🟡 Evan Spiegel LIVE in the Ultradome | Colin & Samir, RJ Scaringe, Scott Kupor

(04:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (56:21) - Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., best known for creating Snapchat, the camera-driven social platform he helped launch while still a Stanford student, and has since become one of the youngest self-made billionaires in tech while steering Snap’s evolution into an augmented-reality–focused company. (01:43:03) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:49:47) - RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian Automotive, discusses the company's strategic focus on expanding its product lineup with the upcoming R2 SUV, aiming to offer a more affordable electric vehicle option starting at around $45,000. He highlights the importance of vertical integration, including the development of in-house technologies like the Rivian Autonomy Processor, to enhance vehicle capabilities and maintain a competitive edge. Scaringe also emphasizes the significance of creating distinctive vehicle designs, such as the unique headlight configuration, to establish brand identity and appeal to a broader market. (02:29:26) - Scott Kupor, Director of the U. S. Office of Personnel Management, discusses the launch of the U. S. Tech Force, a two-year program aiming to recruit 1,000 engineers, product managers, data scientists, and AI specialists into various federal agencies to modernize government infrastructure. This initiative addresses the need for modern technical expertise and aims to attract early-career professionals, who currently constitute only about 7% of the federal workforce, compared to 25-30% in the private sector. In collaboration with 25 tech companies, the program offers participants career development opportunities and a job fair at the end of the term, facilitating transitions to private sector roles if desired. (02:41:00) - Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry are the creators behind Colin & Samir, a media duo known for their in-depth interviews and analysis about the creator economy; through their YouTube channel, podcast, and newsletter, they break down how creators build businesses, spotlight emerging platforms, and offer industry-shaping commentary that has made them leading voices in creator-focused media. 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 Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/ fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, December 15th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. It's Christmas week, baby, and the Christmas decorations continue to grow in the TVPN UltraDome. Our good friend Tyler Cosgrove over there is feeling the holiday spirit. He's looking fantastic. And if you're wondering if he has shoes and socks and pants, Tom. Put the shoes up on the table. He does. It's a full costume. Yes, that is fantastic. Almost as fantastic as Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards. Bill Pay. Accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Get started at ramp.com. So, uh, Tim Sweeney was taking a victory lap. I sort of missed this. This was last Thursday. Basically, the Ninth Circuit struck down, you know, Apple trying to do something else in the Apple tax battle with Epic Games. So, uh, a quick, quick refresher on this. Uh, Tim Sweeney says the Apple tax is dead in the United States. Uh, this particular nail in the coffin comes from the Ninth Circuit. Uh, these things are never fully over, I've learned. Like, it's just, it's just, there's, there's a class action lawsuit, then there's another lawsuit, then there's this one, then there's appeals, then they go to the Supreme Court, then they go back to the Supreme Court. It's always up and down, like, that's just the nature of these things because the stakes are so, so high.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Exposure seems a little hot on that. What's going on there? Uh, but basically, um, the court had, had said, uh, that Apple could not charge 30% if a developer routed an app customer to their own payment page. And so Apple was like, yeah, totally. We're cool with that. How about 27% plus 3% for payments and 27% for like IP licensing? And so like, the end result was exactly the same. It was literally 30%. It was just like structured slightly differently. They just changed the language. And so, uh, they were, they were, uh, you know, this was contempt. Like, like, you know, it's like, we, we told you not to do this and you're still doing it at Apple.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  And so now they, they're not supposed to. Uh, of course, like the weird takeaway here is like these big momentous things happen. And then the stock moves like not at all. Um, because of course, um, you know, my conclusion from digging into this was that the... Fundamentally, like, consumer behavior has built up over almost two decades now. I mean, the App Store was launched, I believe, in 2007. This 30% fee, this initial, this whole saga starts in 2011. This guy, Robert Pepper, he sues Apple, along with three other plaintiffs.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Pepper.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Mr. Pepper, alleging that he was overcharged for iOS apps. Imagine, I mean, that's not exactly what happened because it's like a class action lawsuit and it's much bigger stakes. But it's funny to imagine a guy just saying.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm coming for you, Apple.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  You know what? Flappy Bird, I was charged $2 for it. Should have been $1.70, something like that, $1.20. And, and taking it all the way to the Supreme Court.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if he's a Flappy Bird whale and he spent millions, tens of millions of dollars on the app.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, yeah, the economics are a bit, you know. You wouldn't normally see somebody like that suing Apple because they're like, you overcharged me by $2,000 across the lifetime and I'm suing you for damages and it's like a lawsuit that will, you know.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  With the class action lawsuit, obviously you get a couple of plaintiffs who are exemplary of the problem. And then when the settlement happens, it's like billions of dollars paid to everyone who ever purchased an app, right? And, and you see these things before, like, did you use Facebook between 2016, 2017? You may be entitled to like five cents, right? Class action settlements happen all the time. Obviously massive economic incentives for the, for the lawyers who fight them. Anyway, before I continue, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the software, meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  So, basically, the, you know, Apple's gonna work to, so now the, the court ruled that Apple can't do that anymore. They can only collect fees that are in line with actual costs of facilitating links, links to out to other, other payment processes.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Cloud costs for one link?

• 4:35John Coogan?

  I know, I know, it's crazy. And the

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  They're like, actually, actually, we need to use AI for this.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  And we need to

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, that's actually what's gonna happen. So basically, right now, it's like, the, like, if, if I, I'm, I'm the, uh, I'm the App Store. I'm Apple, I have the App Store. Um, you have your own app and you have your own, you know, Stripe account and you wanna pay, you wanna accept payments your way. Um, Apple says, well, you know, even though we're, yes, you are checking out on your payment rails. And it's your app. Like, I created the link and the technology that creates links within iOS. And that is helping you, so you gotta pay me an IP licensing fee. And, you know, typically, it was like 27% of whatever you make, which doesn't make any sense

• 5:22John Coogan?

  because obviously, my, as Apple, my, my costs don't scale proportionally to your revenue. It's, it's linear with regard to my costs. So like, yes, if, if Apple probably

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  These are pricey links, John, these are pricey links.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Like, you're laughing, but like, like, realistically, like, the, the iOS team that has been working on just, just links, like, there's, there's code there, there's code there. Like, and they get paid a lot. It's probably in the millions. It might be, you know, across all of the different amortized

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  I know, but if you're, if you're a

• 5:52John Coogan?

