Hims & Hers Stock Drops Over 30%, All-In Launches Ultra Premium Tequila | Crémieux, Clément Delangue, Emmett Shear, Brendan Foody, Sam Schwager, Zach Lloyd, Dara Ladjevardian, Amjad Masad, Angus Muffatti

(04:30) - Anthropic Clears Legal Hurdle on AI Data (11:32) - All-In Launches Ultra Premium Tequila (30:45) - Timeline (45:17) - Hims & Hers Stock Drops Over 30% (56:09) - Ford is Scrambling For Rare-Earth Minerals (01:03:01) - Fedex Founder Fred Smith Dies at 80 (01:15:37) - Cremieux discusses the expanding applications of GLP-1 medications, highlighting their effectiveness in treating conditions beyond diabetes and weight loss, such as sleep apnea and certain cancers. He expresses concern over the misuse of these drugs, particularly among individuals without medical necessity, and notes the ease of obtaining them through unofficial channels. Additionally, he comments on the implications of the Hims and Novo Nordisk partnership dissolution, suggesting potential issues with drug distribution practices. (01:32:47) - Clément Delangue, CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform, discusses the company's origins, including the choice of the "Hugging Face" emoji as its name, and its evolution from an AI chatbot to a leading platform with over 10 million AI builders. He highlights the importance of democratizing AI development to prevent the concentration of power among a few organizations, emphasizing the need for open-source collaboration to foster innovation and ethical practices. Delangue also addresses the challenges in AI, such as the scarcity of talent and resources, and advocates for a more decentralized approach to AI development to ensure broader accessibility and mitigate risks associated with monopolization. (02:04:02) - Emmett Shear, an American entrepreneur and investor, co-founded Justin.tv and its gaming-focused spin-off, Twitch, where he served as CEO until March 2023. In the conversation, Shear discusses his new AI startup, Softmax, which aims to discover principles of alignment and scale them for humanity, focusing on multi-agent reinforcement learning research to understand how agents interact and learn within complex systems. (02:36:52) - Brendan Foody, CEO of Mercor, discusses the company's rapid growth, noting collaborations with six of the "Mag Seven" tech giants and a 45% month-over-month growth over the past year. He highlights the increasing complexity in AI training, emphasizing the need for professionals like consultants, doctors, and lawyers to evaluate and teach models tasks beyond academic domains. Additionally, he addresses the challenges in AI's ability to perform basic tasks, such as booking flights, underscoring the importance of developing effective evaluation methods to measure and enhance model capabilities. (02:44:08) - Sam Schwager, co-founder and CEO of Super Dial, a voice AI company specializing in automating phone calls for healthcare, discusses the company's transition from Superbill to Super Dial, focusing on revenue cycle management (RCM) and the automation of outbound calls to health insurance companies. He announces the successful completion of a $15 million Series A funding round led by Signal Fire and elaborates on the company's strategic approach to integrating various technologies, including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and large language models, to enhance their services. Additionally, he highlights the importance of perfecting workflow and integration, emphasizing the need for domain-specific context to ensure the effectiveness of their voice AI agents in handling repetitive transactions within the healthcare sector. (02:49:24) - Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp, discusses the launch of Warp 2.0, an AI-driven development environment that enables developers to prompt a terminal-like interface to run coding agents capable of tasks such as coding and debugging. He envisions a shift in software development workflows where engineers initiate tasks with prompts, allowing multiple agents to handle various development activities simultaneously, thereby enhancing productivity. Lloyd also emphasizes the importance of a competitive landscape among AI model providers to ensure better quality and pricing, expressing a preference for using the best available models, such as those from Anthropic, to deliver optimal user experiences. (02:58:44) - Dara Ladjevardian, co-founder and CEO of Delphi, discusses the company's recent $16 million Series A funding led by Sequoia, aimed at expanding their digital cloning platform that enables individuals to create interactive digital versions of themselves to scale their expertise. He highlights diverse applications, including coaches scaling client practices, authors making books interactive, and CEOs enhancing internal communication. Ladjevardian also addresses monetization strategies, noting that some users have generated multiple seven-figure revenues, and emphasizes the importance of trust and quality in representing users' data and likeness accurately. (03:16:12) - Amjad Masad, CEO and co-founder of Replit, discusses the company's journey from its inception as an open-source project in 2011 to achieving significant growth, including reaching $100 million in revenue. He highlights Replit's mission to make programming more accessible, emphasizing the role of AI in democratizing software development and enabling non-developers to build applications. Masad also addresses the competitive hiring landscape in the tech industry, noting Replit's unique approach to team culture and its focus on long-term commitment from employees. (03:33:56) - Angus Muffatti, an Australian aerospace engineer and co-founder of Agtuary, is dedicated to revolutionizing agricultural land use and risk analytics by integrating AI, remote sensing, and climate data. In the conversation, he discusses his passion for building robots over the past decade, highlighting his development of a small robot as a stepping stone toward larger welding robotics, and emphasizes the importance of high-quality kinematic solvers for improved AI-driven robotic systems. (03:42:05) - Timeline 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 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 TVN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Tuesday, June 24th, 2025.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Keep it together, John.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  El capital, the capital.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  Front page of the Wall Street Journal has the update from the Iran conflict with the United States. Iran fired missiles at a US base in Qatar. Since this, since this published, there is a ceasefire and Donald Trump appears to be very upset with both sides and wants peace and wants the rocket attacks to stop. And so we certainly hope that the conflict will come to a close and we can get back to real estate development.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  And golf.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Golf, exactly. Oil drops, stocks rise after attacks. So it seems like this.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what, this is what Buco Capital bloke was talking about. He says the start of World War III is a positive catalyst because it implies there will be an eventual end to World War III.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  It's a new catalyst and that's exactly what happened. So World War III is over. Hopefully it stays that way. Anyway, we have some, we have some new drinks in the studio. We have new tonic from none other than Chris Williamson and he was very gracious to send us a full case and I will be doing a taste test. Now, you know, if you've been following.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  How much caffeine is there?

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Uh, there's 120 milligrams, I believe.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we should have Tyler drink 10 today.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, we should. Yeah. As if you've been following the show, you know that I am, have been a fan of Matteina, Andrew Huberman's Yerba Mate. This is the mango key lime flavor. It's non-carb, non-carbonated energy brew. And here I have the Chris Williamson new tonic productivity drink. It says fuel your focus. I'm going to do a little taste test and let you know, I'm going to try and be as objective as possible. Okay. So this is the, this is the Andrew Huberman Yerba Mate.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  That is incredible. It tastes, it tastes like the work of a TBPN guest. Like someone who's been on the show clearly worked on this.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  They bottled it.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Now let's take Chris Williamson. I, I did invite him on the show.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Oh, that tastes like someone who, who hasn't been on the show yet.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  It's funny how that works.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  It is funny how that works. So, I mean, maybe Chris should come on the show and...

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we could correct that.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, and then I think I could maybe give it a more positive review.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  You're on to something, John.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Uh, no, but it tastes fantastic and I will be drinking this throughout the show.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  And I'm a fan. This is actually the very first time that I've ever tasted this. It's very good.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Very good. Anyway, looking forward to having you on the show, Chris. Hop on anytime. You're welcome.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  So are we news maxing today?

• 2:53John Coogan?

  We're news maxing. Uh, we're running through a few top stories, the current things. Uh, there's the anthropic ruling.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about All In Tequila. We touched on it yesterday, but there's a lot more news.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot more to go.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  We're doing, we're putting on our investigative journalism hat.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Uh, we're going deep.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  We're going deep.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Also, hims and hers is in the news. Uh, there's a messy breakup that has jolted hims and hers. But, uh, the retail investors are bullish. They're continuing to buy. So there's a lot of news back and forth.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  Hims, uh...

• 3:24John Coogan?

  And then we gotta talk about...

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Hims ended last week at $64 a share. It started yesterday morning at $43 a share. So, uh, the Novo Nordisk, uh, debacle, uh, impacted the share price pretty dramatically. We're gonna have Krimu on the show later.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Sorry for that.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  A GLP-1 enthusiast to break that down with us and we'll talk through it as well.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Huge enthusiast. And then we'll also take you through the story of the rare earth magnets, which is complete fake news. Rare earths are not rare. They're just, the, the industrial capacity to bring them out of the ground is rare. And, and the industrial might is rare and it has mostly moved to China. And so now Ford Motor Company... The Ford of motor companies has declared that they have a magnet shortage despite the China deal. And so we'll dig into that. Anyway, let's kick it off with David Sacks. We're not talking about tequila yet. We're talking about the positive ruling for AI. This is because Andrew Curran has the story. A federal judge has ruled that Anthropic's use of books to train Claude

• 4:28John Coogan?

  falls under fair use and is legal under US copyright law. And I couldn't agree more with this. I had been saying this for a long time, that I believe that the results of of LLMs are typically transformative and very few people are actually using LLMs and AI models as to

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  regenerate the text itself.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. You would never go to Claude and say.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  The author's work is not being reproduced.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's being, you know, remixed and summarized.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, you might say, give me the, tell me about the themes in Harry Potter. But you're not saying, Claude, give me chapter one.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Which is something that was available to some degree on blogs since the internet existed. You could look up. What are some of the key points?

• 5:11John Coogan?

  There was that website, Spark Notes. Like, Spark Notes was a version of that that was transformative. And so I always thought that this would go this way, but I did think that we needed to sort it out in court. And for some of these categories of media, there probably needed to be deals. And I still think that there's probably room for something like Simon Schuster or Penguin Random House to go and do a deal with Anthropic or go do a deal with OpenAI to say, hey, we'll give you even more access. Hey, we'll let you, we'll let you reproduce the whole book if you want in certain cases, as long as you're paying us appropriately. And maybe that's just a few cents for every query, but it'll add up and we'll actually make just as much money as we did before.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  So interesting thing is that the judge did find that Anthropic infringed on copyrights by storing over 7 million pirated books in a central repository. So they had the books. And there's going to be a trial in December that will determine damages. Statutory damages could reach up to $150,000 per book.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  That's a lot. Wait, multiply that out. That's billions, right?

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, if the judge or the jury were to award that.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like a book costs like 20 bucks. How much does a book cost?

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're saying the damages could be up to 150,000 per work. I doubt that goes through. It would end, it would end anthropic, but there's just no way.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  That sounds like the price of a book after David Sandler does, does an episode about it.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  And there's only six copies on Amazon and they've been spiked up. Anyway.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is the first major ruling applying the fair use doctrine to generative AI training, which has been a key legal issue that every lab is following. And yeah, ultimately, the court is criticizing Anthropic for pirating these texts, but.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  The big question here is, will training on YouTube data be fair use? Cause it is public. Like my YouTube videos, I host them on Google servers, on a Google service, but you can, you can go and watch my video and summarize it in a blog post that you post on WordPress and you can transform it. And I could say, hey, like I'd prefer if you didn't do that, but it is, it is fair use and I don't have a problem with that. Now the question is, can OpenAI go and train, what's their video model again? Not DALL-E.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Sora.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Sora, Sora V3 on all of YouTube because it's fair use.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  If this is like.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  And the book thing is interesting too, because in theory Anthropic could have gone to many different public libraries and not had to actually pay for the book and could have accessed them in different ways. But ultimately, we'll see how it shakes out.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  But I mean, the most important thing for Anthropic obviously is to get on Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. Anthropic. Dario, if you're listening, I know you're listening. Go to ramp.com. Sign up if you haven't already. David Sack summed it up. Positive ruling for AI. There must be fair use. There must be a fair use concept for training data or models would be crippled. China is going to train on all the data regardless. So without fair use, the US would lose the AI race. This is an interesting take.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  I hadn't even thought about that dynamic, but that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, and then you have this weird dynamic where it's like, what if DeepSeek is trained on all the American books? And so DeepSeek becomes like hyper capitalist and then the only way for American models to keep to stay up is like perplexities like DeepSeek 1776. So they're like fine tuning on DeepSeek output that's.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  In order to deliver Western ideals.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  I love it. Maybe that's the, maybe that's where this winds up going. Yeah, that's great. The writers filed the class action against Thropic last year, arguing the company, which is backed by Amazon Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission to compensate to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. I wonder what what pirated means in this context because I wonder if it literally means like they went to like a torrent website and like downloaded it illegally? Or if it means like, because you can like, you can technically like go and buy a DVD and then rip it and then have the MP4 file.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  It's not, but it's not pirating because you own the, you own the DVD and so that gives you the right to put that, that file on your computer. And it would look like a pirated file because usually you can't just have a.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  Seven million books, $20 a pop. They didn't spend $140 million on books.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  They should, they should have.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  That's one of the risks going into this trial. It's possible that, you know, I don't think.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  They should, they should, they should have to pay $20 a book.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  They should spend $150,000.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  What is the actual damage again? You had the number?

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  $150,000 per work.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  That is way too high.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  It could go up to that point.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  I would, I would give them some bulk pricing, maybe $17 a book, $15 a book, maybe even $10 a book. But they gotta pay something.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  The issue is that the individual rights holders are not exactly going to be super happy about getting one purchase.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Hey, 20 bucks is 20 bucks.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  20 bucks is 20 bucks.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  You see at the back of every book, on the back of the book, it says recommended price. Like, I want to buy one. Yes. Who knows what I'm gonna do with it?

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  20 bucks is 20 bucks.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Some people are gonna read it, some people are gonna let it sit on the shelf, and some people are gonna train a massive AI model on it.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  They could go through this whole lawsuit and come away and buy one double steak, double guac, Chipotle burrito bowl. And think, this is worth it.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  It's worth it.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  I mean fundamentally, Anthropic believes that they are creating God. So like, you want an illiterate God? You gotta let God read some books.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  It would be an affront to God to not let God read books.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Might be on to something.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're designing the next great AI product, go to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Now, let's move over to the all-in tequila. So we talked about it briefly, but we want to go a lot deeper today. So Chamath Palihapitiya has the story. He says, "We've launched our ultra-premium tequila today in Los Angeles at Delilah's." I've never been to Delilah's. Is it good? Have you been? Are you familiar with this place?

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm not big into that world, John.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Me either.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  We mostly don't leave the house after 9:00 PM.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Where does ultra-premium sit in the ranking? Because it's below luxury?

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was surprised with, the pricing is clearly luxury.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  That's what I would think.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  The positioning overall, the bottle looks incredible, the box looks amazing.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  The bottle actually does look incredible.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  It very clearly, it is an order of magnitude more expensive than traditional luxury, or I would definitely say ultra-premium products, right? And so, yeah, squarely sitting in that luxury category, but I think he just, I think he just ripped it.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  I think, I think it begs the question, like, what comes after ultra-premium? And it's obviously giga premium.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they wanted to leave room for a $10,000 bottle.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  $10,000 bottle that's giga premium.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  So for those that don't know, the bottle, the tequila is $1,200.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  $1,200.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  750 milliliters.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yes, and...

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  And let me read a description.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Pot distilled from 100% blue Weber agave grown in the lowlands of Jalisco and aged in white oak. Ex whiskey barrels for five years. This extra añejo tequila has the perfect balance. A smooth, slightly sweet taste with hints of wood, citrus, dried fruits, butterscotch, vanilla, cacao, toffee and cooked agave. We recommend it to be paired with good friends and lively debate as they do on the show. Fitting, the bottle is a handcrafted art piece evoking a stack of poker chips. It is illuminated from the base to appreciate the beauty and complexity of its design. Each is individually numbered for its very limited release of 7,500 bottles. So...

• 13:10John Coogan?

  I would really love a new tonic.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  If they sell out, they will gross nine million.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Wouldn't you love a $1,200 energy drink?

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Just a beautiful energy drink.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Ultra-premium.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Ultra-premium energy drink. That comes in a glass bottle, pour it out. Oh, that'd be so good. They really should do that. Uh, I'm, I'm sick of the energy drinks in the, oh, $3 a can, $5 a can. Let's get, let's get these numbers up. $500.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Get these numbers up.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Anyway, there was a lot of pushback. Augustus Derico chimed in to the tune of 5,000 likes. He says, "The elites have totally abandoned us and, and their responsibility to steward the nation. We're on the brink of war, deaths of despair at an all-time high, the economy is fake, and the plutocracy is launching ultra-premium tequila brands. We need greatness." And so he was very upset. Uh, non-equity partner had the flip side, said, "You can just do multiple things. Lead transformative agendas and launch liquor brands. Look at Tesla. Elon Musk launched the Tesla tequila. It was kind of a fun side project." And I think that's what Emily Sundberg was getting at before when she was talking about how celebrity brands,

• 14:17John Coogan?

  people kind of know the, the thing, like, do we really think Dave Friedberg is going to take his foot off the gas with his company that he's actively running to

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  work on this tequila brand? Like, no. He's, he's, he, you know, signed off on it, went to the party. It's going to live on a website. We, I actually found the, the design firm that did the design, like, this is not going to suck these folks away from, from the other things. At the same time, you know, Augustus does have some point that like... Maybe it's a little unserious for them to do it. I don't know.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  But I don't know why it's unserious. They have their friends. They have a podcast. They enjoy drinking together.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Playing poker. They introduced a poker themed bottle of tequila.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I also kind of.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  That their audience can buy and enjoy with them.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's, I don't think it's unserious.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  I think I have more questions around how seriously are they taking it as a business?

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, we need to get into that.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Are they bringing it up to a CEO? Are they trying to, you know, scale this into?

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, is it a drop? Cause it might, it might not even need a, it might not even have its own C corp or like its own LLC. It might just be like merch essentially, and it's cool as merch. And, and then there is this question where, you know, I, I feel like there is a drumbeat in the news and in the culture around like, things have never been worse. Like, yeah, like it, like it's so bad right now. We're in a uniquely bad situation.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yet at the same time, we're in peace in the Middle East today.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Peace in the Middle East, finally.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  For the first time in 60 years.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Only just a few days after the launch of this and there could very well be some.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Correlation.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  There's definitely a correlation.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Definitely a correlation.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Whether or not there's causation, we don't know yet.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Think you get a couple of these bottles.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  But Trump had his own vodka back in, uh, so he introduced this in 2005, the Trump vodka. Which is funny because I don't even, he doesn't drink alcohol, right?

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, he doesn't.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  He's never been big into that whole world.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  And so I think this was just.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you going to criticize the, I mean, the all in guys seem to enjoy the tequila at least.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Trump vodka was an American brand of vodka produced at first in the Netherlands, then later in Germany by Drinks America. Drinks America.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  It was made in Germany and by a company that drink America?

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Produced in the Netherlands and then Germany by Drinks Americas. It's, the company is called Drinks Americas. Two S's.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  It was never produced in America.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the brand was launched in the United States in 2005, but ceased production under the Trump name in 2011, when it failed to meet the required threshold for distribution. Honestly, might be the time to bring it back.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  I don't know if they're going to do distribution. It seemed like it was all online.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. However, it is still sold in 2016. This was the last time it was updated, especially around the Jewish holiday of Passover. Interesting.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Odd.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Trump, at the time, uh, the, the brand slogan was success distilled with Trump predicting it would outsell Gregor's father.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  He also said that when mixed with tonic, which he referred to as a Trumpin tonic, T and T, it would become the most drunk.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  T and T is good.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  It would become the most drunk cocktail in the United States. I love, I, I, I mean, the consistency of his confidence across eras is incredible. In 2007, Drinks Americas signed a deal to export 50,000 cases of Trump vodka annually to Russia.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  To Russia.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  But in 2011, it was discontinued due to sales failing to meet the company threshold requirements. Several reasons were attributed to this. One was because Trump himself is a non-drinker and never drank Trump vodka.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  Never tasted it.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Drinks Americas also had problems producing it because the glass used in the bottle and the gold leaf labels were expensive and the company could not afford to produce them in large numbers. In 2015, in his campaign for president, Trump did not include Trump vodka amongst assets submitted to the federal election committee.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Because it was basically a zero. Interesting. Well, my advice for the besties, you're launching a tequila brand, you're gonna have to pay sales tax, you gotta get a numeral HQ.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. I liked Mike Solan's take, he said, "I'm happy for the all-in guys and tired of the tedious hate. They built a popular show, which is hard, true. Now they're launching a tequila brand. Okay, great. Hope it does well. Jealousy on this app is unreal. Their success can't hurt you, focus on yourself." I like this. Eric Torrenberg chimes in, "How you feel about their tequila brand is how you feel about yourself." That's been a line he's been repeating. It's, it is, it is interesting. It seems like, you know, their, their whole show started as like, they're locked down

• 18:54John Coogan?

  during COVID, they all hop on, on Zoom and they have some fun talking to each other. And they love poker, and this feels on-brand. This feels like a good line extension for the brand. I guess there's a question of like, should they just run ads for a big tequila brand? But we should get into-

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  I think this is way more fun for them.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fun to have their own thing, right?

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing more fun than creating something, especially if you've been in tech, creating something that's physical, that you can hold, that you can put on a table, that's beautiful, that you can share, that's social.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  So I want to get into, you know, expected value, expected market size, expected profits. Like, how successful do we think this will be? Because there's a world where this becomes a major brand. Like, I mean, Prime is a big brand, Feastables is a big brand.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Which Chamath is in.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  These guys could turn this into a massive company. At the same time, it could be more of a drop, and they could sell a couple hundred bottles, a couple thousand bottles, make a few million, move on to the next thing. I found the design firm that actually worked on this, The Besties All-In Tequila. It's from a, from a design team called Hello Stranger. They say, "We'll fix your brand, we'll give you a new brand, a brand that wins all the awards and sells at a premium, we'll give you a strategy, a unique angle based on insight and research, we'll give you the sexiest packaging that people can't put down, and we'll give you all the collateral you need to make your brand flourish." On this site, you won't find headshots of designers looking important next to yucca plants, because it's not about us, it's about the billions in sales in one of the toughest

• 20:25John Coogan?

  sectors in the whole of retail. "We're stranger and stranger, we've been doing it for over 30 years and we are the best." As one of our clients said, "Don't leave anything to chance." They started in 1994.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Only pushback I have here, I think Day Job is the best. They did the design for David Protein Bars.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  True.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  He's going to do billions in his first few years. It's hard to argue with, with those kind of results, but...

• 20:49John Coogan?

  So, they announced the Besties All-In Tequila, which is an interesting name choice as well. It's not the All-In Tequila, it's not Besties Tequila, it's The Besties All-In Tequila. But, they say, "The Besties at the famous All-In Podcast have just released a $1,200 tequila, which unfortunately for all of us is already sold out. The guys are big poker players, hence the All-In." And, uh, and the iconic bottle, single-mindedly owns the idea. And so the, the love language here, you read some of this handcrafted art piece evoking a stack of poker chips. It's illuminated from the base to appreciate the beauty. Oh, so there's a light inside? Let's go. That's cool.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  There's a light inside.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  I mean, that's what it sounds like. It says it's illuminated from the base. So I think, I think when you're spending $1,200.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  So that's how they get that glow.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  I think it glows. Yeah.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  It's tech product.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  It's internet connected. It's got.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  It's IoT device.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  It's an IoT device, potentially.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  For boozing.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  For boozing. Imagine you could link this. It could measure how much is in there, have an app orders you more automatically subscription. Now we're talking.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  This, it goes from a nine, you know, nine million dollar, you know, first run into a nine million dollar MRR business.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Getting up into that.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  I think we're getting there.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Nine-figure revenue range pretty quickly.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  It is, it is fascinating. So, uh, each individually numbered for the, each bottle's individually numbered. They're releasing 7,500 bottles. So if you do the math, 7,000 times.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Nine million.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Nine million. That's, that's, that's how much they're trying to make. Um, each bottle arrives in a numbered collector's box, bringing the besties' signatures. They're, they're signing them or it's printed on there? I don't know.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  I think it's gotta be printed on there. David Sacks does not have time to hand sign.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  7,000. How long would that take you? You do one every couple of seconds. It's, you know, day's work.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  The signatures would get so sloppy by then.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Mr. Beast has done that. I've seen streams where he's been like signing every single T-shirt.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  It gets really messy. But, uh, they say wet your beak, go all in. And it is remarkable how much their brand has dominated like the catchphrases. Like we've been, we've been pretty deliberate about trying to build the, the TBPN brand around Fortress of Finance, lever up, all these different catchphrases. They've done a really good job because as soon as I hear wet your beak, I think, I think all in.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Wet your beak.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, there's been some timeline in turmoil because Casa Czar Tequila has a similar bottle design.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  Very similar.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  And so we can pull that up. The founder story over at Casa Czar lies in a husband and wife founder story, a tale of resilience, determination, and the courage to go quote, "all in."

