, it's where internet culture originates and where the world's most influential people convene. Finding my community and building an audience on X has impacted my life more than any single thing. It's unlocked friendships, professional opportunities, and it's even where I met my girlfriend. While I already spend every waking hour on this app, I'll now be spending that time helping others unlock the same value. And will certainly be leveraging the power of Grok to create hyper-relevant timelines and help people understand everything that's happening. Thanks Elon Musk and the X team for inviting me to work on the product that I live and breathe.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Head of product, but also poster and resident, right? They lost Yepsin.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yes, they did.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Or, uh, fired him. Uh, but they're bringing back a new poster and resident who, residents who's going to be absolutely, you know, dominating the timeline.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I think, I don't know, it, it's interesting, like Nikita's had success iterating very quickly on product and, and, and developing viral apps. He's also spent enough time in large tech companies like Meta and Discord to like probably be able to play, you know, there's probably some overhead that still exists even in the leaner X. So I wouldn't be surprised that he's actually kind of the perfect person there. And then obviously the fact that he's so dominant on the platform and obsessed with it and really, he's a power user. That's probably exactly what you want in a head of product. So I'm bullish. Are you ringing the gong for him?

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  You know why I have this out?

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Why do you have that out?

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  Because the rumor is that X backed up the Brink's truck.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  The truck? No way.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  This one. So I'm gonna hit the gong for Nikita.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Hit the gong. Congratulations to Nikita Beer. He's been on a generational run and it continues as X has had a product.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna start texting him now when there's bugs. Head of product, that means chief bug squatter.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  I actually don't hate to hear there's that many bugs. I've, I, I, everyone says that there's a ton of bugs.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  You got your head in the sand.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  I think it's a spillish year. I've been having great, but there are a bunch of things that could, you know, be improved with the product. And so I'm sure he'll come up with some interesting ideas and it'll be a lot of fun to follow. Anyway, in other news, you gotta also ring the gong for Apple. Our boy Tim Cook, he pulled in, he paid for half of his annual salary just by selling a sponsorship in Apple's F1 movie for a fictional team, APXGP. Expensify paid an eight-figure sum to become the title sponsor. They also sold sponsorships Shark Ninja, IWC, the watch brand. They really built it out and it makes it look better. I think it makes it look better that it's real brands instead of like fake brands.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Legit?

• 7:41John Coogan?

  No, it looks super legit.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was interesting. I, I, I knew that, um, I don't have a lot of insight into how entertainment companies sell sponsorships in shows. I know it's super prevalent, right? You'll see like, okay, why is this character driving a Hyundai? It doesn't actually make sense in the context of their life, but like clearly it's Hyundai.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  It's all over the place. So sometimes like, uh, when, when I was running Soylent, there were, uh, people who'd come to us and just like, they would just be like, we had it on the set that day and we wanted to throw it in the fridge and so we did. So you got a spot in this. We were in a Super Bowl ad once because they needed to, the cars in the Fast and Furious movie were, were driving through Times Square. And they needed a, uh, they needed like some billboard in the background. So they just put up an ad for our product. Virtual billboard. So sometimes it's like, we need something, we need a product that we can clear. Like, you know, Andrew Huberman is gonna be fine with us, with us promoting, you know, Mataina Yerba Mate on here. But if we were at a really, really Hollywood level, like we would have, if we were gonna drink like Monster or Red Bull.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're at a Hollywood level.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  I know, I know. But yes, we are in Hollywood. But there is a level above where, where, where like you would have to get clearance to use the thing in the actual, uh, in, in, in the actual film. And so a lot of times it's like, can we just get quick approval and not have to pay or not have to do any legal stuff? Other times it's more complicated where they're actually going out and selling it. It sounds like they sold this for this. But anyway.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  And polymarket of the day.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  They didn't just make money on the sponsorships.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The box office was a hundred, was it 140 million?

• 9:13John Coogan?

  They crushed it. 140 million.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Blew it out. Polymarket had it. Uh, if you were looking, they clocked it last week.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, it was, uh, the market was, uh, hasn't, I guess it's still in the process of resolving.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  The predictions were, I mean, the, the, the core predictions were around like 55 million, I guess was kind of the middle band here. 50 million and it blew that out. I mean, F1's popular and it's, it's so, have you seen the other F1 movies? Of course not. Why am I even asking? Ford versus Ferrari? You haven't seen that? Drive? You haven't seen that, right?

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  But big news. I saw my first UFC event. So I'm catching up. Jordy's gonna see his first movie. I'm gonna see my first UFC event. It'll be great.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  John, yeah.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  I loved it. It was a lot of fun.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  UFC with, with Senra and Rob Moore.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we had a great time. John, John asked, who's playing tonight on Saturday? I said, well, John, I don't think they're gonna be playing. They're gonna be punching each other in the face. And, uh, the knockout on Saturday was spectacular.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  My wife was like, oh, you know how like when guys go watch the football game, they like toss around the football beforehand? Like, are you guys gonna be like punching each other before you watch the punching? And I was wondering if you guys are gonna be like, yeah, let's just go like spar a little bit before we sit down and watch UFC.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's roll.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Maybe we should do that.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, next time.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, this is actually massive news. Toby Lookie has summed it up well. But so Tesla has the first, the world's first autonomous delivery of a car. So this Tesla, I believe it's a Model Y, uh, drove itself from the Giga factory in Texas to its new owner's home. 30 minutes away, crossing parking lots, highways, and the city to reach his new owner. And Toby Look, he says, "Put it on the front page of all the newspapers." "Well, we printed it. It's in the front page of TVPN. What else do you need, Toby? Come on the show."

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  No, this is significant. It's costly to get a car delivered. Obviously, if you're getting a car delivered from hundreds of miles away, the gas fees are going to be high, but it costs money. The other thing, you just got a car recently and the shipper damaged the car

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  while it was being shipped.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  It just turned itself.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  Now it needs to be repaired.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yes. And so I'm very interested in what this actually means for, like structurally, for the business of Tesla. We'll have to dig into this, but I wouldn't be surprised if like that, like so Tesla's famously like cut out the middleman of like dealerships, and I think that's really improved their margins. And I imagine that that delivery is not an insignificant line item for Tesla right now. Like you order them, they have to put them on trucks, they have to deliver them. There's all this extra, all this extra step. And I, I feel like delivery fees are around a thousand bucks, maybe? It depends on how far you're going, but like you have to have multiple people securing the car, traveling with it. It's not just.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Every time I've bought a car.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Hundreds of dollars.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Outside of, you know, a few hundred miles away, it ends up somewhere a thousand.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  A thousand bucks. Yeah. And so, and so, yeah, you assume that there's like a 50% margin tacked on that? And it's like, it's a high margin add-on?

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  The other thing here is it's effectively passing on the delivery cost to the consumer because it's really just mileage, right?

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, mileage and energy, and then you get a half-charged car and you're like, you're like, okay, I gotta charge it up, but who cares about that? Nobody cares about that. And so I wonder, I mean, this, this should be, you know, somewhat material. I just wonder how material. It might be like, okay, it drops their COGS by 0.01%, but it certainly is exciting and you can imagine we're one step closer to like, push a button and buy a car and it just arrives, which is very, very cool. Yeah, finger hovering over the button with that one. Get one just, but I'll be waiting for the

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Naturally aspirated V12.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Or V12, yeah, version. As soon as they roll that out. Yeah, it'd be fantastic. Anyway, in other news.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Your naturally aspirated V12 Tesla is getting delivered.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's just getting noise complaints along the way because AI is just joyriding it, just pulling over to do burnouts.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  I mean, have you heard Doug Demiro's riff on electric cars? He says that they're technically naturally aspirated. They don't have turbochargers. They don't have superchargers. How are the batteries cooled? Naturally. All the air flows through the car naturally. There's no turbochargers, therefore it is a naturally aspirated car.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Xiaomi is not far, right? I posted a picture today. Their new car is just almost a one-to-one copy of the

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're in the journal there.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  Porosongue.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, the news is.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Apparently it's selling very well. They've got two, over 200,000 non-refundable orders.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Not just over 200,000 for the, this is the electric SUV, the new Xiaomi, 289,000. And that's not just so far, that's in the first hour.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Solid.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Uh, potentially.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, just to show that we respect business, I'm gonna hit the size bumps a lot.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Congratulations to the folks over at Xiaomi for ripping off the Porosongue so successfully. That's on B3. Anyway, the last top story we have today is from Luke Metro. He says, I know a 409 evaluator hates to see this coming because Robinhood has tokenized stocks and everything else. And so now there are private company stock tokens and they're shouting out OpenAI and SpaceX. But Luke Metro works at Anduril, obviously has some stock options and he's getting ready to

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Anduril is.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  To trade them on Robinhood potentially, who knows?

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  In the, in the pipeline.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  In the pipeline, I would imagine. Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, we had Ken from Republic on last week, also building his own private company.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  This was coming or something, or maybe there's some underlying market structure bill, but this feels like it's a wave that everyone's doing it all at once, right?

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Part of it is that this administration has been extremely crypto-friendly.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Seems like everything, not everything, but most things are fair game now. And so I think a lot of companies saw this coming. And have just been racing to deliver new product experiences. It is funny to think about, I guess these, the SpaceX and OpenAI tokens are going to be available to European Robin Hood users only.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  And so it is funny to think about.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Since when is Europe more liberal than America?

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI and SpaceX shares.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  I mean, could be the best place for them to earn yield.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  Apparently rolling out on the, on the, the Robin Hood chain, so they're launching their own L2.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  With Arbitrum.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  And I'm interested to see this roll out.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, they cleared a, an exchange of OpenAI tokens today, or OpenAI stock, like, like the first transaction. Yeah, the first, the first transaction's gone through. Luke Meta had another funny post that was like, I just hope that my Anduril stock is valued at like the Robin Hood Dgen retail trader valuation and not the price that Foundry pays.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  This is very funny.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  That's good.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, oh, sorry, we're blocking the camera. Anyway, let's go through some, some of the deep dives. I want to, I want to dig into that Wired article that was burning up the timeline over the weekend and then we'll, we'll read through some of the Wall Street Journal coverage of the list, AI's secret file of geniuses. But first, we have our first intern challenge of the day.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  The first.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there might be many.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Even when you finish this, Tyler, you're not, you're not safe.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  We, we, we were, we, we purchased and, and received a Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. Very nice foil, look at that foil. This is a nice product. So this is the latest and greatest out of Meta for their virtual reality headsets. And the challenge is to beat the first level of Halo Complete Edition, Halo CE. This is Halo One. Tyler, you've never played Halo at all?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  I've never played Halo.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Okay, but you've played first person shooters?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Okay, so you should be able to do it, you think?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so I asked ChatGPT.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  The, the, the speedrun world record for Pillar of Autumn, which is the first level in the first Halo game is like three minutes, but you have to like cheat and go through the walls and stuff. An experienced player can do it in like 15 minutes. First time person ever playing should be able to do it in between 20 and 30 minutes. So for this, let's give you, let's give you an hour. If you can beat under.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  An hour? 12 minutes.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Let, okay, let's give you, let's give you 45 minutes. If you can do it in under 45 minutes, you will get to keep this.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Oh, let's go.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Okay. So, uh, can we get a timer?

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, start the timer.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  So it is, it is 11:20. Let's give you 40 minutes. So if you can do it before noon.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  So go get it and start. Okay, time starts now.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  He's hustling, he's hustling for good reason. All right, have fun Tyler.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  So the problem is that the level takes like five minutes, but unboxing and setting that thing up, I think is going to take like 40 minutes. So that's the real challenge.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Godspeed Tyler.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  But Tyler will be working on that during the, during the show and good luck to him.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, back to the timeline. A poster by the name of Toucan says nerds is quoting, on the left is Ronaldo, another post. Real Madrid spent 80 million to sign him from Man United. On the right is Jia Hu Yu, which I am struggling to pronounce. Meta paid 100 million to sign him from OpenAI. And Toucan says nerds have been complaining that athletes are overpaid for decades. Finally, the nine-figure nerd trading market has emerged. Take that LeBron Jameson.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Jameson. Doesn't even know his name. It's fantastic. Well, you know, if you're, uh, if you're on a hiring spree, you gotta get everyone in your organization corporate cards. Head over ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's dig into this OpenAI leadership. Uh, the OpenAI.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  This was, this article was, all this news was kind of coming out.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Over the weekend. Uh, there's no, there's no decency anymore. You can't even take a summer weekend in June.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  You can't even send an email to a 3,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired. Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday. Promising to go head to head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by Wired, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's superintelligence lab. "I have a visceral feeling right now as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." I mean, this makes sense. You like, you need to, you need to tell the troops that like, you know, we're prepared to go on the counterattack. Like, we got attacked, but we're ready to go back.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, is like, I don't think that, I don't think that Meta is necessarily going to try and go eat ChatGPT's lunch. Like, I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber. And he was saying like, you know, he was kind of reiterating like, never bet against Zuck, like, he's working on an open source model. But a lot of it is, is more of this like, B2B applied AI necessarily than trying to go and, and, and disrupt ChatGPT. Because Google's already running that playbook. Like, Mark can see that and see that like, what happens when you're a trillion dollar company? And you roll out a, basically a direct clone of the ChatGPT app? It's like, yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a num, in a notional terms.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Like, I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has like, a hundred thousand user, or a hundred million users and like, lots of five star reviews. But it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of ChatGPT. And so when you pull someone off the street and you say, what do you use for AI? They say, chat. They don't even say ChatGPT anymore.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  So dominant. And so I think Mark knows that he shouldn't necessarily try and go after that. But he should be going after the next thing and the next, next thing and have a model that he can

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  pipe into all sorts of different, uh, uh, features within the meta ecosystem. But.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the crazy thing is there, there's not, it doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid of, a, a talent raid of this magnitude, right? We, we covered, uh, Ken Griffin raiding Enron.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  But it was after.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  But it was post the collapse.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox PARC in, in nineteen seventy nine. Nine in the early eighties, but like

• 21:51John Coogan?

  It was kind of a downswing.

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't anything of this magnitude, nor, nor was it, hey, we're going to come in and just give you these like nine-figure off,

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  And things like that.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's very common for a startup to be able to pull people from the big legacy company that's kind of sclerotic. And, you know, we've seen a lot of people that were at Apple or Google or Microsoft or Xerox. And then they went to Google and then they went to Meta and then they went to OpenAI. I mean Brett Taylor, who's the, who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI was the CTO of Meta. Right. And it's like, okay, he clearly just wants to be in like the hot thing and he's like a startup guy almost. And I believe he was at Google before because he worked, he, yeah, he redid Google Maps. And so like the, like the story of Brett Taylor is really like the default, I think for most like startup people. It's like he's at, he's, he's early at Google.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  He works with Paul Buchheit on Gmail, he works on Google Maps. Then he goes over to Meta, CTO there. Then he goes to OpenAI, he's chairman of the board there. And it's like, he is a, he's a startup guy. And so he's always riding like the new way. You usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one other, some other precedent here in 2011, in 2010 and 2011. Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  So Facebook had crossed half a billion users. They were in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  And they went heavy into Google. So they went and got high performers from ads, search, mobile on the Android side. And, and some of the social product people from Google Plus. And Zach did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went in with these sort of heavy, heavy, heavy comp packages. And was very successful. Google had to respond and increase comp in, in a number of different roles.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Did they poach any designers, any people that use Figma.com? Any people that think bigger, build faster? Anyone that, you know, because Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. It would be a different place. But, but fortunately you can go to Figma.com.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  You can think bigger.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  And you can get started for free. Anyway, what do you think of the, the buzzword superintelligence? This whole, like, they've really rebranded it. Is it a goalpost shifting?

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  I think it's smart. I think he poached the word superintelligence.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  It's mine now.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Because.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  And he's not saying, and he's not saying the safe superintelligence team. He's just saying.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Unsafe.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  Reckless.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Safe superintelligence.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Implies reckless.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Implies reckless superintelligence. I like that. But it's funny because, you know, everyone was focused on like AI as a buzzword. Then it was AGI. Then it was, now it's superintelligence. But like, you know, within our group, like, we all think like, superintelligence is kind of the old thing. Like, everyone, like, me and you, like, we know the secrets to this stuff. Like, it's kind of, it's kind of already priced in. The real killers, they're focused on the next thing. You know what I'm talking about, right? Giga intelligence. That's the one that people are getting, right? Really? Like, the real killers are like, yeah, well, like, AGI is basically here. Superintelligence is basically here. But giga intelligence, that's the one we're working on. Because we're gonna need a new buzzword. Because we're burning through buzzwords at an increasing rate.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  And so we're just, we just steamrolled the Turing test, completely blasted through AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here.

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  But, you know, superintelligence, we're gonna solve this buzzword. We're gonna churn through this in a year or two. We gotta start working on giga intelligence now.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  This is the way.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Start adopting it.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, "We've been more proactive than ever before. We're recalibrating comp and we're scooping out, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent." Still, even as OpenAI, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. "While I'll fight for, to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others," he wrote.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  It's such a brutal dynamic if you're Mark Chen, if you're Sam, because not everybody at OpenAI is getting poached. But presumably, Zuck is working with all the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at OpenAI, who do we really want?

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  And then going to them and making the maxed out offers. Meanwhile. You can't, like, the team dynamic, if you have a few researchers on a team and somebody gets, you know, somebody's potentially getting poached by Meta and you say to retain them, you're like, okay, we're going to give you this sort of massive incremental grant and the other people on their team are going to be like, wait, well, is that my market value? I didn't go talk to Facebook or I didn't, I turned down, I never took the meeting or whatever. So you should pay me the same thing too, right? I'm loyal. Shouldn't, don't you want to pay?

• 26:56John Coogan?

  I'm a missionary.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm a missionary.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Why are you paying the mercenaries more? You should pay, you should pay the missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries. Rough, for sure. Anyway. Let me talk about linear.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  No, the other, the other thing is it creates this like really nasty incentive to basically be like, oh yeah, you know, you maybe got hit up by Meta recruiter like many months ago and you can be like, yeah, I mean, they reached out to me and suddenly they're like hovering around you like, being like, all right, what's it gonna take? We really don't want to lose you. It is a...