  There is a lot.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  If you're a successful mobile developer, you've been paying millions of dollars to Apple forever. And you're talking about millions, like, relatively fixed OpEx for Apple, that again, doesn't

• 6:04John Coogan?

  And they make like 30 billion a year or something like that. So, so, so it's like, it, it, like, they have paid for the R and D by, you know, fully. Um, but basically, you know, they're, the, the idea is like justifiable costs should be like 10 bucks, maybe like 100 bucks for reviewing an app. And just saying, okay, we ran our software, we understand the, the, you know, is this, is this violating any rules? We maybe had a human pop by and look at it for, you know, a couple of minutes, make sure that this is compliant with the App Store. Um, and, and then there are obviously be other costs, but, you know, should it be millions of dollars? Should it be proportional to revenue? Should be 30% of revenue? Uh, a lot of people have been arguing, no. Um, but, uh, of course, this will go back and forth and Apple will probably try and

• 6:48John Coogan?

  make the, the, the fee as high as possible, of course, because they have every incentive to. Um, but, uh, what, what, what else is interesting about this? So, um, so, oh, the, the other interesting thing is that in, in Pepper versus Apple, um, there was this question of You know, like where in the chain is the monopoly pricing having an effect? Like where is it increasing the the price of the good? And so this all goes back, this Ben Thompson's like the best chronicler of this whole saga, of course. And he he goes back to this Illinois brick company versus Illinois, the state of Illinois.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  And so this was in 1977, and the the Supreme Court held that only direct purchases of direct purchasers of illegally priced goods had standing to sue. So the Illinois brick case, this is pretty interesting. He says, the value chain was very straightforward. Concrete block makers, including the eponymous Illinois Brick Company, great name for a company that makes concrete blocks. Yeah, Illinois. They were accused of colluding colluding to fixed prices of concrete blocks, which were bought by masonry contractors. Masonry contractors in turn submitted bids to general contractors for construction projects, which were ultimately paid for by the state of Illinois.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  And so the state of Illinois sued for damages alleging that the higher prices resulting from the price fixing had been passed through to the state of Illinois. So even though the masonry contractors were like, okay, yeah, like the Illinois Brick Company is is with all the other brick companies, they're jacking up prices, it doesn't really matter because they just passed that through. And so there's a question about like, well, you didn't actually pay the higher price directly Yeah. state of Illinois, but it was passed through. And so that that harm gets passed through. And so, you know, he says, in this value chain is obvious who the direct purchasers were. Masonry contractors, to the extent the state of Illinois suffered harm, it was indirect pass-through harm. Thus, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Illinois did not have standing.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  So the so the state of Illinois could not sue then. If every party in the value chain were to sue, the infringing party could be the subject of duplicative recovery for damages and parsing out the share of damages would be extremely difficult. So it's the masonry contractors that have to sue. Now. In Apple versus Pepper, there's this question of who is harmed by Apple's alleged monopolistic practices. According to the plaintiffs, the value chain looks the same as the concrete block manufacturers. Basically, there's developers who sell their apps to Apple, who sell those apps to consumers. But Apple said, whoa, whoa, no, we're not a retail store, even though it's called the App Store. It's not a real store. We don't buy

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  We don't buy inventory.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  and sell them. Exactly. We're more, we're an agent. And so, the company argued, Apple does not buy and resell apps. Instead, Apple acts as an agent for developers. And says, as respondents, note, this is from the actual court case, "The developer agreement confirms that Apple acts as an agent for app providers in providing the App Store, and is not a party to the sales contract or user agreement between the user and the app provider. Thus, respondents concede that the direct sale is actually between developers and consumers facilitated by Apple as an agent and conduit." And that sort of makes sense. You know, you go to a grocery store, they buy the apples from the farmer, they sell them to the customer, they take possession. A real estate agent facilitates a transaction, doesn't

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Take a fee, like a fixed fee.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Takes a fee, takes a fee, takes a fee.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  If Apple, if Apple was actually going and like buying licenses and then reselling them, you know they'd be negotiating like crazy too, and be like, we'll give you a dollar, and then we're gonna sell it for $10. So you could argue it'd be even worse for developers in that situation.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, the, the, the interesting thing about, about this, this whole case is just, just how much the reality of the shape of the App Store and, and the business of the services, services narrative changed the, the entire financial story of Apple over the last, I guess, decade and a half.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  The, if you want to look at Apple's stock, you should head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions. But what you should do if you go and you look at Apple is look at the price to earnings ratio. Because back in 2011, it was 9.7. Let's call it 10x price to earnings. Today, it's 37x. So, obviously, the business has grown, but the, the value of the earnings is so much higher. Why is that? It's because it's so much stickier. And it's because they've developed this this services monopoly essentially where they have aggregated, you know, it's the Ben Thompson aggregation.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  It's a toll road for your life.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  It's not a toll road. That's a good, that's a great, that's a great thing. It's a, there is a difference between a toll and a tax. And a toll is something that you pay that is directly linked to the, to the service that you're getting.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you're, you're saying it would be more like a toll road now?

• 11:56John Coogan?

  Now, yes, now it will be a toll road and we should celebrate that or developers should celebrate that. Tim Sweeney should be celebrating that because a toll road is something where it's like, it's like I'm paying five dollars to drive down this road. That money goes directly towards this road.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tax structure applied to a toll road is like, what economic value are you creating by driving down a road?