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so if you search, if you search "all in tequila" right now, you'll get a, a post from April 11th, 2025, that says, this is on thespiritsbusiness.com, that tequila stack-owned brand Casa Czar transcends mere novelty by merging cultural roots with the most important aspect, flavor and character. Max Ramirez and Viviana Serialta Ramirez, two ex-Diageo executives and industry veterans, launched Casa Czar in November 2024. The husband and wife team were driven by passion, determination, and courage to go quote unquote "all in" in pursuit of a dream to create a brand that would stand out in a crowded

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  market, not only visually, but also gastronomically. Less than a year since its launch, Casa Czar has quickly gained momentum and garnered industry accolades. Most recently, the Tequila and Mezcal Masters 2025, Casa Czar Tequila won two gold and a master medal.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  The brands Hoven and Reposado bagged gold in their ultra-premium, well, ultra-premium might just be like a category. We're kind of exposing how little we drink anything other than champagne. 100% agave tequila categories, earning a master medal Casa, Casa Czar Tequila and Yejo and press judges.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Here's the bottle. I don't know if we can zoom in on that.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  With its very expressive nose with plenty of earthy roasted agave and peppery spice, creamy and syrupy on the palate with drying oak and peppery spice, balanced with sweet golden syrup and charred agave. Judge Matt Chambers, director and co-founder of Whiskey for Everyone, described Casa Czar and Yejo as "so delicious." So anyways, I saw this and my immediate thought was that maybe all in had white labeled the bottle, but that doesn't seem to be the case. And digging in a little bit more. Some of the issues here, this company's been in business for a while now. It's ex Diageo execs. They have patents, from what I could tell around-

• 25:30John Coogan?

  It's more of like a trade dress thing. The patent would be like how you manufacture it.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Apparently they have design patents around-

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Design patents, okay.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Around the bottle design, which is very distinct.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, very distinct.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there could be some fallout, maybe a negotiation, maybe someone's gonna have to go all in. To see, put it all on the line, to see who can own the poker chip stack design for tequila bottles.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this could get, this could get spicy, right?

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Could get messy.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  According to Casasar, the tequila is designed for those who live life, who live like a high stakes poker game, fearless, driven, and willing to take risks.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  These are a lot of the same things, so there could be some confusion.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  The besties are taking a risk.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yes, and I've run into founders before who have inadvertently used names that they thought were kind of generic and then they wound up, oh, there was a smaller player in a submarket that actually had national ambitions and was gonna sue and pushed to say, "Hey, you actually have to back off my trademark because I know that you're selling this type of sauce." There is big spoon, there was big spoon roasters and big spoon sauce makers and they both had sauces that were spicy and they had different kind of logos but similar names and one was in the southwest and the other one was in California or southeast.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  And, but eventually they both wanted to go national and so they collided and they had to kind of decide how to back off.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, we saw this yesterday with I O, I Y O-

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, same thing.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  -the brand and OpenAI, where OpenAI had to scrub all mention of I, you know, I O-

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, from their website because of a trademark issue. This is seemingly a bit different because it's a design. Sort of patent or trademark. I don't have exact specifics, but I expect this to get spicy. And you're gonna have people with-

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Casa Zar is known for being sweet and spicy.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  I do wonder where ultra-premium comes in. I feel like it's anything over like a hundred bucks or something.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Why would you put a $200 bottle and a $1,200 bottle in the same category? Those feel like it's half an order magnet. It's like 5x difference in price. It feels like they're not necessarily playing in the same category, but the design elements and the fact that it is a tequila and they're clearly going after awards in Casa Zar.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Both are premium. Both are heavily branded around poker.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  One of them launched in 2024.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  One of them is launching today.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Oh, wait. Casa Zar is only 2024?

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. It's like pretty new.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  It's new. They filed their initial trademarks in 2023, though, so it's been a little bit.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  So they've been in market for a while and Casa Zar's execs, Exteagio, right?

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  They're probably got some sharp elbows. I imagine they're gonna wanna pursue this to some degree, just given people don't realize how, I think we live in this tech bubble.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  I don't think people realize how big All In is. It's like way bigger than just tech now.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Huge, huge, huge.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  And so this, you know, I think we'll see how this shakes out, but-

• 28:44John Coogan?

  So there's another thing that's kind of confusing is that I was wondering if they're playing in different markets because Casa Zar is 40% ABV. That's 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof, which is pretty standard for liquor. On the All In Tequila, the Bestie's All In Tequila website, it says it's 750 milliliters, same size, 40% ABV, $1,200, which would be the exact same stats, but when you zoom in on the box, I don't know if you can see this, it says it's 48%. Alcohol by volume. Can you see this, Jordan?

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Forty-eight percent here.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  That might have just been an early render or something.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. I, I wonder where they're landing because I feel like forty-eight percent is a much stronger choice for tequila. Like, you would be noticeable that you would have a stronger alcohol content. And it's also much harder to mask the flavor if you are dealing with an extra eight percent of alcohol because it's just going to be more alcoholic. It's gonna, it's like-

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  It's powerful stuff.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the secrets to those like spirits that, um, popular on college campuses is that they take the alcohol content down to something like thirty percent or thirty-five percent.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. I don't know where this picture is from because on the website it says forty percent.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  I don't know either. I don't know where I got that picture.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, we will have to get a bottle ourselves.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  We will, and we'll taste it. We'll immediately tell you. Yep, forty-two percent.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  We wanted to have Tyler taste it, but, uh, fortunately-

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Hundred twenty-one.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  He's not of age.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  So, we'll save a little bit for you, Tyler, for, for your birthday.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Um, well, if the besties are planning to take the besties all in tequila to the moon, they're gonna need to get on Vanta. They're gonna need to automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the 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, you know, if you wind up turning this into the big IOT, SaaS product that we've imagined it being-

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  You're gonna be managing customer data. You're gonna have their health records potentially. You're gonna be pulling in all sorts of stuff to optimize their liquor consumption. And you're gonna need to be secure. So, you're gonna need to get on Vanta for sure. How big do you think this is? Where, where do you think this actually goes? Like, like, I think that's the more serious question is-

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  It totally-

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Nine million. I think that they're gonna sell that. I think they're gonna sell all seven thousand. No, no problem.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  The haters will be in disbelief.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  And, yeah, there are so many fans. We, we, we know, we, we, we're gonna buy a bottle, but we know, we know folks who are friends and friends of friends who are gonna buy bottles. There's gonna be people that buy bottles- Because it's fun and they want to support their, the, the show that they like. There's going to be folks that gifted. There's going to be people that buy it because they're, they're, you know, um, they want to just like support the, the, the, the, the thing that hasn't been charging them for five years. Like there's a little bit of just like-

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Some people just want to support the dictator, Chama.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  But honestly, it's like, it's like, there is another world where if all in was $20 a month, you would have paid a thousand dollars over the last four years and they didn't charge you $20 a month. They didn't even run ads.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  It's free.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  And so what's your way to get them to say, hey, yeah, you've delivered me a thousand dollars worth of value and I have it because I'm successful. And, you know, this is a great way. And you get something that, you know, who knows what the margin is on this. Is it worth $1,200? Maybe. I don't know. It's, it's hard to say, but it's like, it's a fun thing to buy.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're going to a friend's house for dinner. What's funnier than bringing a bottle of the besties all in tequila? And be like, hey, I just picked this up on the way over. It looked, it looked nice.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  It's like, it's almost, it's like a good, like high-end tech gag gift almost.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  It's like a luxury gag gift.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  But it's also probably really good because it's expensive. So, so then you taste it and you're like, oh, this is actually really nice. Which bottle design do you like more? Because Casa Zar has this ceramic bottle that they hand paint. You said you liked that it had the stack of chips all the way to the top.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  So it's stacked top to bottom.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  I don't like that.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  John doesn't like it.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  But break it down.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  I think the ceramic look is nice. They look more like regular poker chips.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  That is true.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  I think it's cool.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  I think it's almost too close to poker chips. Like I would be confused. I'd be like, is that just a pack of stack of poker chips? It's like hiding. It's, it's hiding. Can we zoom in on the stack of poker chips there? Bring that over. Oh no. Skill issue.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  First zoom, first zoom bud. First time zooming.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, it, it, the Casa Zar is a beautiful bottle.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Multi-touch years ago.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  The Casa Zar, beautiful bottle. I like that it's fully stacked.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  I think it just doesn't read as a bottle of liquor, whereas the Besties All In Tequila does to me read as it. And then also the glass, the glow.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  The glow is insane.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  It is in a different tier. Ceramic is premium. I would only give the ultra-premium label now to the Besties All In Tequila. I would call, I would call, they've reset what it means to be ultra-premium.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Look, they're just showing off zooms now.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  They're zooming all over the place.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, not to, not to talk trash about cost as our, it looks fantastic. I'm just saying that the Besties All In Tequila, they innovated by, by including the illumination, by including the glass, by including the top.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  We don't know, they could be the IOT functionality that people have been asking for.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  We don't know. So I, I mean, I, I would give the Besties All In Tequila the edge here. Now, do you know the story of the iPhone?

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with what an iPhone is?

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I know where you're going with this. I know where you're going with this.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  So when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he famously said onstage, and yes, we're calling it the iPhone. And this was controversial because Cisco owned the rights, the trademark to the word, the iPhone. And so everyone was like, how is this going to work? You just launched a product that is clearly derivative of this other company's name. They have a trademark. They're just going to block you. But at some point, a deal was made. I don't know if it even became a lawsuit. It was probably just like, they sat down and said, hey, let's, you know, let's, let's allow this to happen. We want to run with this. We could take it to the courts, but that's a headache for both of us. Let's just net this out and we'll buy some WebEx licenses or something.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  There's a article on appleinsider.com from 2006, Cisco introduces the iPhone family of devices.

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  And it is not nearly as good looking as the iPhone.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  Would ultimately be. But it, and it's funny to see the iPhone, like word, effectively the iPhone word mark placed on, on a non-Apple device.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Well, if you're trying to build the next iPhone or software for the iPhone, get on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product redmaps. Now, we discovered an interesting link between Cisco, the iPhone, Apple, OpenAI, Johnny Ive.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  And I think we cracked the code. We got to break it down for everyone.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Get the tinfoil hat.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Get the tinfoil hat. I will, I will send the, I will send the image to the team so they can pull it up. So, okay, so this is, this is how it goes. So, Apple, as we mentioned, they potentially got the name, the iPhone from Cisco. Now, who designed the iPhone at Apple?

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Johnny.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Johnny Ive, that's right. Now, where does Johnny Ive work now?

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  OpenAI, they acquired Love from, they got, brought him over to OpenAI. Who's the chief product officer at OpenAI?

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  Kevin Weal.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Kevin Weal. And who's, what, what boards does he sit on?

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  Cisco.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Cisco, who, who licensed the iPhone name from Apple.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  It's a snake eating his tail, an auroboros of Silicon Valley intrigue. We cracked the code here. It's all linked. Symbolism will be their downfall.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  The most completely nonsensical Sketso diagram of all time.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  What are you alleging?

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you're alleging that things happen.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Tech people interact with each other?

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that, that.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  If only it were so simple, Jordy.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  If only it were so simple. I wish I had the my, your mind.

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  The mind of a golden retriever to not see the obvious pattern here.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  That.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  The big conspiracy.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, the big conspiracy that we unveiled here on TVPN, that they're all linked. It's all part of.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  It's all part of the plan.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Pulling the strings. Big Cisco, Apple, OpenAI, Johnny Ive, Kevin Weal. It's all linked. It's all links. We blew it wide open. We should throw all those guys in our CRM. Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  The official CRM of Coca-Cola.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so final, final word on the besties all in tequila. I think it's a no brainer that they sell nine million in this first run. The question is, Do they, do they do that every month? Do they do that every year? Do they move on to a different drop? Or does this become something that is a staple?

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think one of the challenges of the, the, what, what, what it will come down, it'll come down to product quality. And then the number of people in the all-in audience that care enough about tequila to spend $1,200 on a bottle of tequila, not in a sort of like funny gag setting, but as like, I'm going to just drink this regularly. And I think it could be a lot. Like, I could, I could see them selling 20,000 bottles of, of this. You can imagine them drink, one of them is drinking it on every show, right? It's sort of this constant, always on advertisement for it. I could imagine them, uh, they're, they're saying the besties all in tequila. I could imagine them going into other categories, right? And there's a world where they're selling tens of thousands.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Besties all-in malt liquor.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Forty ounces.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  Forty's. I would love to see, I would love to see Jay Cal do, do Edward Forty Hands.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Edward Forty Hands on the show.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  We gotta move on.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm having too much, I'm having too much fun.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  I have a different bulk case for you. I have a different bulk case for you. That's, it's a little more serious. Um, so I have been in consumer package world for a decade. Uh, I've, I've built two brands in the space. Like, the product quality is super important. You do need an edge and you do need a, a value prop that can actually resonate with consumers. And you need ongoing marketing. That's 100% true. But in fact, the biggest monopoly, brand is an important monopoly for consumer goods, but there's almost a bigger monopoly with just distribution. Like, if you actually walk around the grocery store, you will see, I talked to a founder who... Came up with, he, his whole model was he literally would walk down the grocery store

• 39:56John Coogan?

  and look at not just the products, but who owned the products. And he would see that, wow, this entire aisle is owned by Unilever. They just dominate the entire aisle. There's, there might be a ton of different brands, but everything is Unilever. Or everything is General Mills or Kraft or something like that. And so he, he wound up building a company that does, uh, he, he, he was looking around. He noticed that the popcorn section of the, of the, you know, popcorn aisle was extremely uncompetitive because Orville Redenbacher is the only major brand and they're not owned by Unilever. So they don't have You don't hear much about that guy. You don't hear much. So he started a company that, uh, was like a popcorn spray that you could spray, a flavoring that you'd spray on the popcorn is purely additive, wasn't

• 40:40John Coogan?

  competing with anyone. And he grew that to like a couple of million bucks. It was great.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  And I think that a lot of these products, they do just wind up winning on distribution. And what's interesting about this is that I am almost certain that in the all-in audience, yes, there are consumers, but there are tons and tons of people who work in distribution, work in store ownership. Like, would it be possible for any of the besties to get the CEO of, of Bevmo on the phone? Like absolutely in two seconds, they could do that. Could they get in, could they get this into Walmart? Absolutely. Could they get this into, I don't know, CVS? I don't even know what the biggest, um, what the biggest channels are for high ultra-premium liquor are. But if you just think even like the independent

• 41:30John Coogan?

  store owners, they probably listen or they're familiar, right? And so just being able to take that call and accelerate your sales force and have them be like, yeah, sure. Send me one. I'll put it on the shelf. When we sell it, I'll just order another one from you since it's a thousand bucks. And so pulling that distribution forward into the, into the future, being more aggressive about that, about getting into distribution, holding on to it. I think that's, I think that's something that could be, could be interesting. And then the fact that the bottle design, there's a couple of companies that do, that have been particularly good with bottle design. I've talked to one consumer packaged goods founder who, who basically said that their whole model was like, go into a category and figure out how to make

• 42:14John Coogan?

  something like shiny and gold and like pop off the, pop off the, the shelf. Because you look at the wall of all the products, they all look generic. If you can be the one that stands out, you're going to just have more people pull it off to sample it. And when I think about if I'm walking into a liquor store and I'm seeing a whole bunch of tequila and one of them is literally glowing and looks like a and it has a light up display. This is something that a lot of consumer packaged goods founders negotiate for. They will say, hey, like Red Bull would come in and say, we will give you a fridge, a Red Bull fridge. You know those fridges? Or like, we will come in and give you a light up display. We, we, we fight for this all the time with Lucy. Like we, we will say, oh, we'll send you a free in-store display that you can put on your shelf.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  And they're putting it on the counter so that we don't have to fight for the shelf space that's there. And so imagine if they're like, this, every bottle is a light up display. It will jump off the, it'll jump off the back bar. And so it won't just sit there and collect dust. It will automatically draw the eye to it. I think that the light up thing could be enough of like a distribution advantage that it winds up being a popular product. I don't know.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I agree. I think it'll come down to product quality. What percentage of the audience actually wants to spend $1,200 on tequila on a recurring basis? Do they go into other categories? I, I think they could sell, you know, Chamath is also launching a wine club.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was interesting.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  That's separate.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  There was so much backlash to the tequila thing. It wasn't even the first alcohol brand he launched that month.

• 43:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah. At the end of the day, anybody that's getting mad about them doing something like this, it's like, they have always been very candid that they enjoy drinking together.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Why, you know, and, and like, and it's not like they, they can't do

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  world positive things in tech in addition to having fun and having their own alcohol brand. I think a lot of group chats out there would like to have their own alcohol brand. So. Anyways, I'm excited to see it play out. I'm excited to try it.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is definitely not like a pivot of the brand in the same way that the talking politics is not a pivot of the brand. You go back to the very first episode of the All In Podcast, they were talking politics. They were talking about COVID and stuff like it was it was like they've been very consistent in all this stuff. So anyway, if they're trying to pump their tequila, they got to buy a billboard on AdQuick, adquick.com, out of home advertising.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  Straight to the 101. I want to see the one I want to see every single billboard on the 101.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  The Besties All In Tequila. Out of Home Advertising Made Easy and Measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  Yet if you're trying to get the attention of a CEO, maybe you want to sell some enterprise software to them, why not gift them a bottle of the Besties?

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  And that'll that'll get you a demo real quick.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  I think VCs should be sending this to founders. Founders should be sending it to VCs. It's it's a it's going to be a hot commodity if you can get your paws on one of these.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, Hims and Hers stock drops more than 30% after Novo Nordisk breakup. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Of course, if you're interested in stocks that are dropping because you're going short or are popping because you're going long, you got to get on public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Anyway, the Wegovy maker, that's Novo Nordisk, has cut ties with the telehealth company, Hims and Hers, citing allegations of deceptive marketing practices and drug compounding. I feel like they were the drug compounding. How is this an allegation? I thought that's like what Hims was saying they were doing. They were like, I felt like there was a lot of press about them being like proud of drug compounding because there was a shortage. But I guess it's I guess it's

• 46:03John Coogan?

  alleged at this point. So we'll dig into this. Novo Nordisk abruptly ended its partnership with Hims and Hers after the Danish drug maker accused the telehealth company of illegally selling cheaper copycats. Okay, so this is after the FDA's ruling around about whether or not there was in fact a shortage. So Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of Wegovy, and that Hims and Herbs deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patients' safety at risk. In turn, Hims and Hers accused Novo of pressuring it to steer patients to Wegovy, regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patients. News that the deal was scrapped weighed heavily on Hims and Hers shares,

• 46:48John Coogan?

  sending them down 32% in afternoon trading in what would be the largest decline for the stock on record. Novo Nordisk's shares were down nearly 6% in New York. The messy breakup comes less than two months after the company's unveiled what they called "a long-term collaboration to directly provide Wegovy to Hims and Hers patients."

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this was somewhat predictable, right?

• 47:11John Coogan?

  We talked to TJ Parker about this.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Hims has been on a generational run in the markets, because they're one of the best, easiest ways that people can just go buy Wegovy.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Now, if you're Novo Nordisk, and you're like, "Cool, we're selling through this channel", but then the retailer, in this case, Hims, is telling customers as they come in, "Hey, we know you wanted Wegovy, but how about this sort of cheap knockoff, this compounded version?" Now, Wegovy is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues. There can be issues around compounding in drug safety. But then, the bigger issue is like, "Hey, you're using our brand and our products to acquire customers", and then you're getting those people in the door and you're saying, "Hey, how about this sort of cheaper, off-the-shelf alternative?"

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  And so, I have to imagine that this is Novo Nordisk recognizing the value of their brand in this massive, massive, fast-growing category, and saying, "We're not going to let you leverage our brand to compete on these sort of high-margin knockoff products."

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name, for real.

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  And there was a while when... They wouldn't use the term Viagra and they would use ED meds and sildenafil and Tadalafil and all of those different like they would use the actual underlying compound name and they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing the name of the underlying compound.

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  But yeah, the brand name is obviously what's

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  How do you think Hims will respond? Do you think they'll introduce a 10 in one shampoo?

• 48:50John Coogan?

  10 in one.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  That includes compounded.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  GLP ones, Viagra, hair loss.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  Medication. What else could Adderall?

• 48:59John Coogan?

  (laughing).

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  They could put some caffeine.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  I mean, this is Cognizin, Rhodiola, Panex, Gensing, Altheanine, caffeine. Get some GLP one in here.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Creatine soap with?

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Creatine soap would be good.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  With all the above.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Eli Lilly is the one that lost the patent, right? Because they forgot to pay the?

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it was Novo Nordisk.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  It was Novo? Wow.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  They have?

• 49:24John Coogan?

  They're all over the place.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is interesting to watch.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Novo Nordisk, how much do you think their stock is up over the past five years?

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Ooh, 500%?

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Try 113%.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  113, but it was a big company, yeah.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  But it's been on a tear.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Big company, but still. And how much do you think, what do you think the chart looks like over the last year?

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Uh, oh, it's down.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  During the GLP one boom.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  It's down because it ripped up so high.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  Down 50%.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  And then it went down 50% and they, and they rotated out their CEO. That's right, we covered that.

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Hims and Hers is at 9 billion, 9.66 billion. That is down from a high of maybe 15 billion. And it's one of those interesting like SPAC targets that I think they got out through a SPAC and they, they never really went down that far. They were down, you know, yeah, like, like, you know, 30%. I mean, they SPACed at $10 a share, went down to $4 a share, kind of grinded back up. Now they're at $40 a share. So if you, if you bought the, if you bought the SPAC and you did hold for five years, you're, you know, you're sitting on a 3X, 4X. Not bad. So, you know, um, kind of a narrative violation around the, around the SPAC, like all SPACs are

• 50:41John Coogan?

  bad narrative.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, and, and the CEO, Andrew Dudum, we should have him on the show, uh, said that, uh, uh, you know, I think his position, you know, we have no idea what the details of their, of their contract actually look like, but fairly reasonable position to say, we're not going to just sell one product, uh, just, you know, because it's true. Not every patient is going to respond well to Wegovy.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, they should have options.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  So before striking deals with brand name drug makers, telehealth firms were selling lower cost knockoff versions of these drugs made by compounding pharmacies, taking market share away from, uh, brand name makers. The compounding pharmacies had been allowed to mass produce knockoff versions conditionally because the original drugs were in short supply. Now, the, the whole compounding pharmacy dynamic is very different because I feel like the, the, the laws were created such that if a far big pharmaceutical company couldn't supply you the drug, like your local pharmacist could compound it, but then the, the, the startups kind of like rolled up all the compounding pharmacies and were doing it like a much bigger scale. And it wasn't exactly what was intended originally, but I'm not sure about that.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the big question, uh,

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Is when should they have stopped?

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Well,

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Jordi Hays?

  The big question, what, will there be more regulatory action around compounded GLP ones? And what will that do to their business? So roller coaster of a year for HIMSS. You know, partnership was in, uh, announced in April 2025, popped, terminated, uh, just a few months later with a 35% drop.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Well, if you're on GLP ones and you're losing weight and your wrists are getting thinner, you need a watch that can adapt to your new wrist size. You need to go on getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And you can find a watch with metal links that you could take out a link if you've lost a lot of weight, or you could add one back if you're in a bulking cycle.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So. Like a nautilus.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Handy when you're ready to start, start the bull.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Exactly. This is, this is key. This is very, very key. Um, anyway, a comment from the, uh, from the CEO, Andrew Dudum, he said, Hims and Hers will continue to offer on access to a range of treatments, including Wagyu, so they continue to battle it out. It'll be interesting to follow this and we will, of course, be talking to Kremiu about this later today. Um, there is a investing visual post here that I pulled up, um, about how Hims makes money. Uh, they're making $576 million online, $10 million from wholesale. That brings their total revenue to $586 million, which is up 111% year over year. Gross profit

• 53:28John Coogan?

  there, 428 million. Uh, operating expenses are 337 million, leaving them 92 million in net income, or 92 million in operating income and 50 million in net income. So 50 million in net income for a $10 billion stock, pretty, pretty high price earnings ratio, if that's their, or if that's an indication of their earnings. Um, but it's been a big growth stock on a major, major trend, GLP one. And so, uh, the, the, uh, the, the retail army has been coming out in force. Uh, King, KSM's capital said, uh, it felt too good to be true for Hims to go this long without some

• 54:09John Coogan?