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's crazy game theory. Like every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  And then timing that, um, timing that with,

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  with this like summer break that I guess OpenAI was saying like, hey, everybody should take the week of the fourth off, or not the week of the fourth, but anyways, you wanted to say something more important.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, you know, if you want to see who your high performers are, just look in the linear, right? Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  If Zuck were able to gain access to OpenAI's linear, it would be illegal, but it would also tell him, tell him a lot.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't want to do anything illegal, Zuck. You want to be on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So the news comes as competition for for top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100 million signing bonuses to some OpenAI staffers, according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. So this this $100 million signing bonus, this just got baked into the lexicon. But I was listening to Dylan Patel on Jordan Snyder's China Talk podcast.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  It's actually transistor radio, but it goes out on China Talk anyway. And Dylan Patel was saying that that might be that might be a kind of a game of telephone a little bit in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making $100 million over a number of years in stock based on appreciation. But he was very skeptical that anyone was getting 100 million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus. So I don't know how real that number is.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and remember that the Zurich team came out and said, the Zurich team explicitly said, we didn't get it.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  But I know, I know.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  The way that he phrased it.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Could have been more.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  Clearly were getting.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. I do think that that the round numbers are are easy to latch on to. Like, why is Mom Donnie talking about billionaires specifically? He doesn't have a problem with 999 millionaires because like that's not easy to grasp. Like, people latch on to round numbers. 100 million is so much. A billionaire is so much and it's easy to it's easy to quantify. And so the 100 million, if it was 80 million, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million. And so so I don't know. I don't know how real that is. Maybe that was thrown out as a total package and then it got kind of telephoned into, well, you know, they it's basically a signing bonus because they they got the deal on the on

• 30:24John Coogan?

  the as soon as they signed, but they do have some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some way. But there's a bunch of creative accounting that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like $100 million of value, which is not far off from, OK, what would it take? You know, Johnny Ive got, you know, a huge offer to go to OpenAI. And it was structured in an interesting way with like an acquisition and, you know, but he got.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Just got a few points.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were it was a few. It was a few percentage points. And when you think about the scale of OpenAI and the scale of Johnny Ive's legacy, like, Yeah, like, what would it take to get someone like that to join here? He's a founding designer, basically, so it's a couple, couple of percentage points. So, multiple sources at OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number to Wired. So, I don't know, because it kind of benefits like both sides to, to have that number out there. It's kind of unclear who would, who would really want to confirm that and then what the nature of these things were.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that's interesting though, the other thing that's interesting is, if you're working at OpenAI, and let's say their top researchers have on average a hundred million dollars in OpenAI shares that they're, like, the truly top people.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  And then you get an offer that's like a twenty million dollar signing bonus, but it's, you know, it's kind of paid out over time and that, or, or they can claw it back if you don't stay past a certain date. And you're kind of looking at it and be like, okay, I'm already a senti, and I'm getting an offer to like go to a new team that I don't know if I'm gonna like, and it's, and it's unclear. Like, the vision is not quite as clear at Meta, right? I'm joining the superintelligence team, it's gonna be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources, that's exciting. But it is a big switch if you're already happily vesting out tens of millions of dollars. So, it would make sense that these twenty million dollars, you know,

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  if it's twenty million dollars, I can see that. If it's a hundred million dollars for the, for the top, top, top people, it makes total sense.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, what was the, uh, I mean, the, the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably like, way over a hundred million dollars to him personally, based on his ownership in that company, which was acquired. And so, like, that number doesn't feel impossible. Uh, I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it, um, based on, based on what Dylan was talking about.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  There's just enough precedent here that, again, going back to, uh, Zuck rating Google in, in 2010, 2011, he was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid-level engineers, just because he was like, I need a really good ad product, I want to make my ad product great.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, have you seen the, why am I even asking this? Have you seen the BlackBerry movie? Of course not. But the, but in the BlackBerry movie, there's this whole story about they go and they try and poach someone and then it was controversial because they like backdated some stock options for someone to basically give them more like cash, but without having like the the initial impact of that cash. It's kind of interesting. But yeah, I mean, to poach top talent, it's expensive. It kind of benefits both, maybe. I mean, I don't know, like on, on the Meta side, do they want, does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up to a hundred million dollars out there? Like maybe, because that, that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh, wow.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Mark is really taking this seriously. I should, I should talk to Meta's recruiting team. I should actually hear them out. And then if they wind up coming back to me with a fifty million dollar offer or a ten million dollar offer, like, you know, we can discuss that and I can see and they can evaluate how much I'm worth, they can make an offer, but at least it got the conversation started. But I don't know, there was also the theory that Sam Altman put that a hundred million dollar number out in order to kind of like poison the well, because if, if Mark comes to you and says, hey, you're a top AI researcher, come over here. And then the top AI researcher just says like, yeah, great. I hear, I hear a hundred million dollars is the going rate.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  And Mark's like, no, no, no, that's like fake news that, that Sam was spreading. Like, we're actually paying fifteen. Then you're like, well, no, like I was, I was hoping for a hundred.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Sam is one of the most Machiavellian people and.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, you see, it could be like 4D chess on both sides. I don't know.

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort and has repeatedly and most unsuccessfully tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with, with comp focused packages, Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI, Google. OpenAI and Google. Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta. One source tells Wired, they haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky's the limit. Which is funny because yeah, of course, like Anthropic's like so missionary driven, like it's going to be very hard to, to, to go to Anthropic and

• 35:32John Coogan?

  research scientists and be like, ads, better ads. They're like, we're building God here.

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Not for, not for Anthropic guys. Anthropic guys are true believers. They don't care. What's a hundred million dollars in a post scarcity world? Doesn't matter. You want to be on the, you want to be on this, on the, on the post scarcity train. Chen's note included-

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  It is so, it is so telling though, like how you, how you like sort of like try to, you know, pinpoint like Zuck's views on AI. He's like, I'm not even gonna bother with this people at Anthropic. Not a culture fit.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Too AGI pilled.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Senator, we sell ads.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax super intelligence, go to numeralhq.com. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with super intelligence for sales tax.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  The official sales tax automation provider for Lucy.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true. Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company, where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for Meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off. It's not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision. Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a C-suite executive. This is weird. Where's the, where's the end of this quote? That's odd. I'd like to be able to talk you through it and I know all about their offers. The remarks come as OpenAI's staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for OpenAI's grindset.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  It's really fantastic. Also, extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4th. Like, I'm normally pretty anti-taking time off, but if you're gonna go really hard on a particular holiday, make it July 4th, you know?

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Give a week off around July 4th. I love it. I was, I, I was posting, you know, the over, I need a polymarket on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th. Do you think it'll happen?

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  I actually think they're 100% should be a polymarket on that.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Right? It's kind of 50/50, right? Like, he is definitely locked in, very busy, probably not a lot of time off. He sees that, he knows from this that OpenAI is down this week. So that's probably like, really encouraging to be like, I want to go harder this week. They're off.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  At the same time, like, it's one of the greatest pieces of content he puts out.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  Think about how hard Zuck is going right now. The week of July 4th. And just don't get outworked by him.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  Just don't get outworked by Zuck this week. It's gonna be tough.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  He's in year 20. What excuses do you have? You're, you're three months into your startup.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go harder.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  Go harder. I love it.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation. Another leader at the company wrote, "If you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and want to support you."

• 38:49John Coogan?

  So. While OpenAI's leadership is taking Meta's efforts seriously, Chen also said that the company is getting too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short-term comparison with the competition. The sentiment is backed by a former OpenAI staffer who worked closely with Altman and this, and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements, announcements every few months. This was a really, this was key to their strategy was like.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  Always have a buzzy announcement ready. If the competition does anything, just drop a.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Oh, Google I/O is happening? Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called I/O the day before or something like that? Like, or like, oh, they're, Google's announcing the new Gemini. Let's just steamroll them in the timeline that 24 hours before.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd love to introduce you deep research.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  I mean, it's, it's masterful and like, but that's the game you gotta play. That's the game on the field. Like, I, I, I think.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  No, he, he really is the best.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  But he's not doing anything wrong.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  He, he.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Is up there with Elon in terms of

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  Creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Real

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Product value.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  To justify the hype that was being sold.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, six months ago, basically. So like staying on the bleeding edge.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  And this is why the anti-tech people hate him and Elon so much because they're like, they're like, it's overhyped. Uh, it's not useful. And then like a year later, it's like, there's Tesla cars everywhere. The rockets are landing and like 90% of people are eating

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  And chatting.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Every day.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Tens of billions of visits.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Like, okay, so it was real, but also he was overpromising, but he delivered at a, at a higher level than anyone in human history. And that's just like, it's, it, those two things are in, in, in conflict. So someone said this, like Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey. Or whatever, P T Barnum.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  He's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot in a, a human in a suit, acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing. Uh, which is just, it, it just breaks people's brains. Um, anyway, we need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to, to compute. A lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year into intelligence. Uh, Chen wrote, this is the main quest and it's important to remember that skirmishes with meta are the side quest. Last but not least, I'll be around this week, recharged and ready to go pound for pound. DM me anytime. I love it. He's ready to go.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Fired up.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Get him in the ring.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  I love talking with Mark.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  That was a, that was a fun conversation.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, guy's in shape. Let's get him in the, let's get him in the octagon with Zuck. Mark on mark violence. Let's see it.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  I mean, and if, if there was a pound for pound list for the top AI researcher in the world, he's in the conversation.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  He's in the conversation. It's amazing. It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions. Altman wrote in on Slack in response to Chen's message. Very grateful to, we have him as our leader.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these, it can't be overstated, making these decisions, right?

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  One of your best people comes, comes to you and says,

• 41:50John Coogan?

  It's hard.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Hey. I'm really happy here at OpenAI.

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have eighty million dollars of stock.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  And I was just offered one hundred and fifty over the next year and it's highly lick or over the next few years. It's highly liquid.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:06Jordi Hays?

  Meaning that I can market sell it quarterly forever.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  And meanwhile, you're going through this for-profit conversion.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all?

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, obviously.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  What are you? I mean, like, if you want to, let's say you want to buy a fifty million dollar house and you have a hundred million dollars in like illiquid open AI. Like, is that gonna be hard at all? I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management are gonna be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  You're only gonna have to put down ten percent.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but but meanwhile, the company's failing to go through a for-profit conversion.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, so that.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Satya's taking twenty percent off the top.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  I mean, that applies.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just, I'm just saying.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  That applies like a small haircut, I would say.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, there is always.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  There's always gonna be a tension of somebody having massive wealth but not having greenbacks.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  There's always gonna be that tension.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Jordi Hays?

  And people seeing that that Meta is one of the most liquid.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Stocks in the world.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Can constantly trade in and out of it and it's ultimately.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Just it's stable.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Fashion stocks.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Trusted by millions and who knows, maybe they'll have open AI soon, anything's apparently.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Anything's possible.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  You, yeah, we should, we should, you know, Robin Hood has, you know, the the tokens around private companies. Maybe we should tokenize nonprofits. I want to be able to trade, you know.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  PETA, you know, let me, let me, let me go long PETA, let me get some, let me get some leverage on that. I want some.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Leverage, please.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Levered options on PETA, Tyler right now.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's get on the Tyler cam.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  How are we doing on timing?

• 44:02Speaker 02

  I think I'm in the right mission.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Oh, you did it? No way. 15 minutes left. Let's see it.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Okay. I can't believe he got it set up so fast. That's amazing. Okay.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  That's honestly...

• 44:14John Coogan?

  He's sitting at, he's sitting at 26 minutes so far.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  All right. Well, have fun in there, Tyler.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  I just look over and I just didn't realize he was on VR. It's amazing. I think he's actually playing it. This is crazy. Cause my number one complaint with, with the quest was that it just takes a long time to set up. And I think that it caused a lot of dust and stuff.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  You intentionally did this challenge and made it seem like, oh, I'm gonna happily give away my, my new VR Xbox.

• 44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  Thinking that there's no way he could finish it in 40 minutes. But now, now he's...

• 44:45John Coogan?

  I think he's gonna do it.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  He's speedrunning.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Pillar of Autumn. It's happening. Anyway, Swix has the story. He's breaking it down.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  He has some good highlights here. The mark, mark v mark war has resulted in going from, oh, the good people don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something. One week company shutdown, question mark, question mark. I mean, I was going back and forth here. I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  In that, hey, people already need a break. We shouldn't have them walking around the office.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  The way they were writing it, it felt like this had been on the table for months because the company has been working really hard, launching a ton of stuff. And it seems like if, it, it, it just seems like an odd, an odd choice to, if you're in the middle of this mark v mark war, that that would be what you choose to do, would be a one week company shutdown. But I don't know, maybe. I, I, I, I'm just, I'm not 100% that like the, the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown. It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time. Anyway, this third point is very interesting. Pivoting product launch calendar to AGI race, especially when Stargate comes online.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online and that should be a big, like the biggest, the biggest cluster ever and unlock even, even more.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Maybe pre-training scale, but there's a question about how important that is. And maybe you can do more reinforcement learning in a more distributed way. So I don't know. Also, like, it's not exactly like Zuck is GPU poor. So I don't know. I don't know how big of a deal it is, the Stargate thing. We'll see. But number four, for some reason Meta is ignoring Anthropic. Don't care about safety. If this is true, of course. The Anthropic point was very funny. Anyway, there's other posts in here that we should cover. Satwik Singh says, what Sam never understood was that Zuckerberg torched 20 billion over VR headsets with Nintendo Wii graphics and didn't even flinch.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  Didn't even flinch.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  You know what's so funny? Like, those, the Nintendo Wii graphics thing, that was like, that was like, three months. And then after that, it was, he was doing that Lex interview in the metaverse. Did you ever see that? Where it's like, it is like photo real immediately.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  We got a wild demo at Meta HQ of all the new products. And we were blown away. I'm not even sure, I don't think we can say much.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  We can talk about it in like, the abstract. But, but yeah, I mean, none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics. But, but, but, I mean, that was, that one picture was like iconic and kind of like, it felt like, oh, this is kind of a step back in terms of.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, many more people saw that picture than actually use the product.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, because there were plenty of, there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics. Like the Hero game for the, for the Quest when it came out was Robo Recall, which looked super sci-fi and just looked awesome. And it was, it was, it was great. And there were a bunch of other games. But yes, I mean, the point is, is that like, Mark is totally ready to spend $20 billion on a big project if he thinks it's valuable. And here he clearly does. And so he's going after it. Anyway, similar founder-led company that's building amazing AI stuff. Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. We've had Owen on the show before. He's been on.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in bank offs, number one on G2.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Ranking on G2, let's go. So if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying this, they're not saying this, but I'm going to say this is the official, the official.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  AI CX tool of both AI safety and being AGI pill.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic uses.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Oh, really? No way. There we go. Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic will love that. They're like, we said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Two podcasters could say it's the official.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Way over their skis on this endorsement.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  It's the official CX agent.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Anyway, Rune had an interesting take here, diving into the why the these trade deals are so. They're not really trade deals, but these pochings can be so can be so damaging. And he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms. We're going to debate whether or not his point is well taken. He, of course, works at OpenAI and has for a number of years. Rune says, intellectual property by default is a market failure. Single, well-informed, talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions of dollars of tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. The athlete metaphor is somewhat wrong.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  In industries where patents and such aren't viable market participant, aren't viable, market participants will drastically underinvest in R and D efforts due to IP seepage, just like the I drink your milkshake, milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights. There is a compelling pro-consumer case for non-competes. Interesting. Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non-competes. Interesting. I mean, the the the immediate impact of non-competes in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Rune, which is interesting. The other question is.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You'd have to move AI out of California.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Oh, people would then. Maybe. Or they or they would choose to be there.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying if you really want to use non-competes, go where they can be enforced, right?

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Yes, but then as.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  Historically.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, but then as a as an AI researcher, you'd say, I definitely don't want to leave California because I'm going to get a much better deal here.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  School here.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, my my question is like. I've always been interested in like, why can you know, like the consumer packaged goods industry like patent like a tab on a can for 25 years and like Walt Disney can own like the shape of mouse ears for like 80 years, but like Google can't own the transformer for like even a minute. Like I get that it's like some sort of fundamental discovery, but I've always been interested in how little IP works in technology. So that's interesting.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it just is, is a byproduct of hacker culture and the sort of like positive sum culture of Silicon Valley?

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you'd think that would change if there were tens of billions of dollars on the table, right?

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a culture of, you know, competition doesn't kill businesses.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  So, so pull to refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee, like a Twitter UX UI developer built that, built that user interaction and then Twitter had a patent on it.

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  Lauren Brichter.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  American soft, software developer, best known for creating tweety and the pull to refresh interaction.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  So he created that, that, that design pattern and then he had a patent on it. Twitter owned the patent and Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said, you know, we're not going to enforce this. And then it got baked into Instagram and it's, it's now natively in iOS and it's in, in all of, you know, it's basically like one button to like include.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  If you're, if you're true, if you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  True, but now we've actually moved past that. We've moved into endless scroll where you actually don't need, like if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh. You're just keep, you just keep scrolling to the bottom. So, so we're actually post pull to refresh and now we're in the endless scroll, but endless scroll, I believe was developed by Pinterest and they had a patent on it for a while, I think. I might be wrong here, but, but, but endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned, uh, which is just odd to me. Um, and then, and then there's the other question of like Coca-Cola has been able to keep the, the, the, you know, the formula as a trade secret. For like a hundred years or something and it's just odd that that tech companies can't seem to do either. They can't keep the secrets.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  You can have trade secrets. Yeah, it's not like an open AI researcher can go over and say, here's, here's a bunch of code. Let's roll, let's roll it out. Right?

• 53:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  It it's basically there, the in the the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Jordi Hays?

  For a certain amount of time.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  Value of knowing what works and what doesn't. And so the my my like naive read on this is that if you had had a top tier open AI researcher at Meta during the Lama four build out. That researcher would have said, hey, don't focus on pre-training scale as much. We need to get a reasoning model out. And we need to focus on RL and post-training much more.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  Much more. And and when you talk to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about.

• 53:42Jordi Hays?

  You think?

• 53:42John Coogan?

  Seek and how deep seek was was was doing all these innovations and like moving to floating point eight, like smaller smaller, basically smaller numbers storing the weights. And he was like, oh, yeah, but open AI was doing that like two years ago. Deep seek just open sourced it. And so it's like, the world found out, if you found out the best practices from deep seek because they open sourced it, like you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been coaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  So two things could be.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  Could be happening here. One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  And and try to recreate some of the magic and and get a, you know, leading, a leading model or or set of models out of it that he can use in a bunch of different ways that we've discussed. Or none of this matters and Rune is is baiting, baiting Zuck into just overpay.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  This is like.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  The forty chess is like, oh, yeah, this is, they're getting everything. They're taking everything.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 54:41John Coogan?

  No, I don't necessarily believe that because I did talk to Rune like years ago. And I was like, but like, is this going to commoditize? Like, is the foundation model layer going to commoditize? And he was like, there are like, the secret to OpenAI in many ways is like the Thelian secrets. Like, they understand things at a lower level that other people just don't. And so that will compound and stay advantaged. And he hadn't even predicted the dominance of the consumer and like the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end to consumer AI. That's incredibly valuable. But just on the research side, just on the research side, like they can stay ahead just by understanding like the secrets of what works and what doesn't. But it's interesting. Anyway, let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Adio is the new, is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 55:32Jordi Hays?