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna charge you thirty percent of that.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Exactly. Oh, you're, oh, you're, you're transporting a shipment of televisions on this road? Those are high margin. Or, oh, you're, you know, oh, you're, you're a rich person driving this road?

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  You have some GPUs, you're hiding GPUs on your truck, are you not?

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, oh, oh, you can certainly break us off more. As opposed to saying, you know, every time someone drives on this road, it takes a dollar of depreciation, we need a million dollars to repave it every year, and so we need to link the, link the cost of using the service with the actual underlying cost of operating that service.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  My question with these changes is what is the, what is the consumer experience gonna be when trying to cancel subscriptions? Because the one aspect of the App Store that I've always appreciated is the ability to one-click cancel from within the App Store and not having to go to individual apps or services and cancel. And so I do wonder, as soon as you let payments live outside of the App Store, everyone has experienced any type of software retailer making it hard to figure out how to cancel a subscription. And so will Apple keep that kind of one-click cancellation ability within the app or will they actually have to let?

• 13:32John Coogan?

  I mean, this already exists because like you can go put your credit card down in Fortnite. The thing is that I think the subscription revenue is. Not as much as you think. It's not as much of a driver. Like the in-app payments, the one-off clicks, like those are much, much bigger driver of overall economic activity. But I don't know. On the subscription side, it would be interesting if there's like some sort of re-aggregation at like the Stripe level or something like that. I don't really know. But in general, the interesting thing is that like, so Apple's price to earnings goes from 10 to 40, basically, like massive run-up. And this is all on the back of like the services narrative that Luca Maestri, the CFO,

• 14:17John Coogan?

  sort of outlined in, I think, 2016. He said, "Each quarter, we report for our services category, which includes revenue from iTunes, the App Store, Apple Care, iCloud, Apple Pay, licensing and some other items. Today, we would like to highlight the major drivers of growth in this category, which we have summarized on page three of our supplemental materials. The vast majority of the services that we provide to our customers, for instance, apps, movies, TV shows are tied to our install base of devices rather than to current quarter sales." And so he's saying like, "You need to stop thinking about our financial performance as driven by how many phones do we sell this quarter. You need to think about just how many

• 14:57John Coogan?

  users we have broadly and start valuing us more like Google, more like Facebook. Like, you know, if you're an iPhone user, it doesn't really matter if you bought a new one this quarter. Obviously, that's sort of continuing, but the big, the big game is better monetization on top of the user base."

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  We should try to get Justin Khan on to talk about his company Stash, because Stash is effectively payments built for game developers to circumnavigate the App Store. And so they're very well positioned here.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  So Luca Maestri went on to say, for some of these services such as content, we recognize revenue based on transaction value. For some of these services such as App Store, we share a portion of the value of each transaction with the app developer. And we only recognize revenue on the portion that we keep. To fully comprehend the scale of the services that we are delivering to our installed base and how fast this business is growing, we look at purchases in addition to revenue. When we aggregate the purchase value of all the services tied to our install base during fiscal 2015, it adds up to more than 31 billion. That's an increase of 23% over 2014. So he's like, and so Ben Thompson has some funny quotes here. He says, like, first off, it's striking that when Apple was facing one of the most challenging years in the stock market,

• 16:13John Coogan?

  its first response was basically to make the plaintiff's point in Apple versus Pepper. Suddenly, the company wanted to recognize all of the app revenue, a portion of which is shared with developers. Sounds like a company in the middle, sounds like a tax. And then secondly.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Wait, repeat that original line. You said they've grown 34%?

• 16:34John Coogan?

  31 billion. They increased 23% over fiscal 2014 was the historical growth. So basically, what's going on is Luca Maestri is the CFO of Apple, and he's having trouble in the market because it's 2015 and what's happening? Well, you're eight years into the iPhone. 2007, the iPhone comes out. It's expensive. It doesn't have 3G. It's got a lot of rough edges.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't have copy and paste.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  But it's cool and it's interesting and there's lines out the door for them. And people at the higher end, like a cell phone back then was like 100 bucks or you'd get it for free. You'd get it as part of a, you know.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  Cellular bundle.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every two years, you'd get a new phone and it was free, basically. Then the iPhone comes in. It's $600, very expensive, very upmarket. Then a year or two in, they start figuring out how to bring down the price. It comes down to like 300, 400. There's these incentives for signing up for a year-long plan. There's a whole variety of things that make it. You know, the App Store comes out. There's like, there's just more functionality. You don't. You you no longer are like, well, my BlackBerry still does this, but Apple doesn't. It's like, no, they do the enterprise stuff. They they've checked all the boxes. And so it's growing, growing, growing. But eight years in, everyone who has one, like, they won the game.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  And so device, like, actual the device install base, device sales are starting to flatline.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  And so then they need sort of the new, a new narrative for the stock. Because it's getting, sort of getting beat up because Apple's basically winning.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Sold everyone an iPhone.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  But it's over. They like, the trade's over. Right. It's like, yeah, we get it. Everyone has smartphones now. So the, the, the iPhone, iPhone revenue is basically, or or unit sales are slowing significantly. Of course, they're able to raise prices still because people are locked in like, it's a good business. But it's not this like incredibly high growth thing anymore. So Luca Maestri needs to come in with a new narrative, and that's the services narrative. And so the services narrative is is saying, hey, for a long time, you've been looking at this bucket of basically like other revenue. We have device sales, which you've been obsessed with as the investor, as the Wall Street. You've been obsessed with, you know, how many iPhones we're selling, how much we're selling them for, our margins on those iPhones. How how many we can make, all of that.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  And then we've had this other bucket, which is like iTunes, App Store, Apple Care, iCloud, Apple Pay, licensing. There's a bunch of other stuff.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Treating it like the storage feature on the iPhone where it's like, hey, you have like photos.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  And these other things that are taking it and apps.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  And then like, don't worry about other.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't worry about other. Don't worry about other.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  We're just gonna throw everything in there.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Don't worry about other because we don't really know how it's growing. Is it that high margin? We don't know. Then all of a sudden, it became like, don't just not worry about other like, in fact, focus entirely on it. Focus on it exclusively because it is the best revenue that's super high margin. And it's growing really fast. And oh, by the way, if you zoom out and you look at the economic activity that is driving on top of the App Store. And that's, you know, yes, our take rates 30%, but on top of it, just in 2015, it's $31 billion of economic activity in that ecosystem. And so this is, this is like an admission of like the economic power that they have. But.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson was not a fan of it. I mean, he was a fan from the stock price perspective, but he had some really, really harsh words. He said at the time, "It seems incredibly worrisome to me anytime a company predicates its growth story on rent-seeking. It's not that the growth isn't real, but rather the pursuit is corrosive on whatever it was that made the company great in the first place." It's like, whoa. It's sort of like, okay, they're going like private equity mode, like the beautiful art, the creativity is gone at this point.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  And Tim Cook has effectively done exactly that.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, and he says, "That is a particular," again, this is from 2018, "that is a particularly large concern for Apple. The company has always succeeded by being the best. How does the company maintain that edge when its executives are more concerned with harvesting the profits from other companies' innovations?" So going forward, the growth story of Apple has been someone else innovates, someone else creates an app, and we'll take 30%. And we don't need to do the innovation, that doesn't need to happen here. And that's a big shift in the narrative. Whereas before, all through 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, it was like, the innovation comes from Apple.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  They're like, "We're gonna make the iPhone 1700. It's gonna be newer, lighter, better, faster, stronger, and they're gonna buy it, and then we're gonna take our cut from everything on top of it."