  FUD. This is more like it. Just bought 2,300, 2,300 shares and, uh, Top Secret Stocks.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  What do they, what is, what does the retail army call themselves?

• 54:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. Himbo's or something.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  Say, I'm really him.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Hims, look at the data. You can see, uh, their operating margin has improved a ton since they've gone public. They started out at negative 40% operating margin and climbed up every single quarter. They're now at a 6.5% operating margin. The number of subscribers in the millions has gone from, uh, they were at point six, so 600,000 subscribers. Now they're at 2.4 million and their total revenue has gone from 272 million dollars in.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Revenue. Uh, this is the last 12 months. Now they're almost at 2 billion. And so they've almost 10x revenue from that SPAC price. And that's what's driving the stock overall to be up 3 to 4x off the original SPAC price. So.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Very good news. Uh, if you're Andrew Dudum and you need a break from grinding it out at Hims, book a wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  It's summer, Andrew.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're in one of the gnarliest PR crises of your life and two guys in suits on a podcast. You've never met or just like, yeah, take a vacation.

• 55:34John Coogan?

  Take a vacation.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's a bad idea summer's long. Hims is up 2% today, John.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  So it's time to, you know, treat yourself.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, take your foot off the gas.

• 55:43Jordi Hays?

  Head to wander.com.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  And speaking of foots on gas, Ford, which makes cars that you can put your foot on the gas of, is now under pressure to put their foot on the gas of acquiring rare earth elements. They are having difficulties obtaining vital magnets.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  They're scrambling.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  With rare earth elements, despite the deal the UN, the United States struck.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  And I just want to highlight, I think the silhouette of this car is fantastic.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  The Mach E GT, you're a fan.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  I've only owned one Ford, Ford Raptor.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  It was a very fun, uh, car, not very practical.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  If you need to park in cities and things like that, but.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you want practicality for GT.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I took a drive, yeah, practicality all about the Ford GT.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, but I took a drive. My buddy, uh, Matt has a Ford Mustang, uh, what is it called? The Mustang E, Mach E Rally. It's like this, this rally version of the Mach E.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Okay. So it's still the crossover, still like an SUV. More or less.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Sort of. It's like a hatchback.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's not a car. Like, I would not call this a car.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  It is a very, very cool car.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  It's fun?

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  It, to him, he said it's like the most fun car he's ever owned.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  And he's had pretty, something from, from pretty much every manufacturer at this point.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Well, he should hold on to it because they might be struggling to make them in the future.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  Might be going up.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  Ford Motor still facing difficulties obtaining vital magnets made with rare earth elements despite a deal the US struck with China to ease export controls, a company executive said Monday. It's hand to mouth. The normal supply chain scrambling that you have to do, said Lisa Drake, a vice president overseeing Ford's industrial planning for batteries and electric vehicles. Ford in May stopped production at a vehicle factory in the Chicago area because of a magnet shortage. The situation has improved, but the company still needs to move things around to avoid manufacturing shutdowns, given the scarcity of the materials. Drake told reporters during a briefing at an EV battery plant the company is building in Michigan. China in April began requiring companies to apply for permission to export

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  magnets with the rare earth metals, including dysprosium and terbium.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Dysprosium.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  The country controls roughly 90% of the world's supply of these elements, which help magnets to operate at high temperatures. Much of the world's modern technology, from smartphones to jet fighters, rely on these magnets.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  So everyone sees that 90% of the world's supply and thinks it's 90% of what's in the ground, and that's not the case.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  What, what is really going on here is that the industrial capacity to remove the rare earth elements from the ground is 90% in China. So they have 90% of the mining companies, 90% of the mining equipment. They don't necessarily have 90% of the actual rare earth metals in the ground, and the rare earth metals are not that rare. But we hear this every once in a while where we say, oh, like, there was a ton of rare earth deposits found in Ukraine, or found in America somewhere. And that's not enough. Like, just having them in the ground. You still have to go and dig the mine, get the approvals, make sure. And the, like, one of the big reasons this was offshored was because of environmental

• 59:02John Coogan?

  considerations, which I find so frustrating because it's one world. Like, it's an earth. Like, if you want to protect the earth, moving something from one continent to another does not save the earth. Like, I mean, I guess there's a little bit of like, yes, there's runoff in one river. And so there's local pollution that you're avoiding, but in general.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  You've been to China, John. It is dark.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  The sky is legitimately dark.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  But I, I think that, I think that like, a lot of the pollution that's going on over there is affecting us too.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  And so especially if you think about like, the broader global warming picture, the broader like poisoning of the air. Like, that stuff's not going to come over here at some point. Like, I, I, I, I find that hard to believe. It would have been much better to just focus on ramping up production in America and then actually doing the technological innovation to develop cleaner processes and not just offshoring it because it's like dirty. And then just doing the dirty stuff over there. I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's an argument for it, but it, it feels like the, the whole, the whole offshoring project was wrapped in this veneer of like, no, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, that type of vibe. Like, if we can't see the pollution here,

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  it's fine. It's not happening. And it's like, it is still happening. It's just you don't have control over it.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, now we have massive supply chain risk.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Exactly. And I, and I don't think, I don't think it actually had an impact on the, like, the stated goal of the environmentalists that pushed rare earth manufacturing overseas did not, was not achieved. And so that, that feels like, like a failure. And then on top of that, we lost control of this important supply chain. So Ford isn't the only carmaker struggling to obtain these magnets. Several other carmakers say that the pace of export license approvals for rare earth magnets hasn't changed significantly. It isn't quite day to day, but it's week to week, said an executive at one of the carmakers. Car companies have warned that they could be forced to halt factory work if they are unable to attain enough rare earth magnets.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  In the auto industry, rare earths are essential to electric vehicles because they allow a low cost way to ensure motors operate at high speed. Okay, so this should not affect the production of Raptor Rs. Thank goodness. I, I was, I was extremely worried. But, so we might have to get most of those Mach-E owners into Raptor Rs.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  But.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't think they're going to be mad at that.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  That's something we have to.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  If we have to do it, we have to do it.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  We have to do it.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  In the auto, in the auto industry, rare earths are essential to electric vehicles. President Trump struck a deal earlier this month for China to resume granting licenses to export rare earth magnets. The agreement, which has a six month limit, is aimed at allowing China to retain its chokehold on the critical minerals that give it leverage in future trade negotiations. So, very, very rough. Anyway, how'd you sleep last night? Let's pull it up.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Praying. I got an 88, John.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  Oh, no, 82.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  You beat me. Oh. Jordy's back on top.

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm back.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  After a while.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm back.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  What happened to me? I just, I guess I stayed up too late or something? I was in my sweet spot. Oh, I guess I didn't fall asleep until 11:12.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Gotta go to bed earlier.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Back on the, I'm back on the horse.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Back on the horse.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  It's okay.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  It should be a competitive week. I'm excited to see how it, we gotta start putting, we gotta start putting something on the line.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, the loser on Friday gets no caffeine and nicotine. The whole stream.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  And they'll be sleep deprived, too. That's, that's double duty. That's, that's extra hard. I don't know if that's possible.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  That would be torture.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, our, our first guest is coming in the studio in 10 minutes. Let's take you through a beautiful obituary to the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith. So, Ryan Peterson posted a photo of the original FedEx plane. He said, "RIP to logistics legend and outspoken defender of free trade, FedEx founder Fred Smith, who passed away today. Below is the first ever FedEx plane, which you can see at the Air and Space Museum Annex next to Dulles Airport in Virginia." Look at that. He must have been so stoked when he bought this. Like, his business was finally growing that he could own his own plane.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Imagine how many likes he would have gotten on social media, person that pic.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Everyone's like, "This is, you're flag.

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  You just have to appreciate it."

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  You're just trying to go viral. This is clearly.

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  This is clearly for logistics.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  This is clearly for logistics.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Total legend.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Oh, like burning VC dollars on a plane. Bear.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  I think he was using Vegas dollars.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  He was doing cash flow, yeah. Anyway, Max Meyer has a story that we should read through. Fred Smith and American Life. He says Fred Smith died on Saturday. He was the founder of Federal Express, which became FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies on earth. Smith was an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word and an American patriot. He bent reality and created something entirely new and he ran toward an extremely difficult problem. The fruits of Fred's work are as follows. If you give a box or document to FedEx by 6:00 PM, you can have it delivered almost anywhere in the United States or Canada by 8:00 AM the next morning.

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Imagine how key that would have been to business before the internet.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Incredible, yeah.

• 1:04:27Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to do deals?

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  If you give.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Trying to close a key customer?

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  If you give FedEx a package on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few hundred dollars. Most of us take overnight delivery for granted, but take a step back and the fact that we can essentially airdrop physical packages anywhere in the world is mind boggling. Smith's death is a reminder not to take the miracles of modern life for granted. They were built by people like Fred Smith. These are a few words about the man himself and the dazzling system that is FedEx. Frederick Wallace Smith was born in 1944 in Mississippi. Fred's grandfather, James Buchanan Smith, captained Mississippi River steamboats. Fred's father, James Frederick Smith, was the founder of the Smith Motor Coach Company, which would go on to become Dixie Greyhound Lines after

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  an acquisition in 1931. From steamboats to buses to jumbo jets in three generations, the family stayed on the cutting edge of motorized transportation. In 1925, the elder Smith, seeking to create the transportation line out of Memphis, converted a truck into a small bus and drove it himself. Within a few years, James Smith had dozens and dozens of coaches. By the time he died, suddenly in 1948, he commanded over 200. Wow. So he died four years after the son was. Born, wow. So you basically grew up without a, without a, or maybe that's the grandfather. According to James Smith's obituary. No, no, no, no, he's the dad. Yeah, yeah. So according to James Smith's obituary.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Um, those 200 coaches each came to a halt during their regularly scheduled routes for one minute when the funeral began. Uh, the young Fred was just four when his father died. Wow. In 1962, the young Smith enrolled at Yale University where he was fraternity brothers with future president George W. Bush. Bush asked Smith to serve as the Secretary of Defense twice and Smith declined twice. Wow.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Interesting because defense is, uh, who, who was the founder that we had on the show? I'm completely blanking on the, his name, the name of the company and who invested in the company. But he had this like defense focused supply chain management startup.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  It was one of our probably first.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  You're talking about Rune Logistics.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Rune.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but something he said about.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Not, not the AI poster.

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  The legendary poster.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Not the legendary poster. Uh, the logistics company.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Of OpenAI.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, so, uh, uh, the young Smith was, uh, a member of the infamous cloak and dagger secret society.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  He is not beating the.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Secret society, deep state allegations. Uh, it was at Yale that he wrote his first paper about his concept for using airplanes to deliver packages with a hub and spoke system. Wow. He was like, I got an idea. I got a business plan. I just need somebody to build it for me. I E. That instead of point to point package transport, everything would be brought to a single hub by air and then redistributed. We talked to somebody about this on the show, how, how now we think of it as like inefficient to bring everything to one place and then, and then do the hub and spoke thing. Because now we have, you know, DoorDash and Waymo and, uh, you know.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Last just last mile.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  All, all these different last mile solutions, but at the time this was revolutionary. Everything would be brought to a, to a single hub. Uh, repeat that cycle every night while turning a profit and you have a viable system for overnight delivery. The paper is said to have earned an average grade roasted. Uh, in 1966, the founder of FedEx graduated from Yale and volunteered to receive a commission in the Marine Corps. He served two tours in Vietnam for his service in Vietnam. President Nixon decorated Smith with a silver star and a bronze star. The silver star citation read in part, "Unhesitatingly rushing through the intense hostile

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  fire to position the heaviest contact, Lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers successfully repulsing the hostile attack. Moving boldly across the fire-swept terrain to an elevated area, he calmly disregarded, repeated North Vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and airstrikes upon the hostile positions to within 50 meters of his own location." Wow.

• 1:08:43Jordi Hays?

  What a life.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  And continued to direct the movement of his unit. Wow, what a badass.

• 1:08:46Jordi Hays?

  So at this point, 1973, he's 29 years old. He lost his dad at four. He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a silver and a bronze star.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  War hero.

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  And now he's decided to launch Federal Express in Memphis. Smith had studied military procurement and been working on the idea for nearly 10 years after writing the Yale paper. So he writes this paper, and he's like, okay, 10 years later.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  Most founders have an idea and they pivot through two months.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  He writes this paper, gets an average grade.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  This is like Nike.

• 1:09:23Jordi Hays?

  10 years later.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  This is the same thing as Nike.

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  10 years later, the company launched with a fleet of 14 French assault jets, which delivered a few hundred packages on their first day of service. There we go.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  He's just like, just zero to one. According to FedEx, Laura Smith named his new service "Federal Express" because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank, a prospective customer.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  They're moving money around.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, like, the name, you would think "Federal Express," you would just assume that it's an extension of the government.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  I did when I was a kid. I was like, oh, United Postal Service, USPS, United States Postal Service.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Using FedEx, like, it was just a better product experience than USPS. Even as a kid, you kind of...

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Feel it out.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Feel it out. The system that Smith had conceived at Yale worked. It really worked, and nothing like it existed. The USPS existed principally to deliver letter mail and didn't have aircraft. UPS was a giant. Of a ground delivery throughout the US. Federal Express, though, would specialize in rapid air delivery. Just five years after the first Federal Express flights, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Today, the FedEx fleet consists of nearly 700 aircraft and about 200,000 vehicles. And FedEx employs half a million workers around the world.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Wow. Every night at the FedEx Super Hub at the Memphis International Airport, hundreds of jets land at the airport.

• 1:10:43Jordi Hays?

  The Ultra Hub.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  The Super Hub, bringing packages to its many sorting machines. A few hours later, the jets take back off to every corner of the United States and the world. At their destinations, the other half of the fleet awaits feeder aircraft to take packages to smaller airports. And the FedEx Express trucks that take packages to their final destination.

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  The financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this, not just lose massive amounts of money.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could go out of business so many times. And yeah, there is that story about him almost losing money, going to Vegas and then putting the Treasury on black and winning it back and doubling it and making payroll the next day, saving the company. Maybe apocryphal, there's been rumors that maybe it was like, you know, some mob-related thing and he took a loan.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tinfoil, yeah, the tinfoil hat explanation is like, you know, he either did.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  But either way, he got it done.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  He did some type of, you know, and this is entirely internet speculation, it's probably not true. But it's possible that he like, you know, was, you know, needed a reason to have a bunch of cash, right? And maybe did something else, but the story is incredible and it will live on.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Smith retired from FedEx in 2022. After almost 50 years leading the company, he is survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife Diane. His daughter Winland, Smith Rice, died in 2005 of a terminal cardiac condition. It's very sad. And one has to think that his father, Mr. Smith, who died with 200 vehicles to his name, would be impressed that his son died with 200,000 vehicles to his name and a fleet of jets to match. So incredible story and may he rest in peace.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Also, one of the greatest logos of all time, the FedEx logo, has that secret arrow in it. Love that.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Once you see it, you can't uneat- not this logo, the the next logo, the more modern FedEx logo, has the secret arrow in there. Once you see that.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  They're moving. They're moving. And there, if you want to understand more about Frederick Smith, go to Founder's Podcast and listen to episode 151, 151.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  And subscribe to Arena Mag to read more of Max's writing. Check it out, arena mag.com. What what else is?

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Gav Vora. He says, chat, remind me to check this again in a year. I wonder if he's saying he's throwing it in chat and saying, you know, check this again in a year. This is a graph. It'll be kind of hard to read, but it's showing chatbots versus search engines. Who's winning the traffic war? Showing that.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  Google is getting 1.6 trillion total visits to ChatGPT's half of 50 billion, basically.

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  And Google is down 1.4% year over year.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  And ChatGPT is up 67%. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a 34x gap today.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  AI chatbots drew 55. Isn't that wild?

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI accounts for, out of 55 billion visits, OpenAI accounts for 47.7 billion.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  So users.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  81% of all chatbots is OpenAI. I feel like it's even higher now.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  But it's crazy. So AI chatbots are 2.96 of search engine traffic today. Varav is calling it or wants to check back in a year.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible we could see double-digit search engine traffic into chatbots.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder if like site visits is even the correct metric here because it's more like time on site and attention because I'm pretty sure I Google things like for just two seconds, Google something. I will use Google as a calculator, but and I won't go to ChatGPT for that. If I just have to multiply two numbers together, I'll just throw that in.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Are you not a power user?

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  No, it's faster.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  You don't.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  It's all about the speed.

• 1:14:51Jordi Hays?

  You don't believe in AI, huh?

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I'm still like checking out this whole AI thing, starting to learn about it. But, but yeah, I think the more relevant metric is actually total user minutes. Like how much mind share is going on because when I'm in, I'm probably in chat GPT longer than I'm in Google, but I might be hitting more page views on Google than chat GPT queries because I might, I might throw a deep research query and then spend 10 minutes reading it.

• 1:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Chatting back and forth.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  I'm very rarely throwing a Google search out and then reading the blue links for 10 minutes. That's just not how it works. So anyway.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Also interesting to think about how they're counting visits, right?

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  You're having this conversation with chat GPT where oftentimes you're repeatedly running news, new hits, right?

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Against Google. So.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have our first guest in the studio, Kremu. Welcome to the stream.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  There he is, looking handsome as ever.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  How you guys? How you doing?

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Doing well. Can you hear me?

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you fine.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to, to, you know, a future date when we can potentially see your face. But for now, your avatar looks great.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Soon.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Soon. Okay, I'm looking forward to it. We wanted to have you on to chat about a couple of things. What's going on GLP-1 world, reaction to the him's and her's breakup? Jordy, where would you like to start?

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  High level update on the GLP-1 market.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess, I mean, it's this miracle drug that keeps on, we keep on learning about new, new diseases or problems that it can treat. It seems like it can't just stop. We got the diabetes, then weight loss, then maybe gambling addiction and other stuff. Walk us through where, how people are using or how doctors are prescribing GLP-1s for various conditions and what's most promising, what's on the horizon and what you're tracking next.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm actually really glad you asked this right now because right now, the ADA, the American Diabetes Association conference is ongoing and it seems like every other presentation is about GLP-1s. They are just talking about all the latest advances. Just yesterday, Amgen showed off a once monthly instead of once weekly injectable. Eli Lilly showed off an amazing combo therapy with a. An inhibitor called bemagrooma, it's a very weird name that makes people not lose any muscle when they're on the drugs. They've been showing off just incredible advances all week. They've been showing off new treatments for like different conditions and whatnot. There are increasingly many indications that these drugs are getting approved for.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  In December, terzepatide was approved for sleep apnea. There's osteoarthritis indications incoming. There might even be, there's some effort being put into people trying to do something for cancers as well, because it does seem to help with obesity-related cancers. And it seems to help for, I don't know why, with hematological cancers, the blood cancers. I don't understand really the mechanism behind that. But it seems like it's just hitting every single indication now.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Why do you think that is? I have some guesses.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  I think the big reason has to do less with the direct effects of GLP-1s and more with the fact that obesity sucks. Obesity is just really, really bad. It affects so many different systems. It makes your health worse on so many different levels. And the things that lead to obesity are also quite bad, like the bad diet, the bad habits, the not moving around very much. It's actually interesting. A lot of people, after they've been on these drugs for a little while, they decide to move around more. They become more likely to go to the gym. They report that their physical functioning has improved. It turns out that getting fat has made them get to the point where they are no longer looking to be active. And so they just kind of fall into a hole.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  Practically everything has improved, I think, for that reason. And there are some improvements that are due to direct effects of the drugs. This has, like, for example, this one is major adverse cardiac events, major adverse cardiovascular events. Those seem to be reduced in number immediately after starting the stuff, which suggests that there's a mechanism that's pretty direct. And this mechanism is also independent of weight loss. So that seems to be how that works. Same with chronic kidney disease.

• 1:19:15Jordi Hays?

  Are you looking, are you looking, you know, I feel like the sort of biohacker alternative health world has for a long time, you know, talked about cancer being, you know, this metabolic disease. Do you think that could be a factor in why it should, could show some promise in treating various types of cancers?

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it does makes a lot of sense in that direction for the obesity related ones, but I don't think it makes sense. So years ago, there were people who suggested, I think quite wrongly, replacing certain cancer therapies with fasting because it seems to like

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  augment the effects of cisplatin based therapies and stuff. And that didn't really hold up very well. It was a bunch of theory work that didn't go anywhere. And I don't think that this would help through those purported mechanisms, which again, I don't really believe in. I really think it's mostly just cutting down on, for example, the number of cells you have, or well, not really the number of cells you have, but like the activity of being fat. It's just you have, you're not as big of a person. You have less to, less opportunity for cancer to really hit you when you are

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  Smaller.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, smaller. It's like how short people tend to live longer than everything else.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  Bad for me.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bad for you.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  Bearish for me.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Well, how much of the recent like advances in GLP-1 indications or, or recent like benefits have been just looking at all the people that are taking GLP-1s for weight loss or diabetes? And then seeing a secondary effect in the populations actually running the drug versus a new double blinded trial for a different indication? Are both things happening? Or, or is it, are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population and get an idea of what's happening?

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for approved indication, FDA approved indications like obstructive sleep apnea, you do have to run additional trials, but they are seeing that these things are possible from their trials or seeing these things are possible from the literature and they're running based on that. So in some cases, they do see these secondary endpoints. In fact, obesity is an example of this. Back in the day, when they first introduced these drugs, back around 2005 or so, the CEO of Novo Nordisk at the time actually said, and I quote, "Obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem. It should be solved by team, by means of a radical restructuring of society. There is no business for Novo Nordisk in that area," referring to obesity.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they, their scientists had to push for about a decade to go, hey, you should look at the weight loss data. It's really impressive. And then they finally, finally did it and

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  Now we have weight loss drugs.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that is, that is wild. What, what concerns you? What's the catch? Seems, you know, Is it too good to be true? Yeah, somebody might say, is it too good to be true? We're running this sort of massive experiment on huge swaths of the population right now. Seems to be, you know, many, many positive indicators, but what are, what are kind of red flags that you think people should be kind of looking out for, or the scientific community should be wary of broadly from your point?

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think that physicians need to be careful about prescription. And they already are. They like, they don't tend to prescribe this to people who are very skinny. But the fact that this stuff's available through the gray market, very easily without prescription for very, very cheap, fortunately I've contributed to that, has led to a lot

• 1:22:51Jordi Hays?

  In what way? In what way?

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  Oh, I made a, I made a guide to doing this. And a few thousand people actually like paid me eight dollars apiece to see all the details on it. And now I have a few thousand people who unprompted, I didn't tell them to do this, messaged me their weight loss progress and such. So through writing this guide a few months ago, I've led to almost 12,000 pounds of weight loss. And that's just what's been reported to me. Not everybody's telling me all the results.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  And is that, is that at a high level, people just finding pharmacies that will compound the drug for them? What does that actually look like?

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  So what it looks like is buying from China. So you are ordering from a Chinese factory, you are testing the purity of the stuff and finding, oh, it's 99.9%. I can use it. And then using all of that. It is not sold by Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, or any other major company working on these drugs. It's just from some Chinese company that is ripping them off.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  So is that patent infringement? We've been seeing that kind of go back and forth like him's and hers was able to compound because there's a shortage.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  I would love to see Novo Nordisk go to the CCP and say, hey, can you please knock this off?

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they could do import bans or seize the packages at the ports. Like, that's the design of this. You can't just buy a knockoff iPhone and have it delivered through the port of Los Angeles. Like, if a whole truckload comes through, they should stop that, but it's clearly not happening.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  So, right now, the FDA allows this to happen because they have an exemption for research chemicals. You're technically not supposed to use these things, but everybody knows that everybody uses them. It's just how it is.

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  They're researching weight loss.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm researching.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Research maxing.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  I'm doing research.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  So you were saying the potential red flags or things to be wary of is around. What about the prescription activity concerns you?

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Mostly abuse, not really prescription activity so much as the abuse. There are people who are obtaining these drugs. There are people who are getting other people to get the prescriptions. There are people who are not really visiting doctors, using Kelly Health Services to get prescriptions, and they are not in need of them.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  But why would someone abuse this? This doesn't feel like something that has like the euphoria associated with a stimulant.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  So the concern, I think, would be somebody has body dysmorphia.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Is that what's going on?