  Next level.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Next level. Well, I mean, you know, we have a light guest booking today. But, you know, we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. We can continue. We can go over to the Wall Street Journal because in the exchange section, there is a fantastic article related to this, says, "It's known as the list and it's a secret file of geniuses." And I'm looking at this, it says, Mishka Balenko, Yu Zhong, Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list, Lucas Byers on this, the new guy. It says Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, a couple of other folks. But, you know, it's just the usual people that we know.

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, it's known as the list and it's a secret file of geniuses. Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them, even if it costs ungodly sums. We love ungodly sums. We should be ringing the gong more this episode. All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about the list. A compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together. Lucas Bayer works in multimodal vision research, which Tyler broke down for us.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine if Zuck spun up like basically like a Hot or Not style tool? That's just like pins to researchers together and like he makes other researchers like just do the test and then just puts out a list of like these are the, this is the, the top 50 people.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  Yep. This is so good. So Lucas Bayer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation, creation of awesomeness.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  Very Reddit coded.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  But he's a poster on X as well. Yu Zhong specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers. Misha Balenko is an expert in large scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and skiing, or as he puts it on his website, applying hill climbing, search and gradient descent algorithms to real world domains. That's very cute. The recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They also have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their twenties and thirties and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems

• 58:08John Coogan?

  that require spectacular amounts of computing power and their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued. The chief executives of Tech Goliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial intelligence revolution.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, it is funny, some of the, you know, some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs because how do you compete? How do you compete when, you know, historically you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest? You could have come to them with a ridiculous, what would be very ridiculous for a VC, which is I will spin up a new company, not ridiculous, it happens, but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways. Spin up a new company, I'll give you 200 on a billion and you can take 10 million personally in secondary immediately. And that is no longer even that compelling of an offer if the odds of actually winning.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Are low and you just want the most access to compute and be

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Traded.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, absolute, absolute banger ripping. Uh, this was, this was Tyler's handiwork.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Oh, Tyler, how we doing?

• 59:20Speaker 02

  I, I, I'm in like some kind of maze right now.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  No, I lost already.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  I think he lost.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  It's past noon.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  It's past noon. Wait, whoa, Ben, what you got on the timer?

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  I've got four minutes still on the timer.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Four minutes still. Okay. Well, let's give him another four minutes. You better finish this. I'm surprised this was so hard, but I bet you, I bet you if we roll the tape, it took him 30 minutes to set up. And he's, and he's actually on track. I bet he's gonna, I bet he's gonna finish the pillar of autumn, the level in normal time, like 20 to 30 minutes. But the setup, because I only gave him 10 minutes for the setup.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is the reality of, of pledging.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Podcasting.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Pledging to be a technology brother.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Uh, nobody is in this escalating arms race is chasing the prize recruits quite like Zuckerberg, who has tried to raid Silicon Valley's top research labs, dangling $100 million pay packages. We're hearing it again. She was like few superstars in hopes of poaching them. Uh, the billionaire CEO of Meta wants them to join his new company's new lab focused on super intelligence. Uh, one recruit has, who has spoken with Zuckerberg, who is personally courting his dream team of potential hires, describes the company's goal as nothing less than a transfusion from the country's top AI labs.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  It's all it is. It's a transfusion.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  It's blood transfusion.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a blood transfusion.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  It is, it is wild. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I, we, we gotta talk to some more VCs about how they're coping. We got, we gotta get some coping VCs on here to hear them cope about. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's actually a fine time to invest in AI. Hey, what do we got here? Tyler?

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  I'm done. I'm done.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  You're done? No way. What's the clock? What's the clock?

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Two minutes, 45 seconds.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Wow. No way he did it? Yeah, let's go. Oh, that's amazing. Let's go. Wow, congratulations Tyler.

• 1:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Did you even get to play your new Xbox?

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  No, no. He had to unbox it. I wanted the unboxing to be part of the experience.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow. He just ate your lunch, Sean.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  He did. Congratulations Tyler, very good. That's amazing. Okay, so break it down. How long did it actually take you to get set up and get the game running?

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, well, okay, for the first like five minutes, there was just like a software update.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Okay, that's what I was worried about.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then I had to connect to my phone. There's like the Meta Horizon app.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  And then it was probably like another couple of minutes. I had to create a new Microsoft account and then get Xbox Game Pass.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  And then I wasn't sure which Halo it was. It took me like a minute or two there.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  And then the first like probably five or six minutes of playing the game was just cutscenes. It wouldn't let me skip it because I'm like, it's like the tutorial of how to play the game. And then finally, and then I just crushed through it.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Crushed through it.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  So how long do you think it actually took you to go from like I gave you the box to you were playing the game?

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Uh, I actually have no idea. I mean, I was pretty locked in. I don't know how long I was playing.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Okay, we should have had splits because my, my, my big pushback on VR right now is that if you get an N64 or you get like the old, if you, if you got an Xbox for Christmas with Halo the DVD, like you would put that thing in, plug it into the, to the TV and you would be playing in two minutes. Like it was so fast to get up and running.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  And I've always been upset with how many things you have to, you have to link it to your phone, take it off, log in, create a password. Like all of that I've always been really annoyed with.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  I think that they should make you do the account creation after the fact, after they let you get hooked on playing and be like, this is fun. Okay, cool. Yeah, now I want to create a social profile because I'm, I'm having fun. Anyway.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the app seems very unnecessary. I don't know what the app is for.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Odd.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Because it wasn't like to sign in. I still have to sign in on the, like using the joysticks.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  I mean, at one point I had, I had, I counted I had like six different passwords that were relevant to play Oculus games. Because I had, I had a PIN code that was like. Draw it. I had a Oculus password, but then Oculus got rolled into Meta. And so I had a Meta password, but then I also had a Facebook password that was different. And then I had like a PIN for paying with things and it was just like so many different things. And it's not that hard when you're on your phone and you get one password and you just kind of like autofill passwords all day long and two factor codes. But when you're in VR, it's super hard to type everything out. So wow, I'm very, very impressed that you pulled that off. I thought that that was going to be a failure. So congratulations. Enjoy it.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  So break down the experience of actually playing. Were you playing on a big, big 2D screen and you were sitting there in like a theater, basically?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So the screen was probably like six feet in front of me. It was like in front of the slate. It was like great experience. Yeah. I didn't find it to be like, like the refresh rate was like totally fine. I'm not motion sick at all.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  No screen door effect or anything?

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  No, it was totally fine.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  And then, and then also break down, um, so you, were you technically streaming the game over wifi?

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  I believe so. I, I'll look, but I think it was like cloud gaming.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I think, I think the, the actual Xbox, uh, like, like frame rendering is happening in the cloud and they're, and they're streaming that to you and then rendering in VR. And then the headset's just pinning that to the world, which is really, really cool. So I have this thesis and, and you'll have to play with the headset more and let me know if it plays out. That I think that, uh, you know, Palmer Lucky has that take that's like, uh, soldiers will be wearing VR headsets on a daily basis before consumers are because the, the military can underwrite like a $5,000 VR headset. And so he's, he's betting on augmented reality glasses for the warfighter being the first real use case.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  I have this thesis that, you know, before, before people were using the iPhone for dedicated iPhone apps like Tik Tok and Uber. People were using to make phone calls. Like it was a phone first. And I think that that will be basically a TV first. And people will be playing traditional video games and watching traditional movies before we get VR GTA 6. People will just be playing GTA V. And so I think all the VR companies should focus on making the the movie watching experience and the traditional video game experience like super, super smooth so that you just get in, you can actually chill in that thing for two hours, actually beat Halo. Maybe, maybe, you know, the whole game only takes three hours to to beat. Maybe you got to be on the stream now.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay gamers. Okay gamers. Let's get back to the news.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Let's get back to the sleep scores. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy?

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, before we do. I was absolutely mugged.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  No. What happened?

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna hold on. Get a pod 5.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  69. Rough. I got a 92, baby. Let's go. Generational run. Hit me with the action hall. You know the rule. If I beat you, I get that sound effect. Action hall.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  92. Get, go to 8sleep.com/TVPN.

• 1:06:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm worried to think about what, how I would have slept if I didn't have an 8.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  And you know, the only thing that I got penalized on was I went to bed too early. 9:30. And they're like, you don't usually go to bed at 9:30. And so I pulled it off.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  I was penalized by screaming children in the middle of the night.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Brutal. Inside the secretive world.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Now, we have some breaking news. I'm gonna dive into this. So this morning Zuckerberg announced his super intelligence team.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  We got 4,000 likes on this traded post? No way. Tyler, oh, you're on a generational run today. That is amazing. Okay. Wow. 4K likes.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Back to the breaking news.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, please, please.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  So Zuckerberg sent a message this morning in a memo introducing the new super intelligence team. So we were just covering his list.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:10Jordi Hays?

  He got a seemingly a lot of people from his list. So Zuckerberg introduced Wang, who will be the company's chief AI officer and leader of MSL, as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman will co-lead the new lab with Wang with a focus on AI products and applied research. Here's the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg's memo. It notably doesn't include the employees who joined from OpenAI Zurich office. So this is Kylie Robinson's reporting over at Wired. So Trappett Bonsall pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of O-series models at OpenAI. Correct.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Xu Chao B, co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode in O4 Mini, previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAI. Hua Wen Chang, co-creator of GPT-4o's image generation and previously invented Masket and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research. Ji Lin helped build O3, O4 Mini, GPT-4o, GPT-41, GPT-4.5, GPT-4o, ImageGen, and Operator Reasoning Stack. Joel Pobar, inference at Anthropic, previously at Meta for 11 years at HHVM, Hackflow, ReadX, performance tooling and machine learning. Jack Ray, pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5, led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Hong Yu Ren, co-creator of GPT-4o.

• 1:08:40Jordi Hays?

  And this just goes on and on and on, but the big takeaway here is that these seem to be some important people and not what Sam had originally messaged as none of our best people.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Wow. That is a big.

• 1:09:01Jordi Hays?

  But obviously, things have changed since.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  I think we need some more trade deal posters, except it's not much of a trade deal, just full poaching. It's pretty, pretty crazy.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  No, this, there will, whenever, whoever writes the book on this era.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Ashley Vance.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Ashley Vance.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Obviously.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Will have at least a chapter dedicated to this talent raid.

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Pretty unprecedented.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 1:09:28Jordi Hays?

  I think the difference, the difference when, when Facebook was raiding Google.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  In 2010. It was just spread out over a much longer period of time. And it wasn't.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Narrow.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't, I mean, this is unique because in that situation, Zuck was poaching from Google. Zuck poaching from a company that still is like many people view as a startup, right? Even though it's worth hundreds of billions. So.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is pretty remarkable.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Turner Novak said, is it true they poached Matthew McConaughey from Salesforce?

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  I like that one.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, so we could go back to this list, but, uh, clearly he made a list. He checked it twice and he got a very meaningful.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  It's time for Zuck to head over to Bezel and get him something, get himself something to remember this moment by. Cause his Bezel concierge is available to source him any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. He could get a new Richard Mill. He could get a new Vacheron or a new Patek. He has a Cubidus, maybe needs to fill out the, fill out the, the stable a little bit after this. Uh, pretty remarkable.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing that's, that's interesting here, Daniel Gross is not anywhere in this memo.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Who was rumored.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Is the full memo listed or is it just like, they just didn't include this because, uh, it, it's just wired reporting and they don't realize how big of a deal DG is.

• 1:11:01Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I think, I think they.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  They would have, they would have included it. Yeah. Maybe, maybe like the negotiation is still like ongoing, like it is, it is a more complex situation because it's like a CEO leaving an active company. And so, uh, it's not, it's not like a full like free agent or acquisition or, you know, going from W2 to W2. It's, it's a little bit more complicated than that. So. Fascinating. Well, the AI talent wars are the current thing and we have been enjoying following them. It's a great time to be an AI researcher, even better time to be a podcaster.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, incredible overnight success for all these researchers. It's not like they spent, you know, 10 to

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Getting PhDs.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  15 to 20 years, you know.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Also, in a field where people were like, oh, that will never happen like that. Like, like this is crazy sci fi. This is not like going to ever be real. Like you're just, you're doing like complex math.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  Cute chatbot.

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Cute, cute picture.

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  No way. Yeah.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Cute picture that makes a morphed hand.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Look at that hand with six fingers.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'll never be commercial.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  You bozo. Oh, you're working on ImageGen?

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Why does that person have?

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  Deep Dream, the thing that puts dogs in every picture? Oh, yeah, that'll work. Yeah, right. Yeah. Cat detector.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Hot, hot, what is it?

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  Hot dog, not hot dog. Yeah, now it's the most valuable technology in the world. Yeah, I'm, I'm super, I'm super interested in seeing like what they build. Obviously, like, it's going to be like a good model. Like, we know that they're going to try and build like a, a, a big, good model.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be open source.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Maybe. It might not be.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  There's like, like Mark, Mark hasn't guaranteed that he'll be open source forever.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  The model's really good now. We're gonna, we're gonna charge it for it. No, but, but

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  He could, he could. I mean, like, Joe, open source, yeah, I mean, it could be, it could be closed source. It could be open source variations. It could be, you know, a, a chat-driven product that directly competes with ChatGPT. It could be something that just lives behind the scenes.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  It could be a tab. It could be a new tab.

• 1:13:09Jordi Hays?

  You know what? I actually like, I would like to own a piece of search, too. I got a bunch of DAUs. They're searching stuff all the time. I kind of like that market. I think people might want to discover products that way. I think you could build a pretty good ad product on top of that.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting though, I mean, it feels like LLMs right now are so single-player and Meta products are so social and communication and entertainment oriented.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Launching a consumer.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  And the social thing is like, it's right around the corner. It's right around the corner. Already, I will, I will, I've done this with you where I will go and generate an O3 Pro response, let it cook for 10 minutes, have 4O generate some charts or graphs or images off of it, and I will just share the chat with you, and then you can trace through the whole thing as you like.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  And that workflow back and forth is amazing. Ben Thompson wrote about it, how he has a research assistant who isn't at the level of him in terms of analysis, but can ask a bunch of questions, and then he can go back and see, okay, he asked this question slightly the wrong way, so he got slightly the wrong answer. Let me just continue chatting with the same interaction in GPT-4 or 4O, and actually improve and get the answer that he wants. So, it's fantastic. Are you about to hit the gong for something?

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's like 20 researchers that just signed a Meta.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  And I'm just gonna do it.

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  We're just experimenting here.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny, Dan Ratcliffe in the chat says, "Every researcher hire I see, I think, of Jordi's tweet on companies doing NBA-style trade deals, OpenAI trading researcher for Anthropic, throwing in a couple 2026 Waterloo grads." The only thing here is it's very one-way. So, I called it, but I kinda didn't call it, in that Zach's just absorbing, you know, he's not saying, he's not.

• 1:15:08John Coogan?

  Turns out in tech, everyone's in free agency.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  At all times.

• 1:15:12Jordi Hays?

  At all times.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Yes. There are no binding contracts that can keep someone at a company for five years. It would be, yeah. It would be very interesting if sports shifted to that model where there was no long-term contracts and you could just mid-season be like, oh, I guess Tom Brady's going to the Eagles. I think Saquon Barkley is being traded mid-game, like at halftime, he switches teams because there's a team that paid more. Like, that would be possible, I guess. And that's what we're going through here. I don't know. We'll have to get Tyler to give us a breakdown of these folks on tomorrow's show. Maybe we could go through these folks and talk about some of their history, what they've

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  actually done, who's the most legit. I wonder how important the, what's that called? The Dunbar? Is it Dunbar's number? No, I forget. There's a quantitative way to assess how powerful, how, why can't I, Jigster's number? I forget.

• 1:16:18Jordi Hays?

  Bench press?

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Yes, bench press. No, basically, you look at the papers that they authored, and then you look at how many citations that paper has. And so if really great researchers are citing your research, then you are a great researcher, that type of thing. It's kind of like a six degrees of separation, like the Kevin Bacon thing. Anyway, should we go to Apple F1? You know, it's also in the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's cover this journey, Journal. Can Brad Pitt's F1 movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit?

• 1:16:53John Coogan?

  It did. It did. This is old news. Also, it's funny because the paper version says, "Apple is now trying to make people, make movies people actually watch." Did you see how brutal the written headline is compared to the online one? So the online one is, "Can Brad Pitt's F1 movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit?" Like, okay, that's like kind of shade at Apple, like they haven't really had a big screen hit. But then this one is just like, oh, yeah, they haven't even been trying before. And now they're trying to make movies people actually watch. Brutal. Well, you probably, if you, if you're familiar with F1, you're probably familiar with it some from some billboard ads you saw. So if you're trying to run billboard ads, go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

• 1:17:38Jordi Hays?

  And measurable.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy how, so that the, I was off earlier. This is Apple's first box off it hit. It's a $55.6 million debut.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  And the poly market had it, there was under 43 million, 43 to 47, 47 to 51, 51 to 55, and then over 55 million. So it had it at 80, 71% just about a week ago. And that ended up being true by half a million. So, close, but accurate.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. I thought it was like 140 million. What was that number? That's different?

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  I think I, I think I hallucinated that.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Pretty well with the, okay. Anyway, we'll get the details here. So in the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  It was, so, so it was domestic.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Oh, the domestic box office versus international?

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  Those are the numbers. Okay. Well, Ben Fritz and Joe Flint over at the Wall Street Journal have the story. They say, "When the team behind this weekend's Brad Pitt movie, F1, first pitched their idea around Hollywood, nearly every major entertainment company wanted in and a bidding war quickly erupted." And we like that. "Then Apple Bigfooted them all." Tech companies, they love Bigfooting. "The tech giant agreed to spend nearly $250 million, more than two AI researchers, than, more than any other studio, thought the drama about an aging driver's last shot at glory was worth, said people with knowledge of the

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  matter." Pitt was paid more than 20 million standard, more than the $20 million standard for A-list movie stars, and will get a cut of the film's revenue if it's a hit. "F1 is one of Apple's biggest entertainment bets since it, since it leapt into Hollywood in 2019 and embodies the unusually lavish and meticulous approach to the business."