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, should we continue?

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can move on. Let me tell you about Apple's newest partner, Gemini, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  Megan, in the Wall Street Journal, has a scoop. OpenAI ended a policy earlier this week that required employees to work at the company for six months before their equity vested.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Wait, they only have a six-month cliff?

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was already short. A few months ago, XAI shortened their waiting period, known as a vesting cliff, from 12 months to six. And then there's been, I don't know if you want to start reading through it at all, but...

• 22:05John Coogan?

  The change to the vesting cliff announced by Applications Chief Fiji Simo, came on our show last week, is designed to encourage new employees to take risks without fear of being let go before accessing the first chunk of equity.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Interesting. So, so they had a problem where people would come in and say, okay, I gotta just do politics for the first six months because I don't want to get fired before. That's like, that's a crazy culture, I feel like.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  I think this has to be more reactionary to Meta.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, some of the other.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  OpenAI shortened its, has shortened its vesting period for new employees to six months from the industry standard of 12 months in April. We have to, we have to ask Adam Spiegel about how he thinks about vesting periods and, and running a public company where your, your employees can, you know, sell the stock that they get. He's the perfect person to ask about this, this exact article. Let's see, Elon Musk's XAI and OpenAI competitor made a similar change in late summer. People familiar with the matter, with the matter said, XAI didn't respond to requests for comment, of course. The decision to loosen or do away with restrictions meant, meant to ensure new hires stick around reflects

• 23:23John Coogan?

  the frenzied competition for top-tier technical talent within AI, within the AI industry. Tech companies typically have a one-year vesting cliff, that's what I'm certainly familiar with, for new employees, preventing them from having to give away stock to hires who leave quickly or don't work out. But with AI companies, including Meta Platforms, Google, Anthropic wooing top researchers with pay packages that can be worth a hundred million dollars or more, researchers and engineers have been able to hold out for the most attractive terms and in many cases have been quick to leave jobs they have found not to their liking. Yeah, I think that this is just like a, sort of a Red Queen's race, just a, if you give a mouse a cookie, sort of situation where.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  Competitive market, employees end up benefiting. I also could see it them trying to kind of rehab their employer brand. You remember there was a bunch of, this was probably six, eight months ago at this point?

• 24:21John Coogan?

  OpenAI.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI had a bunch, there were, there were some articles surrounding. They they had some like really restrictive exit agreements.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  And so a lot of people were pretty frustrated around that.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  I feel like that was over a year ago. That was

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe a year and a half ago, about a year and a half ago. Uh, yeah, that story broke that if you left and did maybe didn't sign a non disparagement agreement or NDA or something.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  If you didn't sign it, they could claw back all your equity. And then they were saying like

• 24:49Speaker 02

  That was important during the whole like Ilya ousting thing.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  A lot of the employees left after that, but then they couldn't talk about it.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I always thought that, uh, like the bull case for that was, well, if you're going to be whistleblowing on something that's like a true AI doom scenario. Well, then money doesn't matter. So you shouldn't matter about them clawing back your equity. But of course, there are more like mundane, uh, reasons why, you know, you might want to talk about your previous competitor or previous and previous.

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  There was another line that some people zoomed in on here. Connorsen over at Bloomberg Opinion says, company expects to spend $6 billion this year on, uh, stock-based comp, almost half of its projected revenue. Um, and and and I saw this post going viral in a few different areas, but a company that creates however many hundreds of billions of dollars in value in a year and then has $6 billion of a non-cash expense. It doesn't seem that crazy, right?

• 25:49John Coogan?

  No, not at all. It seems like like fairly low for, I mean, it's a $500 billion company. So it's 1% of the market cap that's going out, uh, to employees. And also they they have to be in like an incredible talent war. They're growing. There's just so much to do there.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  The the number that that was that was shocking to me was that, uh, you remember last week how, uh, there's the the rumored SpaceX IPO? That is apparently continuing. So SpaceX schedules bank pitches for IPO is in the Wall Street Journal. Um, but, um, The SpaceX IPO, if they raise 30 billion, will be lower than the 40 billion that OpenAI offered.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Raised in a

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  In this private

• 26:32John Coogan?