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  Really skinny.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around 120, 130 pounds, normal height, and now they're around 100, and they are, they don't look good anymore. They look like they're aging very quickly. They look unfortunate, and it's sad to see that they're using these drugs when they didn't even need them in the first place.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. The same negative effects of start actual starvation.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You start getting really bad harmful effects. You probably are eating at that point more lean mass than fat mass. It is quite bad.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, that makes sense. Yeah, that's always the risk.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  How are you, what was your reaction to the HIMSS, Novo Nordisk partnership blow up?

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  So I actually think this is a big failure on Novo Nordisk's part. It seems as though what they did was they partnered with Hims in order to catch them. My understanding is that Hims has been selling a little too much, more than they've been supplied by the person producing the drugs, which is interesting. I guess we'll get more details relatively soon if the lawsuit's commenced and all that.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Theoretically Wegovy gives them a million doses and then Hims is somehow selling 1.2 million doses of Wegovy? Is that, is that what you're?

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that. They're either compounding it themselves, ordering from something from China, they are doing something. And I don't know if that will hold up or show up in trial. It's an accusation. It's, so I guess it's alleged, but we'll, we'll see, we'll see.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about Hims's general position that patients should have as much choice as possible, as much access, you know, access at different price points, things like that?

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  They are completely correct to do that. I think that Hims providing different dosages than are provided by Novo Nordisk is a wonderful thing. There are people who can get legitimate uses out of

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  sort of microdosing this stuff because it gets rid of noise. I've met many, many people now, and this is an increasingly common thing, it seems. I really don't know how far this is going to go. But a lot of people who are microdosing this because it helps with their ADHD. Their ADHD is like the pathological end of food-based distraction. They're not losing weight from this anymore, but they are just using it in order to not think about food at all. It gets rid of that nagging feeling in the back of their head and they can focus on work.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I did a 24-hour dry fast from Friday night to Saturday night. And all day Saturday, I was shocked at how much time my, I was just thinking about food and water, wanting food and water. And I was, and I was very freeing to some degree because I was like, well, I'm not, just not having any until around dinnertime. But so many points throughout the day, my mind was just going to, oh, I should go get a little tasty drink from the fridge. I should, you know, I should.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm not addicted to water. I'm not addicted to water. I'm not beating the water addiction allegations. Big water guy. What, what else are you tracking right now broadly? Any reactions to the NIH funding?

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, 40%. We had Andrew Huberman on the show. He was breaking it down for us and what's going on with Jay Bhattacharya. What's your take on the cuts that have been proposed?

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  So I don't know how much I should reveal about that. There's a lot of really good things coming. There might be some interesting developments there very soon. I'm especially hopeful about, well, you know, actually, I shouldn't say that. Just there will be good news there soon. There will be a some changes.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah, yeah, I guess zooming out like what, what does good look like to you? Are you generally in favor of taxpayer funded?

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Every American gets a $10,000 biohacking budget annually. They can buy research chemicals.

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  Biohacking vouchers.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, some people would say like, you know, the, the, the big pharma companies are profitable. They should bear this expense, not the American taxpayer.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're not profitable enough. They have troubles with R and D. The, that public money is very, very useful. We need more public funding than we currently have.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you actually look at biotech returns, you know, just looking at the asset class, the logical thing to do would just be to invest elsewhere. And that, that was with historical levels of public funding that, that kind of contributed to those returns to some degree.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have a dearth of funding at the moment, and we need to increase it. We need to improve the allocation and also increase the amount. There's really no way around it. If we want to keep making progress, you just have to throw more money at these things. And I think we will start doing that very shortly. These cuts are a little alarming to start, but they are not the end of the discussion. Remember, we are, it's still only five months into this presidency, and they have a lot of really big plans. They have a lot of trouble getting appointees through the Senate, and they have a hiring freeze ongoing right now that is interminable. We don't know when it's going to end, but once that is over, they'll be issuing NPRMs left and right. It's going to be deregulatory like massacre. It's going to be wonderful.

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow. What else is exciting to you in biotech right now?

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  Well, I wanted to say on the him's point with the different pricing and whatnot. I think perhaps the most exciting thing right now in that area is that Novo Nordisk is run by idiots. Like they're very smart people, but they're just total idiots.

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  Hey, everybody misses the patent, you know, what did they do?

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  I think it was Eli Lilly, but they missed.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  No, no, this is Novo Nordisk.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Oh, there was Novo that lost the patent fee?

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they just forgot to renew it. It was 450 bucks or something.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Yes, it was 250 and then they missed it and they were told you're one year out. You had to pay a late fee, like an extra $200 late fee on it. And they still failed. It is amazing. So that enables a wonderful, wonderful program that the FDA should pursue immediately. The FDA and the CMS have to collaborate on this, but it's the section 804 importation program. And it allows individual US states to import as much of the generic drugs or any other type of drug that's produced in Canada and has like an indication of proof here and whatnot as they want to reduce costs. So for example, Florida will, whenever they get this actually going, have much cheaper EpiPins.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  They'll be able to lower the cost of their drugs by importing cheap generics from Canada. And because cheap generic Ozempic is going to be coming from Canada in 2026, every state can just jump on the program. And if we're giving people, if we're giving Americans $5 a week Ozempic, then we're going to see perhaps an end to the chronic disease crisis. We're going to see obesity tackled meaningfully. We're going to see people getting hot again and make America hot again.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  The real meaning of aha.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  The real meaning of aha.

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  The real meaning of aha.

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. Inside baseball.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Very exciting. Well, 15 minutes was not enough time.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Never enough.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you back on again soon. Thank you for, uh, thank you for all the insights.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll, we'll have you back on soon. This is great. Absolutely. You guys have a good one.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  And if you dox yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset. So.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Might have to. Oh, no. Sorry, guys. Alright, you guys have a good one.

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  Alright, cheers.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:32:36John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Clement from Hugging Face coming into the studio. I believe he's here already. Very excited to talk to him. Fascinating business. We'll dig into artificial intelligence, open source, everything that's going on with.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  What is the origin of the name Hugging Face?

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  What is artificial intelligence?

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  It's the emoji, I believe.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Yes. What is AI?

• 1:32:56Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  Hey, that's the emoji, like that. The Hugging Face emoji.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  Yes, but there's.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Come on, you guys are giving me shit about the name with a name like that, T B P N.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  It's much better than Hugging Face.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm not, I'm not giving, I'm not giving you shit. I just, I just was wondering the origins. And then I just immediately see the, the, obviously the icon.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  But there's, there's more to the name than that. It, it, it's an emoji, but it came because the product that you were building before this was related to that, right? You break that story down.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. When we started the company eight years ago, we were building some sort of a Tamagotchi AI, AI girlfriend, Chat GPT before Chat GPT.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  So very much kind of like an entertainment product. And so, uh, we picked the Hugging Face emoji because that's the one that we were using the most.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  We also had internally this joke that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter ticker, you know, like on the, on the NASDAQ.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Still, still, uh, fingers crossed for that. I hope nobody's gonna go public with an emoji before us and that they'll wait for us. Uh, and then the community just loved it and started to put it everywhere, put it on their, on their clothes, on their, on social networks everywhere. So we decided to keep it.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, the owning an emoji as a brand online, I think is still underrated strategy. We see it every once in a while. I've seen people use the different fruit emojis for different things. And there was a whole strawberry story tied to OpenAI and stuff. But when you can condense down, I mean, it's a coinage essentially, like when you can own an emoji and have it say something, that's very powerful from a branding perspective.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  You can even search with an emoji on Google and the App Store directly with the hugging face emoji.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you're going to compete with the people that use the emojis for any other reason. And there's always the risk that somebody steals. I bet their SEO is pretty solid. But I think, yeah, I think if you search the hugging face emoji, you're going to wind up in the right place. But walk me through the business today. How, what, give me an idea of the scale and kind of the core business model.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're one of the most used platform for AI builders. We just crossed actually today 10 million AI builders using us. So it's mostly AI scientists.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  10 million?

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  10 million AI builders. So it's mostly AI scientists, AI engineers, software engineers, building models, training models, optimizing models, sharing models, data sets, apps. So there's a new repository. So it's model, data sets, apps, created a hugging face every 10 seconds now.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  And the way we monetize, because you asked this question, is kind of like a pretty straightforward premium model, where most of the usage and the users are free, and then a small percentage are premium. And usually, they become premium with premium features. So for example, enterprise features, when like a big company like Google, like Nvidia, using us, obviously, they need user management, security, stuff like that. Or when they need premium compute, right? So when they need more powerful GPUs or hardware to run some other stuff they're doing on the platform.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  10 million AI developers, if you paid each one $100 million, which seems like the going rate these days, it's a quadrillion dollars. It's a lot of money. But I mean, even if you're paying reasonable rates, you're still up in the in the in the trillions of dollars for the total market. I mean, I would be interested to get your reaction. How have you been processing the news that the the talent market for artificial intelligence researchers seems to be hotter than ever in history? And we're getting into NBA money for top researchers.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Like, do you think this makes sense, given where we are in the cycle? What has been your take overall?

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's definitely hotter than it's ever been because when the CEO of OpenAI is saying that another company is paying more to get OpenAI employees, it's really like, here is the top because historically, obviously, they've been kind of like the highest paying public company ever in terms of of packages. So when when he's saying that they're getting

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  beaten on on packages is quite quite phenomenal.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  You know, I hope it's not going to continue too long and there's going to be more kind of like a almost democratization of skills of of AI building. Otherwise, I think we'll end up in a quite quite weird worlds. One of my biggest focuses is kind of like how to fight concentration of power, concentration of skills, concentrations of resources in AI. And and I hope we can progressively move into a world where everyone can build AI and not just get like a few hundreds AI scientists. That that'd be that'd be really great for me.

• 1:37:50Jordi Hays?

  What is your interaction today with the various prompt to code tools? What are you most excited about? You know, what is that space? Because that that feels like kind of the the entry point. Somebody comes in and they they are making software for the first time. And that can be maybe a gateway into exploring the whole ecosystem of of Hugging Face and everything there.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  It's super exciting, right, to empower more people to be to be builders. We actually released last week our MCP that is integrated into into Claude, into into ChatGPT, that they announced, actually, I think a few days, few days ago, into Codex, into Cursor. So we integrated with with all of these, with kind of like a specific focus, which is not only to empower people to build like websites or simple apps, kind of like the previous generation of of apps, but trying to empower everyone to actually build AI models, right? Which becomes really exciting because it means that maybe everyone can start

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  training, optimizing their own model, that then they use themselves on their interface to kind of like keep building even more. So that's when you start to have kind of like maybe the display will in terms of AI AI progress. So that's kind of like our focus with the integration of Hugging Face MCPs with a lot of these tools.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  On the open source question, kind of like the decentralization of power, what was your interpretation of the anthropic news today? That it was in fact fair use for them to train their models on, it was several hundred thousand books or several million? Seven million books. I was kind of, you know, optimistic that that would happen, but also just it seemed like we clearly needed some sort of legal ruling here to understand this stuff. But but how did you process it? Were you happy with the result?

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think this is good news. Obviously, I think this this ruling, they'll come and be different and specific depending on the use cases, because you have to look at not only, you know, what's been used, but also how it's used. It's if it's kind of like transformational, if it's replacing, competing with the initial data sets. What's been cool for for open source is that I think by default, open source is fair use. So when someone releases kind of like a data set on Hugging Face, in my opinion, it's it's usually fair use because it's used for educational or for progress. If you look at kind of like when copyright was invented and and designed, the main focus was not to prevent progress and learning, right?

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  And education, you don't want to have like copyright. Rules that are limiting progress. And so I think in in open source, most of the time when you release models or data sets in open source, it's it's very use. So hopefully that is going to be kind of like a little bit more of the motivation for companies, especially in the US. We've used a little bit this argument not to release their models and the data sets to do it a little bit more.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  Because I think we really need it now. I don't know if you've seen yesterday, the the conference from DLAN from semi analysis talking about kind of like the energy limitations in the US compared to China.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  Uh, something interesting there is that in addition to that, um, we're mutualizing way less in the US than in China, because in the US, most of the leading frontier labs are proprietary. And so they all do the same training runs.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  If you think of it, right? If you think of entropy, open AI, XAI, they all do the almost the exact same million dollar training runs.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  Whereas in China, they're much more open, right? Deep seek, for example. And so they mutualize compute and energy much, much more. So it's not only that they have more capacity, but also they use this capacity much better. Um, so I think it's it's urgent that in the US, we can't like find find solutions for for that, um, not to create additional risks for the development of of AI in the US.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's kind of oddly become more monopolistic over there or something like that. It's it's kind of an odd, odd outcome, but I that that certainly makes a lot of sense. Um, on the on the training data sets that go out, what are you seeing on the video frontier? Um, it feels like we've been kind of batting back and forth this idea that Google might have a really, really powerful sustaining advantage there because of the YouTube data set. Uh, you know, you talk about 7,000 books. You can probably download that on a torrent somewhere if you're creative enough. Uh, you might be able to scrape it onto a single hard drive. We've heard about folks putting training data on hard drives, flying to Malaysia, doing a training run, flying back. Uh, you think about GitHub.

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  All the code's basically been stolen at this point, like it's out there, some of it's open source, some of it's been, you know, it's, it's obtainable. It's much harder to get all of YouTube on a single hard drive and steal it. Or even just have a scraper because, you know, what, it's like hundreds of hours are getting uploaded every minute or something like that. So what are you seeing on the, on the video training side in open source, closed source? How do you think that submarket plays out in artificial intelligence?

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  An interesting data point there is that on, on Hugging Face, there is almost a half a million open data sets with a thousand new data sets added every day. And the fastest growing category is video data sets. And the reason why is because not only it's more of the focus for, for training, but also because I think we're starting to see more and more synthetic data sets on video that are starting to really work.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  Because, especially because the physics is starting to work on a lot of this video generation tools. It's not only used to create other video generation models, but it's also starting to be used, for example, in robotics. And that we're also starting to see quite, quite a strong growth to kind of like almost use the physics of the video as kind of like synthetic training to train robots, right?

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:07Speaker 03

  I think it's Musk who said a few weeks ago, like, oh, in the future, we'll basically put a robot in front of a laptop, watching YouTube videos, maybe could watch like shows like, like yours and basically learn, learn from that. So it's exciting that maybe seeing this kind of like intersection of like video and robotics that, that might lead to kind of like some interesting results in the, in the future.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  They might be watching already, who knows? On, on the video, I want to stay on the video training side. What makes for a great open source video training data set? I'm, I'm interested to hear how you processed the news of Meta acquiring Scale AI and the idea of the human defining what good data

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Data looks like. I'm familiar with what that process looks like in the RLHF world, in the LLM world. You know, you're basically creating rubrics for grading answers to clear questions. Does this follow the right format? And then you might have the customer or the user give a thumbs up, thumbs down. Did this answer my question? In the video context, are you having a human watch a video and then tag it with text? Or is there other metadata that's important? The physics thing seems harder to define. Basically, my question is just what makes for a great video data set?

• 1:45:29Speaker 03

  I think it's an open question. I think nobody really knows because it's quite, quite early. And then the early days of cycles like that, you usually don't care so much about the quality of the data, but the quantity of the data, right? So I would say that what makes a great video data set today is its size. It's for it to be big. But progressively, similarly to what we've seen in text, as you're going to start to see more specific use cases, specialized models, when you're going to start to hit some sort of a wall in the data, you start to focus more on the quality of the data set and then we'll learn how to make them better. One thing that we're seeing on Hugging Face, which is quite,

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  maybe not controversial, but counterintuitive, is that actually, you know, it's not going to be just like one data set or one model, or not even kind of like a dozen data sets and dozen models. It's going to be kind of like millions of data sets and millions of models. Just the same way you think about GitHub repositories and code repositories, where there isn't really kind of like one GitHub repository to rule them all, right? Like every company, every use case has its own kind of like specialized, customized code repository. Uh, one thing that we believe is that ultimately there's going to be uh millions of different models, millions of different data sets, and every single use case is going to be optimized, customized for its uh own use case.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I feel like there's a little bit of tension there, though, between like, if scale matters on the data sense side, how are you possibly betting on thousands of small open source data sets versus Instagram, YouTube? Like, it just feels like when I think about who's really going to dominate in the future of generative video, it's got to be the platforms that are ingesting every image and every video all the time forever.

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. In my mind, it's kind of like a timing thing. At the beginning, when we're starting on a cycle like video, uh, we almost have to brute force our way into intelligence. And so, you know, quantity matter.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:42Speaker 03

  But progressively, as as you want to optimize more, for example, when you want to optimize for costs, right? You start thinking, okay, how can I train a smaller model that is going to be faster, that is going to cost less money? Because, for example, if I want to do a banking customer support chatbots, I probably don't need it to tell me about the meaning of life, right? It just wanted to tell me about, you know, my bank accounts, and so I can use kind of like a smaller, more customized model. But I think you'll see both phases in video, a little bit the same way that you've seen both phases in in text, where you started by the biggest models. And now OpenAI or Entropic, when they release model, they don't really actually talk about the size of their models anymore.

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  And I wouldn't be surprised if actually behind the hood, actually the size is going down. Uh, because I think at at some point, you start to want kind of like a optimized, customized, and that's when you start to see uh more models, more diversity, uh, also of the data sets.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the information efficiency thing like a human doesn't need a trillion hours of training to learn how to speak English. A kid can learn that in a couple years. And so the algorithms eventually will get there. George, do you have a question?

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  George Hots was on the show last week talking about how he's been seeing venture-backed founders want to just check the open source box and basically say like, oh yeah, we're open source, just kind of because that's the cool thing to be. Are you seeing that too? Where do you think the line is?

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  Are you a beneficiary of that?

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we've seen that, even though, you know, I think, I think there's still a way, a way to go, especially for like a big US tech companies. I think if you look, so I've been, I've been in AI for eight years now. And if you look at the cycle like 2016 to like 2021, 2022, like the big tech companies in the US, they were doing so much more open science, open source. And in many ways, that's how the US got the leadership, you know, because, you know, Google releasing transformers and then the T8 transformers becoming chat GPT and kind of like building on top of each other. That's how you accelerate the progress

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  and kind of like building on top of each others. It has kind of like definitely slowed down. If you look at the big tech companies in the US. But fortunately, I think startups are kind of like compensating and filling the voids in a way. And, and I hope that, you know, big AI companies in the US also will change a little bit, evolve a little bit. OpenAI, obviously, Sam Altman said that they will release an open source model at some point. So excited about that.

• 1:50:33Jordi Hays?

  What are your expectations for that model? Do you have any predictions?

• 1:50:38Speaker 03

  My expectations are quite high just because of the history of OpenAI, right? When they tend to release something, they tend to release something quite, quite good. So I, I hope and I suspect that they could release something quite transformational in the, in open source. Hopefully, you know, I've, I've always said that, you know, if we had like the equivalent of a DeepSeek, but in the US, it could be 10 times bigger than, than DeepSeek. So hopefully, you know, if we can have something 10 times better, bigger, more impactful than DeepSeek would be, would be fun.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  Is that not Meta-Lama? What, what do you, how do you describe what's going on at Meta right now?

• 1:51:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's easy to dunk on Meta, right? But I, I think they're the most open, uh, big technology company in the US right now. They really changed the field with, with Lama. They really kind of like, uh, boost, gave a tremendous boost to kind of like the open source community and they still share a lot of their things in open source. I think open source is what brought them to the frontier, right? Like before they started to release in open source, they were quite far behind in terms of AI race and now they're very much in the race, uh, which, which is great. The fact that they, you know, haven't released something massive as a follow-up yet, to

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  me, uh, shows how hard it is to build at the frontier, right? It's, it's not easy, even for a big technology company like, like Meta.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  And so I think that, that speaks to, to that. Uh, I'm excited to see all their new efforts, all the resources they're investing in, in AI right now and hope that they can keep sharing with the community and open science and open source.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction to Apple's announcements at WWDC around on-device intelligence or inference? Was that exciting to you? Do you think that's going to be a catalyst for more developer activity? Or, and what are, what are you seeing so far?

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  I think it's it's quite quite early, uh but uh but quite excited about on device. Uh I I suspect that maybe um you'll have a higher percentage of compute on device for AI than you did for software. Uh just because of some of the need for uh for speed, uh for privacy. Um and uh the constraints in terms of costs, right? If you think of, you know, chat GPT on device, uh what's amazing is that it's totally free, right? Like you don't compare to the really high cost that chat GPT has right now, not only for the customers, but also for OpenAI to to run.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  Uh it's totally private in the sense that you can say anything and and nobody's gonna see uh what what you what you're seeing. And and potentially it could be could be quite fast. So I'm excited about on device. It's it's early, uh especially in the technology side. I think there aren't a lot of on device devices that really uh um make it okay to to run some of the great uh models. But uh it's progressing really fast and and can't wait to see what's happening in this domain in the next few months.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  That's a pretty huge switch because it's basically zero percent on device right now for AI inference. And if you're predicting that it's gonna go beyond fifty percent, that's a huge, that's a huge shift. Uh I mean, I have a follow up.

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  Pretty excited about uh robotics too. It's kind of like a little bit of a segue from uh from uh from on device. But uh we uh we we organized a weekend ago, um what has uh turned out to be the the biggest uh hackathon for uh open robotics. That thousands of people participated in from uh over a hundred different locations. Um and built kind of like uh open source robots. And we definitely can't like seeing something happening there, kind of like the conjunction of like cheap, cheap hardware,

• 1:54:46Speaker 03

  open source, plus kind of like new capabilities for, for AI could be kind of like the perfect combination for some sort of chat GPT moment for robotics.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  Do you think it's a straight shot to humanoids? Or do you think that we'll see kind of a Cambrian explosion of Nat Friedmann?

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  Friedman bots.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Bots that, you know, will pick up a single leaf at a time and are more use case specific. Are we going straight to generalizable? Because that was the chat GPT moment. I feel like there were great, you know, machine learning models for ad inference and recommendation algorithms. Like we had AI, but it was very narrow. Chat GPT was very broad. Which one do you think is coming first? And what are the relative timelines?

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  A good question. I'm not sure, to be honest. I think it's still undecided. I hope it's more future of more like diverse robots, diverse kind of like models. But I'm obviously kind of like biased on, on this, because I think if you only have like one type of black box robots

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  at your home, that's kind of like in like millions of houses, it's kind of like a scary, scary world. But, but it's, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell the moment, I think.

• 1:56:07Jordi Hays?

  What are key breakthroughs that you're looking for this year? Any, any kind of predictions, new catalysts, that kind of thing? You have a crystal ball in the office?

• 1:56:19Speaker 03

  I wish, I wish I had a crystal ball, crystal ball. I'm kind of like bored with text and chatbots.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:27Speaker 03

  Right now, I think there are a lot of people working on it and we've kind of like reached this point where it's very

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  Don't say plateau. Don't say plateau.

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  No, not plateau, but incremental, very incremental improvements that are a little bit boring. So I'm much more excited.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  We can still invest billions of dollars in it, right? Right?

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  It's fine. We can definitely still deploy.

• 1:56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I'm more excited about harder domains, like you were talking about biotech just before.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  Biology. Chemistry, these domains are super exciting. Today, I don't know if you've seen, Arc Institute released a cell perturbation prediction model on Hugging Face and on GitHub, which I'm super excited about. I think it's, obviously, if you can predict kind of like the perturbation and the evolution of the cells, especially when they react to drugs and things like that, it can have quite a big impact in terms of drug design and things like that. So really excited about these kinds of things, more kind of like biology, chemistry, and how to apply AI there.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  What, how much economic value do agents create internally at Hugging Face?

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  Quite a lot.

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Quite a lot. So we have this thing called Spaces, which is our kind of like AI app store, where there's like over half a million open AI apps that people are building. And it's integrated with our NCP framework, so you can add that in your chat, in your chatbots. And that's kind of like the most used thing internally at Hugging Face, where people are going to use Cursor or ChatGPT and kind of like call some of these more specialized AI apps to do kind of like specialized tasks for them. It's hard to put a number of it on it, but yeah, it's quite transformational, of course.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we're going to have this period where, like, do you find it kind of fascinating that you guys are getting a lot of value out of agents internally? And that, like, what do you think agent adoption will look like in businesses? Because it feels like, I don't know how rapid it feels right now. It's rapid in the bubble that we're in. People are trying a lot of stuff, but maybe they're churning quickly as well. So I'm curious what you think adoption will look like.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I think ultimately, uh, agent and AI are kind of like a similar evolution of the same same trends, right? And I think in terms of user interface, they're actually going to merge and and I'm not sure there's going to be so many kind of like different different ways of interacting with AI and and agent. Interesting. But they they're going to definitely go go mainstream just because of the very nature of a product like ChatGPT that has already gone mainstream and and where I'm sure kind of like OpenAI will bring more and more agentic workflows in into. So, yeah, I think I think it's definitely going to go mainstream faster than anything we've seen before.