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  Which has brought little commercial success. People who have worked at or with the company say Apple executives crave hits, but only want to produce content they believe reflects the high-end aspirational qualities of the iPhone and MacBook. There's little chance, in other words, that Apple would make a critically reviled blockbuster like a Minecraft movie. Yeah, I talked to a very successful Hollywood producer about this dynamic with Apple, that so much of being a movie studio is, it's a hits-driven business. You gotta slop it up sometimes. You gotta do the kids movie, like Shrek. You gotta hallucinate a little bit.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, Shrek is not, is not an Oscar-winning film, but it's a hugely valuable franchise. Franchise, yeah. And so, he was basically saying that Apple had one hand tied behind its back because of the brand standard. And that it would only want to do things that had a polish and a prestige and that That were expensive. Expensive, and if you're, if you're only doing like half of the surface area of what a movie studio can do, you, you're just gonna get eaten by Netflix. That's gonna say like, "Yeah, let's put the reality show on this show. Let's do this, let's try this, let's try some prestige." Yeah, let's do Love Island. Yeah, yeah, let's do Love Island, whatever. And Apple just wouldn't do that because it's not the brand. But, it seems like they're figuring it out, and F1's a good example of that.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  So, with sleek production values and strong reviews, F1 is exactly the kind of movie Apple wants. It was made by Top Gun Maverick director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and Apple executives have privately said they hope it will be the land-based version of the airborne blockbuster which grossed 1.5 billion in 2022. Wow, you think it could get up there? That would be fantastic. But, pre-release surveys indicate F1 is struggling to generate interest among audiences beyond older men. Its success or failure will be a referendum on Apple's ability to meld carefully curated,

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  and I gotta go to B4, carefully curated content with broad appeal after six years in which it hasn't released a single box office hit.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  To date, worldwide box office of Apple original films, Killers of the Flower Moon, did not see that one, 2023, 160 million. Napoleon, that was an Apple movie? Oh, 221 million, I saw that. Did you see that? People didn't like it. I, I, I thought it was pretty good. It was long, but it was fun. Argyle, 96 million, that one didn't do too well. Fly Me to the Moon, 2024, did 42 million. You have not seen any of those, correct?

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Nope.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic. F1 will be available. It's okay, I haven't seen UFC 724. Who cares? To each their own. F1 will be available on Apple TV, the company's streaming service, after its run on the big screen. Apple's TV plus.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, to, you know, I knew this, I knew this movie would be somewhat significant.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  I felt inclined to watch it.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  And so knowing that it was releasing, or I thought it was releasing, I was like, okay, great, I'll watch it on Sunday. There's no HBO. I'll watch it on Sunday.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Okay, and what happened?

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  And it wasn't on Apple TV. It was, it was at the movie theaters.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:05Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't want to go to the movies.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  You're allergic to movie theaters. When was the last time you were in a movie theater, physically?

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  When we saw Dune 2 with the absolute squad.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  This is the movie to take the boys to. We gotta do it. It's hard to schedule, but we gotta do it. This is a call to action for all the fans.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Many podcasters are descending on Malibu for the month of July.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  This is the thing.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  So maybe we'll, maybe we'll, maybe we'll get it done together.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  So, uh, yeah, and, and Ben Thompson's been beating the drum on this, this idea of like, Taylor Swift understands windowing better than like Netflix executives. Have you seen this thing?

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  So basically like, windowing is the concept that, um, when you have a valuable media property, you should monetize it at, at, at, at increasing rates of cost based on time. And so when Taylor Swift comes out with a new tour, you can first go and see it live in person at SoFi Stadium and tickets are like a hundred dollars, maybe more, like a couple hundred bucks. It's expensive to go see it. Then, months later, you can see the movie version of her tour in movie theaters. But it's not on streaming. And so then you're paying $20 instead of $200. Then, after a couple of months of it being exclusively in theaters,

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  then you can stream it for free if you're subscribed. So it's like, let's call it like an average cost of like $2. So you went from like 200 bucks to see it live in person, 20 bucks to see it in the theaters, $2 equivalent to like, stream it on Netflix for like, you know, 10% of your Netflix spend that month or whatever. And then eventually it'll be like free on TV or whatever, free, it'll be even free, or maybe she'll put it on YouTube. And so it's this very, it's a very good way to price discriminate and get the maximum amount of value out of a piece of content. And Hollywood had been very good at this for a very long time. Like, you would come out in the movie theaters, then there'd be a big gap for like, three months. You just couldn't see the movie at all, no matter what. It was like, you gotta go see it in the theater because if you don't see it now,

• 1:25:06Jordi Hays?

  You won't be able to see it for six months.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Six months. And then, and then the DVD comes out, or the Blu-ray comes out, and it's like exclusive just, and you have to buy it. And then, and then after that, it goes to Blockbuster, you can rent it. And then it goes on TV or HBO later. And like, it might not be, it might be a year or two until you can actually go and see the movie for free. And so Hollywood was really good at that, and they were printing money. And then, then, you know, the streamers came and disrupted all this, and like the binge era started, and you can just watch everything for free constantly. But Ben Thompson's point is that they kind of went too far, and they started giving away things that people would actually go see in theaters for free on streaming.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  And so even this, I think there's going to be a lot of people who are like, okay, it's an Apple TV Plus exclusive. Like, how long do I have to wait to just watch it at home? Oh, like, two weeks? Like, okay, I'm not gonna go see it in theaters. But if they window it hardcore, and they say, look, yeah, it'll be on Apple TV Plus in seven months, then people will be like, well, it's worth it for me to go see it now. Anyway.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have some notes in the chat. One, Michael Ginsberg says, "Community note, Shrek won two Oscars."

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  Owned.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Owned.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Owned.

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  Shrek is not only a cult classic, but it's an award winning film.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  It won, wait, did it win best animated? No way. Cause that's actually hard one.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Fact check that Tyler.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Best CGI or best music or something.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  And then Blake, Blake Dreyer says, just got back from F1 IMAX incredible. As a fan of the sport.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you gotta see it. I think it's also the type of movie that you want to see.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Turner says, wasn't a bad film.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Nick Kotov says, it was just too long.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  F1 too long? How long is it? Two hours, over two hours? Got to be 90 minutes. Get me in, get me out.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Two hours, 36 minutes.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  That's so long.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Anyone that would put out content.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  More than two hours a day is just completely out of line and unhinged. We would never put out three to four hours a day.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  This is a pot calling the kettle black situation, but we're doing it.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Yes. So Shrek, according to Michael says best animated feature and best adapted screenplay.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. I say I corrected.

• 1:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Shrek.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Do you really think Shrek meets the brand standard of Apple? Like no way, right? My, my point holds. I don't think Apple.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook would kill to, to be able to put out a film of that caliber.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Well, the Wall Street Journal disagrees with you. They say that they wouldn't put out the Minecraft movie. Anyway, Apple TV plus has earned a reputation for content that excites critics more than audiences, including the Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Content that excites critics.

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Apple TV.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  There's a lot of examples of that in media. There's, there's a lot of tech media that's just for the insider, for the media folks. It's journo on journo content. Killer's the Flower Moon, Oscars best picture winner, Coda, literary adaptation, Pachinko and the spy drama, Slow Horses. Yeah, I tried to watch Slow Horses. It was pretty good. It's, it's few mainstream successes include sports comedy Ted Lasso, sci-fi workplace drama Severance, and straight to streaming film, The George or The Gorge. We're into entertainment to tell great stories and we want it to be a great business as well, says Tim Cook. He told Variety. Apple TV plus spokeswoman declined to comment. Analysts have questioned why Apple spends billions annually on a business so far afield

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  from its core consumer electronics operation, even if it's barely a blip for the company worth more than three trillion. The strategic value it brings is sufficiently mysterious for people not to talk about it very much, says Craig Moffett at Moffett Nathanson, good buddy of Ben Thompson's. Apple TV plus costs $10 a month. And yeah, so a lot of people think that the Apple TV plus like production team is to like, take, take pressure off of the like the 30% Apple tax discussion. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show. Will is in the studio. Welcome back to TVP. How are you doing?

• 1:29:06Will Brown?

  How's it going?

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the trade deal.

• 1:29:09Will Brown?

  Thank you for having me back.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. What supercar did you buy? Did you go Bugatti Chiron? Or you go F80? I mean, we, we hear that the, the numbers are huge right now for folks like you.

• 1:29:23Will Brown?

  I mean, I'm taking a plane more so like, that was a lot of.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. People say, you know, fly, you know, we wanted flying cars. We got.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  That you would imply that Will drives himself is offensive.

• 1:29:38Will Brown?

  I mean.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Will Brown?

  Waymo for the first time recently. I'd like, I'd been to like SF, but like, I hadn't been around SF proper that much since the, the Waymo craze took off. And so like, that's been like the, the car experience really just like.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:54Will Brown?

  Self-driving cars, damn.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. So are you in SF full time now?

• 1:29:58Will Brown?

  Uh, still back and forth New York. I'm like, kind of slowly starting to spend more time in SF.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  It's on brand. You're decentralized. You're decentralizing AI. It's, it's, it's a perfect fit. Perfect fit. Anyway.

• 1:30:12Jordi Hays?

  Did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline?

• 1:30:17Will Brown?

  A lot of stuff was happening on the timeline. I did, I mean, I'm in New York right now. I did some New York stuff on Saturday, but yeah, I mean, it's been, it's been good. Lots of drama intrigue as usual.

• 1:30:31Will Brown?

  Trade deals. I know I've been tuning into earlier. I know you guys have gone over all the, the major roster updates.

• 1:30:39Will Brown?

  But yeah, it's, uh, exciting times. Open AI, open model soon, hopefully, but not this week.

• 1:30:48Will Brown?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, the first place I want to start with is the actual trade deals. Did any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting? Had they been on your radar? Have you met any of these folks? Can you give us more context on how academic are they? How product oriented are they? It does, it feels like this is purely research, you know, beefing up of the research team. And Meta kind of has product solved. Is that the right model to think about this? What, how can you characterize like the shape of the team that Zuck's building?

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Even there's thousands of really great software engineers that work in AI.

• 1:31:31Will Brown?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  And but what, you know, even kind of getting a sense of like, how many people was, were Zuck really going after? Was it 250? Was it 100? The list that came out today is, you know, somewhere, somewhere, I don't know. There's like 20 people on it, something like that.

• 1:31:48Will Brown?

  Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's a great list. It's a lot of like very senior, senior researchers who know, who have like been through some like real product cycles. Who like, I think the goal is people who can bridge the gap from research to product. Because like, like one thing Meta has a strength of, but I think doesn't translate in like this era is they have a lot of really good like academic researchers. Like Yann LeCun's whole org has a lot of very talented, very capable researchers who write important papers. But it's the kind of stuff that doesn't really turn into exciting products. It's like more betting five or 10 years out. How do we want to do things eventually? Versus like going through a pre-training cycle for a Gemini or a Claude or an OpenAI model.

• 1:32:32Will Brown?

  Like that has a different set of considerations. And so this to me looks like they want like 10, 15 great people who have been through those research to product cycles in terms of the model being a product.

• 1:32:49Will Brown?

  And it seems like. They probably like they got Alex and then supposedly Nat and or Daniel to kind of handle a little more of the of the business side, but producty business stuff.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a management role.

• 1:33:07Will Brown?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. What what is your take on Jan Le Cun right now? How should we think about his position in the AI world? There's I've I, you know, I see these memes of like, he's a non believer. He doesn't believe in like, super intelligence and like AI God. He's a little more practical. It seems like he's been he's been right about some things in the sense that like, we haven't had we we're not feeling a fast take off right now. So I think you got to give him some credit for that. At the same time, like, there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing on Le Cun a little bit for not driving the the product side of the business. It's like, it's one thing to say that, hey, we're not going to go straight shot to AGI God. But

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  then, the the the downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're going to be living in like, B to B SaaS world of AI implementation and productization, productization, then like, go do that and like, make sure that the models work really well for business. And so, I don't know. What is your take? How would you how would you describe Jan Le Cun in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to like a layman?

• 1:34:17Will Brown?

  Sure. Yeah. So I think people over index on thinking of Jan as the meta guy like too much.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:23Will Brown?

  I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone in the Lama org who was as visible as him, because he was not involved with Lama at all. Like, their fundamental AI research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Jan Le Cun's work is very academic. And it's really like, it's I think he's like, I think on one hand, he like, is right in the sense of like, we don't have the full picture yet. Like, we don't have full on AGI that can like, do a human's job forever. And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is like, there's more work to do. There's more science to do. It's not just. Productized, the current set of techniques in terms of like the end of AI forever.

• 1:35:08Will Brown?

  But his goal is not to do the productization like he like the org he's in at Meta is really isolated from products. He's there to kind of boost the reputation of the org academically as well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more productive, but his job is not to like go train a business model, to train a model that is going to be used by businesses and like, I think people like that org fair, the friends I have who are there like are there because they essentially wanted to be a professor, but they want tech company resources and not to have to teach. And that is essentially what that org is.

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, does that lead to better recruiting on campus essentially like you can go get researchers because Jan LeCun can come do a really powerful lecture?

• 1:36:02Will Brown?

  Maybe, but I think of it more as like the same way that Zuck did Metaverse stuff. Zuck is very willing to make 10 year bets.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:10Will Brown?

  And so that org for Meta is not about what product to release next quarter. It's what are our 10 year bets?

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  What about?

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  So Meta shares just hitting all time high.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  So the stocks, the stocks performing. I'm curious from your time at Morgan. Thank you for that, John.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  It's incredible. That is incredible.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  But generally up 5% over the last week.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  What, how, how did Wall Street generally sort of like process the like Meta AI story? Cause now obviously at least the market seems generally. Excited. It may get to the point where we did with VR where people are like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, cool it on the metaverse, you know?

• 1:36:59John Coogan?

  Well, it's funny because like, like, like you add, you add all this up, even if it's a hundred million dollar offer number is real. It's like, okay, so now we're at like $1 billion in spend. It's 5% of the metaverse hole that was burning. And it's like, you know, from a Wall Street perspective, you're like, I don't care about, I don't care about $1 billion. I care about $20 billion. Because that was what was weighing on the stock during the metaverse build up. But this is like, AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it upfront. And it seems like, even though it's a big number, $100 million offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less. But I don't know. What do you think, Will?

• 1:37:37Will Brown?

  Right. Yeah. I mean, I think the, I don't know the context fully of the 100 million. I know people have all these theories, but like the, the scale AI numbers we do know.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Will Brown?

  And like that, that's a big chunk of their like, I don't know, they don't do those every day.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Will Brown?

  But they've done a handful in the past at that scale, like WhatsApp was 20 billion or something like that. And

• 1:38:04Will Brown?

  I mean, it's hard to read into like the, the charts. Like I, I think people are generally like expecting that Meta will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change.

• 1:38:17Will Brown?

  Whether that is like justified or not, I mean, we'll see.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting, George.

• 1:38:25Will Brown?

  The product side is going to be interesting because like, they're not a B2B SaaS company.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  Well, so I want to push back on that.

• 1:38:32Jordi Hays?

  They're an entertainment company. And I think that, that I, I don't, I don't think that people are, are fully understand the potential of Gen AI around entertainment. Like it gets talked a lot around, oh, you're going to be able to generate, you know? An entire movie or generate video games or things like that. And I, and I think that we haven't seen, we've seen some fantastic examples so far, but nothing, nothing that, that is, I, I think like George Hots was on our show and he was talking about how like, basically AI is going to be like having five CIA agents follow you around all the time convincing you to buy products. And like, that is like one kind of dark bull case for

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Dark bull case.

• 1:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Dark bull case for Meta in the context of AI, because it's like, it's possible that, that Facebook is already the best ad advertising product in human history, like period, hands down, there's nothing better. And then could you make it like two, three times better? It's very possible.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to push back on the B2B thing because yes, yes, they don't sell B2B software, but I was thinking about it in this terms, like if you, if you were running a company where your entire, you only had one client and that client was Meta and you sold them CRM and infrastructure and LLMs to improve the back office and do, you know, censorship and, and, you know, and reality checking and, and looking for bad words and looking for improper posts and recommendation algorithms. Like how much would that company be worth? And how much revenue would they be making just from that one client? And I think it's in the billions because it's just such a large organization

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  that it's potent, it's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI inside of Meta are like, it's a multi-billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that. I don't know.

• 1:40:30Will Brown?

  I think a company at Meta scale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most, like they probably have some services

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Will Brown?

  that they're using, but like they, like they, could they rebuild their own cloud? Like, cause they use AWS for a lot of stuff.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:44Will Brown?

  Can, they're not a compute company though. And in terms of like platform stuff.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Will Brown?

  I feel like those companies, once you hit a certain size and you just like have so many engineers that you want everything like Google rewrites all their own stuff.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Will Brown?

  Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. And can they, is there another like a tale of end of that that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of her?

• 1:41:09Will Brown?

  Entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that just I was just reminded of, have you seen the Italian brain rot videos?

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Love them.

• 1:41:15Will Brown?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, I know people, it's like silly, it's stupid. But it, there is something there in terms of this like communal narrative storytelling with a level of vibrancy that we haven't seen so far. It's like Looney Tunes. But people just like come up with these where you could imagine Meta kind of eating a good chunk of the like video gen market. If they have an answer to like V O three. Where that becomes part of the platform. It ties into the whole metaverse thing of like creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends. But instead of like Instagram stories, it's like, okay, what's, what's the evolution of stories?

• 1:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Have you, have you seen Higgs field?

• 1:41:58Will Brown?

  No.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Field AI, I think it's an ex Snapchat team. Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that are photorealistic. But in the sense photorealistic.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  It looks like Instagram photos, not like.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Full time influencer generated it after spending hours trying to create it and you can't tell that it's not real. And so it feels like, it feels like Meta integrating that kind of thing where it's like. It, it'll be interesting to see how this actually plays out because everybody will be able to be a super tasteful creator. Or like generate these sort of unique styles and I'm sure at that point it'll switch. Everybody will be like, well, I only follow organic farm to table influencers.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:42:48Will Brown?

  Yeah, I feel like they, their AI integration so far have all been kind of weird. Like there's these like Instagram accounts you can chat with. And then there was the whole Meta AI homepage disaster where old people were like leaking personal info without realizing it. But I guess Facebook's always had that.

• 1:43:10Will Brown?

  Yeah, I think it'll, they'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that will have they'll have to get creative because they haven't, like, it's been a while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really stuck. Like,

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a Studio Ghibli moment by you're like going

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  I was saying this, they should just pre-render everyone's profile picture as a Ghibli and just when you open the Instagram app, it's just like, here, we did this for you. It would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost, but then it's just like you could share it and it's just more virality around it. But I don't know. And like even baking that down into a filter. No, it can't be so like OpenAI branded now. They have to do it.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not saying, yeah, I'm saying like an entirely new.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  But yeah, yeah, basically like the the filters in the Instagram app should be like style transfer or like fully generative instead of just like color grades. That's clearly the next thing and they should just, and they should just do that. But what do you think of Sam Altman's ability to get through this? Like, he's had a series of exoduses and seemed to continue to march on the anthropic departures, then SSI and thinking machines, like XAI, like, this is not the first time.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Not his first rodeo.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  It's not his first rodeo. And so there's this whole narrative of like, never bet against Zuck. He's been down on the metaverse, came back. He's been down on mobile with the HTML5 thing and he came back from that, went native and super dominant and bought Instagram, WhatsApp, super dominant in mobile. And so never bet against Zuck, but then also maybe never get bet against Sam. Maybe they both win and maybe like the real loser is like, I don't know, some, some other company or something. I don't know.