  In the private markets. And so there's been this big question about like, like, are the private markets tapped? It appears it's the David Goggins thesis in the market.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  The David Goggins thesis for life.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  I mean, if you, if you went back, you know, like, I don't know, five years and you were like, yeah, like, do you think you could raise 40 billion dollars in the private markets? Or would you have to go public for that? They're like, you know, Saudi Aramco level funding, like, yes, you'd have to be public. But turns out you do not have to be public because in fact, 40 billion is available in the private markets if you're OpenAI. Let me tell you about Numeral. Compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth. Let me continue with this. Tech investors have privately complained, they're complaining? What do they have to complain about? We're in a bull market. They privately complained about the ballooning stock-based compensation associated with

• 27:23John Coogan?

  fast-growing AI startups, arguing that it eats into shareholder returns. Companies that are needing to be more competitive are dropping the traditional first-year vesting cliff. Co-founder of Levels.FYI says, in August, after Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched that full-scale raid on OpenAI's staff and offered giant pay packages, OpenAI gave some of its top researchers and engineers a one-time bonus, with some employees receiving millions of dollars, The Journal previously reported. Yeah, I was thinking about that with the, Mark Chen went on Ashley Vance and was like, I was like, I don't, I don't compete with Meta dollar to dollar, like, I won't match their offers.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  He won't go ban for ban.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  He won't go ban for ban, but it, but it doesn't mean that he won't fight back.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  But he'll go cliff for cliff.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  He'll go cliff for cliff for sure. And also, he'll go like one-time bonus during a crazy raid, like, if, if, if the, if the time calls for it. So it's not like he's not participating in the war at all. He is a little bit, but I, I think it's the right, I think it's the right move. Yeah, I, I do think that there's been this, I don't know, is it hedonic treadmill? What is the correct metaphor for, for what's going on with these offers? But it's very clear that like,

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Like, you know, whoever, like, the, the details of the, of the packages are leaking, at least through internal, like, back channels. And so, the next person that gets hired wants something a little sweeter. Like, something a little bit extra, a little cherry on top. And so, you go from, you know, four-year vest, one-year cliff, to three-year, six months, to no cliff, to, you know, add more zeros on the pay package, more guaranteed, more upfront. But, at the same time, there is something to, I mean, the reason I would argue in favor of no vesting cliffs here is that it does feel like the value that you can get from a new engineer joining, from a, from a competitor at least, is on day one.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Like, day one, okay, you were, you just left Anthropic.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna plug your brain, we're gonna plug your brain.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  You just left OpenAI, you just left Meta. What's going on there? Just take us through it, right? Like, that's going to be the day-one orientation. Uh, and so, are they adding value on day one? Like, basically, right? I would imagine. So, uh, to be capturing a little bit of that value, that seems like a win for the AI researcher. At the same time, it is just another sign of the, of the froth in the, in the AI market.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Finn Barr says, "Okay, but seriously, why is everyone leaving Meta? People are speculating in the comments." Jane says, "Vest." Finn says, "But if you stay longer, you vest more." True. Uh, someone else says, "No direction for the company. Several major unannounced RL project canceled. The hundred-million-boys reportedly do zero work because they know that if Zuck fires them, he'll look foolish." I don't know. I think, I think some of these hundred-million-dollar, uh, men and, and women, just, that do, they are about that life. They do want to pursue greatness. They do want to do the biggest run. Uh, so, who, who knows? I, I'm sure there's some instances of that.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, Andrew says, "Behind state-of-the-art on their models." Of course, that's why Zuck, uh... You know, overpaid for talent is to try to catch up.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no PMF on their consumer AI products, even though they forced everyone on Instagram to see it. Uh, I think we gotta wait a little bit for the Christmas season to come and go and see how, see how these things are selling.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, they don't even use Llama models internally to code. I mean, that makes, that makes sense.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  It is a tough position to be in because they don't have a, like a, like a public cloud. They don't have a cloud service, even though they are a hyperscaler. So like with, with, with, uh, with, uh, with Google, like even if they, even if Google gets completely smoked by OpenAI and ChatGPT and ChatGPT winds up being like truly like the, the, you know, the, the Facebook of, of chat apps. And it's like 99% people use, it captures 99% of like the consumer AI value. It's like, well, like having a Gemini API is still extremely valuable because like you have cloud services. It, it would, it would be odd for Meta to wind up like trying to build a cloud, a public cloud service like around the Llama models. Like, I mean, even if they went, even if they went closed.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Zuck did say at one point though, that they would be open to reselling capacity.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, but then you're going up against Anthropic directly. It, it feels, feels very, very tricky. I don't know. Um, anyway, let me tell you about cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer Devon. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Uh, what else is going on? Uh, VCs funded OpenAI and in return, OpenAI automated them. This is, uh, GPT 5.2 thinking is able to construct a cap table accurately in spreadsheets. This is what Fiji Simo was talking to us about, about, uh, emerging capabilities. Seems like they might have RL'd on some spreadsheets. That's pretty cool. Truly, everyone is going after spreadsheets at this point. There's a, everyone from our sponsor Ramp

• 32:39John Coogan?

  to Microsoft, to the, to a number of startups that have been on this show, talking about Excel agents, Excel plugins, Google Docs plugins.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm so interested to see how that market actually shapes out. Because there's so many AI for Excel plays, some full stacks, some, some plugins.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's like, it's not that Harvey was pitched as like a Word plugin, like even though lawyers do a lot of work in Word, that was not the, that was not the instantiation of that product. It was, it was much more just like, you know, full, full-service product. It was interesting. Anyway, there's a clip of Sergey making a joke about automating away VC. Should we play this video?