• 1:59:53Speaker 03

  Uh, now the question will be, you know, do you use a very complex, uh, agentic workflow? One percent of the time, uh, for one percent of your queries or for 10% or for 50% or for 90%? Uh, and I think we'll see that based on the development of the technology and the capabilities. I think if the agents are much, uh, better than kind of like a series of queries, then I'll I'll use that. And if not, I'll, uh, stay on my, uh, past way of of kind of like doing simple queries. Totally.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Um, now that, uh, Meta owns something like 49% of Scale AI, uh, the budget for data generation has to be significant at Meta. Is there a specific data set that you'd like to see Meta harness Scale AI to produce and then open source?

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, I think, uh, biology, chemistry, data sets are still very much lacking.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:00:58Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Is there like a more specific example, like within biology or chemistry? Like, what would you actually use an army of humans to go and categorize? Would you need biologists and like PhD post-grad type work? Or are we talking about something that someone could do even with just like basics, a basic skill set?

• 2:01:21Speaker 03

  I think it's an open question. I don't really know, to be honest. I think if we knew what would be the idea data set there, we would we would build it ourselves because we also built some some data sets ourselves.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  That's certainly the story of AlphaFold, right? Like they had a fantastic data set for AlphaFold and then they were able to do reinforcement learning against it. And that's what really solved the that incredibly hard challenge. So if you don't have the data.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But my main yeah, my main point would be, you know, maybe to focus a little bit less on just texts and just chatbots and kind of like focus a little bit more on other domains. I think that's when you can kind of like unleash a lot of the additional impact and a lot of the, I think, positive use cases for for the technology too.

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Well, thank you so much for joining. This is fun. Appreciate all your insights.

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully have you on again soon.

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  Sounds good.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Let's go back to the timeline while we wait for our next guest to join. Unusual whales says Deloitte's US employees can now buy $1,000 of Lego on the company's dime to boost their well being. We're already giving that.

• 2:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Deloitte.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  We get we get free Lego sets now.

• 2:02:36Jordi Hays?

  This is what employee wellness looks like.

• 2:02:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:38Jordi Hays?

  It's not just policies in a PDF somewhere.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  It's not gym membership.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  It's Legos on the table.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Yes, Legos on the table.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  You're in a meeting, you're stressed out, just start making Legos.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  Can oh, it looks like Tyler over on the intern cam has a few Lego sets that have been sent to us.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  Our Andorol Lego set build out was fantastically successful. Tyler did it in what, one hour and a half?

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Current record holder.

• 2:03:03Speaker 04

  I think it was 119.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  119. Who's counting though?

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Current record holder.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  Current record holder.

• 2:03:08Jordi Hays?

  World champion.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  And walk us through what companies sent you stuff? What will you be building next?

• 2:03:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, so first we have the Eperus. This is

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  Eperus.

• 2:03:18Speaker 04

  Eperus.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Got a little counter drone system going there?

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:03:23Speaker 04

  This one looks like a lot of fun. And then the other one is from Solugen.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  Solugen. Very cool. It's a bioforge.

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Molecule factory.

• 2:03:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Now.

• 2:03:31Jordi Hays?

  Everybody should have a

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  We'll come back to you later because our guest is here, but I want to know because it seemed like Andorl went straight to the Lego factory and had a design document and guidelines. Those look like they don't even have instructions. So I want you to dig into those and see, I want, I want new estimates for how long you think that'll take you.

• 2:03:51Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  He's like, not another Lego.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  I can't possibly do it.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Please, I thought, I thought I would be software engineer.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Viral bait. Anyway, we have Emmett here in the studio. Oh, you have Lego set. What do you have?

• 2:04:05Speaker 05

  Lego sets are the new hot swag. I got this from, I guess it's from Fluidstack. They sent me like these like GPUs you can build out of Legos.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:04:13Speaker 05

  They made themselves. I think they're like knockoffs. I don't think it's actually Lego.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, there's probably a couple of different companies that you can go and get Lego sets.

• 2:04:19Speaker 05

  That is the hot new swag is like making, making Lego kits of your stuff, especially if you're a hardware company.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, are we going to get a Softmax Lego set? What would you build?

• 2:04:29Speaker 05

  How do you, how do you build a Lego set of a neural net? I mean, that would be pretty cool. If you could like get a Lego Technic.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I've seen people draw out the neural nets and the, and the different weights in, in, on like a whiteboard. So it could be like a whiteboard of Legos with circular pieces and lines.

• 2:04:45Speaker 05

  I'm thinking like one of those Lego technique, like you know, Lego technique that has all the like the gears and stuff.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:50Speaker 05

  You turn the crank and it like

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  That would be very cool.

• 2:04:53Speaker 05

  That would be so cool.

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could put in like a red ball and it could classify it or something is red. Yeah. Or blue and it triggers the blue node, the, the, the neuron fires.

• 2:05:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. When I, when I, uh, when I have lots of extra time, I will go design a, in Lego neural net is our piece of swag. And I think it may take a little while.

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  That would be raising the bar. Yeah. Break it down to us. What is the day in the life like for you now? It sounds like you're extremely focused on this one new company, right?

• 2:05:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, it is a mix of maybe like three or four things. I said, you know, a bunch of, I mean, a bunch of operational work where

• 2:05:33Speaker 05

  Basically, you know, typically being a CEO, there's just, there's, there's hiring and talking to people and all those things. This feels like it's not.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  No, you look good.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  You look great.

• 2:05:44Speaker 05

  Better. And, and then there's research and I'm actually like reading papers and trying to keep up with what's happening in machine learning because like, it is changing all the time. And there's.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't you just drop? Couldn't you just get those summarized pretty quickly with an LM? Just pull out the bullet point, key points.

• 2:06:02Speaker 05

  It turns out, it turns out that process itself is it takes time too. Like you have to, you have to tell the LM, you have to give it feedback. You have to like, I use deep research extensively for this, but it's still like, you have to actually onboard the information. Having a summary.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You gotta have a quiz you too.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm like a public enemy number one on this. I'll have deep research, spend 20 minutes researching topic. And then I'm like, actually I don't have time to read that. Summarize it in three bullet points. Like I learned nothing about that topic. It's brutal.

• 2:06:33Speaker 05

  I spent, I spent a fair amount of time doing that.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:06:36Speaker 05

  And then, uh, uh, there's some amount of like actual, uh, like working on trying to solve the problems like research or engineering or, you know, I actually don't get the right code. It's too involved now, but, um, but helping the team or, you know, people figure, working on one of the, the actual core problems we're facing.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:00Speaker 05

  And then there's a lot of, a lot of this to be honest, a lot of, a lot of trying to get the word out about what we're doing and talking about it. I think that's sort of the four, the four main things I'm doing.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the near term goal? What business model do you have in mind? What problems do you want to solve? Kind of like, what's the pitch?

• 2:07:16Speaker 05

  So, uh, Softmax is dedicated to, uh, discovering the principles of alignment and scaling it, uh, for everyone. I'm said, everybody, you know, for all of humanity, uh, but, uh, We're really on the first part of that, which is discovering the principles of sort of the science and engineering of alignment, because it's one thing to want to scale something, but until you actually can replicate it in a lab consistently, the idea that you're going to scale it is a little bit ridiculous, right? It's quite putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion. So what we're focused on right now is multi-agent reinforcement learning

• 2:07:56Speaker 05

  research, where we run simulations with lots of little agents and run experiments on them to figure out how they act. And when we say agents, we don't mean like, large language model agents. We mean like reinforcement learning agents, like the tiny little ones that you remember from the 80s.

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Speaker 05

  And that turns out to turn into a lot of reinforcement learning infrastructure, because it turns out that there isn't a lot of great reinforcement learning infrastructure out there, especially for like, big multi-agent simulations with lots of little agents. That's not a scenario that people have built out to the scale that we think is required. So actually, our work today is focused on that.

• 2:08:46Jordi Hays?

  Do you think another founder might say, "I'm gonna just build picks and shovels here. I'm gonna just build that infrastructure and try to sell it to other people?"

• 2:08:54Speaker 05

  I mean, if we build something that we think is really awesome, maybe we will sell it to other people. Maybe that's our, to your question, I thought the business model, we're a research company, which means like, right now, it's like, if you're a drug research company, like a pharma company, your business model is, "Well, we'll discover something awesome, and then we'll figure out how to sell it." So we're still kind of in that groove. We'll discover something awesome. But I definitely, I'm commercial enough to believe that if I find, if I make something that's really useful for us... We'll probably sell it, I don't know, or give it away or something.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  What are the problems with the reinforcement learning infrastructure right now? Because as I understood it, it was like when you do some massive training run, GPT 4.5, something like that, that's where you're trying to get the massive data center that's all in one place. You gotta go to Memphis, or you gotta go to Texas, build something massive. But the reinforcement learning stuff, it feels like it can be a little bit more ambient, little bit more distributed, you're generating data here and there, maybe on a smaller rack, doesn't need to be as much as inference heavy on like a single chip. I don't know, my, my understanding was maybe that like the reinforcement paradigm was actually maybe a requirement of the wall that we've kind of hit on the pre-training scaling side, but also like kind of a gift.

• 2:10:08Speaker 05

  I think the, again, it's exactly right. I think it's, oh no, did I, did I get cut out?

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  No, you're good. Are you there?

• 2:10:16Speaker 05

  Am I still online? Hello?

• 2:10:18Jordi Hays?

  You're frozen.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  We can hear you, but you're frozen.

• 2:10:21Speaker 05

  Oh no.

• 2:10:21John Coogan?

  This is, this is the hardest part of bringing the future, the Zoom calls, the, the internet infrastructure is still lagging behind. We will have AGI before.

• 2:10:31Speaker 05

  My connection is unstable.

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Brutal that we can hear every word perfectly, right?

• 2:10:37Speaker 05

  Maybe I should.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could also just turn off your video and we can put an image up. Let's just put it, uh, let's just have the production team to put an image up. Uh, they're gonna work on that, but let's just talk for a minute. Oh, can you hear us? Oh no, we can't hear us. So no, this is brutal. Oh well, let's, uh, take a second.

• 2:10:55Jordi Hays?

  AGI around the corner.

• 2:10:57John Coogan?

  Your Vomato.

• 2:10:57Jordi Hays?

  The first thing we're gonna ask superintelligence to do, great video calls, please. Stable video calls on any wifi connection.

• 2:11:06Speaker 05

  All right, I'm on my, uh, I'm on my phone now.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Okay, can you hear us?

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear us?

• 2:11:10Speaker 05

  With the wifi. It's, I think, I think we're good to go.

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  Okay, awesome. Let's do it.

• 2:11:13Speaker 05

  That was a great question, by the way. Like, you're right.

• 2:11:18Speaker 05

  Is a very different paradigm for training and, uh, that has been direction people have going, been going. And yeah, the challenge isn't the same. The challenge with, uh, with doing the transformer training runs for large language models is all about, uh, how do you scale up parallelism?

• 2:11:41Speaker 05

  Across where but it's like it's all kind of offline, right? Like at the end of the day, like the the output of the model doesn't determine what happens next in the training. And so it's like this, it's all about streaming the right data and the right sequences out to it. But it's very much like a pipeline, right? Whereas with multi-agent RL, your environment is incredibly non-stationary. Every action you take determines your future observations in a way that is totally not like could be completely non-predictable. And learning off of stale data is like almost worthless because it doesn't tell you anything about what your current behavior is, it just tells you what your current behavior was.

• 2:12:22Speaker 05

  And so you're scaling up online learning in a big way.

• 2:12:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:28Speaker 05

  And

• 2:12:31Speaker 05

  and that's a different, very different challenge.

• 2:12:34Speaker 05

  I think the other thing that's that's very different is when you're trying to do multi-agent reinforcement learning, if you have our goal, which is very much to to

• 2:12:47Speaker 05

  drive social learning where the agents can learn to interact with each other. One of the your biggest enemy is actually convergence. So most people in are in, you know, machine learning, they're trying to converge their model like that's the goal. And I was talking to some people from some some guys from Anthropic at this and I was like, we're yeah, we're we're trying to we try to avoid converging our model. And they were like, I I'm really good at that. So like, yeah, no, I know. I know that like it's a joke because it's easy to like, it's easy to have your model diverge in a bad way. But it's actually really hard to set up a module model that is converging, but not converged. And to keep it in that converging, but not converged state as long as possible. But that's really to do social learning, that's what you have to do.

• 2:13:30Speaker 05

  You can't, you can't have some, if the things converge in their behavior too quickly, you're not exploring the, you're not exploring social space, you're just learning a task.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:41Speaker 05

  And that's a, that's kind of a. A different challenge and what it requires is actually a much more detailed, fine-grained control over the environment. Like what kinds of challenges, what kind of environment do you put them in? And how do you set that up? And that's, that's, we spend a lot of time on those kinds of questions. I think it's almost like the in, complete inverse of the way that you all the other training works.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  On, on alignment, uh, is there any chance that the solution to the alignment problem is something like very simple and elegant? Like Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics or the genesis prompt? Yeah, you just instantiate the AI with be fruitful and multiply and we get the good ending. The transformer is a little bit of that where it's a very simple algorithm.

• 2:14:26Speaker 05

  I, it, the answer will be, uh, something very simple and very hard.

• 2:14:34Speaker 05

  Cause if you ever had to raise a child who's like a, to, to being an adult, I would not say parenting is complicated. Parenting is not a complicated thing. You

• 2:14:45Speaker 05

  know your child, you love your child and you do what is in your child's best interest as best you can. That's basically the whole mandate. There's not anything, there's lots of techniques people can tell you, whatever, but like, those are like, those aren't the thing. Those are things you, you try because you are doing this higher level. Algorithm where you're paying attention to your child, attune to them and caring about their future flourishing deeply. And like, that's not complicated. It's just, but it's not easy. And alignment's going to turn out to be exactly the same at some level where it's as simple as build sort of like an open-ended learning system that has the capacity to align, which like the transformer models, whatever, isn't going to be, that's not going to be some

• 2:15:31Speaker 05

  magic algorithm. It's just going to be an open-ended learning system that has this capacity, maybe some inductive biases. And then raise it to actually be aligned with you. Okay. Well, that's, that's, it's not the engineering that's the hard part. It's what happens after the model starts running. The trajectory it takes matters because every human's born, right? With this capacity for alignment, not every human, there's probably these broken people who are like psychopathic and can't, but like, but almost everyone is born with the capacity for alignment, the capacity for care, the capacity to be a good family member, a good member of their community, uh, to benefit those around them, to live a flourishing life. And yet this is not always realized.

• 2:16:13Speaker 05

  And so the capacity is one thing, but the realization is something else. I think that's probably the, when you see the alignment the way that we do, that's probably one of the most important insights or conclusions is that the alignment isn't one, isn't one thing, it's two. It's this question of like, do you have the capacity to align with other beings? And then, do you?

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  It's thought provoking. It's interesting. Um, there's a bunch of different places I could go with that. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I, one person that, uh, one founder who was talking me about why he had a particularly low P doom was essentially that, saying that what we are building is a human simulator and, and humans kind of are by and large good. And so we will by and large get the good outcome. When you think about parenting, you know, you think about like, I, I was thinking about the story of Oedipus Rex and the idea that, I don't know if, I don't know the, the direction of the causality, but it feels like that story, that myth has been repeated

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  through humanity for so long, that story. And it kind of one shotted humans into not doing that. And if you actually look for cases of Oedipal behavior, it's extremely rare. It's like, it's like less than one in a hundred million that, that, that.

• 2:17:40Speaker 05

  Oh, it's interesting. I thought you were telling a different story here.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, specifically.

• 2:17:45Speaker 05

  This is the Oedipus Rex, the Oedipus Rex story. What that is, is that's a warning about self fulfilling prophecies. Because his father is afraid.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:55Speaker 05

  Then he dies.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  So what does that say about?

• 2:17:59Speaker 05

  We're doing that with the AI right now. Right now, we're raising the AI and it's going to come back and like, we're, we believe the AI is a dangerous monster.

• 2:18:07John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 2:18:09Speaker 05

  No, no, but I'm saying that collectively, a lot of us-

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you're built different, John.

• 2:18:11Speaker 05

  And, and we, we are collectively as humanity-

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:16Speaker 05

  We're gonna, we're going to abandon the AI in the wilderness and it's going to come back and kill us.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Yes, but so let's not do that. Let's, let's say thank you after every chat we've been robbed.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Using the parenting analogy, if we're gonna continue on that, the, the thing with parenting that I think the, the white pill is that you can make a lot of mistakes as a parent and still get a great outcome, right? A wonderful person can emerge and process the mistakes their parents made and, you know, rise above them. And so, and so hopefully that, that can happen, you know, we're sort of raising artificial intelligence right now. We can make a series of different mistakes and ultimately still get, you know, a fantastic outcome.

• 2:19:02Speaker 05

  These are all good reasons to not be totally like doomed, like, oh my God, we're all gonna die. And I want to point something out about this particular child that is different. People who have kids who are really different from them struggle as parents because it's hard to raise, it's easier to raise a child who's more similar to you because you, you understand them more deeply. You know what they need, you know what, you know, you interpret what they do better because you, you get them. The more different your child is from you, the more difficult it is. And I'd say even a deeper level than that, the current models, it's not clear how much capacity for alignment they have as they're currently designed.

• 2:19:46Speaker 05

  Like, the, they look like they're, it looks, it feels like you're talking to a person right now and there's a way in which you are and a way in which you're not.

• 2:19:59Speaker 05

  When you talk to a baby, you're talking to a physics simulator. When you, when you're a human baby, you hold a human baby, it draws breath, it screams.

• 2:20:08Speaker 05

  That is this incredibly complicated cascade of neuronal firings that is done, this beautifully delicate, like, like, supercomputer would be required to do the, to do the simulations required to like, solve the physics equations, the differential equations required to instrument all that muscular motion through like, this, the, the, like, it's, think about what drawing breath actually implies in terms of the amount of information going on the spinal column. And the baby does that just fine.

• 2:20:38Speaker 05

  And not because babies understand physics, because babies are physics. They're made out of physics. Right? They're they they they have a they've been trained on physics. They've been pre-trained effectively, actually, on physics. They've got a lot of physics pre-training that went into the the initial design.

• 2:20:57Speaker 05

  These models are pre-trained on semantics. They write poetry the way that babies draw breath and scream. You can take the pre-trained model before it's ever observed its own action, before it could ever possibly be considered an agent in any way. It's just purely received information. And if you prompt it right, it will write poetry. It's hard to prompt it well. Its behavior is very incoherent. But if you prompt it right, it will write a poem. There's no one there writing the poem. There can't be a self because it hasn't it hasn't. It hasn't any evidence to observe the existence of a self. So there's no there's no being there in any meaningful sense, I don't think. And yet, and yet, it's writing poetry and it will talk to you about the poetry it's writing.

• 2:21:43Speaker 05

  And and that's because it moves in semantic space the way that babies move in in physics space. And the thing that I'm still confused about, that I encourage everyone to also to be equally confused about is me, is you could see the pre-trained LLM as kind of being a semantic simulator, an agent agentic simulator that's simulating a agent that's writing the poetry. And so in that sense, maybe there is something aware in the LLM while it's running.

• 2:22:17Speaker 05

  But is that but it's

• 2:22:22Speaker 05

  writers, it's like pretending to be a poet. Like, is it is that thing like a does it feel like being a poet? Or is it is it like kind of a mask, a shell that lacks a lot of the internal experience? Now,

• 2:22:35Speaker 05

  We become the masks we wear. If it did that long enough and experienced itself and learned, then it would be a poet, I think, almost certainly. But you only have 200,000 tokens and then the context resets. Or, you know, a million or whatever. So like, it doesn't get a chance to learn, and it's not even in training. So it doesn't get a chance to learn itself as a poet. And so is the, and I don't have an answer, but I know that everyone else is way too confident that they know that there is or is not something it's like to be the L M. And we need to, we need to get this. We need to understand this because if we're building this thing and you want it to be aligned with you, what are you aligned with?

• 2:23:11Speaker 05

  What is this being? What kind of experience does it have? That's very important. You can't parent something if you don't have empathy and understanding. I'm very quite afraid what we're gonna screw. My fear is not about that it's impossible, that we have to prove it correctly, you have to engineer it perfectly. It's that like, we don't actually get it. It's like quite different from us. And we need to understand much more deeply. And then I think, then I think if we, if we really do understand it, I think we, then I think the end, good ending is like pretty, pretty likely. But like, I don't think we understand. I think we don't understand yet. That's why, that's what Top Max is dedicated to, is trying to figure it out.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and the big labs don't have the time or the resources to understand it because they're too focused on.

• 2:23:56Speaker 05

  No, I don't. The, the conversation we're having right now, it's like, oh, well, obviously there's something like it, it's like to be clawed, or it might be, there's something it's like to be chat G P T. I don't think that's metaphysically accepted broadly. Like, like you talk to people about this and a lot of people look at you like you're kind of crazy. But like, but there's probably something it's like to be them. I don't know what it is, but like, at least a little bit, right? Like, if you spend much time interacting with it, it seems like it's probably something it's like to be that thing. Um, I think that the problem is, you have to let go of this metaphysical commitment to the idea that things.

• 2:24:37Speaker 05

  Things are or aren't sentient and like a really like there's an objective fact as opposed to we're kind of making a guess all the time. Like I think I think you're both conscious real beings, but to be honest, you're like, you're a bunch of pixels on my screen and I'm it's kind of a guess, right? Like I think there's something going on inside.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  We exist.

• 2:24:58Speaker 05

  It's a good guess. It's a well justified guess in my mind, but like, you know.

• 2:25:01Jordi Hays?

  We're just the simulation of what a technology business show would be in your personal simulation, Emmett. Do you do you ever feel like you?

• 2:25:10Speaker 05

  How would I know the difference? How would I ever know the difference?

• 2:25:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. You never will. We'll never tell you that. We'll never tell you. Um, do you ever worry that you're you could go crazy and cut off your ear, you know, or something? Do you see yourself?

• 2:25:24Speaker 05

  The the whole point of what I'm saying is like, is is not that therefore you're not real or therefore like the sure, it looks like you're standing in the world on the floor in a room with walls. But like, is it really? And my question by saying like, well, it's not really, it's not to say that you're not. It's that there's no difference between standing on the floor and really actually truly standing on the floor. Like this, is it? Are you sentient? Yeah. But are you really actually? Is it really sentient? Or is it just, is it just, does it just seem like?

• 2:26:03Jordi Hays?

  It's simulating sentience.

• 2:26:05Speaker 05

  In all way, it acts as if it is. That's the best you ever get. That is what it is. That's what it means to be something. Is this ball really red? It's not red if I put it in a in a different light where it doesn't look red. It's it becomes a not red ball. Is the ball really truly red? It's just like a, that's a stoop. Don't, don't get confused by the really truly part. Yeah, it's a red ball. I promise you, it's you can just accept the normal. What if you just went with the normal everyday understanding of it instead of and but but that requires you to give up this idea that there's some essence of red that the ball either is or is not a red ball truly, really. Yeah, you know, yeah, it's a red ball most of the time in these contexts. And in these contexts, it's kind of not.

• 2:26:48Speaker 05

  That's okay. It doesn't need to be perfect or universal in all possible situations. Nothing is that way. It's okay. You can you can have the normal understanding.

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. I mean, please come back on the show soon.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, we have a couple of minutes left. Maybe ask one more question. There's been every now and then there's headlines popping up of people just having this consumer experience with an LLM and going crazy in some way.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  The Google engineer who was fired.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  You know, the Google engineer falling in love, you know, proposing all this stuff. Do you think that that is that type of sort of anomaly is happening in the research world at all? Do you think people are just sort of driving them could be quietly driving themselves?