• 1:44:59Will Brown?

  I think as long as OpenAI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, like they have the center of gravity for the AI world, like in the same way that no matter what Android ships, people are not going to switch from their iPhones, like. Someone that have to go very wrong for people to not see OpenAI as the winner, I think. Or there's the kind of the default.

• 1:45:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the other thing is the average ChatGPT users not waking up today being like, oh, I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers, right? They're they're just still using ChatGPT as a Google replacement or they're talking with it as a companion. So, yeah, I think the lead is still very, very real. And and I just and again, it's going to create opportunities for people to say, hey, I want to go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day.

• 1:46:02Will Brown?

  Right, and I do think it'll get to a point, especially with like 2025 into 26, where there's a lot of product stuff that people seem like I think we're early on products and we'll keep getting better versions of the same things in a way that's like kind of predictable. Like the image models will keep getting better, the agents will mess up less. But like, we can already use those things and we can start building deeper concepts around that. And the question is like, okay, what are the winning apps? Like, I imagine that like the real time clearly kind of thing, some OpenAI is going to do their version of that at some point.

• 1:46:42Will Brown?

  Other people probably will too, like, does that become modality that people really want? Like live overview on their screen, on their phone? Like, what's the what's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI generally? Because a lot of those use cases, like it's they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models like way smarter at whatever. It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging?

• 1:47:11Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of paths here, going back to the Clouly thing, where one, Roy is like right about the UX and like wins the market. And the other option is like, he's right about the UX, but like doesn't win the market. And then there's like, you know, it's just not the right form factor or whatever. But any of, at least the first two outcomes are hilarious in that, in that Roy Lee ushers in the new, the new paradigm of, for, for engaging with, with language models. I'm curious, any, is all the stuff around every B2B SaaS player descending on the sort of like, single interface, like a chat interface that generates software? Was that predictable to you?

• 1:47:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that's, do you think that that's like part of a multi-year trend? Or is that just FOMO?

• 1:48:03Will Brown?

  I mean, like Copilot was early. It was like 2020, 2021, like the first GPT-3 Copilot came out and like, that was already one of the early like, LLM applications that people were interested in at all. And then it took until Cursor for it to really, like, I think Cursor plus like 3.5 Sonnet, was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. And it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more useful than a toy and like a thing that actually want to use day to day.

• 1:48:35Will Brown?

  And so I think that that's one path is like, and then the more background agent kind of things are like starting to take off now, which I imagine like those will get reliable enough that they're like useful for cranking stuff out.

• 1:48:49Will Brown?

  They already are kind of depending on what you're doing.

• 1:48:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:53Will Brown?

  Like, I think, yeah.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  We're about halfway through the year. What, what are, what are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking? The, the OpenAI, open source model could be one, whatever meta launches next, right? I'm assuming they're going to be dark until this new team can, can really cook and bring something great. Maybe they don't do anything this year, but I would assume they, they come with, with something. What else are you, are you tracking?

• 1:49:24Will Brown?

  Yeah, I mean, for me, the oh three release in chat GPT was like a pretty like game changer kind of thing where it was like, we saw with like deep research that like, okay, they kind of figured out how to make agents work, but it was also just like this one version of an agent. And oh, three, you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent where it can like, do some pretty complex stuff that was kind of new to see from like the GeoGuessr thing was crazy.

• 1:49:50Will Brown?

  And having that as a like vision of like what AGI starts to look like, I think is pretty cool. Of course, from the like research open source world, there was a deep seek as like the RL craze taking off, but like, I mean, I'm I work on RL, so I like, obsess over it and like, think about it a lot. But I do think we're really starting to see these recipes, at least in the broad strokes of like, okay, here's how the LM thing can go. We figure out what we want it to do. We give it some tools. We set up these environments. We figure out how to evaluate it. And then we can just kind of like, let it go. And these things get better at doing those things via trial and error.

• 1:50:29Will Brown?

  And so like, I like, I think that is one way to kind of forecast where things are going. It's just like, what are the plausible use cases that people want to use LM's for? They want an agent to do X, Y, Z. And then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb? And I think like, you see a lot, like, there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to like sell their RFT service. There's these startups popping up. There was a

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Was the RFT service again?

• 1:50:54Will Brown?

  Uh, reinforcement fine tuning.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:50:56Will Brown?

  And so like, they're pushing this pretty hard.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  You're spending over $10 million like Palantir, uh, OpenAI will also customize a model for you.

• 1:51:05Will Brown?

  So they have like a uh, serious, heavy, uh, like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have like a more, like in the thousands of dollars service.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:15Will Brown?

  Where you are getting to essentially do fine tuning on opo mini.

• 1:51:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:20Will Brown?

  And that is a little more self-serve, um, but they're also like doing consulting around that, the forward deployed thing around that.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Is that an important strategy for OpenAI? To ca- to to kind of stay in the game against open source models like Llama?

• 1:51:38Will Brown?

  Yeah, but I think also against other like thinking machines, there was some report that this is a version of the strategy they're getting is like go to enterprises, talk to them about their problems, turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. And

• 1:51:59Will Brown?

  if the like, that's one potential roadmap towards like having more like AI everywhere is just like having services that were whose job is to like come in, whether or not it's fine tuning or not, just like make them into agent shaped tasks.

• 1:52:16Will Brown?

  Where you can then optimize the model and have someone craft the model experience like for you.

• 1:52:22Will Brown?

  Because like, I think a lot of enterprises are still like in the spot where they don't really like, there's, there's not, as you see by the like the talent war, there's just not that many people in the world or in the market who really understand this stuff at a level where they can go make it happen. And so like the open source thing, on one hand, it's cool that you in theory can go do it. But it's also like, there's not that many hands who can, who are equipped to like, go make the thing happen.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  Actually fine tune Llama four or whatever.

• 1:52:53Will Brown?

  Exactly.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we actually talked to a startup that's doing basically that, like small models for specific business use cases like, okay, you just have a ton of CSVs that need to be turned into JSON and we build you an L and that just does that or whatever. Interesting.

• 1:53:08Jordi Hays?

  How do you, after the, the scale news and then there's a bunch of players popping up or, you know, everyone from Merck or to Labelbox to Handshake.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  It's a lot of them.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  A lot of different people competing for that market. How do you see that market evolving over the next one to two years? I think there were certain people saying scale got out at the perfect time in many ways. But clearly there's a lot of, at least gross revenue up for grabs right now in the near term.

• 1:53:43Will Brown?

  Yeah, I mean, I think like the, the broader sphere of like creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that curation is going to be important. Especially for these domain specific applications.

• 1:54:02Will Brown?

  I think it's gonna be less like, oh, we just need more tokens. And it's more about, we need a curation of goals and objectives. Because like, tokens, you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just like more internet texts, or more like, human written math solution examples.

• 1:54:26Will Brown?

  And it doesn't scale super well. But the thing, but nice thing about the past expectations, you can kind of like, pour in more compute without necessarily needing more data. It scales much better with compute.

• 1:54:40Will Brown?

  Whereas we don't really have like a great way of like, spending 100x more compute per pre-shamed token, other than make a giant model.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Yep. Do you think Llama will stay open source for the foreseeable future?

• 1:54:54Will Brown?

  We'll see. It wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route, where like, they are still, they still do open source, they still have the Llama brand. But it isn't like their flagship thing, where they start doing, whether it's for internal products, or it's they really want to show that they're the winner, releasing closed models via API or other services, where not all.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  Do they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model? I mean, you mentioned that they use AWS, so it'd be kind of awkward, right?

• 1:55:23Will Brown?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much. I think that it'd be something that comes in a product.

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:55:32Will Brown?

  Or maybe they partner with, like, you could see them partnering with someone like a Core Weave.

• 1:55:38Will Brown?

  Or Nvidia directly. Nvidia's hoping to get into the inference serving game, it sounds like.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think, so, one of Swix's takeaways from the Wired article was that, like, one big development that's coming is, when Stargate comes online, OpenAI will have the largest single cluster for pre-training, but it feels like we might be at the end of that game, and we might be doing more compute-intensive work in a distributed fashion. And so, maybe having it all in one place is a little bit less relevant to just, you know, oh, trump card, Stargate, boom, I win, I have the best model by far.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  How do you think about the impact of Stargate on like the AGI race?

• 1:56:31Will Brown?

  I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely going to do is take a pretty big model. I don't know if it'll be like quite as big as like a 4.5, but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's on the app. Like, what does like an 05 level of RL look like?

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:47Will Brown?

  See how good that is. See what?

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Do you need Stargate to do that though? Or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Cause I've heard like a lot of RL is like you're generating, you're doing verifiable rewards. You're generating in a bunch of different data centers. You could do it completely distributed and you don't necessarily need a Stargate to do that.

• 1:57:04Will Brown?

  You can do it distributed, like it is very inference heavy. There is still like a lot of weight updating. You have to sync the model across. You have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:15Will Brown?

  And so having it colocated certainly makes it easier. You sure it's easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre-training. But it's not like trivial.

• 1:57:28Will Brown?

  But I think like a lot of this is just data, people are building the data centers without necessarily knowing exactly what experiments they're going to run. They just know more stuff is coming, but also a lot of this is going to be inference. We're like, they want to be able to do like Meta has a ton of GPUs they just use for Instagram ads. Recommendations. A lot of Stargate will probably be serving Ghibli like.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  I mean, that makes a ton of sense. Like I'm, I'm running into rate limits on.

• 1:57:54Jordi Hays?

  I haven't seen one.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  Literally everything like, like Google. It's like, how, how do they run out of TVs? They spend 60 billion on GapX every year at least. And 03 Pro too. I mean, I get timeouts on this stuff.

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  Last question. I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI leveraging the TPU for, for inference or reporting to be starting to use it. Was, was that kind of?

• 1:58:21Will Brown?

  I mean, it makes sense that they are considering all options, given the friction with Microsoft. Like they don't have a, a core cloud that they're super close with. They're not like there's, they need to both try to lower their costs for inference.

• 1:58:39Will Brown?

  As well, like that maybe was a factor behind the, because the 03 had a big price drop. That might've been TP related. I don't know. Pure speculation, but like Google has TPUs and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well, really fast.

• 1:58:54Will Brown?

  If OpenAI wants to compete at that level, they have to consider all options.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Makes sense. Well, great day to have you pop on.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

• 1:59:05Jordi Hays?

  Knowing how things are unfolding, we'll probably, we'll probably ping you to jump on again later this week. Stay ready. Great to have you. Cheers.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  And we got another Will coming in the studio. It's Will Day on TVPN. We got Will from Ulysses coming in. Not talking about AI, talking about the ocean, talking about boats, talking about the gundo, military. Who knows what we'll talk about, but we will talk about the origin of his company. How you doing, Will?

• 1:59:36Speaker 04

  I'm good, John. How are you getting on?

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  I'm great. Good to have you on the show finally. Would you mind kicking us off with just an introduction on yourself and your company?

• 1:59:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. My name's Will O'Brien, one of the founders of Ulysses. We are building autonomous vehicles to solve the most critical tasks in the oceans. And so in practically what that looks like, we build an autonomous surface vehicle. It's a 30-foot vessel that launches and recovers swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles. These underwater vehicles can read as well as write. They can sense, they can take maps, they can take images and collect data, but they can also do physical manipulation as well and robotics. They can, they can do kind of whatever you want, whatever you want to task them to. And we make both these vehicles probably about 10 times cheaper than anyone else in the world.

• 2:00:27Speaker 04

  So while some people are building maybe humanoid robots as a general purpose robotics platform for land, we're building the maritime equivalent to that. Humans obviously are not evolved for, for land and so are for the ocean. So we need, we need something for that. So that's a bit about us. We're based in San Francisco. As you can tell, I'm not an American. I'm Irish and some of our founders, founding team are Irish and Scottish. And yeah, that's a bit about us.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  How'd you settle like, yeah, yeah. What was the inciting like problem set like, how, how, how did you land on this industry to work on? Like, what, what, what, what got you?

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Good question. So two years ago, one of my co-founders, a crazy Scottish man called Jamie Redderburn was on a surf trip and he got talking to a biologist working on this plant called seagrass. He'd never heard about seagrass before. I had never heard about seagrass really before, despite growing up by the seaside. And he became captivated by it. And then he, like, you know, like any good autistic engineer does, he goes down a rabbit hole, learning about it and telling all his friends about it and telling us about it. Seagrass is this wonder plant in the oceans that supports 20% of the world's fish stocks. It holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean as well. Underneath it, it's 35 times better than

• 2:01:45Speaker 04

  rainforests are removing carbon, but it wasn't in Finding Nemo, so nobody knows about it, really. So we kind of discovered this and, you know, in learning about it, he realized like it's dying off all around the world. And it's basically very time intensive and expensive to bring it back to restore it. And basically, the methods people are doing to restore it are manual, the divers going down with their hands and they're manually planting seeds and takes a lot of time, takes a lot of money, and it's not really working. And he kind of had the, you know, we kind of had this insight then that like, while we've mechanized, you know, nearly every kind of form of large scale outdoor work on, on land, that really hasn't happened in the oceans yet. And like, nobody's built the tractor equivalent for the oceans. And, and that really like a lot of the kind of

• 2:02:29Speaker 04

  tasks in the ocean, whether it be in this, you know, narrow, weird, wonderful domain of seagrass restoration, or in the world of defense, or in the commercial industry, if you're building infrastructure, we're still sending down tons of divers to do like manual tasks that really just like make absolutely no sense. They're dangerous, they're expensive. And so we kind of started in this like world of seagrass, got very obsessed with that and, and had a very successful kind of first year, just doing autonomous seagrass restoration services for, for different governments around the world, working with governments in Australia and the US. We did a million dollars in revenue last year and we're on track for, for over two this year.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  When I met, when I met, when I met Will and I heard this like initial wedge, I was like, this is so fascinating. Like find like the most weird obscure market that no one would ever think of and just absolutely dominate it. And then use that to earn the right to do many other things. And I think I introduced Will to like 10 seed funds in like 30 minutes at one point. Without getting the opt in from Will, it was like, people need to meet you. And then within a few days, people were committing. So.

• 2:03:35John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Good to see you on the show, Will.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  I learned to scuba dive off the coast of Catalina Island. And when I was, I was like 15 when I was doing it and it was, had all this amazing tall California kelp. And I went back like a couple of years ago and you, you've heard this story. There's like an invasive kelp species that came over from Japan, I believe on like a shipping container, shipping tanker. And it completely wiped it out and it looks completely different. And I don't know if it's particularly important to restore the original California kelp. I imagine it probably is in some abstract sense, but it was just a bummer as a, as a scuba diver to be like, it's not what I remember, which was like swimming through this beautiful forest. It's just kind of these tumbleweeds now.

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's man, it's those fucking purple urchins.

• 2:04:19John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:04:20Speaker 04

  It's, it's, that's it. What happens, a big, a big way of like that invasive species are transmitted in the ocean is like a, like a, a ship will like, you know, be in, in the, in the, in Tokyo and in the port. And then it'll fill up its, it's like its ballast. So it'll pull in water. And when it's pulling in water, it'll take in fish or urchins in this instance and fill up. And then it'll go out to sea and then it'll land in San Diego or San Francisco in the port and then it'll release them all. So this happened as well with lionfish in the Caribbean, in Miami. And yeah, those lionfish are nerdy. They're just like chewing up the coral everywhere. I, I went, I went calling them once. I was in the, in the Cayman Islands,

• 2:05:02Speaker 04

  working there one summer and we were getting paid to like spearfish these.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  Yes, I've heard this. Yeah, I mean.

• 2:05:08Speaker 04

  And they taste great.

• 2:05:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is the good side of the lionfish is that you can just hunt them relentlessly because no one cares about them because they're so invasive. And they're like pretty fun to shoot and you shoot them.

• 2:05:20Speaker 04

  And you can make leather wallets with them.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22Speaker 04

  Making lionfish leather wallets.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  And you're like, I'm actually, I'm hunting, but I'm saving the world.

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's like pigs in Texas.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like pigs in Texas. I mean, it's actually a problem and it needs to be like really dealt with. But as a, as a consumer of hunting, it's fantastic.

• 2:05:39Speaker 04

  Oh, it's great. But yeah, these are, these are good examples of tasks again that are just like still today. It's like Irish dudes and spears going down just like.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, like there are realistically, there aren't that many people that want to go spearfishing, lionfishing all day, every day, forever. Because like the, yeah, a couple tourists doing it once a weekend is not going to do the job. So yeah, you, you need automation.

• 2:06:00Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. Yeah. And like we, yeah, so that's the kind of, these are the types of, this is like, you know, the same platform that we built for Seagrass. It's a service vehicle, it's underwater vehicle with a different robotic payload and a different model onboard, fine tuned on finding urchins or finding lionfish. You could, you know, we could have like a service that just like solves this problem for someone.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  What's the origin of the name?

• 2:06:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, uh, there was, there was kind of a few things. I mean, as most great ideas, it was conceived in the midst of drinking a rake of points. And, uh, but we were, we were, me and my co-founders were out, we were just like thinking about different names for the business. And then we were thinking about that, um, 1997 animated movie, the, uh, called Treasure, Treasure Planet, um, where, uh, these like people that go on these, this quest in the submarine, um, to, to kind of save the world. And, uh, they, uh, they, we looked it up and it was called, the submarine in that movie was called Ulysses. And then interestingly, when we got our first office, we got our first office in Dublin, just after we raised the, the pre-seed in, um, October, uh, 24, uh, or 23.

• 2:07:06Speaker 04

  And, uh, we got our first office and to, to the left of us was the house that James Joyce grew up in. Uh, I was sorry, Ulysses of the Irish connection as well, which is, you know, another reason we chose it. But to the left of us, there was a house, that house that James Joyce grew up in. To the right of us was the house or the Museum of Literature, Ireland, where the first, uh, copy of Ulysses is kept. And, uh, in the, in the park opposite our street, just there's a big, huge statue of James Joyce with a quote from Ulysses there. Um, and, uh, that also like a bit a week later, my mom found a photo of me at home next to like a picture or an extra, like a, a James Joyce quote. And there's a Ulysses quote underneath it. All, all this kind of happened in the same week. So it's kind of like. Okay, we're keeping it that.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, because the nominative determinism here is that, I mean, the story of Ulysses Odysseus is like a 10-year grind. And it's like absolutely miserable, like facing the Cyclops and getting enchanted by Circe and the sirens and like, I imagine that if things, if nominative determinism holds.