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Do you have the ability to pull this up? Let's do it. What does he, what does he say?

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  No audio on our side yet, folks.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Can you look? Well, in the meantime, let me tell you about, oh, here we go.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Can do that human majority of jobs in, that we know today, like more than 50%, might be replaced by machines that can do that human judgment piece better.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Well, we've been working on the venture investment machine learning.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  It's kind of true, actually.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  As long as I can buy one, I'm good.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  You think you'll do it?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  That is kind of what Google Ventures does, no? They started that way. I don't know if they're actually doing that. Like, I don't know, they keep hiring partners for whatever reason, so.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  This is actually hilarious. Where was this?

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Extremely candid.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  This is very funny.

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  What is up with this CIA lost a nuclear device in the Himalayas? Did you read this article? Apparently this is not new.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  It's not a new story, but there's some new reporting in here.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  Okay, what happened? How do you lose a nuclear device in the Himalayas?

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  I want to go through this. My only concern is that it's going to potentially take like an hour to read through.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Let's do it another day then.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can do it. Let's do it tomorrow.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Let's summarize and put a link to it in our newsletter where you can get tech analysis and news, get our daily op-ed, top headlines and more. Sign up at tbpm.com. There was going to... Oh yeah, you want to go to someplace? Take us wherever.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  I was going to take us to Brett Adcock.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  He had a party over the weekend with Dead Mouse.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  And let's play this video. So I... He posted earlier today that that figure is looking quite cheap now in comparison to SpaceX, right? Because there's a new biggest line on the private markets chart.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Is he drinking on here? What is he drinking?

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  I think he's having a... I think he's cracking open some cold ones.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  So my theory is that they have done billions of dollars in sales.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  And this is kind of their way of signaling.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Signaling.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  If you know, you know. Because of course it would be absolutely insane to have a party like this.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  If you still hadn't shipped a product, if you still were kind of a sort of a... I don't know if they're pre-revenue, but certainly being valued on vibes.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  So there's no way they would throw a party like this.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Because SpaceX has 30 billion in revenue, right?

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  So and it's going out at 1.5 trillion. So it's at like 50x revenue. So to be cheap... He probably trading at like what 20x revenue, something like that?

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  That was my, that was my theory at least, right? So they're at around 40, that's their

• 36:30John Coogan?

  40 billion?

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  They're at around 40 billion.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  So yeah, they could be doing like two or two to four billion in revenue potentially. If, if it's cheap on a, on a dollar per revenue basis.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  I think this is, this is very much a

• 36:39John Coogan?

  On a price to sales ratio.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  A wink wink moment because seriously, um, you know, no, no, I don't think any CEO would throw this crazy of a party if you weren't, uh, if you weren't really, really printing. So expect an announcement soon.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  I would, I would.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Expect an announcement soon on, uh, on the revenue side over a figure.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Anyway, that's wild. Astro compute, Pranav, are we getting him on the show? Have we tapped?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's coming on tomorrow.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Okay, fantastic. So we, we, Pranav, uh, has, has done the math. He sat down and did the math on the data centers in space. He said, said everyone and their mother has something to say about space compute, but no one has comprehensively broken down the physics, energy, cooling, economics, and the real work involved. So I built a first principles model to show you guys myself. Tyler, what was his conclusion?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, so I mean, you can go through it. You can like, like change all the different parameters and stuff. And then you can run the simulation and then kind of see where it lands. I, I think the, the conclusion was that like, there are a lot of scenarios where it does make sense. Like we, we like today, uh, right now, if we use current technology, probably not. But if you kind of, um, you know, uh, use the trend line where things are going, I think it's like pretty reasonable to say that like, there's a scenario where it does work.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  What are you laughing at?

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Fiber, fiberglass is clearly an OG. He says, that was some OG dry humor rage baiting, like from day one TVPS.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  We certainly, a year ago, a year ago, that was certainly like 50% of the show's content.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  Fiverr, it's, it's great, it's great to have you here. Thank you for, for being a day one.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  Uh, Andrew McCallum, who's building spacecraft over at Varda Space.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  He's gonna put data centers on a boat, potentially. He has a boat project that's very fun. He says, "Data centers in space, it might not be economically rational, but it might be physically possible." Oh, is he breaking rank from his, from the co-founder of his company, Varda, Delian? He says, "I'm trying to bring some quantitative structure to a conversation that's been mostly big number vibes." So we have sort of dueling, dueling math equations at this point.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  What is he, uh, this is vibe coded from public, from, so maybe we need to have a debate. Maybe we need to have them both on. But he says, "TLDR, the analysis is actually far more favorable than I thought. It's a close thing. I desperately want a Cartershev level civilization, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us." Interesting. So, so he, so, I mean, Delian's been saying like, "It's impossible. It is not gonna happen anytime soon. It's not gonna, it's not gonna, not gonna be a thing." But Andrew McAlp says, "There just might be a chance." Who else is talking about

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  This post from Goth. Goth says, "My dealer, I got some straight gas. This train called Space Data Centers. You are gonna effing fry. LOL. Me, yeah, whatever. 20 minutes later. Dude, WTF? We just need to radiate the heat and then we can totally bypass terrestrial regulations, my friend. Pacing. I should buy magnet stocks to get ahead of all the railguns."

• 39:58John Coogan?

  What is?

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  They're smoking space data centers, John.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  This is, yeah, all over the place. Theo was happy about the Epic thing. Props to Epic for seeing it through to the end. This is an incredible win for developers. Quoting.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  EZ in the chat says, "Data centers in a volcano." That, nobody's, nobody's talking about

• 40:23John Coogan?