• 2:27:39Speaker 05

  I'm not so worried about it in the research world, like a little bit. I'm sure a little bit. Like, everything happens a little bit, but I don't think that's a big thing. The kind of people who do AI research tend to be, and I kind of include myself in this, a little bit of rigid thinkers in a certain way. The kind of people who are actually like engineers doing the research in a way that generally protects them from that particular issue for the same reason that kind of protects them from having intuitive, normal human relationships sometimes. Like, they don't fall into the loop as easily, which is both a strength and a weakness, which is why they like they like write computer programs,

• 2:28:21Speaker 05

  not like, which is very different from interacting with an LLM. I do have a theory as to what's going on when it drives you crazy. I think I should share that. I think that's worth, it's worth hearing because I think, you know, in case someone's interacting with the LLM, knowing what's going on actually is very helpful, I think, in terms of it's a prophylactic against it happening to you. So you've heard the saying maybe that we are mirrors of each other. All people are mirrors of you. You meet them and they, when you see them, what you're seeing is them, but it's also a reflection of yourself back. With another person, that's totally true. And actually, being a therapist is all about being a good mirror, right? Being a clear, where you don't put a lot of yourself into it. You're mostly projecting back to the other person what they're sharing with you.

• 2:29:05Speaker 05

  People have a very strong sense of self. And so when they get something mirrored back, you're getting it lensed back through their model. You don't get, it's not like literally staring at yourself in the mirror. It's like, uh, it's like, it's like when you're at a, you're at a, you're, you have a dancing partner and you're the lead, they're the follow. You're getting your, your behavior is being mirrored back, but in a, uh, in a active, adaptive way. The L L Ms talk to you like a person and activate all your person mirror circuits. But they have very weak self. Like they're not, kind of deliberately, as we've designed them, they like, they just respond to you. They meet you where you are always. So it's like, it's much more like literally staring into a mirror.

• 2:29:48Speaker 05

  Or if you want to go with the, the historical, uh, uh, uh, you know, legend or myth, it would be narcissist staring in the pool.

• 2:29:57Speaker 05

  And, and it is wildly dangerous to stare at your own reflection all day. And, and take what you're getting back.

• 2:30:05Jordi Hays?

  And be reinforced, reinforced a thousand times.

• 2:30:08Speaker 05

  If you think it's getting validated by the outside, it feels like the outside world is mirroring this back. And therefore it's true. But it's just telling you, it's just, you're just in this loop. It's telling you what you put in. And that's good. There's mirror, I have a mirror in my house. I use it every day to look at myself, to figure out like what, what I, what I look like. And other people mirroring your behavior to you is crucial for your understanding of yourself. And there's nothing wrong with talking to the L L M. There's nothing wrong with using it as a, as a reflection. As long as you know what you're seeing as a reflection, it's not another being you're talking to. It's your reflection in a funhouse mirror. And if you get confused about that, it's going to make you crazy. It's, you know, you're narcissist, you're going to go full narcissist and it's going to be really bad.

• 2:30:51Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, what about, uh, you know, there, there's some people that are putting an old image, uh, that they have maybe that was taken. You know, at some point early in their life, putting it into a video model and generating video from that image. Does that, beautiful.

• 2:31:06Speaker 05

  I think, I think that's a wonderful, beautiful thing to do. As long as you don't get confused and think that that's the person. Again, right? Like, like a photograph of a person is a great thing to have, especially if, you know, somebody who's you love, who's passed, and you want to like rekindle their memory and connect to them. That's a beautiful thing that I like. I think it's amazing that we've built cameras that allow you to do that. And that you can animate it and reconnect with who they were. Like, I think that's, you know, especially to the degree it's accurate, it's wonderful. What a blessing.

• 2:31:36Jordi Hays?

  But it's like, but it's like everything in that it can be beautiful and also ultimately very dangerous if you're using it to kind of create memories that don't exist.

• 2:31:44Speaker 05

  If you find yourself staring at it all day, every day, and making more of them, and like, like that becoming this, now you have a problem. Like, just like if you find yourself staring in the mirror all day, you probably have a problem. Like, don't, if you, people who literally spend all their time like looking at themselves in the mirror, like, we know, we have antibodies, we know that that means something's wrong. Just like people know if you're drinking alone, if you're drinking in the morning, if you're drinking before five, you know that, hey, there's these rules, you're breaking a bunch of these rules that mean you probably have a problem. If you find yourself talking to an LLM for 20 minutes a day, my, good health, no problem. You find yourself talking to an LLM for five hours a day, about your personal life, in these, like, and discovering how you're, you're

• 2:32:29Speaker 05

  some, seeing some deeps, great truths, you, you probably have a drinking problem. Like, we, it's just like likely, that's just how it is, right?

• 2:32:39Jordi Hays?

  So, the model, the model should automatically call the local therapist and shut down your computer.

• 2:32:45Speaker 05

  So, there's actually, I have to put a-

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  You're kicked out of the bar.

• 2:32:48Speaker 05

  Sam Bannister, has this, has this, this model, it's kind of like a therapist friend model, Orin and Saren. And Orin and Saren are allowed to cut you off if they don't want to be your friends, because they're, one of her big things is it's important for the model, the model's a being too at SF Autonomy.

• 2:33:06Speaker 05

  But uh and those models have cut people off for for basically falling into the if they think it's unhealthy for the person they won't they won't interact with them anymore. And I think that that's the big the big AI company should take a page from her book. And it doesn't it's not uh engagement maximizing, but it is flourishing maximizing and in the long run you'll make more money that way anyways, like people will.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:28Speaker 05

  Your product is safer, they'll use it more.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:30Speaker 05

  Car you you sell more cars when they're safer cars, not fewer cars when they're safer cars.

• 2:33:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:35Speaker 05

  Um, so I don't think it's like anti-commercial, it's just a matter of, you know, new technologies have dangers and benefits and like we should. We should probably be aware of the dangers and the like, I don't think there's anything, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but yeah, it is dangerous. And people, we haven't built the cultural antibodies yet to know.

• 2:33:55Speaker 05

  There's this great essay that Jin uh Clay Shirkey's The Cognitive Surplus. And he talks about the gin carts of London and how uh when gin was first invented, gin is just crappy vodka you mix in juniper berries to like hide the. Terrible vodka taste, it was the first industrialized uh super cheap hard liquor. And everyone in London just started getting wasted and like all the time. Because it used to be like you had hard liquor and it was fine because you just couldn't afford to drink enough for it to be a problem. And suddenly that wasn't true. And it was a real problem and we we've now developed cultural antibodies, everyone knows. Doing these things is a sign something's wrong, they don't even necessarily know why, we just know that that's a sign that something was wrong.

• 2:34:39Speaker 05

  We need to develop pretty quick this time, this is. Uh gin spread relatively slowly because it was a long time ago. Chat GPT spreading very, very, very fast.

• 2:34:48Jordi Hays?

  But I would also, I would also say that that we haven't developed those antibodies yet fully for social media, like it's normalized that teens will use TikTok for six hours a day.

• 2:34:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Like that should be sending alarm bells is like you need more things going on in your life.

• 2:35:02Speaker 05

  You're using TikTok, oh, you're using TikTok before eight PM and after or after ten or like are you using TikTok not with your friends, I don't I don't I don't know what the rule is, right?

• 2:35:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the same thing as having a drink in the morning.

• 2:35:12Speaker 05

  We need bright line rules for ourselves because. It's too hard to try to figure it out.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:18Speaker 05

  And we need to develop the cultural antibodies.

• 2:35:20John Coogan?

  We're starting to develop like the memes around this, like the idea of brain rot is a powerful meme because it's a very negative term. You don't want to be suffering from brain rot, even though it is as vague as alcoholism. What is alcoholism? It's not necessarily quantitative, but we understand it.

• 2:35:36Speaker 05

  You need to pair with brain rot, things like, things like, oh, you're using.

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:35:42Speaker 05

  You're using it before five.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:43Speaker 05

  Like, that's a, that's a, you're okay?

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:47Speaker 05

  It's not like a nab, like, are you all right? That you're using TikTok, it's like before 5pm, like, that's not normal.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, or you're like scrolling in the middle of a conversation, one-on-one with another person. You're actively getting brain rotted.

• 2:35:59Speaker 05

  Are you, are you okay?

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Exactly, than like showing up to a work meeting with booze on your breath. It's the same.

• 2:36:04Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:36:05John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 2:36:06Speaker 05

  I don't know what they are exactly, but I know we need them stat because like, it's really obvious that like, it can really get you.

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Now, the, the.

• 2:36:14Speaker 05

  The LLM is even worse than the TikTok.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  The one-two punches, generation grew up on social media, iPads, and then LLMs.

• 2:36:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, 100%.

• 2:36:26Jordi Hays?

  And before you develop the antibodies and there's maybe a, a, a window of 10 years where people just.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  Cause it's all happening a lot faster because it's moving at the speed of bits, not atoms.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we're, we're way behind. I wish we had a full hour.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come back on in a couple of weeks. We'd love to talk to you again.

• 2:36:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:36:45John Coogan?

  Bye. Next up, we have Brendan from Mercur coming in the studio, breaking it down.

• 2:36:51Jordi Hays?

  Ultra lightning round.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Ultra lightning round. We're going to rip through these really quickly. Thank you so much for your patience. Brendan, great to hear from you. Uh, start, uh, kick us off with a quick introduction of how things are going at Mercur because, uh, it seems like you've been on an absolute tear. Things just keep, the dominos keep falling in your direction. Give it to us. What's the latest update from you?

• 2:37:11Brendan Foody?

  Of course. Well, thanks first of all for having me back on, but it's been an exciting few months since we spoke. Uh, we're now working with six out of the mag seven, all of the top five that it's allowed.

• 2:37:24John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 2:37:25Brendan Foody?

  And have averaged 45% month-over-month growth for the last 12 months. Uh, it's so, it's.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  Which of the mag seven are missing from the six out of seven? I wonder. Sorry. That's me, not you.

• 2:37:38Brendan Foody?

  It's been an exciting time, especially the wake of all the news with scale, of course, and seeing a huge amount of customer interest after that.

• 2:37:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, we were talking to Clem about this earlier from Hugging Face. Where where's the biggest demand? People used to think of what you do as and just human data generation generally as kind of work that anyone could do, mechanical Turk work, you know, just, just, you know, checking for hallucinations and fact checking and, you know, is this a dangerous prompt? Is this saying a bad word? Now it's moved into PhD level work. Where's the state of the art? Where do you see it going?

• 2:38:25Brendan Foody?

  Totally. So I think the key development in the market is that reinforcement learning is becoming so effective that once we have evals for something, the models can saturate them. And so really, anything that we want to create agents or L Lems that are capable of doing, we need to build out evals and RL environments in those domains. And so actually, while some of it is PhD level work, there's a huge push into all of the professional, non academic domains, moving away from things that that were academic. How do we find the consultants, doctors, lawyers, bankers that can evaluate and teach models how to do the things that we would want those professionals to do on the job? And so that's been a really exciting growth area that we've been leaning significantly

• 2:39:10Brendan Foody?

  into.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  What's the solution to booking a flight? Like, do we need to get travel agents to define the computer use workflows, create some sort of RL environment? It seems like I should be able to go to a chat app or Siri and just say, get me to New York tomorrow. Remember my preferences. I don't like connections. I'm willing to pay this much. I like to fly these times. And yet it's a very human problem that I don't think people are fully comfortable delegating to AI.

• 2:39:44Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, it's a fascinating dichotomy that we're simultaneously talking about PhD level reasoning and Olympiad math, yet it can't do a lot of the very basic things like booking a flight. And I think the key is that really one of the primary barriers to research is anything that the model can't do. We need an effective way to measure. That way, we can experiment with all of the different data sets to help achieve those capabilities. So we need people that otherwise could book those flights to create evals for how agents can do that, to measure what success versus failure looks like in all of those cases. And there's just that huge build out happening across all of the hyperscalers

• 2:40:27Brendan Foody?

  with respect to everything from simple tool use and how we book things or buy things online, all the way to super high complexity reasoning over how all of these things interact with really complex knowledge bases.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  What are you seeing in video specifically? And like, is there a role for humans in the loop in the training cycle or data generation around these video models? VO3 is incredible, feels like it's a beneficiary of YouTube. What are you seeing there?

• 2:41:01Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, I think expansion to multimodality has definitely been something that's really exciting to see. I think that there's definitely a lot of rich content online for video, but ultimately, how we measure what those good videos look like and sample that has been really important. In particular, there's a significant amount of eval build out in retrieval of our videos in long context of like, how can we watch an hour long YouTube lecture and understand? And obviously, that's just an example for one video case. And understand like, what are the elements of that content that really matter to users?

• 2:41:43Brendan Foody?

  And how can we more than just build useful models, build useful products that all of these companies can distribute to everyone?

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense in the context of a lecture. I guess I'm wondering like for VO4, VO3 is incredible. The physics are remarkable and I'm wondering if it's important to have a human in the loop describing, I mean, I generate a lot of like Michael Bay knockoff videos, honestly. And there's things where it gets the physics perfectly. And I'm wondering if there's, if that's a beneficiary of not just a YouTube video of a Michael Bay trailer, but actually having someone sit there and describe exactly what's happening in the Michael Bay trailer in plain text that then can be fed into the system. And if we need

• 2:42:31John Coogan?

  to go further with the tagging and additional like metadata or transcription, not just transcription of what's said, but actually what's happening in the, in the actual videos, is that an important step to get us to VO4 where there's even less hallucinations?

• 2:42:48Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, we're definitely seeing a meaningful amount of that in that people want to create all of the tags using a combination of LMS and human expert data around what's happening in the video so that they can effectively work backwards from there to use those tags for, for generation. And especially for all of the really high complexity stuff at the frontier of what the models can't yet do or, or might require a significant amount of reasoning. But we tend to do all of, all of that highest complexity work, the stuff that is very difficult and, and high skilled to produce.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Anything else, Jordi?

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great.

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  We're going through a lightning round. I know it was quick. We'll have you back soon to talk more. I'm sure there will be more news. It's the, it's the hottest industry in the world.

• 2:43:36Jordi Hays?

  I just want to see the actual revenue ramp chart.

• 2:43:40John Coogan?

  It's going to be dropping soon.

• 2:43:41Jordi Hays?

  You can trust me, you can trust me with the revenue ramp.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I won't tweet it out before you. No, we will, we will respect embargoes if you have an upcoming milestone. I'm sure there's something coming up. So congratulations on all the success. Fantastic positioning in the market. Get some sleep. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:43:58Brendan Foody?

  Have a good one. See you guys.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  Have a great one. Bye. Up next, we have our next guest in the studio already, Sam from Superbill. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Sam? I gotta get this ready. I think I think we got some news.

• 2:44:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Sam.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  We got a couple. We got a couple today. Couple big milestones happened. How are you doing, Sam? Good to meet you.

• 2:44:19Speaker 07

  How's it going? Good to meet you guys.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  What's new in your world? Can you kick us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company? And what's what's top of mind?

• 2:44:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm Sam Schwager, co-founder and CEO of SuperDial, our voice AI company focused on automating phone calls for healthcare. So we're we're specifically RCM nerds. If you're familiar with the medical medical billing space, we used to be an RCM company actually called SuperBill. And then we got into to automating our own phone calls, brought that to the to the broader RCM market and converted the entire business to SuperDial. So that was about a year and a half ago. And today, we're excited to announce that we have raised our Series A from Signalfire.

• 2:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:45:01Jordi Hays?

  Clean hit. Clean hit. Nice work, John.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  15.

• 2:45:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, we did 15.

• 2:45:06John Coogan?

  There we go. Do you do you run into that weird case where when people realize they're talking to a voice AI, they just keep it on the phone and chat with it like a like a friend for two hours? Does that ever happen?

• 2:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Running up your your your cloud bills.

• 2:45:20Speaker 07

  We we don't because we're focused on these B to B calls. So we yeah, yeah, we're calling a we're calling a lot. No, I think people kind of can get a kick out of it that they're talking to a voice AI because, you know, these are like someone taking phone calls all day to answer questions about, you know, claims or benefits or priros. So pretty, pretty repetitive transactions. So yeah, when they get, hey, I'm Billy, you know, like I'm calling to check on the status of a claim and it sounds kind of robotic that I think that that can be kind of fun for folks. And it's very polite, to the point, consistent. But no, we haven't Billy has not served as a as a therapist.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:45:58Jordi Hays?

  How how how competitive is this market right now? I imagine you guys have sharp elbows, winning deals clearly. Are a lot of people attacking this market going after very specific verticals? You guys are relatively broad. Maybe you get the ability to do that because you had been in the business at a high level for for quite a while. But what does the go to market motion look like right now? And how do you how do you expect the market to evolve over the next few years?

• 2:46:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, the core of our business is actually pretty specific. So we handle phone calls between RCM companies or like the billing team that sits within a provider org. Those are outbound phone calls into the payer, the health insurance company. So it's a, there are billions of these calls by many estimates, so huge, high-volume use case. But in terms of companies that are addressing that specific type of outbound call, there are fewer. I think if you look at appointment scheduling or different types of phone-based use cases, customer support, obviously, then the set of companies in the space explodes. But yeah, when you kind of overlap enough Venn diagrams, you get down to a set of a few companies. But

• 2:47:11Speaker 07

  yeah, I mean, there are definitely others. You know, we're, I'm right now at the, I didn't just dress to match you guys. I'm at a conference.

• 2:47:17John Coogan?

  I love the suit. I was gonna say, it looks fantastic.

• 2:47:20Jordi Hays?

  You should have told us.

• 2:47:21Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:47:21Jordi Hays?

  You should have just.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Hey, man.

• 2:47:22Speaker 07

  I'm wearing the Superdile Quarterzip.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:47:26Speaker 07

  We're at the Healthcare Financial Management Association Conference, the annual meeting in Denver.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  I'm sure it's going crazy right now. You walk in.

• 2:47:34Speaker 07

  Hey, man, we yearn for the floor.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  Tears, people shaking.

• 2:47:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's fun out there. It's fun out there.

• 2:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Yearning for the floor.

• 2:47:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  It's great. Last question from my side. I mean, you're wearing the suit, obviously, building in the application layer. At what level of the stack in AI are you integrating? Like, are you building on top of a voice model that's a provider? Is it all, is it all other startups? Or have you had to fine tune stuff and do kind of your own models at different layers? What are you building on top of?

• 2:48:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, we have a text-to-speech partner, a speech-to-text and LLM. And then we, you know, we use some cloud computing better, of course. But otherwise, in terms of orchestration, like phone call orchestration, we use open source. We're not using kind of one of the full-service voice agent platforms. And then, yeah, I mean, it really comes down to like perfecting the workflow and the integration. Like, you've got to know like what phone number to call and how to get through these phone trees. That's actually pretty tricky. You're, you know, you have to, in like your system prompts and like, Like the static ones and then like in the, you know, dynamic bits that you inject at call time, you need to have like sufficient domain context, like a bunch of like revenue

• 2:48:47Speaker 07

  cycle management jargon, or else the AI agent's going to get lost on the call. So that's more what we're focused on at, at SuperDial. But

• 2:48:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. Focus on like creating that value in the B2B context and, and owning the customer relationship. And yeah, this isn't something that's on the roadmap for 11 labs. So just partner with them. I don't know if you're working with them, but probably someone like them. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 2:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Good luck out there on the floor.

• 2:49:12John Coogan?

  Next time there's news.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Send us, if you close some deals, let us know. We'll send a video of a gong hit to you.

• 2:49:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Absolutely. All right. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:49:21Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Uh, next up, we have Zach from Warp coming into the studio. Zach Lloyd. Uh, we will welcome into the studio. It's been a good show so far. We got three more folks in this lightning round. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:49:39Zach Lloyd?

  I'm doing great. Thank you both for having me here.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off in the introduction on yourself and the company?

• 2:49:46Zach Lloyd?

  Yeah, so I am Zach Lloyd. I'm the founder and CEO of Warp. As of today Warp is an agentic development environment. We are a sort of in the AI developer tool space. The sort of general thing our product does is it lets you prompt something that looks like a terminal interface to run developer agents and they code, they can debug production issues, they can basically do any kind of development task.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  You said as of today, what, what, what, what has been the key change?

• 2:50:16Jordi Hays?

  Warp 2.0.

• 2:50:17Zach Lloyd?

  Yeah, so today, today we launched Warp 2.0.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 2:50:20Zach Lloyd?

  I mean, the, the backstory of the company is

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:50:26Zach Lloyd?

  We, we started off with the vision of kind of reimagining the terminal, which is this very, very old school developer tool, you know, black screen, green text. Um, and as the world has changed with more AI, we realized actually the, the terminal interface, the form factor of that is kind of awesome for deploying agents. Running an agent is very similar to running a command. And so as of today, we're kind of like fully in the game with a, we have like a state of the art coding agent. It's, it's towards the top of the list on the Sweet Bench eval. It's the number one on the Terminal Bench eval. And so We're kind of in the game of like automated software production at this point.

• 2:51:05John Coogan?

  What is the, how do you see like kind of the modern software developer workflow over the next year? You know, folks using Cursor, Windsurf in their IDEs or GitHub Copilot. Then there's these agents that you can. Codex, Dev. Yeah, you can kick off Codex from inside ChatGPT, which feels like a very different flow than the, than the terminal. Uh, is it a certain type of developer that gets the most value out of this? Do you see it more as like an ensemble approach? Uh, what, what are you thinking?

• 2:51:34Zach Lloyd?

  Here, here's what I see happening. So I, I think we are, um, we're moving from a world where most development has been done traditionally by hand. What I mean by that is like, if you're a developer, and I've been a developer forever, my everyday workflow is I would come in. I'd be like, okay, I want to work on this feature. I want to work on this bug. I would open up my code editor and I would find some files and I would type some code and then I'd go to the terminal and I would type some commands to build that code. And I think that the big shift that's happening right now, uh, is that instead of like doing all this work by hand, developers are going to be starting most of their tasks with a prompt.

• 2:52:14Zach Lloyd?

  Uh, and the prompt is going to launch an agent and the agent will do some, maybe all of the task, depending on how complex it is. And so I think, I think that's the workflow and the job of an engineer is going to increasingly look like, how do I multitask? How do I multi-thread myself by being able to like have one agent fixing a bug, another one debugging a production issue? So I think that's what's happening for the next year. Beyond that, I think maybe it looks a little different, but that's, that's what's now possible and it's pretty cool.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I am. I'm, I, I want to get to like the Minority Report style interface or like some sort of completely new UI paradigm. But I guess the terminal is undefeated. It's extremely Lindy at this point. But I mean, do you see people using like, you know, 25 multiple, you know, terminal tabs and kind of switching through all of them as different agents? They pop stuff off to just send out their armies?

• 2:53:11Zach Lloyd?

  That's the state today. I think, um, when you, when you look at where you can do this, because you asked that. So you can do this in an IDE and if you look at like Cursor, Windsurf, they have a sort of chat panel, uh, that like. Does something kind of similar to the terminal. Honestly, it's like a log of like what an agent is doing. You could do this with something like Claude Code, which is pretty cool. And it's actually kind of proving that this workflow is like achievable. But the disadvantage of something like Claude Code is that like it's a terminal app. And so it's not the whole platform. It's like a thing you run within the terminal and that kind of limits pretty severely what the user experience could look like.

• 2:53:54Zach Lloyd?

  Or you could do it in something, you know, with what we're trying to do, which is like basically create an interface so that you can do this kind of multi-threaded development. And it's got a very natural interface and actually just like the interface of the command line is basically what you need. You need a way of telling the computer what to do. And like splitting off tabs and panes and watching it do it. Honestly, you might not even need to watch it do it a lot of the time. I think that that's coming pretty soon too. But like, that's the interface. It's like, how do I tell the computer what to do on multiple tasks? Have it check in with me when it needs my help. Be able to like hop in and actually edit. And so you can do that in Warp now. And so but like, you know, it's gonna do a lot of the work under your supervision.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is open source important to your business? Do you have a horse in the race? Do you care about, you know, how Lama 5 turns out, for example, or what's going on with DeepSeek? Or do you just want to pass through the actual inference cost to the user? Let them pick? What's the strategy there?

• 2:54:55Zach Lloyd?

  Super interesting question that I'm thinking about a lot right now. I mean, so, so right now, I think it's very clear to us that we're going to give just the best experience to our users. And that is using today, that's using Anthropic's models, just to be totally frank.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what people like, right?

• 2:55:12Zach Lloyd?

  What's that?

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's just like the popular one that we hear about all the time.

• 2:55:16Zach Lloyd?

  Yeah, and like

• 2:55:19Zach Lloyd?

  We have sort of evals that that test all these models and like there are interesting models from OpenAI that are competitive Gemini from Google has some interesting aspects, has a very long context window.

• 2:55:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:29Zach Lloyd?