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  The sirens for you are.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  You won't be getting a quick buck in an aqua hire at Meta anytime soon. You're going to be at this for a very long time. I'm rooting for you and I think you will ultimately be successful, but buckle up. You're going to go on an entrepreneurial journey if the name holds.

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, who are your, who are your biggest Irish, Irish tech heroes? What makes the Irish so, so infatuated with technology?

• 2:08:34Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, what makes Irish people so infatuated? I mean, you guys are well aware of the high burning conspiracy, of course. As, uh, as to, uh, I don't know what you guys have to say about your, uh, the accusations that, you know, that Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hayes are at the core of this, uh, cabal of Irish people in, um, technology or Irish.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Never beating the allegations.

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Never beating the allegations.

• 2:08:57Speaker 04

  What about Paddy McCormack? What about Molly O'Shea? What about all of these people with Irish surnames? What are they doing? What are they, why do they all suddenly have media programs?

• 2:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Why do they all follow each other?

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  Why does Apple domicile all of their cash there? It's a good question.

• 2:09:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. You think, you think it's, uh, the Rothschilds, you know, running the money splat, actually the Collisons.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto is actually an Irish name. There's the old fodder on, on Nakamoto. So there's.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:09:26Jordi Hays?

  It goes, it goes deeper.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  It goes deeper.

• 2:09:29Speaker 04

  My, my, my favorite Irish technologist would probably be George Bill, the inventor of, uh, Boolean algebra.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 2:09:35Speaker 04

  The foundation for modern computing.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't realize he was Irish.

• 2:09:38Jordi Hays?

  Deep cut.

• 2:09:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then modern, modern ones, Owen McCabe is a good friend as well. Big fan of Owen. I remember they're doing Intercom. It's very, very inspiring, um, to see, to see someone like that. And obviously the Collisons as well. Um, but I feel, I feel the Collisons, everyone appreciates the Collisons. I don't think, I don't think people appreciate the, the great business that the guys at Intercom are building. And I know you had him on the show recently and.

• 2:10:01Jordi Hays?

  We just partnered with him.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's a sponsor now.

• 2:10:03Speaker 04

  Huge. Ring the bell. Ring the bell.

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you can have in your tin foil hat conspiracy, there's definitely a line between us and own and then us and intercom and own appeared on the show.

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  He just happens to pay us through Stripe, you know.

• 2:10:22Jordi Hays?

  I had a random question for you that I'm sure you have strong opinions on. Every now and then I'll see a video that's off the like coast of Chile and there's just like just fleets of fishing vehicles as far as the eye can see. What's going on down there? Is there any solution to it? I'm sure you've gotten asked that is your guys' tech, something that could help address that.

• 2:10:49Speaker 04

  It is. Yeah. And we're speaking to some partners about about kind of supporting on this problem right now. I think there's like two aspects to this problem. So yeah, like characterizing the problem. And the Chinese are, you know, destroying many oceans around the world, particularly in countries where they basically just don't have the money to monitor. Their their seas and enforce marine protected areas and these sorts of things. So up and down the coastlines of South America. This is like the single biggest thing that like say the American navies are spending time on right now. West Africa as well is just being completely like the fisheries there have been completely decimated in and around the Antarctic as well. There's massive krill populations and krill populations are they're this kind of foundational species for a lot of other marine life in the ocean.

• 2:11:34Speaker 04

  You take away the krill, which is the kind of bottom of the food chain, you know, it knocks all the way up to the to the whales. And and then you lose the whales as well and nobody wants to lose the whales. So that's kind of like characterizing the problem. Okay. The reason the problem exists is okay, two reasons. Navy's that basically just can't cover enough area and get maritime domain awareness. They just can't. They don't have enough assets and you know, that's part of the problem. And there's like a governance aspect to the problem as well, right? So okay, how does China get away with it? Well, so you know, the the people responsible for kind of looking after, you know, law on the high seas quite often is what you'd call the flag state. So where the boat is registered. All these boats are registered Chinese, Chinese kind of like knows this is their kind of, they use this as what you know, you'd call like gray warfare.

• 2:12:19Speaker 04

  And it's kind of similar with the critical undersea infrastructure, you know, it's not really officially the Chinese state, but it may as well be because they're not like prosecuting on it. And so uh on the, on the technical side, I suppose like the, the problem here is like the, again, the paradigm of, of maritime operations is kind of, you know, is, is stuck and it's, it's broken, right? It's, you know, you could probably characterize it, we call it this, the heavy tech bottleneck, right? So basically any mission you want to do in the ocean kind of has like a few um features around it, it like, it, it generally uh, you know, relies on these expensive manned assets.

• 2:12:56Speaker 04

  So these could be airplanes like P three Orion's, or they could be um, you know, expensive uh, national security quarters, these big coast guard quarters, these hundred foot, two hundred foot long vehicles. And uh, these costs like tens of millions um to, you know, in capex, and then the running cost for them on a day is like tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to run daily. And then you use these things as like a platform on which you put sensors um, uh, or you, you use it like an unmanned system, and that's kind of like what it relies on. So it's like small numbers of very expensive assets, whereas the way we're seeing autonomy going around the world, whether it be like self-driving transport networks, like self-driving cars or drones in Ukraine.

• 2:13:36Speaker 04

  It's like we're moving away from these small networks of exclusive vehicles to large networks of small autonomous vehicles, right? So it's like going from buses and trains to like a network of Waymos or Tesla robotaxis, uh, you know, on the battlefield, it's moving away from fighter jets to like a, a bajillion Neos drones. Um, you know, it's like, it's like, this is like just the way we're going, but that hasn't really happened yet in the ocean. And the limiting factor, we think, is that um, basically drones are still like crazy expensive in the ocean, unmanned systems are crazy expensive. Even if you want to buy, you know, the, the sexiest unmanned surface vehicle, you're still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater vehicles, you're spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. And but we haven't had like a D G I yet for the ocean, right?

• 2:14:16Speaker 04

  We haven't had someone that really completely collapsed costs to the degree that you can buy fleets instead of single units, so. Again, that's kind of like what we're trying to position ourselves as is like this person you can buy if you're like the Argentinian Navy and your fisheries is just getting obliterated. You can buy like a swarm of surface and subsea vehicles to kind of solve the problem for the fraction of a cost you purchase a manned asset for that works 24/7 with zero optics and just controlled over Satcom.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  How much is the problem that people, you know, these governments don't know something is happening or they know, but it's 30 boats that have showed up somewhere and they're just going to fish, you know, and basically decimate all life until they're maybe pushed away by a boat like what it what is I can see the technology angle of getting just like more coverage and knowing more about what's happening in these different areas, but it feels like there needs to be more will from the government as well to just say like, we're not going to let this happen.

• 2:15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the the will is like certainly there. It's just they do. They don't have the budget on current assets like it like, you know, like some of these like if you want to buy more of these like, like boats that they would need or these planes that they need to like survey or get like awareness on the area. These are like tens of millions, not hundreds of millions for some of these assets and the Argentinian Navy just doesn't have that kind of money. So they know that in general, there's a problem there, but they just don't have enough assets out there. I mean, it's crazy that like most of the Argentinian Air Force's time is now spent on looking for Chinese ships over their waters. It's it's them. So it's like, they just, yeah, they don't have the money. So yeah, you really do need cheaper solutions for these types of folks.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  What other what other stories are you are you tracking or kind of problems globally that that you think your tech can?

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  I want to hear about like this big shipbuilding bill. Like, how does the new budget fit in? What are you tracking in DC? I know you're still an early stage company, but I imagine that the the long term has to be figure out a way to get to program of record, work with the DOD, but break it down. How are you actually thinking about that? Because it feels like there's a lot of different applications. You got to stay dual use. You got to stay agile while you're building the underlying tech. But what are you? What are you looking at in DC?

• 2:16:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, like for us on the kind of um government BD side, there's there's kind of three plates that we're always spinning, right? There's like the the DC plate, there's the like operator or warfighter end user state, and then there's like the acquisition sta- uh teams. It's that place. So we're always just like in constant dialogue and with like, you know, different members of these these three and these bodies. So, yeah, the the the most recent um, you know, appropriation for for defence is very interesting. And there's uh many, many billions uh going to um maritime unmanned systems, particularly surface vehicles and underwater vehicles. I think there's a general recognition um on the hill right now that like, you know, the you know, the Chinese are producing like hundreds of ships per per year.

• 2:17:24Speaker 04

  And uh, you know, US is producing one ship per year and not like trying to bu- beat them on shipbuilding is like probably not feasible. We're not going to ramp up that production that quickly. We need to just play a different game. And I think they're seeing like unmanned systems as like the the way to that. And so, um, yeah, just this week it was announced again, and another um nine billion. Um, you know, a few months ago as well, there was another four billion allocated to this line item. So, um, yeah, there are the things that that that we're tracking. There's some some existing um programmer records that are already set up that um that were, you know, in the kind of running to um to kind of to kind of challenge for and uh get a get a position on.

• 2:18:03Speaker 04

  And uh, there's also talk of some new ones being set up for these some of these newer categories of vehicles that haven't been developed yet. But, yeah, out of the three plates that we're spinning right now, it's, you know, generally that, you know, you you you do want to have like um a presence in DC, kind of like at this early stage. It's not the main focus. The main focus is refining our product with the end user, understanding what their needs are and building building to spec. And so that's kind of like our main focus right now. And so we can speak to some some folks in Navy about that. And and uh members of DHS and Department of Homeland Security and other other groups as well on this. And so they're kind of our our main focuses right now in that front.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Probability P Atlantis. What's the probability that you guys find it?

• 2:18:47Speaker 04

  Uh, I think, I think, uh, very high. Um, I think it's probably.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Very high. You think that Atlantis exists?

• 2:18:56Speaker 04

  Yes, I think there's like two very good candidates for Atlantis.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:59Speaker 04

  There is one, um, structure in Mauritania in, um, modern, modern day Mauritania. I call the RICAT structure. Um, so the RICAT structure is basically three concentric rings in, um, the middle of the desert with salt deposits and between each of them. It looks manmade. You can see it from space. You can look up the RICAT structure or I C H A T. And, uh, the only description, the only description we have from, of Atlantis is actually from Plato. Plato describes it as being this like walled city full of gold with, you know, built with the kind of this city hall being at the middle of three concentric rings. The ring, you know, the rings were each filled with, um, seawater.

• 2:19:39Speaker 04

  And, um, modern day Mauritania is also where, um, the richest, uh, the richest, uh, man that ever lived, existed. So there was this Mauritanian king who had, um, more gold. He would have been the, I think the, you know, the first trillionaire. Um, and, uh, yeah.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  That's here for.

• 2:19:57Speaker 04

  And, uh, and he, uh, and, and, and so that, that's the gold part of it. The RICAT structure, the three rings of that part of it. And then there's also these, all these like salt strations all the way from the coastline in West Africa to this location. So it's kind of the theory that there was this, um, there was this, uh, apocalyptic event about 11,500 years ago called the, related to the comet hitting the earth and, uh, Atlantis was there. There was a great flood. And, uh, this, this city was, um, lost. So, um, that's, that's one location. The other one is in, is in, um, the Atlantic Ocean, um, which then would lead to some of the first survivors potentially leaving the Atlantis and going to Ireland and to set up the, the next modern day civilization.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. We're bringing it back. Uh, this is fantastic. Next time we're getting to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. Uh, but thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Well. Great having you on, Will.

• 2:20:48Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us, folks.

• 2:20:49John Coogan?

  Cheers. Bye. Really quickly, let me, when we find Atlantis, you know what we're doing?

• 2:20:53Jordi Hays?

  The cure for male loneliness being called lads.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Lads, yeah.

• 2:20:57Jordi Hays?

  What are we doing? What's the first thing we're gonna do?

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  The first thing, set up a wander.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  You gotta find your happy place.

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring reviews, hotel grand amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation no better.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  A video dropping with Wander this week.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:21:12Jordi Hays?

  That I cannot wait to release.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  And we have a new guest dropping on the stream.

• 2:21:16Jordi Hays?

  We are surrounded by journalists.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we're gonna bring in Kylie. Kylie did the reporting that we covered.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for Wired, covering the leaked, uh, the leaked memo.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  So, let's bring her on in. There she is. What's happening?

• 2:21:35John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:21:36Speaker 05

  Hello. Hello, my first time. Thanks for having me.

• 2:21:39Jordi Hays?

  First of many, hopefully. Uh, how's the day going? You been scooping? Scooping up a storm?

• 2:21:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's been busy. Um, just that this morning and tweeting nonstop and now you guys.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Uh, so what did your, what did your weekend look like? What's the?

• 2:21:56Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 2:21:56Jordi Hays?

  What's, like, break down, like, a, a, a weekend of, of scoops?

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  It's pushing a Signal messenger to the max.

• 2:22:06Speaker 05

  Um, well, it was Pride Weekend here in San Francisco, so that wasn't, uh, fun to combine. I helped a friend move and then I got the first scoop and ran to Pride and Dolores, drank a bunch of White Claws, ran home, slept for 12 hours, and, um, my editor got to scoop. Then we're scooping again, Monday, first thing in the morning, scooping again.

• 2:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so what?

• 2:22:27Speaker 05

  Such is the vibe.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Everything's been moving quickly. What was the first scoop? And, and maybe, like, break that down?

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, so I think that was Friday. I reported on a research paper that's not being released at OpenAI, cause it talks about the definition of AGI, and, uh, sources have said that allegedly managers were saying that the Microsoft deal and those negation, negotiations were a reason for not releasing that paper. And it's really, really tense, as the Journal and Reuters have reported, those negotiations. Then Saturday, four OpenAI researchers went to Meta's new lab. Sunday, uh, Mark Chen, uh, an executive at OpenAI, sent out a memo saying they're basically, Meta's basically robbing our home. Uh, my editor published that one. And this morning, Mark Zuckerberg sent out a list of all his new hires. It's been fun.

• 2:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Huge. So we got to ask, who's your source? Not you guys. You're not going on the record as you guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So, um, yeah, I'm curious kind of what you expect next in this saga. Do you expect? I mean, it clearly OpenAI is not seeing Zuck announced his current list and being like, okay, we're safe now. We don't, you know, we don't have to worry. But at the same time, you know, it's very possible that the worst is behind them.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, my question, I talked to Will about this, was just like, were you surprised that the memo didn't lean more on the fact that this has happened like three or four times at OpenAI? And they've gotten through it every time? Like, I would be leaning on the fact that like, yeah, Dario left. Elon started XAI. Thinking Machines exists. SSI exists. We still have 90% penetration in consumer AI. Walk down the street, ask someone what they use for AI. They're not even going to say OpenAI or ChatGPT. They're just going to say chat. And, and just leaning into that, that, that, hey, we are this compounding dominant force in consumer AI. This is the place that

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  you want to stay and be, as opposed to getting, I think, a little bit more in the weeds of like, the nature of the deal. It felt like an appeal, maybe not respeaking the missionary element.

• 2:24:39Jordi Hays?

  It was just very defensive and came across. I mean, they were clearly scared.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It seemed very focused on like the, the, the, the actual dynamics of like, how, how one of these offers comes together, as opposed to just, um, just reiterating the strengths. That like, here you get to work on the consumer product in AI.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was, it was like, a lot of messaging around, please talk to us if you're, if you're getting offers versus, let's rally, let's, let's all be in the, like, let's ride.

• 2:25:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's, you know, a big part of it came over the weekends. Like, these people are just, these executives are scrambling to tell staff, like, for the love of God, do not talk to anyone at Meta and sign any offers. And they're going on this, like, week-long break next week. So I think they were just trying to get ahead of that. But I think that your guys' argument, that's right. I think it's just like a very emotional, high-stress time. They're trying to ship to very large models. And Mark Zuckerberg is coming in, calling employees directly and offering millions and millions and millions of dollars. So I think, like, their response is emotional and defensive because it's, like, just so high-stress. But that would have been a good tactic, and I don't doubt it's coming eventually.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  How, how solid do you think you are on the $100 million offer? That's been floated multiple times.

• 2:25:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  And we were kind of digging through the game theory of it. Like, in, in one way, it benefits Sam to get that number out because if someone, if Mark tries to poach someone for 50, they might be like, "Ah, I've been hearing that everyone's getting 100." Like, come on. I thought I was one of your top guys. I thought I was near the top of your list. And then, and then, you know, in, in some ways, it benefits Mark because, at, at Meta, because if you're hearing about these $100 million offers, you might be more willing to take that preliminary phone call because you know that they are ready to put money where their mouth is. And so it, it kind of benefits both sides. Dylan Patel was on a podcast a couple of days ago talking about how they're not really sending $100 million wire with cash on day one,

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  that there's earnouts to these structures and they can claw it back if you don't say. And so how much nuance do you think there is on, on that number specifically? Because it's certainly headline grabbing. The, the, the Wall Street Journal, I mean, they, they put it in the special infographic right here.

• 2:26:54Speaker 05

  Heck, yeah.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Because 100 million is a nice round number and it reads very well and it works in a headline. But I'm just wondering if you think, if you think it's 100% real or 50/50 or there's more nuance to it.

• 2:27:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, so my take is the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, both printed that number, and they have really, really rigorous editorial standards to get to print. So they must have seen something, some high-level sources that proved to them that that number is real. I, for one, have not seen that number, and for me, I would have to see an offer letter with that number. But knowing how tech salaries work, I don't think it's just like a wire transfer. It's, you know, going to be golden handcuffs. It's going to be over a certain amount of time. And, you know, the information had a really good story, breaking down, you know, researcher salaries. And just imagine if you came to OpenAI a couple of years ago at 80 billion, 40 billion valuation, and what that is now. They don't really need, you know, all this crazy money from Meta.

• 2:27:50Speaker 05

  But it is attention-grabbing, attention-grabbing, for sure.

• 2:27:54Jordi Hays?

  It's also just funny, when you say $100 million for one person, it sounds like a lot. But if you were to say, "We're going to spend $5 billion to put together a team that is super core to our entire business and win," it doesn't feel nearly as significant for a company that is a multi-trillion-dollar company. So.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  I'm looking at the WhatsApp acquisition price and number of employees. I'm pretty sure they paid more than $100 million per person. Because it was $19 billion, $4 billion in cash, $14 billion in Facebook shares, which are probably worth like $120 billion now, because this is in 2014. And at the time, WhatsApp was a remarkably lean team with around 50 employees. So, I mean, not far off. I mean, what if they had...