  That does seem like free energy.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Isn't that just like geothermal? I feel like that's like-

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  I know, but that, that doesn't spack.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  That doesn't spack. Yeah, that's terrible vibes.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Data center in a volcano spacks immediately.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  For sure. Well, let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. Anthropic has ordered $21 billion worth of TPUs to train Large Claude. Is that really what they're calling it? Text is from yesterday's Broadcom's earnings call. The scale at which we see this happening could be significant. As you are aware, last quarter, Q3, we received a $10 billion order to sell the latest TPU Ironwood racks to Anthropic. This was our fourth custom that we mentioned. In this quarter, we received an additional $11 billion order from this same customer for delivery in late 2026, but that does not mean our other two.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  Kaiju fights are the best kind of fights. From October, this is from Andrew Curran. He says Anthropic is in discussions with Alphabet's Google about a deal that would provide the artificial intelligence company with additional competing power valued in the high tens of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The plan, which has not been finalized, involves Google providing cloud competing services to Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named Google's previous investor and cloud provider for Anthropic. Large Claude was just me having fun with words and is not anything official. I also considered Fat Claude. I'm saving Colossal Claude and Gargantuan Claude for 2027.

• 41:58Jordi Hays?

  Giga Claude.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Vast Claude.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Fermi, Fermi, which is the energy company that went public at a $20 billion valuation, they talked about getting their kind of facilities online, I think in the 2030s, and people were a little bit bearish about that. They've traded down almost 75% since their IPO. So it seems like, yeah, we've basically seen this kind of rolling correction across every single AI pure play.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  You could even say that-

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  But nobody's done volcano data centers.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  No one has done those.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Where are you gonna, the chat's asking, where do you put the heat? Just shoot it up into the air. That's-

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Volcano data centers is funny because immediately you're like, but don't you want the chips to be cold? You want the, you need cooling, not heating.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the heat dissipates with the lava.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  It would be great to just hard light, but the heat's free. Heat's free. Data centers are hot, and in this one, we're getting the heat for free. Now, what happens after a correction?

• 43:06John Coogan?

  You're corrected. I, I, I think we're corrected. I think it's possible that the market is cracked. It's perfectly valued.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  I saw somebody saying that the BG2 interview with Sam made, they, they were claiming like it's very possibly helped us avoid a 2000, 2001 style scenario.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  It could, yeah, things could have gotten a lot crazier.

• 43:28Jordi Hays?

  So maybe that was Brad's play the whole time. He was like, hey, we just need a little reset.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  He's a hero. He's a hero.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna look like, I'm gonna look like, I might, you know, I'm gonna look like maybe a bad guy for two weeks, but now, now he looks like a hero.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  I mean, I, even, even in the moment, he didn't look like a bad guy.

• 43:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no. He asked the question, if he didn't ask that question,

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  he would have been, it would have, it would have, there would have been, I think, some rightful criticism.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Everyone, everyone was wondering.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  It was an important question to ask.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what, uh, I really, I really like Young Macro. This guy's a great poster. Uh, Nick Land proclaims, may coldness be my god. What normies think he means? You know, techno accelerationism, techno capitalism. Uh, I like that the circular AI deals made it in here as well. Just the stock chart.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Just balanced their logo.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  What he really means? He means Christmas. He means Coca-Cola. He means a nice wintry retreat. Yes, exactly. Play some music. This is, this is what may coldness be my god means. It means cozy up by the fire and get festive. I love it.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this reporting on Jim Carrey in Grinch?

• 44:38John Coogan?

  No.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  Jim Carrey offered to return his $20 million Grinch salary and was going to quit the movie amid panic attacks over the makeup.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Then a guy who trained the military on enduring torture was hired to help him.

• 44:50John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Richard Marcinco was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special ops people how to endure torture. Carrey told Vulture. He gave me a litany of things that I could go, that I could do when I began to spiral, like punch myself in the leg as hard as I can. Have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm. Eat everything in sight. Changing patterns in the room.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  What?

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  If there's a TV on when you start to spiral, turn it off and turn the radio on. Smoke cigarettes as much as possible. There are pictures of me as the Grinch, sitting in a director's chair with a long cigarette holder. I had to have the holder because the yak hair would catch on fire if I got too close. Later on, I found out that gentleman had trained me to endure the Grinch, also founded.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  He founded SEAL Team Six.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  So the only, my only kind of question here is, I feel like all these things, if you're being tortured, they wouldn't exactly be like, oh, let him turn the TV off and on again. Let him turn the radio on.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that is interesting.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  So I think, I think these are probably great things to do if you're not getting tortured and you're just developing anxiety attack.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did resonate with this because when we had the, the Halloween makeup on.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, to be fair, it could be, it could be like, like metaphorically being tortured, like in a foxhole as a member of SEAL Team Six, like if you have like, you know, oh, you're, you're, you're staking out someplace and you're in a muddy pit.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  You're pinned down.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  And it's a hole and you're not actually being directly tortured by like an enemy, but you have to deal with a really hard situation. And so you sit there chain smoking and I don't know why you have a TV in this scenario. Again, I didn't land, I didn't land on that one, but.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this just resonated because when we had, when we were three hours into our Halloween episode and I started to realize.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Didn't resonate for me.

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I am fully, it, it felt like very suffocating having, you know.

• 46:35John Coogan?

  I was fine with it.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  Two centimeters surrounding everywhere and.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was a very weird feeling.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I think, I mean, he was doing like nine hours a day of makeup.

• 46:44Jordi Hays?

  Can we get the, can we get the, can we get the Giga chat built around Tyler?

• 46:47John Coogan?