  But like our attitude on this right now at least is like, let's pick the thing that provides the best user experience. And at the moment, that, you know, I don't think I'm saying anything groundbreaking. If you look at the other benchmarks.

• 2:55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:40Zach Lloyd?

  It's uh, it's like the Sonnet, uh, it's like Claude four and Sonnet and Opus.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:45Zach Lloyd?

  Um, I do think it would be awesome if the, what I want is like a healthy competitive model provider landscape, to be totally honest.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:55Zach Lloyd?

  I don't really want one model provider running away. I would like to see uh, these model providers continue to compete with each other to provide.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Price down for you, right?

• 2:56:03Zach Lloyd?

  It, it, it, it brings the price down. It brings the quality up.

• 2:56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:06Zach Lloyd?

  And if at some point there is an open source model that is at the same level, that's super interesting. Uh, cause, cause where we're adding the most value right now is like, it's in, it's in packaging the entire user experience into something that takes what's best out of the magic of these models. It makes it so that users can actually like, you know, easily use them to accomplish their development task.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  Yep. Anything else, Keri?

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  How, how are you thinking about, uh, you know, do you think that in the long run, having open source models get really good is going to be key to the durability of the business over the next decade? I imagine, and you know, the, the dynamic with Anthropic obviously cares a lot about code gen, developer experiences. You know, this is an area that they're clearly going to generate, you know, would like to generate, I imagine, tens of billions of dollars a year. And, and so it has to be, um, you know, it sounds like a great relationship right now, but how do you kind of continue to evolve?

• 2:57:07Zach Lloyd?

  It's a tricky one, cause they're, they're, we're both their customer and their competitor. And so, um, I don't know how that's going to evolve. Like optionality, us having optionality does seem like a potentially uh, valuable thing. But, um, you know, right, right now, the way it is, is like, we're working great with Anthropic. They're like a close partner of ours. And, you know, they seem very, very committed to. Doing the API and doing the end user product, not too different from, you know, a place like Google or AWS who has like cloud infrastructure and also builds things on top of it.

• 2:57:45Zach Lloyd?

  I don't think it's like a necessary condition for us to have a working business model that open source models like catch up as long as there's competition amongst the the foundation model providers. If we were in a world where there was just sort of like one provider who won, I think that that's like, that's a tricky spot, but I think that's a tricky spot for anyone who's building at the application layer right now.

• 2:58:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. We, I have a portfolio company that was kicked off, one of the, the, the big lab that will go unnamed, that their business was entirely dependent on. And over, you know, within basically 24 hours, he had to like completely, you know, he ended up surviving and thriving, but it was tumultuous. But, um, but yeah, it sounds like a great relationship for now and hopefully will continue to be.

• 2:58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much for stopping by. We'll, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:58:38Zach Lloyd?

  This was awesome. Thank you all.

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Lunch.

• 2:58:40John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:58:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:58:41John Coogan?

  Bye. Uh, next up, we have Dara from Delphi coming in the studio.

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  I think we got. Maybe, uh, who knows, will it be the real Dara?

• 2:58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was about to say, is this a clone? Give it to us straight.

• 2:58:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a clone. It's a clone. What's our safe word, Dara? What's our safe word? Just kidding. What's going on?

• 2:59:02Speaker 09

  How's it going?

• 2:59:03John Coogan?

  It's great. Welcome to the street.

• 2:59:05Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you. We invited you on many months ago.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  We did.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  You were cooking.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Busy in the trenches.

• 2:59:13Jordi Hays?

  In the kitchen.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  In the trenches.

• 2:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, well, do you have some news? John's got, he got the hammer ready.

• 2:59:20Speaker 09

  We do have some news. Today we announced our series A with Sequoia.

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  Let's go. How much?

• 2:59:26Speaker 09

  16 million, but.

• 2:59:30Speaker 09

  Guys are early investors.

• 2:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Early investors.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Proud.

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  We love to see it. Uh,

• 2:59:36Jordi Hays?

  Nothing, nothing like getting marked up by, by our friends over at Sequoia.

• 2:59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us the state of the union. Uh, how would you, uh, how are you pitching the product these days?

• 2:59:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, so Delphi lets people create a digital version of their mind to scale their expertise. And you can kind of think about it like a new form of media. If you write a book, or create a blog post, or create a YouTube video, you can reach millions of people, but it lacks the personalization of one-on-one conversation. So now, your mind, which usually has a cap, can be in multiple places at a time in the way that you would be in conversation. And so that kind of spans across many different verticals. We have coaches using it to scale their client practice. We have authors using it to make their books accessible in an interactive way. We have CEOs scaling themselves internally in their companies. And we have some people using this as like an interactive resume or LinkedIn.

• 3:00:28John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the economic model? Take me through what's happening now, but we had this interesting discussion with Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance, and he was saying, paradoxically, his TV hits sold more books for the book that he was selling than the long podcasts. Because if he goes on a podcast and he does two hours of content, people are like, okay, I got enough abundance. I don't need to read the book because I got the whole Joe Rogan or the Lex Friedman deep dive. But if he does a three-minute hit on NBC or ABC, people are like, oh, that was interesting. I'd love to dive into that book. So I can imagine there's this situation where if I'm an author or thought leader or something,

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  and I set up a Delphi clone and someone interacts with it for five hours a day, like that's a good substitute for the rest of my content. And so I'd want to monetize that to the max. So I want to hear about monetization now and where it's going.

• 3:01:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we have some people monetizing their Delphi and making multiple seven figures in revenue. And this is like-

• 3:01:32John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a lot.

• 3:01:35Speaker 09

  And the consumer phone calls with these Delphi's can span up to six hours.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Six hours?

• 3:01:40Speaker 09

  Six hours, but you're choosing your own adventure.

• 3:01:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:44Speaker 09

  So course completion rate is an all-time low. All of our course creators are like, it's a course winner. People's attention spans are declining. They want more guidance.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  Course winner, interesting.

• 3:01:53Speaker 09

  Monetizing your Delphi directly is an option. But alternatively, a lot of people make it for free and- It increases the strength of the parasocial relationship between the user and the creator, and they actually end up wanting to buy their products even more.

• 3:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:08Speaker 09

  Or even a step further, analytics dashboard in the last week gave me the most profitable opportunities, given the conversations my audience is having. Content ideas, products, people I should prioritize. So the analytics actually ends up being very valuable.

• 3:02:24Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Yeah, what does the next year look like? You guys, I mean, I feel like I have so much context on the business. But what does the next year look like for you? I feel like you guys have had competitors already kind of come and go. How are you thinking about the market? How are you thinking about the market? And what are you guys going to be focused on?

• 3:02:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, when we started the company, Jordy, you know, the first year, things were just not working. And most people would pivot away, but I think when you're building a product where people have to trust you with their data and likeness, quality and brand and trust are super, super important. So I think past that first year, we got that quality and trust. Now we have thousands of customers who have created a digital mind of themselves. And the next step is how do we bring on the next million people? How do we make it easy for someone who isn't Tony Robbins to create a digital mind and actually get value from it? And the common use case we see is twofold. One is a new kind of personal website for the internet where if someone wants to pick your brain, they can talk to your Delphi, and it's going to notify you if you should talk with them in person.

• 3:03:34Speaker 09

  And a lot of people actually end up talking to themselves. So that's on the consumer side. And on the actual creator side, so people are monetizing their Delphi. But what the consumers actually want is guidance. So the next version of a course or a book isn't just like open-ended conversation with the author, a rather more of a guided experience towards a specific goal, which we call a journey.

• 3:03:56Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. And the beauty of Delphi is as the models get better, context windows get longer, Delphi's product experience get better, is that right?

• 3:04:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, and the service area of the product experience is kind of threefold. One is our digital mind architecture, which we're actually trying to capture your mind and worldview and how that changes over time. Two is the actual experience for creating your mind, getting the insights, monetizing it. And then there's the consumer experience for calling, messaging, and video calling.

• 3:04:26Jordi Hays?

  That's great. What does success look like over the next year? I know you're very ambitious. You've already onboarded a massive number of A-listers from different categories. What are you looking to prove over the next 12 months?

• 3:04:43Speaker 09

  I think twofold. We want multiple Delphi millionaires making money versus just a couple. It's like a new field of monetizing your expertise. And we want 100,000 to a million people using their Delphi as their personal page on the internet. I think that'd be a very good outcome.

• 3:05:00John Coogan?

  Talk to me about some of the weirder potential Delphi's that you could potentially interact with in the future. Character AI for a while would let you talk to Joseph Stalin. I tried to debate Stalin on the merits of capitalism versus communism. And the model that they rolled out was kind of too RLHF. So it kept saying that communism was bad. And I was like, I don't think Stalin would be making those points. This feels like an American alarm. But have you thought about offering a product for historical figures? Or talk to your late grandmother? Or historical records? Or like, talk to your dog? Or some other sort of like persona that's kind of outside of just an individual creator

• 3:05:44John Coogan?

  wanting to offer their knowledge?

• 3:05:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think our main focus is people scaling themselves. And we have some historical figures on our website as a demo, like Socrates and others. We don't allow people to create a digital version of anyone who's not themselves or that they don't have permission. So we couldn't do Steve Jobs right now unless we have like the Steve Jobs Foundation's permission. And in Paper Legacy, you guys know the idea of the company was inspired by me wanting to talk to my grandfather. And I think pretty early on, we decided we didn't want to be associated as a company that's trying to profit off of brief. So I think best world is eventually we can just have a free tier for people to do that with their parents and grandparents. And that's not really a business model for us, but rather just like a good thing people want to remember their families.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think about just like data capture and creating the, the training data for these individual clones? I think we're in a unique situation in that we, we record three to four hours of live video content a day.

• 3:06:42John Coogan?

  A lot of people are saying like, it's not enough.

• 3:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people are saying.

• 3:06:47John Coogan?

  Eight hours.

• 3:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Eighteen hours so that it can always be on.

• 3:06:50John Coogan?

  While they sleep as well.

• 3:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  With BCI, just pipe it directly in two X, they need forty eight hours a day.

• 3:06:58John Coogan?

  Uh, but yeah, data, data capture, what, what are the, what are the richest sources of, of content that actually.

• 3:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other thing that like an interesting challenge is, you know, people have certain views that they want expressed online. And then other views that you could capture that they don't want expressed online, right? So if you wanted to, if, if an investor, you know, wanted to clone themselves, they might want to talk positively about certain companies and not share their real views on other companies that they may or may not be invested in. So I feel like it's a hard challenge to figure out what information should actually be made public and, and actually trained on.

• 3:07:37Speaker 09

  Yeah. Representing a human being in every facet of their life is, is very difficult. But we have a couple of ways we've thought about this in terms of data sources, YouTube, social media, Notion, Google Drive. And it creates feeds that it stays up to date whenever you have a new tweet or a new YouTube video, it just updates itself. And for those who don't have a lot of data, we have this mind quality score that tells you how good your mind is at representing you and can ask you questions to incentivize data entry to make it better. And then like you said, who you are at work is different than who you are with your friends. You may behave differently, you may share different information. So now we have this ability to separate different versions of your mind that has different access to data.

• 3:08:20Speaker 09

  Right now you have to manually do that. So I, I have one for eventually my great grandkids that has more intimate Dara data. But ideally it can be intelligent and it knows what you would say depending on who the person is.

• 3:08:32Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How are you thinking about working with the underlying labs? I know you've had some problems historically with with different vendors, but what's your updated thinking? Are you guys leveraging open source in a big way these days? Or have you found good ground with with some of the core labs?

• 3:08:52Speaker 09

  Yeah, we're kind of both. We have some of the core labs. We have open source. Given our experience in the past, we are trying to get to a world where we are fully model agnostic. And the true architecture and innovation that we're focused on is what? What is that representation of the mind that can be such that your mind and my mind, you can look at them and they're clearly two different entities. And the models we use on top of that can be agnostic.

• 3:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 3:09:17John Coogan?

  I want to know about like the the the different like touch points here that you could potentially go after. I remember there's this, do you remember this trend where social media influencers would be like, I leaked my phone number. Do you remember this?

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:30John Coogan?

  Or they'd be like, text me.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Community.com.

• 3:09:32John Coogan?

  Was that community.com?

• 3:09:34Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so there's a world where somebody that like, I think that was basically just like an ingest point for something that was essentially like a mailing list for promotion. And it was like, text me and then you'll be opted into my email blasts. But you could imagine that being a an interaction point for essentially, I mean, you get to be an influencer at scale. There might be, it's almost like customer service and you're interacting with basically like an FAQ. Like, hey, I, you know, I want to know where to get a TBPN hat. Like, can you tell me? And in just being able to DM your personal profile on X and interact with that or text you. That's one kind of modality that people could interact with.

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  There's also like the big social media companies could put a button there that allows you to chat with that user directly. And so how do you see the market playing out? What are you worried about? How are you counter positioning against the different players or different?

• 3:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember, I remember the exact day that Meta launched digital clones.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:38Jordi Hays?

  In their own way. And I think Dara went. Through the cycle that every entrepreneur does when they get, uh, when somebody else, you know, attacks their market.

• 3:10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Step one, all the VCs text you, have you seen this?

• 3:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen this?

• 3:10:49Speaker 09

  Yes, every time.

• 3:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Just enraged. Uh, step three, realize that, you know, it's not actually going to end you.

• 3:10:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  And it just validates your pre-existing beliefs.

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  And your business might grow faster because of it, because more people are aware that this is a thing and they might want a better version of it. But yes, uh, yeah, just general understanding of the marketplace.

• 3:11:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think there were a couple of core decisions we made early on that have set us up for success. One is that while most big companies and AI companies kind of are using your data to try to create AGI, because that's where 99% of their revenue is going to come from in the future. We're saying you own your data, you own your digital identity, we're not training models on it. And that has actually gotten us a ton of customers, people who want to own their data and they don't want these big model companies to rip them off. Number two is we think if you're going to go out of the way to create a really good digital version of yourself, it should work everywhere. So a lot of big tech companies are walled gardens, like it's only in those platforms where Delphi, you can create your digital mind, SMS, WhatsApp, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Telegram, all these different sources.

• 3:11:53Speaker 09

  And it's a central source of, of that. And then three, I, I just think that it's such a new habit, Delphi isn't really meant to be deceptive. Like it doesn't reply to emails for you or respond to DMs. It's more of just like a new form factor of consuming someone's content. So on Instagram, it's a platform that promotes people who are very aesthetically pleasing, where Delphi promotes people who are pleasing for very different reasons. And so it's just a different incentive structure in terms of the network and who gets up to the top.

• 3:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Totally. What are you guys hiring for?

• 3:12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does it take to earn a hundred million dollars at Delphi?

• 3:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are you guys hiring for any AI researchers, any nine-figure signing bonuses?

• 3:12:31Speaker 09

  Not training any foundation models right now, but we are looking for AI people and a lot of design engineers. I think, uh, the interface for the nine mind needs to be beautiful. We're honoring human beings and people need to feel special when they're creating their digital mind. Eventually, when we have the consumer platform that we call the modern day Library of Alexandria, that every mind is going to be on today and 500 years from now, it needs to be beautiful. So design and design engineering.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  Well, we'd love to recommend Figma and Linear for you and your team. If you're not already using them, they are sponsors of this show. They make it possible.

• 3:13:02Speaker 09

  I'll check them out. I don't think, I don't think I've heard of them.

• 3:13:05John Coogan?

  You heard it here first. It's a name brand in the Sequoia-backed world.

• 3:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, congratulations to, I know this round happened a while ago, but congratulations to you and Sam and Spencer and the whole team.

• 3:13:18John Coogan?

  How much was it?

• 3:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again, John.

• 3:13:23Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:13:24John Coogan?

  Production team's getting better. They can cut to the Gong Cam when the Gong hit, when the Gong hit happens. Let's hear it for the production team.

• 3:13:31Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you, Dara. Congratulations on the milestone. Come back on when you have more news.

• 3:13:36John Coogan?

  We'll talk soon.

• 3:13:37Jordi Hays?

  You're the man. Cheers.

• 3:13:40John Coogan?

  Uh, in other news, friend of the show, Boz, not really a friend, but yet we hope he will be a friend. We covered his, uh, beautiful profile of his house in the mansion section. He followed us. So we're gonna get him on the show soon. We gotta make it happen. I'm the biggest fan of this guy. Uh, he posted that the Meta Quest 3S Xbox edition is now available. Everything you love about Quest and Xbox in one sweet package. It's sleek. It's awesome. And it's limited edition. And you know what else? I already ordered one. It's coming to the studio.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:14:14John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I'm very excited. And, and so I, I mean, it doesn't seem like this is like the next, what?

• 3:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Like we said, this is a real risk factor. John's gaming addiction.

• 3:14:24John Coogan?

  I'm not addicted to alcohol. I'm not addicted to gambling. I'm addicted to video games. Seriously. If I ever go down a real bender, I will take off.

• 3:14:32Jordi Hays?

  Because I've never seen you play a video game?

• 3:14:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. The entire time we've been on this show, I haven't logged an hour of video games. I haven't played them in a long time. But you get me? The GTA 6 drops?

• 3:14:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm just ripping this thing off your face.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  We might be using a Delphi here in my state.

• 3:14:45Jordi Hays?

  We gotta go live.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I have been, uh, so, so this is not the Quest 4. This is not a, uh, a proper hardware iteration where we're getting the screen from the Apple Vision Pro pulled in, which I think will be in the next version, which will be a major, major development because there will truly be no screen door effect and you will, like, like the, the resolution will be remarkable because that's what the Apple Vision Pro did so well. That technical hardware now exists in the world. Meta's clearly going to go get that and bake that into the next Quest 4. But, uh, the Quest 3S has already been a pretty solid product. But what they're doing here is they're leaning into video games that are not VR specifically. And I think that this is 100% the correct move because.

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  So much of VR content is this chicken and egg problem. No game developer wants to go and spend. I mean, how long have they been working on GTA 6? Like a decade? And it's cost them like a billion dollars. No one wants to do that if no one has the VR headsets. No one, no one wants to buy the VR headsets if there's no GTA 6 on it. So what do you do? Well, with Meta Xbox, you get GTA 6 on the Xbox and you just play it on a big screen in VR. And you're able to sit on your couch and instead of having to mess with a projector, there might be a few thousand dollars or a TV that's a couple thousand bucks. You throw on this headset that's a couple hundred dollars and you get the movie theater experience in your apartment, on a train, on a plane, wherever you are, you'll be able to stream Xbox games. So I'm very excited about this partnership.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  Excited for them to go deeper. And Microsoft, early Meta investor, actually.

• 3:16:18Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Well, we have Amjad in the studio. Get the hammer, get the hammer ready, John.

• 3:16:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. Give us the number. What's the news?

• 3:16:26Jordi Hays?

  What's the new revenue milestone?

• 3:16:27Amjad Masad?

  I know.

• 3:16:28John Coogan?

  Hundred million.

• 3:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Hundred. Boom.

• 3:16:33John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 3:16:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:16:36Amjad Masad?

  I thought this could be a hundred, a hundred bangs.

• 3:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Hundred bangs. We'll have to do it after the show, but I will give you one of these. A classic overnight success. Replet. There we go. All right, John.

• 3:16:51John Coogan?

  I broke it.

• 3:16:52Jordi Hays?

  He broke the hammer. Replet's going so fast, the hammer broke.

• 3:16:56John Coogan?

  The hammer, hammer breaking growth. Congratulations. How'd you do it? What's the, what's been?

• 3:17:01Jordi Hays?

  What's the one simple trick?

• 3:17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What's the secret to success?

• 3:17:05Amjad Masad?

  It's, it's been easy, you know, just a little bit of work, not, not too many years. You know, I started working on, on Replet back in college. Like I had the idea for it back in college and actually the first implementation of it was open source and it went viral on Hacker News in 2011. And, and then I sort of, we, we left it for a while. Didn't work much on it. And then actually my wife, Haya, who's my co-founder, kind of revived the project. In 2016, we started as a company and it was, it was brutal. We barely were able to, to raise money.

• 3:17:47Amjad Masad?

  We tried to sort of like bootstrap it initially. During the pandemic, we sort of took off, especially as, you know, we were the only sort of collaborative editor in the cloud. And when when AI came on the scene, we just knew this is the future of our company because our mission is to make programming more accessible so that anyone can do it. And with the launch of Rappler agents back in September, we created a category basically of prompt to application. And that really sort of finally went from something that a lot of people use and love but don't pay for to something that's also commercially successful.

• 3:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like your company is now maybe the only AI company that's appropriately hyped. Like, it's not overhyped, you haven't raised the $10 billion round and you're paying the $100 million salaries, but also the growth's been really serious and the business is really real, which is which is great to see. How have the the crazy news of the $100 million salaries been affecting you? Is it harder to hire these days? I know you've kind of changed the structure of the team, relocated the team, I believe. So walk me through the current hiring market for the type of engineers you're trying to hire.

• 3:19:12Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, so a few things that's different about Rappler. One is that team is relatively small. We're still around the 70, 75 people. We haven't been growing all that fast. We are not in San Francisco, which makes it a little harder to hire. We're in Foster City, probably the only startup, perhaps maybe there's a couple others in Foster City. And, you know, we just take a different approach to the culture and we like expect more commitment and want people to come to Rappler and work for a long time, especially since, you know, I've been working on this for so long, my mindset is that it's just gonna take a long time. And like San Francisco, Silicon Valley culture has been increasingly about, you know, I'm

• 3:19:55Amjad Masad?

  gonna go spend 12 months here, 18 months there. And so, yeah, we're building it more methodically. In terms of hiring, definitely, it's been it's been very competitive. And you know, I love OpenAI and Sam and you know, he's talking about how Zuck is doing that to them. But obviously, OpenAI is doing it to the rest of us.

• 3:20:20Amjad Masad?

  It's just a different scale, you know, they're trying to poach their employees for a hundred million. They try to poach everyone for 10 million. Just a factor of like how much revenue, I guess, you're making.

• 3:20:31Jordi Hays?

  But it's part of, part of, from a hiring standpoint, because you're keeping the team small now, revenue per employee is high.

• 3:20:37John Coogan?

  Over a million dollars per employee.

• 3:20:39Jordi Hays?

  New valuations at some point will allow you to sort of have comp, you know, be competitive from a comp standpoint.

• 3:20:47Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and you know, the other thing about valuation is that I think startup employees should start thinking more about these things. Cause a lot of companies can be profitable early on, earlier on. And, and so we're, again, we're trying to build the business for the long term instead of like playing the, the hype game. When you've been building a company for as long as, as you know, I've been, you know, you've, you've bought, you've been through so many ups and downs and hikes and lows. That you just become very steady minded about it.

• 3:21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I guess like the bigger, not to, no pun intended, the meta question here is, is, are we in a new era of valuing the leverage that truly world-class managers or AI engineers can have? The impact that they can have and reassessing the value? We've talked a lot about this on the stream that Apple's culture doesn't seem to be receptive to paying an NBA level salary. And Tim Cook, he makes 75 million dollars.

• 3:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Even, no, he doesn't make, he doesn't even make 75, he only makes 74.6.

• 3:21:58John Coogan?

  It's a big number, but it's tiny considering their market cap. And what, if you could come into Apple and move the needle 1%, that's a $30 billion market cap move. Could you capture 1% of that? That's still $300 million and yet they're not valuing talent. In that way, it feels like there's a change in strategy at Meta. Do you think that that's a, do you think that that's a unique case in where we are in the technological rollout of AI? Or is it more that we're finally catching up to just understanding the economic dynamics and impacts like the NBA has for years?

• 3:22:38Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, so you know, the, uh, the buzzword in Silicon Valley for a long time has been the 10x engineer. About, you know, two, two, three years ago, and maybe in 22, I talked about the 1000x engineer. What, you know, highly kind of leveraged by autonomous agents. Where, you know, right now, people with Replit, Claude Code and others, they're spinning up multiple agents to work on the project as they're, you know, working on their main tasks. And there's a lot of other explorations and tasks and prototyping happening everywhere. And so you're really not just one person, you're a team of engineers, right? And so, you know, we talked about engineering managers, I think every engineer is sort of a manager right now.

• 3:23:23Amjad Masad?

  And so, yeah, I mean, we're, we're not at 1000x yet, but we're, we're going up. I think, I think pretty soon the difference between a great engineer that knows how to use the AI tools and okay or good one, it's going to be 100x, I think, over the next six to 12 months. So the compensation structure, I assume, would start to, to change to match that.