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Slightly different comp, though, just given that they were buying a product with...

• 2:28:46John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, yeah, the product's super valuable. But, you know, the researchers that can build an X model and bring Llama to the frontier makes a lot of sense. What else should we dig into here?

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  I think that was it. Any... yeah. I don't know if you touched on this specifically, but any like specific predictions about what comes next? Are you just waiting for one of your little birdies to send you a note?

• 2:29:13Speaker 05

  Well, if you're watching birdies, my signal is at Kylie dot O one. I will be impressed if they get someone of Ilya's, Ilya Sutskever's capabilities. I think that the people who want to build superintelligence are true believers. And you're giving them a value proposition of we will give you so much money, but you're making superintelligence for Mark Zuckerberg. And I think that some of the best brains that really believe in AGIs is prosperous future, or you know, perhaps the end of humanity, don't necessarily want to do that for Mark Zuckerberg. So I will be impressed if he gets one of those minds. He still has about 50 people he wants to hire for this team. So it's just going to keep coming. I think a lot of them are going to continue coming from the top labs.

• 2:29:57Speaker 05

  But what the vision is, what Mark's vision is, I'm waiting to see, so.

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  What about last question? What about Daniel Gross? It had been initially reported, but but he wasn't on the wasn't on the list that that you released earlier.

• 2:30:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I noticed that neither was the the team from Switzerland. I'm going to guess this is pure speculation for Switzerland. They have EU laws that make it strange to employ them right away. But for Daniel Gross, I'm not sure what happened. I saw that was reported by the information with Nat Friedman. I tried to be in touch with anyone who could tell me if Daniel's going, but he wasn't on the list. So I guess we'll see.

• 2:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Very cool. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you start getting some major offers. I can see the the AI researcher space is heating up, the AI journalist. It might be the next domino to fall, so.

• 2:30:49Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  We're here, we're here to help talk you through any any sort of offers that you might get.

• 2:30:55Speaker 05

  Perfect, you guys can take a percent, we'll work it out.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Awesome. Well, great, great having you on and yeah, excited to follow the rest of your reporting this week.

• 2:31:04Speaker 05

  Thanks, y'all.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Bye.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  Next we have Joshua.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  From Chai Discovery with a big launch this week. It's always tough to to launch when the biggest trade deal in tech history is going down. Not even a trade deal, the biggest poaching.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  We keep calling it a trade deal.

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  It was not.

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  Not much on the other side of the trade.

• 2:31:24Jordi Hays?

  It was a non-consensual trade deal.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  It's a, it's more of like a draft and stock is just drafting from the entire league.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  I take 12 of your best people.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:35Jordi Hays?

  For nothing.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's kind of just building an all-star, an all-star roster. It's like All-Star Weekend over at Meta this week. Anyway, Joshua, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:31:44Speaker 06

  I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:31:48Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  Kick us off.

• 2:31:51Jordi Hays?

  Great work, you know, launching on on such a wild day in in tech history. But we are here.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  Is the time run really getting like completely steamrolled by this story or?

• 2:32:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. It feels like that. Maybe.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  I feel like there's also people on vacation and stuff, but break it down for us. What is the big news?

• 2:32:09Speaker 06

  Well, the big news is we've just announced Chai 2, which is our latest foundation model at at Chai Discovery. Chai 2 is actually allowing us to now generate antibody sequences with a success rate that's high enough for us to skip the usual high throughput lab testing. This means that you can go take a target, put that into our model, go generate a set of potential protein sequences and then test them in the lab. And they tend to work with extremely high hit rates. Previous methods were like 0.1% or so. So you'd have to screen, you know, hundreds of thousands to to potentially find something. But here the hit rates are actually upwards of 15%, approaching 20% of of success.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Break down some immediate applications of that tech across maybe different types of categories.

• 2:32:55John Coogan?

  You want to, you want to ask him about making more more potent testosterone?

• 2:32:59Jordi Hays?

  That, maybe we get to that next.

• 2:33:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe that's the right spin out. TVP incubation, we said we would never incubate it. I think one thing that we're really passionate about is going after areas that are really hard to do today. So, you know, like this allows us to do things faster and cheaper potentially, but I think what's really going to be game changing is just opening up new kinds of biology that wasn't possible before. So we've got scientists that are like, you know, maybe working for years trying to enable a certain class of drug program. And if we can now use machine learning to jump to to potential solutions, that could really just really kind of push up the bar of what people need to do. I think it's take a step back, like look at what happened with LLMs. Everyone has to be an AI company now to compete, right?

• 2:33:47Speaker 06

  What's that going to look like in biotech where if you don't have access to a technology like this? And then you start to have these certain areas that are closed out to you, like what is that going to look like? So I think that that's something that we are really excited to figure out.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  So if we benchmark it to the LLM market, do you see yourself taking more of an anthropic path or an open AI path? And what I mean by that is, or do you develop the drugs? Do you wind up being the front end to this and kind of being full stack? Or do you go more like B to B and you have a bunch of pharma companies or, you know, traditional biotech companies that are buying a product or service from you?

• 2:34:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think if we take any lesson from the LLM market, it's that the winners are going to be the ones who are most agile. The technology is evolving at a faster clip than we ever expected. Our our company goal for this entire year was to get to a 1% success rate on this task. And, you know, we're halfway into the year and we're already past 15%. When you have progress like that, it is really hard to predict like how the market is going to evolve. And that's why I think just like being flexible, making sure that we have the best technology, making sure that we have the best way to use that technology as well. You know, it's not just throwing a model over the wall and you get a drug. We really have to make the models work well for the specific applications where they're most important. And we also have to make them much easier to use. We have to get them into the right people's hands.

• 2:35:06Speaker 06

  There's a lot of scientists that if we can bring their creativity and ingenuity together with these new models, that's where the magic's going to happen.

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  What's the state of the art in like? Actual, the actual impact of antibodies, like the last time I heard antibodies in the news was when Joe Rogan was taking monoclonal antibodies for COVID infection.

• 2:35:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  And that was one of those weird things where it felt like a very modern.

• 2:35:29Speaker 06

  Totally not controversial.

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it felt like a very modern piece of science and the narrative around him was that he was not adopting the modern science, but he was kind of on the cutting edge of that fork of the tech tree. And so is our monoclonal antibodies like the most, like the latest and greatest, or are there other applications that are particularly interesting or just driving value, even if they're, even if they're, they're R and D like the traditional way?

• 2:35:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, so about half of drug approvals these days are actually biologics, protein drugs, so antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies are actually just one type. That's closer to what, you know, we've been exploring in this paper, but I actually think what's going to happen is that people have now started to push beyond that. They're basically like by specifics are all the rage right now. That's basically, you can think of it as two antibodies that are kind of stuck together. So you can actually go after multiple targets at the same time, or you can actually get like a more potent behavior for a single target. You know, it's kind of just like two things in one. So if we can make, you know, the first, if we can make each one of those chains like easier to design, then you know, bringing them together is going to be, going to be even easier as well. So I think it just like raises the bar for the kinds of therapies that you have to work

• 2:36:35Speaker 06

  on because it becomes easier to make those drugs. So that's what monoclonal antibodies are. They were really important in COVID, right? They can neutralize viruses. The way that people found them during COVID was actually once to patients who had COVID, they just like, you know, you would go and just like take someone's blood, for example, and try to find antibodies that are in there and then try to develop that into a therapy. But now we can just make it on the computer in 24 hours and then go test it in the lab and have some results in a few weeks. So there's a lot more work to do to make sure that these molecules will actually work in the clinic and will work well in patients. We have early signs that they have drug-like properties, which is really nice to see. But we've got a lot of work ahead of us in order to really bring that to production, if you will. There's still some more engineering that you might want to do on the molecules that are coming out of the platform today.

• 2:37:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what is your sci fi vision for the state of drug development 50 years from now? And how would the FDA have to adapt regulations to enable that? Because I can imagine, my vision is like you come into some type of doctor clinic setting, you have some set of conditions and they're just sort of like auto generating drugs on the fly specifically to your current conditions, but that obviously wouldn't work in the current paradigm.

• 2:37:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that would be the dream. The North Star that we have for this space is something that we think of as like zero shot drug canonets. Right now, we have these zero shot proteins, right? So we specify target, we get some protein that binds it. But the fact that this is possible makes us believe that someday we'll be able to actually just like have the models think about all the other properties that we need for a drug. And it's possible that the first sequences that come out of the model will actually be good enough to eventually move into patients. And yeah, if you can do that, then you know, maybe the next stretch is like, can we actually do hyper personalized medicine, right? Maybe there's something where we take some sample from a patient, we figure out what exact target we need to go after, then we go and generate the drug.

• 2:38:35Speaker 06

  I mean, there's multiple leaps that need to happen, but I can't predict what's going to happen 50 years from now. Like honestly, I failed in predicting what's going to happen in six months. Thought you were going to be at 1%.

• 2:38:45John Coogan?

  Do you use AlphaFold or is it just a separate tech that is kind of complementary, but not in your direct supply chain?

• 2:38:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, the foundation models are built in-house here, so we don't use AlphaFold. We actually can't use AlphaFold, the latest one isn't available to company. So we built our own, we have a state of the art model for predicting protein, protein structure and its interactions with molecules. We actually open sourced that, so we started the company a little over a year ago and then six months in, that was the first thing we did because you really need like an atomic level microscope if you're going to design drugs. That was our thesis when we got started. But we realized that, you know, that kind of level of the technology, we thought would get out there anyway. So we open sourced that, it's being used in most of the major pharmaceuticals today. The community has got a lot of engagement around that.

• 2:39:33Speaker 06

  But now the models are becoming even more complicated. So that's why we're starting to invest in not just the model layer, but how we should make those models useful. They're really starting to look more like pipelines. It's kind of like ChatGPT 03. It's not just a single inference. There's actually, you know, a bunch of complex tricks that you need to run if you're going to get the best results. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it right now.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congrats on the launch. I'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic.

• 2:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, with the rate that you guys are moving, I'm sure you'll be back on in a couple of weeks. So congrats. Congrats to you and the whole team.

• 2:40:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:40:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, really appreciate it.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:40:09Speaker 06

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  Up next, we have John from Campfire coming on the show. Welcome to the stream, John. How are you doing?

• 2:40:21John Coogan?

  I missed this. You haven't been hitting the soundboard enough. I love it.

• 2:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  How are you doing, John?

• 2:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear us?

• 2:40:31Speaker 07

  Yes, I can. Thank you so much for having me on today.

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Do you want to kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

• 2:40:38Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I'm the founder and CEO at Campfire. We're based in San Francisco. And I was a finance exec for about 15 years and just lived the pain.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:40:48Speaker 07

  Software.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Don't give them that credit.

• 2:40:49Jordi Hays?

  The unsung heroes.

• 2:40:51Speaker 07

  The unsung heroes. Never featured in the All Hands, but we're working on changing that here. And lived in spreadsheets my whole life and just helping. I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon, but helping folks. I take all the transactional accounting, all the financial reporting and get it in the software. And so Campfire is the modern ERP for high-growth companies to just help them move to an AI-powered platform. And so that's what we do.

• 2:41:20Jordi Hays?

  How young were you when you realized you wanted to build the modern ERP?

• 2:41:26Speaker 07

  I would say it's not something you think of growing up. It's not like.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm sure kids, I'm sure some ambitious kids these days think I'm going to build, I'm going to build the next gen ERP. But.

• 2:41:39Speaker 07

  You'd be surprised. So going into Y Combinator, there's about 4,000 companies that have gone through it, but they probably hundreds of thousands apply. They're like, you know, no one came to us and said, we want to build a new ERP. They're like, you're, you're like the only one excited about the category. So I would say this was in 2020, 2021, when I really was feeling the pain at a midsize company that I'm like, this is the largest category in software. Why is nobody disrupting it? And that's, that was, that was a critical moment for me.

• 2:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting because it's, it's not going to fit the pro, like you need to have lived and breathed the problem to know what to build. And I think that Y C has like the, the sort of default type of founder that does that. Maybe they have a few years as an engineer at Palantir, or they were a product manager at Coinbase or something like that. It's very different than being like, you know, being in, being in the C suite, actually living and breathing and, and having that ability to go and figure out what to build.

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  Give us the latest on the fundraising side.

• 2:42:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, we announced today Excel is leading our $35 million Series X.

• 2:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:42:53Speaker 07

  I love it. Thank you.

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  I want to talk, you said high growth. I remember I was running a company and there was a big debate over like, oh, like, you know, like, thank goodness we don't need to implement Oracle. We get to implement NetSuite and it was like still a lot of work. It was a big, big ERP. And so it seems like the playbook is, is start with high growth startups, be the first ERP and then scale into that. And then eventually you'll be able to service the really, really large Fortune 500 companies. But it's fair to say that you're not ready to go into a Fortune 500 company today. Is that right? And how do you think about actually growing the business long term?

• 2:43:33Speaker 07

  You said it well. We're hiring on the sales team, so we would love to have you. But in all seriousness, we are not ready for the Fortune 500 yet.

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:41Speaker 07

  We do have customers with hundreds of millions in ARR that have ripped out SAP. They've ripped out NetSuite. They've ripped out everything below that. So we are filling the pull-up market quickly. And one of the reasons for the raise is to go make us enterprise-ready.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:54Speaker 07

  And our customers are saying, I don't want to be in an ERP for a few years, right? I want to be on it for 10 plus. I talked to the CFO at a 10,000-employee company, still on NetSuite. They've already scaled into $100 billion-plus market cap on NetSuite, and they bought it at 100 employees.

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:13Speaker 07

  And so it's like, how do we go, how do we get them at 100 and scale them to 10,000? And that's really where we're going.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, pretty sharp guy running the company over at Oracle. So it is a competitive market. But it does seem like there's, there's lots of pockets of opportunity because the, the, I mean, I, I remember just like the implementation bill for NetSuite was going to be like half a million dollars in consulting or something like that. It was, it was pretty staggering. How do you think about pricing and getting a, a growth-stage company to actually match the value that you're delivering with the money that you make? It's obviously great if you get a big contract upfront and they're locked in for a long time and they're paying this massive implementation bill. There's real costs to you if you have to implement stuff.

• 2:45:00John Coogan?

  How, how are you thinking about ramping a customer into a great profit center for you long-term?

• 2:45:07Speaker 07

  Yeah. First off, like, we've rethought the whole implementation process for the reasons you've stated. Like, you tell your accounting team, we bought an ERP, like, everyone's ready to quit. Nobody wants to go through a one-year implementation.

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:20Speaker 07

  And so we've made it where, like, you give us a login to your old system, we go do all the work, because everybody says, I just don't have time. Our team is way too lean to do that. So a lot of the switching costs, to your point, a lot of it is just like dollars, but a lot of it is just time. So we have solved for both. But to your point on like, how do we get them into a profit center? We're just very focused on getting them in the door and making people super happy, because we know, like, customers drive customers.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:47Speaker 07

  Like, referenceable, and one of your sponsors, Ramp, has done a great job at driving referenceability and customer love. Has really been, I think, the, the virality within the finance and accounting community. It's been a huge driver of their growth, and so we're focused on the same.

• 2:46:02Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys leveraging AI internally and then in the in the product itself?

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  Never heard of it.

• 2:46:11John Coogan?

  Irrelevant.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Don't need it, don't need it.

• 2:46:12Speaker 07

  What it stands for, I'm not familiar.

• 2:46:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, don't need it, built different.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:17Jordi Hays?

  We're doing it all by hand.

• 2:46:18John Coogan?

  Everything's have statements over here.

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:19Speaker 07

  I know. You know, I found, I forgot what it was, but Excel's if statement limit, I like over. You know, you.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  Let's go, that's the final boss of ERP, you have to build an ERP after you hit the limit on Excel. You just unlock a, like Sachin Adella just comes through the computer and says, good, you've broken out of the matrix. Welcome to the big leagues, writes you a check.

• 2:46:43Speaker 07

  Um, our very first version of Campfire was I built a three statement model that was iframed into uh like a login. And it was, it was me on the back end running a Google sheet, a three statement Google Sheets for customers.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:46:57Speaker 07

  You gotta start somewhere.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:58Speaker 07

  Um, but uh, yeah, we're super excited about AI. So obviously one thing about us relative to the incumbents is like, we are investing and putting AI everywhere. But whether it's Meta winning the AI talent war or OpenAI, like we're always going to be on the latest models and we're always going to be multimodal. And so we're going to be inheriting all of the amazing work of all of these amazing AI engineers. And we're of course building out our own proprietary AI models. But the gap between us and the incumbents is growing every time a new model ships. Irrespective of vendor, because we're always putting in the latest models. A few examples, customers are uploading their board minutes from the last meeting.

• 2:47:41Speaker 07

  And saying, take all of our, every row in Campfire of every financial data and come up with a story narrative for the next board meeting. And it's, it's reading the board minutes, it's going through and it's like, here's the five things you should focus on, based on all of it. On the accounting side, it's automating a lot of the accounting. But we've built like a chat GPT for your finance and accounting data. It'll write to the ledger, it'll report for you.

• 2:48:09Speaker 07

  Customers are saying like, kind of feels like we got a promotion. I'm not in there formatting my Y and X axis anymore. You know, the charts are coming out through AI and that's been exciting to me because I live that pain. Guys, I had a diligence report. I had to build the day of my wedding.

• 2:48:25John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:26Speaker 07

  Because we were, we were in a bad ERP. So don't be me. You know, enjoy your wedding day. Enjoy your wedding day.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  Last question for me in the news. Zero acquired the US, the American B2B payments company Melio for three billion. I think this was announced last week. Two and a half. Who's counting at this point? Can you explain to me like what the rationale you think was behind that? Why? And zero feels like a different tier of product, not full ERP, more accounting suite for small businesses. Why would they need a payments product? Are you thinking about payments as a potential revenue generator in the future? Whether it's through Stripe or stable coins, or maybe you're going to buy a payments firm at one point? I don't know.

• 2:49:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I can go really deep on this one. So as deep as you guys want to go, but at Invoice2Go, we were an AR company, 250,000 businesses. We were powering their invoicing globally in 150 countries. We competed with Melio. We sold the bill.com. Obviously, they're a Titan and AP a billion in AP revenue. And so I know zero and Melio well. I'll say zero was really looking to be stronger in the US market. They're very strong in Australia, New Zealand, very strong in Western Europe and other parts of the world. QuickBooks, unsurprisingly, given their headquarters is here, is dominant in the US. Melio brings a strong footprint. QuickBooks also launched their own AP product and zero needed a response to that. And so getting into

• 2:49:58Speaker 07

  the payments game, getting into EPAR, in that solo entrepreneur category where I came from at Invoice2Go is where zero and Melio have a lot. Of strength, we don't compete with either at all.