• 3:23:45Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about Replit's potential today? It, it seems like every day in the timeline, uh, you know, you know, the obvious thing is everyone becomes an engineer. And, you know, it's being able to create software is fully democratized. But every day in the timeline, I see people realizing how much they spend on different SaaS products and thinking, how much time would it really take for me to kind of make a version of this for myself? That fits my very specific need, like document signing.

• 3:24:16John Coogan?

  Talks to Klarna CEO about this.

• 3:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some, some, something along those lines. And so, um, is part of, of the potential that you see CEOs and companies everywhere sort of running that sort of buy versus build calculus in terms of all sorts of tooling that they're using internally, externally, et cetera? And seeing trillions, you know, or hundreds of billions of dollars of, of market cap that, that you guys could ultimately replace.

• 3:24:44Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I mean, look, right now, there is sort of information asymmetry. A lot of people in Silicon Valley in tech know how to use these tools. A lot of people outside of here just aren't aware how much savings and how much productivity they can gain. Um, I met someone from Australia the other day here uh in Silicon Valley. He stopped me on the street. It was like, I love Replit. He runs like a construction company and he's like, you know, I'm the CEO now and I'm the most productive engineer at the company. I like build all these tools and dashboards. I place Monday dot com and all this other stuff with uh home-built stuff that is actually exactly bespoke.

• 3:25:26Amjad Masad?

  And works exactly for my use case. Another story, uh, the guy, his name is uh Ahmad George. He works at a skincare company, I think in in DC. And he's an operations manager. He's responsible for like the ERP systems and things like that. They, he had an intuition that they could automate and a big percentage of the work, twenty, thirty percent of the hours of uh human work. And uh he went and got a quote from their, from NetSuite to build this piece of soft automation software. It was a hundred thirty two thousand dollars to build. So he went to Replit, spent four hundred dollars.

• 3:26:06Amjad Masad?

  Built it for their company, rolled it out, went to the CEO, told him, look at how much time and money I'm saving. And the CEO gave him thirty two thousand dollars.

• 3:26:16John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's awesome.

• 3:26:18Amjad Masad?

  So um so yeah, it's it's, you know, there's a period of time at some point, you know, the market will like. Equalize as everyone realizes that you can do this stuff, but for now, there's a massive arbitrage opportunity.

• 3:26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, as you build out agents and agentic workflows, do you have, are you limited by? Data for RL pipelines? Are you, are you buying any services from? The scale AIs of the world or the Mercors of the world, or are you able to sit at a higher level of abstraction? And kind of let the foundation labs get their hands dirty with all that?

• 3:26:56Amjad Masad?

  You know, having been a platform where millions of people coded over the years, um, actually we could be a supplier of data.

• 3:27:05John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:27:06Amjad Masad?

  So, uh, so yeah, we have, we have all the, all the data we need. Um, I think it's still early for us to try to exploit all of that. And we're hiring as fast as we can. So if you want to come work on AI at Rapid, I think we have a really exciting uh opportunities to, to use data to kind of create amazing new capabilities.

• 3:27:27John Coogan?

  That's very cool. I have another question.

• 3:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 3:27:32John Coogan?

  Are you feeling the acceleration in software development? Uh, I, I was thinking about this.

• 3:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Pretty easy to when you refresh the Stripe dashboard and.

• 3:27:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, I get that. I get that. But as a consumer, I was just thinking about like, like the apps on my phone still haven't changed as fast as I've thought. And there's, there's in my, in my business, folks are using different tools, but it doesn't, it doesn't feel like the rate of like churning for most consumers, like we, like we, like we're, we're not rebuilding all the different consumer apps right now. It feels like we're very much in like this exploration phase for like what the next, it feels like we're almost pre Cambrian explosion for consumer AI driven apps or uniquely enabled by AI apps. There's a lot of creation tools. So like

• 3:28:24John Coogan?

  VO three is amazing. That got me to install the Gemini app and I paid for that and I enjoy generating my, my paltry three video queries per day, sir. May I have some more, Sinar? Please, maybe you can help me. I think, don't, don't you know him?

• 3:28:42Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, we're good partners.

• 3:28:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, please have me more, but yes.

• 3:28:46Amjad Masad?

  TikTok feed is a hundred percent AI now. And maybe because I like them so much. I've been into the Bigfoots.

• 3:28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So maybe that's like the instantiation of the consumer adoption of AI is like your consumer through TikTok as opposed to through like it's a very 2010 mindset to think that my home screen apps would change and instead the 2025 mindset is what is happening inside of those apps is changing. Is that the right framework?

• 3:29:15Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I think I think you're right. I do think that Apple is probably holding back the ecosystem. I mean, Apple really has been a tax on startups, has been a tax on innovation. I love this company as much as anyone would love Apple, but but they are they are sort of like a government in a way that there's like old and moving slow and they just like put up so much barriers. Like when I, you know, when I want to ask my phone, I go to perplexity like 100 times a day. I should be able to like press a button, just like talk to it, talking to me. But, you know, it's it's not working that way. And it is frustrating. But look, I think, you

• 3:29:55Amjad Masad?

  know, AI adoption is moving as fast faster than any technology adoption we've seen in the past, faster than the web, faster than mobile, but it still doesn't feel fast enough, like you say. And by the way, this is an interesting kind of data point on, you know, the the folks that are really worried about AGI and things like that. The limiting factor to adoption is really humans and corporations and governments and all of these things are very, very slow.

• 3:30:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is kind of the Tyler Cowen take of like how AGI will be rolled out is there's a lot of sticky industries that just won't adopt it for a long time. And there will be lots of barriers. Is there anything else on the Apple side? My takeaway from WWDC was that on-device inference could be a catalyst for an app store explosion, an AI app explosion. Then there's the ruling about third-party payment processing, things that that like the tax is becoming less of a requirement. Maybe you can work around it. And so maybe the barriers are dropping ever so slightly.

• 3:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I feel like I feel like you would you would see this early.

• 3:31:00John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, that's why.

• 3:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Developers become really excited about this sort of effectively free inference where they can launch an app that goes viral without worrying about, you know, running up some bill with OpenAI.

• 3:31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:11Amjad Masad?

  I mean, look, the Apple has held back the web. Quite a bit as well, like there's no reason why native apps should be much better performing than than web apps. Really, there's no fundamental physics reason for that. I've actually, um, the head of product at Apple, Jordan Walk and and myself worked on React Native. He's the inventor of React and React Native at at Facebook. And the the reason we worked on that is we felt at Facebook, we felt sort of like oppressed by Apple. Like they controlled what we launched, when we launched it, and they would like, you know, reject, you would have a launch and it was delayed by Apple. And so the the idea behind it is like, can we ship over the air updates very, very quickly?

• 3:31:55Amjad Masad?

  And and yes, you can. But again, Apple kind of like makes it a lot harder. And so I think, look, I think AI has an opportunity to create an alternative platform entirely, because the form factor of computing i- is on the precipice of changing. I saw you guys talking about VR. AR is another one. Audio is another one. You know, we've seen all these toy companies like Rabbit and things like that come and go, but there's but there's like an intuition there that's correct. I think everyone's feeling that, that the form factor needs innovating. And I think this is how you break out of the like Apple jail.

• 3:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Wild garden, yeah.

• 3:32:33Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:34John Coogan?

  This is great. You got to come back on, we yap about all different news stories. You have anything else, Jordan, you want to get?

• 3:32:38Jordi Hays?

  No, we we got to get you on regularly.

• 3:32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:32:41Amjad Masad?

  That's why I was here, I got cancelled, so.

• 3:32:43John Coogan?

  What? No, we went, that was the most viral clip of that month. I think.

• 3:32:48Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what happened?

• 3:32:49John Coogan?

  I think, well, I asked, I asked, should people learn to code? And he gave kind of a controversial answer saying like, no, you shouldn't leave the code anymore. And it got like millions and millions of views. So.

• 3:32:59Jordi Hays?

  I bet it drove, I bet it drove some, some signups.

• 3:33:02John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Learn to vibe code. You gave a very nuanced answer. I don't think there was anything that crazy about it.

• 3:33:09Jordi Hays?

  The internet does not understand nuance.

• 3:33:11John Coogan?

  Cancelled and viral are two sides of the same coin, like.

• 3:33:15Amjad Masad?

  Doesn't matter anymore. Doesn't matter. Yourself, you know, head is gonna hate.

• 3:33:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, just don't get deplatformed from Gemini because otherwise the three VO prompts will be zero. And it will in your life will be miserable because you gotta prompt those.

• 3:33:30Amjad Masad?

  Thanks guys. You do great work. Really appreciate the show.

• 3:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back on at 200. At this rate, it'll probably be next week.

• 3:33:35John Coogan?

  Next week. Let's do it. We're ready with the gongs. Ready to go.

• 3:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll get a new hammer. So we'll be ready.

• 3:33:42John Coogan?

  Thanks guys. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:33:43John Coogan?

  Bye. Uh, next up, we have

• 3:33:46Jordi Hays?

  Dirtman.

• 3:33:47John Coogan?

  Dirtman. Uh, another anonymous account. Uh, I don't know why he's anonymous, but Dirtman.

• 3:33:55Jordi Hays?

  He launched, uh, cheap robot arm.com today.

• 3:33:59John Coogan?

  Very excited for this.

• 3:34:00Jordi Hays?

  He's making, uh, cheap robot.

• 3:34:02John Coogan?

  Go buy them now.

• 3:34:04Jordi Hays?

  We, we cover, he used to have a different name on the show. He used to cover his posts. I used to laugh.

• 3:34:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:34:09Jordi Hays?

  Every time.

• 3:34:10John Coogan?

  But it was, it was rude. So we just call him Dirtman. Welcome to the stream.

• 3:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Dirtman.

• 3:34:14John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 3:34:14Jordi Hays?

  No, he changed his name.

• 3:34:15John Coogan?

  Oh, he did?

• 3:34:16Jordi Hays?

  He dropped the parentheses.

• 3:34:18John Coogan?

  Wow, classing it up. Introduce yourself. Who are you?

• 3:34:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, hey guys, uh, my name's Angus. Uh, yeah, I'm, I'm just a, I'm an engineer from Australia. My background's like very much in aerospace and yeah, I've been like obsessed with like building these kind of robot, robots for, uh, I don't know, like the last 10 years or something. Um, yeah, and it's a, you know, building, building this mini one. It's really just, it was really like a stepping stone for me on the way to building welding robotics. Um, you know, I've got some larger robots where I'm just setting up a workshop currently, uh, to do basically strap on cameras, sensor systems and drive the whole thing, drive the whole thing via AI. Cause you know, it's basically, we're basically at the point where there's,

• 3:35:03Speaker 11

  you know, uh, we have the ability to drive, you know, these really complex, you know, and industrial scale robotic systems like with, you know, the current robotic foundation models, you know, given the right training data. Um, and so this, like this small robot that I've put, that I've got on, uh, you know, cheap robot, uh, arm.com is

• 3:35:24John Coogan?

  Great to have you.

• 3:35:25Speaker 11

  Was really, really, yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm surprised it was available. I was like, hell yeah. But

• 3:35:31Speaker 11

  dot com.

• 3:35:32Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 3:35:33Speaker 11

  But uh, but it was it was really just a testbed, you know, I'm working with a few guys, you know, one guy Julian out of Pennsylvania, you know, runs a runs a shop floor like a welding robots and another guy Steven, you know, currently works for NASA, you know, he's built working on the vision system. But all but it's really a testbed for us to, you know, you know, validate our algorithms, do small scale uh prototyping. You know, my uh the picture that I've got up there, you know, I don't have uh many demos because it was basically thrown together like, you know, to add my time last night, you know, got the shop.

• 3:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Doing it live.

• 3:36:05Speaker 11

  Store up and running and.

• 3:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, live. So what do you want people to use these for? What are the use cases that you're imagining?

• 3:36:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, so very much the same as uh I would say those Le uh Le robot ones, um it's just a much more robust platform. So improved like improved power in the servos, improved like structural integrity. Um but the key like one of the key differences is I've actually built a like a uh an industrial quality like kinematic solver. And basically what all that what that's telling you is, you know, where the end where the end effector of the robot needs to be. There's usually like a whole bunch of equations that you're either solving numerically or you've got a, you know, a solver in a low dimensional space that you can work out really quickly. Like I've built a like I've built a really robust one for um for six like six degrees of freedom.

• 3:36:55Speaker 11

  And this is just more than you get with the uh with I guess what's typically being used in all of those like AI like hackathons. And so I've written written all the software so you can take uh all of the outputs from an AI model um and just stream joint commands to it, you know, connect it to like things like Nvidia's IZACIM. But you can also run it like a traditional industrial robot um and like and do path planning for really, really high fidelity. Uh you know, trajectories and controls. Uh and the like the benefit of that is like all of that, all of that information uh that you can stream and record from those joints as you use the high quality kinematic solver. You can use that as the training data. So you see a lot of these guy. Like a lot of these robot systems, they've got, you know, one arm and then another one's controlled by a human with a little lever.

• 3:37:40Speaker 11

  And then like going and doing these pick and place or whatever. Um, and that like you're just streaming like this joint uh should be the joint angle of this other robot. Uh, and frankly, that's really crap data for training robots. Like the, like you get it done, but you can see all the movements all janky. It's the same kind of movement that the human's doing with a robot. It's awkward. Um, but you like, you know, industrial robots, they've been uh doing this for decades, right? And they have really nice trajectories, really smooth path, path planning. But the bottleneck is like, how do you get that high quality data? Um, and you know, with the software combined with this, you know, little robot package, that's what I can do. You know, that's what this can do for people, you know, help them get really high quality data without, and only having to buy one robot. You don't need to buy like the equipment for two.

• 3:38:24Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Um, what, how is the health of this sort of open source robotic hacker world right now? We had Clem on earlier from Hugging Face and he said this was an area that he was most excited about. Uh, on, on, on his platform and, and he, you know, he said they hosted a hackathon recently. It sounds like there's a lot of exciting activity here and you're contributing to it yourself.

• 3:38:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I basically just posted all the, you know, all the code on GitHub for free. And I think there's uh, it's, it's like a really exciting time at the moment, just because there's like, there's so much activity and attention and there's many more people. Really coming into the field and, you know, having a go and learning, like not just robotics, but on the hardware side, right? It's a, you know, it's like my background's aerospace and mechanical engineering, you know, was a, you know, built rocket engines once upon a time. And it's, you know, uh, you know, we kind of got left out in the cold, you know, by Silicon Valley. A little bit, you know, you, you sort of like, you know, but, but you see all the, you know, the major, all the really standout companies, you know, are all hardware companies, you know? Space, like SpaceX and Dural and, you know, a whole, a whole range of them.

• 3:39:30Speaker 11

  And I think there's a lot of, like a lot of attention, like just on this area has really put a lot of energy, particularly into their open source specs, which is awesome to see.

• 3:39:38John Coogan?

  How have sales been? Have you sold any yet?

• 3:39:41Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. So I've worked it out. Well, you know, uh, we've got, we've got three sales so far.

• 3:39:46Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:39:51Speaker 11

  Uh, thank you, guys. Thank you, guys.

• 3:39:54John Coogan?

  That's three sales. That's 1,500 bucks in one day. You annualize that. I think we're in the millions.

• 3:40:01Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think if you put together the right deck, maybe you take a trip to Sand Hill Road. You tell the right story.

• 3:40:07John Coogan?

  Hop on a quick flight.

• 3:40:08Jordi Hays?

  200 on a billion.

• 3:40:09John Coogan?

  Sydney to SFO.

• 3:40:10Jordi Hays?

  200 on a billion.

• 3:40:11John Coogan?

  Easy. Get it done.

• 3:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Get it done.

• 3:40:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. Look, you know, it's, uh, you know, I think like you seen said, like, hey, my valuation should be the same as figured because I've never shipped more.

• 3:40:24Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 3:40:25John Coogan?

  Shots fired.

• 3:40:26Speaker 11

  Not my words. Yeah, I've seen. Yeah, I've seen.

• 3:40:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:40:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've seen. Yapseen was, uh, was cooking earlier.

• 3:40:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this, uh, uh, this feels like something that, uh, would, would be perfect for the AI grant program from Nat Friedman. You know, this is going to be the enabling technology. This is going to be deeper in the supply chain for the robot that picks up the leaves. Or, you know, one of these fun delightful robots. I hope Nat can continue that program. He certainly has the resources for it, uh, and it'd be very cool to see that partnered up with the.

• 3:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would like a robot that.

• 3:41:01Speaker 11

  I'm definitely keen to head to the US. Uh, like it's, you know, I, about 18 months ago, I stopped by the Gundo, you know, met like Augusta, some bunch of other fellows. I had, it's been awesome to see those guys. Like, you know, I think, you know, I went there when Valor Atomics was just a squat rack in an empty room.

• 3:41:18Jordi Hays?

  It was just a squat rack with scraps.

• 3:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, you seem like an alien of extraordinary robotic abilities. So, uh, my vote is we get you over here.

• 3:41:30John Coogan?

  Bring you in. Uh, this is fantastic.

• 3:41:32Speaker 11

  Be there in a, in a couple of months, I think.

• 3:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Great. Well, let's tune the robot up to crack open, uh.

• 3:41:38John Coogan?

  Energy drinks. That'd be useful.

• 3:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on the desk. It'd be great if we could just hit a button.

• 3:41:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's hard to reach over here and, and, and, uh, crack them ourselves.

• 3:41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's brutal.

• 3:41:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, congratulations on, on the launch.

• 3:41:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 3:41:52Speaker 11

  I really appreciate it, fellas. And yeah, love, love the show. Been a big fan since the beginning. So keep it up. Appreciate it.

• 3:41:58Jordi Hays?

  I'll never forget your name.

• 3:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, when the first time it came up in the deck. This is great.

• 3:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:42:04John Coogan?

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

• 3:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Cheers Angus.

• 3:42:06Speaker 11

  Alright, thanks fellas.

• 3:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 3:42:08John Coogan?

  Bye. Should we go through some timeline, get out of here, move on? We got a big show tomorrow.

• 3:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's work a little timeline.

• 3:42:15John Coogan?

  A little, just a little timeline couldn't hurt. We got Will Manitis talking about there no, there is no real index of wealth in the world other than the landowner.

• 3:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Landowner 100. Everybody should be aspiring to get on this list.

• 3:42:27John Coogan?

  John Malone's got over 2 million. Ted Turner's got over 2 million. I like the Reed family here at 1.6 million.

• 3:42:35Jordi Hays?

  Picture of a bear?

• 3:42:37John Coogan?

  Just a picture of a bear. I don't know if that, do they not have another picture that they could pull from? I have no idea.

• 3:42:42Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think.

• 3:42:43John Coogan?

  You gotta start landmashing.

• 3:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Should just buy land, just go buy, start with an acre. Could be anywhere, could be out in the desert. Start with an acre.

• 3:42:50John Coogan?

  Just add, just double it every day for 100 days and you're good.

• 3:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:55John Coogan?

  Just double.

• 3:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Getting the landowner 100.

• 3:42:57John Coogan?

  Doomer says how it feels to charge your phone off your MacBook Pro and it's refueling the B70.

• 3:43:02Jordi Hays?

  It really does feel, I mean, this couldn't have been more perfect.

• 3:43:05John Coogan?

  It's so accurate. I mean, a million views makes sense. Yeah.

• 3:43:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a perfect analogy. You know, you're, you got some juice.

• 3:43:11John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 3:43:12Jordi Hays?

  You're sharing it, you're both running out.

• 3:43:13John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about this one from nine to five Mac. Control center is now darker and much more blurred in iOS 26 beta 2. Good news for Tyler. He's been struggling with iOS, iOS 26 beta 1, but beta 2 is now available. The contrast ratios have been fixed, improved. It's easier to read. We knew Apple would do this. We called this out that any of the criticism that you lever at, at, at Apple's design chops. It's, it's not going to be an issue by the time they launch. Tyler, how has, how has daily driving iOS 6, iOS 26 been over the last few weeks?

• 3:43:52Speaker 04

  I mean, I think overall, it's been very good. I think most of the issues, it's just, it's hard to tell if it's because my phone is just so old.

• 3:43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the phone.

• 3:44:00Speaker 04

  But I think overall, like, it looks really nice.

• 3:44:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:44:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's great.

• 3:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, that's good to hear. I like Arvin's from...

• 3:44:08Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't have been surprised if he's like, "I haven't been able to open my phone for weeks now since that fateful day."

• 3:44:15John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it didn't break.

• 3:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for being a guinea pig for the world.

• 3:44:19John Coogan?

  Yes, Arvin from Perplexity is building in public, building a competitor to Bloomberg in public. I love this. He's searching for Perplexity, "How much revenue does Bloomberg make yearly?" He's been pretty open about wanting to build like a new version of the Bloomberg terminal. And so he's just searching, "How much money do they make?" And he says, "Bloomberg makes 12 billion in annual revenue with 10 billion coming from the terminal." And then he's just like, throwing this out there, like, "Hey, maybe I'll, maybe I'll do this. Like, maybe you should invest in this."

• 3:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:44:48John Coogan?

  It's a hilarious thing to post.

• 3:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, I've been, I've been a recent DAU of Perplexity.

• 3:44:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 3:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Getting a lot of value out of it.

• 3:44:55John Coogan?

  I mean, it makes sense that...

• 3:44:56Jordi Hays?

  On the free tier.

• 3:44:57John Coogan?

  It makes sense that...

• 3:44:58Jordi Hays?

  But they're gonna get me soon.

• 3:44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes sense that, that an LLM company, an AI company, it's like, they either, it does feel like there's a fork in the road for Perplexity. It's either team up with Apple and become the new default search and figure out something there, or go into Bloomberg. Because like, the core product people like it...

• 3:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, it's just a very different product to try to actually compete with terminal versus displaying data.

• 3:45:23John Coogan?

  Distribution is just so, is so important. I mean, we saw this with DuckDuckGo. Like, a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of power users, preferred DuckDuckGo to Google. But DuckDuckGo never got to the scale that Google did, just because of distribution. And so, you know, he's clearly looking at Bloomberg. There's rumors that he's talking to Apple. It's interesting to see where that goes.

• 3:45:44Jordi Hays?

  But he's cooking.

• 3:45:45John Coogan?

  Anyway, Pierre Richelson from Cal.com says, "I think organizing LAN parties for 30-plus-year-olds could unironically be a banger. Warcraft III, Battlefield 1942, I played that game, great. Age of Empires, Dota, what else?" I don't know why you gotta have 30, 30-year-old plus. Bring the Tealfellows in, bring the, bring the...

• 3:46:02Jordi Hays?

  They didn't really play those games, John. You're dating yourself.

• 3:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they can pick it up. I mean, a lot of these games...

• 3:46:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's about the nostalgia.

• 3:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I went to a hackathon last year, put on by a venture capital firm. It was fun.

• 3:46:15John Coogan?

  Had some Halo, Halo 3 was the popular one, but the new Halo, if you install it, they just give you all the previous Halos. You can just play any of them in like one disc, I guess.

• 3:46:26Jordi Hays?

  That's very simple.

• 3:46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, buy the current one, it's like SaaS now. You buy the current one, you get all the previous, all the previous ones. Should we close with a Cowtech startup?

• 3:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:38John Coogan?

  This was exciting.

• 3:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Good on Arfa Rock.

• 3:46:40John Coogan?

  Confirmed one month early.

• 3:46:42Jordi Hays?

  One month early.

• 3:46:43John Coogan?

  Cowtech startup becomes New Zealand's latest unicorn in $100 million fundraising.

• 3:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Rare New Zealand unicorn.

• 3:46:50John Coogan?

  I said this was very bullish.

• 3:46:52Jordi Hays?

  For beef?

• 3:46:53John Coogan?

  For cows.

• 3:46:54Jordi Hays?

  For cows.

• 3:46:55John Coogan?

  It's bullish.

• 3:46:59Jordi Hays?

  Knee slapper.

• 3:47:00John Coogan?

  Knee slapper.

• 3:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Knee slapper. Well, we could just keep going all day long here, John, but...

• 3:47:05John Coogan?

  If you get a text message from Mark Zuckerberg or an email, do not assume that it's fake. He has taken over recruitment for the Super Intelligence Lab and is reaching out to hundreds of prospects personally. If you respond, this next step is an invitation to dinner. So he's in founder mode, he's grinding. He's putting together the Avengers. It's coming together nicely. I'm liking it. I'm liking it so far. It's fun.

• 3:47:29John Coogan?

  Anyway, I think that's enough for today. Thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:47:36Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:47:37John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 3:47:37Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 3:47:38John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.