• 2:50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Speaker 07

  So we're really like a cut above, so no competitive angle for for Campfire. Um, but I think one that actually no one has really covered is Melio is very strong in indirect. So Fiserv and others, and this is public, um, Fiserv and others are are selling Melio through their channel. So Clover and other systems are out. And so this is a new go to market that's becoming really popular. We saw Brex launch embedded, Bill is embedded, embedded go to market is is really a way to solve for really like efficient go to markets.

• 2:50:45John Coogan?

  Distribution.

• 2:50:45Speaker 07

  And I think this is a new one for for Zero that is a great play.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  That's really helpful. Thank you for that context. Uh, I appreciate it. I always like when people can break down other stuff.

• 2:50:54Jordi Hays?

  And congratulations.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 2:50:57Speaker 07

  Thanks.

• 2:50:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, John.

• 2:51:00John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Tom Lee from Bitmine, the first, uh, new, uh, treasury, uh, crypto treasury company. This time on the New York Stock Exchange, not the NASDAQ. Uh, we're going to talk to him about crypto.

• 2:51:15Jordi Hays?

  Really, really iconic stock exchange.

• 2:51:18John Coogan?

  It is. It's the New York of stock exchanges in many ways.

• 2:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  The city that never sleeps, the Big Apple.

• 2:51:24Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:51:25John Coogan?

  If it was a stock exchange, it would be the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:51:30John Coogan?

  Um, very excited to talk to him.

• 2:51:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So today they announced a 250 million private placement to implement buying Ethereum for their ETH treasury.

• 2:51:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:51:39Jordi Hays?

  The stock.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  ETH has been one of these.

• 2:51:42Jordi Hays?

  Was up 48% in the pre-market.

• 2:51:44John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, so welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:51:49Speaker 08

  Good.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  Good to meet you. Uh, would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and some of the news today?

• 2:51:57Speaker 08

  Uh, glad to. Uh, my name is Tom Lee. I'm the, uh, founder of Fundstrat, which is a research firm. And many of those might know me from that role where I'm, I periodically appear on CNBC and talk about markets. I'm also the chief investment officer of Fundstrat Capital, which is the asset manager. And we have an ETF called Granny Shots. That's, um, 1.4 billion of assets now. And Fundstrat as a research firm has 300 hedge fund clients and 10,000 RIAs.

• 2:52:33Speaker 08

  And today, it was announced that I'm taking a role separately from Fundstrat as chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies, and the ticker is BMNR, and that's to help the company transform its existing treasury strategy to be one that is focused on Ethereum.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  What was the decision to go with Ethereum? We've seen a lot of Bitcoin treasury stories happening over the past year, I would say. I mean, even going back further with MicroStrategy, but Ethereum is one that we haven't seen that much yet.

• 2:53:08Jordi Hays?

  Just before that, I just would highlight that the Bitmine is up 679% today. So the market is excited about what you're doing.

• 2:53:20John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:53:20Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, back to John's question.

• 2:53:21Speaker 08

  Well, to me, one of the things that caught my eye is that stablecoins are the ChatGPT of fintech right now because it's seen rapid adoption by consumers, merchants, and banks, and now Visa, and credit card providers. It's because it really does have a log function benefit over traditional dollars or over, you know, the credit card system. And it's $250 billion today. Treasury Secretary Besen estimated, or said it's reasonable it could go to $2 trillion.

• 2:54:01Speaker 08

  That's a 10x market, you know, addressable market change, which means it's an exponential opportunity. Stablecoins have to transact on a Layer 1 blockchain, and the blockchain that is considered the biggest and the most secure and the most commonly used for stablecoins is Ethereum. So we saw an opportunity to say, listen, let's think about more tokenization, you know, that ChatGPT, stablecoins is the ChatGPT, but it's opening doors to other ways to tokenize assets. And so we thought it would make sense to do some, a treasury strategy around Ethereum. And It plays a role that the bigger we become,

• 2:54:44Speaker 08

  the more important we are to the Ethereum ecosystem. So I think we're actually playing a role in stabilizing Ethereum, because we essentially act as a staking entity. And if we sort of think forward a few years, sorry if I'm rambling.

• 2:54:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:54:58Speaker 08

  Goldman and JP Morgan, as they get into the stablecoin business and Walmart and Amazon, they're going to realize that they need to really secure the layer one that they're operating on. So they want it to be a big blockchain, a lot of validators, Ethereum is the biggest. And then the opportunity is that we're kind of like the plumbing of what banks will look like in the future. Because they'll be staking Ethereum on their balance sheet or crypto in order to fund and operate their stablecoin.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the differences between the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ? And what it means to be listed on one or the other?

• 2:55:38Speaker 08

  Uh, yes. Um, if you look at our press release, what we announced and we put prominently in headlines was New York Stock Exchange listed. And, uh, and we listed all of our partners. The reason for that is that most people know me as a traditional finance world person that also is trafficking in crypto. We've written about Bitcoin for eight years. We first recommended it when it was under a thousand to our clients, but it's been a slow road. This project, the Bitmine Immersion's treasury strategy, is really a convergence between traditional finance and crypto, right? That's where stablecoins are intersecting. And the partners we brought on, you know, Founders Fund, Pantera,

• 2:56:22Speaker 08

  Kraken, Falcon X, Galaxy Digital, uh, are companies that are really straddling the crossover world. And we want it to be on a prestigious exchange. Most of these treasury strategies are trading on the NASDAQ CM, which is like a, a, a sort of a junior league of NASDAQ. We want it to be on something prestigious because we want our traditional clients to come in and say, "Look, Tom, if we're going to be, um, interested in this treasury and learning about why this is might be a new bank model." We don't want to be buying stocks that are on a bulletin board. So it was really important to be on a prestigious exchange like the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:57:04Speaker 08

  So I think that that's a real, you know, one of the advantages of Bitmine immersion is that they invested the time to be uplisted and so that they are on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:57:15John Coogan?

  What is liquidity like different on the stock exchange versus like, I mean, as someone who's like younger and more, I guess, internet native, like the idea of needing to buy a stock on a stock exchange is a little bit foreign compared to just like self custodian crypto directly. And then you have access to buy the major cryptocurrencies on pretty much any app in the App Store these days. Like it feels very accessible and yet, and yet in the past, we've seen the ETF as a catalyst for price movements in the major L ones.

• 2:57:55John Coogan?

  So talk to me about like what's actually going on in the market and characterize some of the different buyers and market participants and why they choose one way to get exposure over another.

• 2:58:10Speaker 08

  Yes, um, yeah. And so let's say I'll take it in two parts. You know, the first is like in terms of a product to buy, a New York Stock Exchange listed stock, which is what BMNR is, has market makers. It's almost like you have like this invisible hand protecting price and the exchange will halt the stock. If it's, if it feels one sided, that's really important because it protects investors. And these treasury strategies need to get institutional investors to sort of back the, back this and become essentially create a two way market. So people can combine and sell these with, with little price erosion.

• 2:58:54Speaker 08

  Now, uh, the second part, though, is someone say, well, Tom, why didn't I just buy Ethereum ETF?

• 2:59:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:59:01Speaker 08

  Or I'll just layer one. And I think the treasury, the Ethereum treasury strategy. Now, there's another one, which is Sharplink, um, which was led by Joe Lubin and consensus, and that tickers S B E T. I think the treasury strategies, especially for Ethereum, can actually deliver better returns. Um, for holders, because let's say the metric for a treasury strategy is Ethereum per share.

• 2:59:35Speaker 08

  Um, now, if you buy an ETF, your Ethereum per share is going to always be fixed. Because it's you're just buying a unit of Ethereum. So you only benefit if Ethereum price goes up. Whereas a treasury strategy, let's say, has an Ethereum per share value. Then there's three ways that that price of that treasury stock goes up. One is um, that the company generates staking yield. So you're getting a little income. The second way that you benefit is if the company can capitalize on volatility. And Ethereum has twice the volatility of Bitcoin. Um, which means the stock's twice as volatile. That means you're you're going to be able to fund

• 3:00:19Speaker 08

  uh, transactions like convertible instruments or sell stock in the open market. And people are buying it for the liquidity and then you can increase the net asset value Ethereum per share. So you're kind of like growing. Someone's actually, if you own a share of a treasury stock, someone's working to get you more Ethereum per share for every share you hold. So they're they're actually like growing it. And the third, of course, is the price of Ethereum goes up. And that's where I think it's really interesting because like Circle, which is a it the second largest stablecoin issuer. And it's been a it's probably the most successful IPO in like several years. It trades at around a hundred times enterprise value to EBITDA.

• 3:01:03Speaker 08

  So, um, so for every dollar of EBITDA, it's like a hundred dollars of market cap. Um, Ethereum has a network yield of four.

• 3:01:13Speaker 08

  So in other words, like Ethereum's four times cheaper than Circle, even though Circle runs on Ethereum.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:01:21Speaker 08

  So if usually like the more you get into the infrastructure layer, the higher the multiple is. That's why software has a higher multiple than a retailer. So that means like it, but if you just said Ethereum should be a 1% yield. Then Ethereum should be like 12,000 um per unit and it's only like, you know, 2500 now. So I think that there's, the third way is of course Ethereum could go a lot.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  What uh, what do you see as kind of the important milestones in Ethereum over the next few years? Uh, we went through kind of the NFT boom, we're now in the stablecoin era. Uh, people have been still talking about store value. They're also starting to talk more about prediction markets. Um, what is interesting to you about uh, maybe crypto broadly over the next few years?

• 3:02:17Speaker 08

  Um, yeah, glad to. Well, you know, what the uh, I'd say the story arcs that we see is one. The regulatory landscape has become very friendly for crypto, um, huge deal. Uh, the second is that institutional fiat money, traditional is getting into crypto. 95% of institutions don't own crypto, so that's a huge addressable market.

• 3:02:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:02:42Speaker 08

  Uh, but then there's technological innovation, as you're pointing out, and that, and there's a lot of great projects because of that. So Bitcoin, um, it's still our favorite layer one, um, and so, you know, but that to us is digital gold. You know, it's, it's really the best way to measure trust. And if it ever traded at the value of golds above ground value, it's a, it's over a million dollars. So we still see a lot of upside. Ethereum unique feature is the smart contract.

• 3:03:10Speaker 08

  And we know that the majority of real world assets tokenized things, including tokenized dollars and tokenized real estate and securities, et cetera. They're actually being minted on the Ethereum or created on the Ethereum blockchain. So I think as the world starts to tokenize an experiment, and remember, there's a lot more equities and real world assets to tokenize onto layer ones. Then the other way is the traditional financial world is trying to equitize crypto, right? Through ETFs, it's there's more to move into tokenizing on layer ones. And the third, of course, is things like solving some of the risks of AI, you know, the whole idea of a

• 3:03:54Speaker 08

  decentralized blockchain. I mean, look, let's face it, there is a a non insignificant risk that AI is going to be malevolent, like there'll be a catastrophe because every innovation has always led to a catastrophe in the short term, like consumer credit was a technical innovation on for consumer access to money and nearly every country that rolled out a credit card, whether it's Asia or Latin America has had a credit crisis. And then in 2008, we had a mortgage innovation with the securitization of mortgages and it boomed for a while. But then we had the GFC. So I think AI is obviously going to be innovative and there's a lot of opportunities.

• 3:04:37Speaker 08

  But it's inevitably inevitably going to lead to a catastrophe. And I think that's when decentralized blockchains are going to be one one answer to sort of managing the risk around AI. And so, uh, I mean, I don't know if the tensor is a solution, but I can see something running off Ethereum and validators, you know, human validators. Um, is one way to.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. Talk to you around about that.

• 3:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Any, any reactions to, there's been a couple announcements in the last week. Republic came out creating their mirror tokens products, which are bringing private company stocks on chain. And then Robin Hood had an announcement, I believe it was this morning around bringing opening eye. SpaceX on chain.

• 3:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Any, any kind of predictions around private company assets coming on chain?

• 3:05:27Speaker 08

  I I love all these experiments because they're trying to provide a hybrid form of liquidity to things that are illiquid, you know? And so it it makes sense. And you know, the the answer to that is it is a big deal that Republic and then Robinhood are doing this because you you're going to create

• 3:05:52Speaker 08

  the probability of a more healthy market. You know, this has to become a two-way market because if someone's just tokenizing assets, but then very few people use it. And the way what I mean by use it, someone may want to own it, but someone might want to hedge something. So like an OpenAI token isn't just someone's long bet on OpenAI. They might be invested in, you know, Grok or something. And then they need to hedge it by shorting the token. Like, if you can create a two-way market, then it's definitely going to work. But if the if the market is purely on like, let's just tokenize it, you buy it and hodl it, then it's going to have the same liquidity problem that it originally had, and then they might even trade it at discount.

• 3:06:35Speaker 08

  And then you you create other risk because now you're putting it on a blockchain. So now you have the actual risk of the physical asset being missing and then the blockchain being broken. So I think it'll be important for two-way markets to develop around it.

• 3:06:50John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:06:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations.

• 3:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 3:06:54Jordi Hays?

  On the announcement and we're excited to follow along. Hopefully have you on again soon.

• 3:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 3:06:59Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:07:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:07:01John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:07:04John Coogan?

  Well, Drew, is there anything else?

• 3:07:06Jordi Hays?

  There's

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  All of our ads, we are out of ads. We need to, we need more sponsors, but more on that soon because we have a new one coming.

• 3:07:15Jordi Hays?

  There's a story on Apple, Wang from Mark Gurman, Wang using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri in a major reversal, but let's save it for tomorrow.

• 3:07:24John Coogan?

  Save it for tomorrow. We do have some other news. Cursor is now available on your phone and on the web. Spin off dozens of agents and review them later in your editor. Andrew says, I joined Cursor to build the future of coding. And yes, as of today, you can code from anywhere with a coding assistant on every web browser and phone. Very, very cool. We'll have to see how, I'll have to give Tyler over there in the VR headset a challenge.

• 3:07:49Jordi Hays?

  He's back in. He's back in. There he is.

• 3:07:51John Coogan?

  What are you doing over there, Tyler?

• 3:07:53Speaker 02

  I'm just chilling in the metaverse.

• 3:07:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 3:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:55John Coogan?

  But what specifically are you doing?

• 3:07:58Speaker 02

  I'm not playing video games.

• 3:08:00John Coogan?

  No? You're grinding?

• 3:08:01Speaker 02

  No, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:02John Coogan?

  How is the, now that you've had this headset for a few hours?

• 3:08:06Speaker 02

  It's sick. Well, it's way better. So I have the Quest 2 at home. And I think it's just all the Quest 3s, but they have this like back strap.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see it.

• 3:08:15Speaker 02

  It's way more comfortable.

• 3:08:16John Coogan?

  It's way more comfortable.

• 3:08:17Speaker 02

  It's like totally comfortable to wear this right now.

• 3:08:18John Coogan?

  That's awesome. So are you doing pass through? Are you using your computer?

• 3:08:22Speaker 02

  I can see you guys right now.

• 3:08:23John Coogan?

  You can see me?

• 3:08:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:24John Coogan?

  How many fingers?

• 3:08:25Speaker 02

  Four.

• 3:08:26John Coogan?

  No way. He's got it.

• 3:08:27Speaker 02

  I'm using my computer. Two.

• 3:08:29John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. You can see right through. It's amazing. I didn't realize the pass through was that good.

• 3:08:34Jordi Hays?

  New challenge. Don't take it off for 24 hours. Starts now.

• 3:08:40Jordi Hays?

  Go on a date with it. Use Cluli with it.

• 3:08:42John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, I mean, this is the Cluli, this is the Cluli device right here. We need a Cluli, we need a Cluli app in there ASAP. ASAP, for sure. Yeah, you show up there. Why don't you take off your Meta Quest 3 S for the interview, actually? I'd prefer to leave it on.

• 3:09:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, there's some other good posts we should go through. Apparently Xfinity is allowing people to use Wi-Fi signals to detect motion in your home at no extra cost. And this Five Seconds account says, "I apologize to all my local schizophrenic, schizophrenics. I owe you an apology. I wasn't really familiar with your game."

• 3:09:26Jordi Hays?

  You remember there was a super, there was a video that came out, it was probably a year ago, where somebody was showing how you can use Wi-Fi signals to like get it. Yeah, to get a very accurate map, like a 3D render of what's happening in space.

• 3:09:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:40Jordi Hays?

  And it was almost hard to believe. And then now, Xfinity, for free, no extra cost.

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  Crazy, crazy.

• 3:09:49Jordi Hays?

  The concerning thing here is is introducing this technology to more people. They're going to realize, oh, I can, if they have, if they're in an apartment building, they're like, oh, I can see when my neighbor's home. Or a thief could set up a Wi-Fi router outside of somebody's home and start mapping it. See, what, what, what's this person's schedule?

• 3:10:10John Coogan?

  When are we going to put this on a, on an assault rifle and give the, uh, give the special forces wall hacks?

• 3:10:16Jordi Hays?

  I bet they're, no, no, somebody was, somebody was saying the CIA and, and other law enforcement groups use this already to understand when there's like an active shooter scenario, understand where they are.

• 3:10:26John Coogan?

  The positioning of everything.

• 3:10:27Jordi Hays?

  We got to fly on the set.

• 3:10:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is, this is going after you.

• 3:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Um, but anyways.

• 3:10:32John Coogan?

  In other news, uh, Kristoff Thuleen Futurist says, I am developing an LLM benchmark test that I believe is truly the first of its kind. Very excited to launch this soon and hopefully partner with some of the frontier labs on it. Uh, congratulations. We'd love to check it out when it goes live, Kristoff. So thanks for the hard work. Uh, you're, you're, you're going up against Arc AGI. So, you know, it's, it's, it's not an easy, easy, the benchmark battle is hot, but good luck to you. And, uh, Delian reflects on the progress of AI. He says, uh, imagine gathering Alan Turing of 1942, Marvin Minsky of 1992, and Nick Bostrom of 2012, and explaining to them that we have passed the Turing test several years ago. And yes, there are some changes to society, but largely day to day life is the same.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  It would be a funny conversation. It is, it is crazy. The soft singularity is real. Everyone's feeling the, the soft acceleration. Um, anyway, any other, I mean, it's just like, yeah, there's just like, it, yeah, we beat the Turing test and now we're on to super intelligence and then eventually giga intelligence. But that's a great place to end the show. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and have a great Monday. See you soon.

• 3:11:46Jordi Hays?

  See ya. Have a great evening.