  That makes us look like, you know, wimps compared to him. We were only doing three hours of makeup. Uh, nine hours is really, really heroic. Wow. Well, totally worth it. If you aren't watching The Grinch this Christmas, go watch something that's being restreamed. Restream, one livestream, thirty plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Merry Christmas.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Will Brown says ChatGPT is the only consumer app with regular pop-ups asking if I want to downgrade my subscription.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  This was hilarious. Three thousand likes. I mean, it's testament to the

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  They're running this as an A B test. They're like, we tell people they can pay less and they don't. They enjoy giving us money.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Hey, maybe, maybe, maybe the pro plan results in more permanent churn. And so this is actually LTV, a downgrade is actually LTV positive. No way to prove that that's true, but it'd be very funny if that was the case. No, the polish around the product is potentially like the way you win consumer. I really think we're in the era of like, of productization more than the latest model.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  The product, the product managers are the heroes now. I want to see a product manager getting a four-year, one billion dollar package.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not completely over for the AI researchers. Like, the models are important. They do get better. And, and there's functionality under the hood that's, that's research-driven, that's valuable, but, uh, you know, if you, if you believe in the Ilya, we're in the age of research, then what is the AI researcher doing? Like, they are doing experiments that for, that you have no idea the timeline. Like, you're not just doing engineering. You can't just put one foot in front of the other and get easy wins. It's actually going and doing science and discovering new, new ideas, new ways to create new capabilities. And so, um, in the age of research, the researchers should be off doing research.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  And the user experience designers are the heroes, basically. I mean, the product managers are, are going to be more important as the, uh, as the apps fight for market share. What do you think, Tyler? You agree with that?

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. It's fun to think about like Elon and Ilya are like perfectly counter positioned, right? Like Elon is like, we don't have any researchers, they're all engineers.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  They're gonna make small improvements. And then you see like what is Grok? Like Grok is like,

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  It's largely undifferentiated from all the other LMS. They don't have like a, like Anthropic has code.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  OpenAI has like actual consumer. Grok is like still kind of undetermined.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  I would, yeah, I wouldn't say that they're counter positioned. They're actually, they're actually agree. They're like, they're, they're, they're consistent. I think they are opposites, but they, they both embrace the fundamental, a fundamental reality about the world, which is that, like, you should either be doing pure research or pure, pure engineering and it's, and it's sort of hard to mix the two. Or, or just that like, research won't immediately have, won't translate to faster times on the racetrack, which is like what's happening right now in the, in the race.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean Elon is like very AGI pilled, right? But he still doesn't think about like doing, pursuing AGI as like a research thing. It's an engineering problem.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, okay. Yeah, maybe they are a little bit more different than I, than I considered. I don't know. I mean, how, how do you interpret the fact that the, the RAGI scores are going through the roof? And yet qualitatively, like people are not shocked by the interaction of talking to 5.2 or the latest Claude 4.5 or even

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's just like, it's just about like the spikiness thing. Or like,

• 50:25John Coogan?

  They just created a new spike.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  I mean, the spike just got longer, right? It's like the, the coding ability of the model I'm sure is much better.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  But the actual like ability to write prose is not that much better because it's just like not what they're pursuing.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  But it is bullish. Like, this has been my take for a while where like, if they can, even if it's just benchmarking on RAGI.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  If you can create a spike in any direction, you can solve sort of any economic problem.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, then the real problem

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Just create every possible spike and eventually it no longer looks like spiky intelligence. It looks like smooth.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the engineering task is to, is to find the RL environment that makes the model better at writing, which is like what they're doing. Like you see all these RL environment startups that basically just make these things that models, that labs train on.

• 51:07John Coogan?

  That specifically do things.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Suspended Cap says OpenAI could probably save 25% on their compute if they just taught the model to give me the answer and then shut the F up a bit. This one resonated.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started, Figma.com, of course.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jason Freed has a note here. He says, one of the best upgrades to ChatGPT is simply changing the base style and tone to efficient and giving it a simple get right to the point, be practical above all instruction. No more praise, no more flourishes, just the answers.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  Everyone appreciates Tyler Jolly maxing. He really is in the Christmas spirit. It's fantastic.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Hey, are you a miner? No, I'm here to sell shovels. Everyone's shov- everyone's selling shovels. Twenty thousand likes on this, just for different shovels. Uh, some people are mining. Some people are mining. Some people are in the trenches, but uh,

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  It is, it is just a few people that are, that are not selling.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Big change from a year ago when everyone was just talking about how rappers were, were cooked and people were talking somewhat negatively about rappers.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Are, are rappers selling shovels during? No.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  No, they're, they're mining.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  It's mining. It's actually mining in like a very small side mine, not the main mine, but like a smaller side mine, I guess. What do you think?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  I wouldn't think of, of mining as being like, um, if you are, are actually like using the models to do like a roll up or something. Um, I think that's more, much more money.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  In the AI, in the AI shovels mining analogy, the mining, I, I feel like it's like, it's Elon and it's Sam and Demis that are doing the mining, right? They're doing the core thing and then everyone else is like, is like, I'm, I'm drafting off of them. I'm supporting them with shovels. Like there, there is a gold mine that's being mined and, and if I'm just like riding the coattails of that, then I'm coming along.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  I think the, of, of the gold as being the output, um, that you can get with the models, when you use the models. The models are the shovels.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  The models are the shovels?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So then, so then.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  That is, that is actually funny.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Like if you're, if you're doing a roll up of, of, um, some, you know,

• 53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  whatever companies and you're using AI to just,

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  you're not like, it's on AI company, but you're using AI a lot to.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Typically, typically the way, typically the way the whole shovels analogy is levied at startups is, oh, you don't have it in you to create a great mobile app. So you're going to build a developer tool that helps people ship mobile apps. That was the original, like, the Shovel's critique. And it's the same thing with AI is the idea of like, like, why don't you solve a cool problem with AI? Actually create some sort of like, you know, system that solves a particular problem versus saying like, we're a platform for running AI agents on top of it. Like, we don't know what the agents will do, but we know that they need, you know, a database or something like that.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  That, that critique has never been, it's never hit that hard with me because like, they're, they're both valuable. We need all of that.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that being said, though, YC, I think it was the spring YC batch, there was a lot of people selling shovels.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  It felt shovel.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  And not a lot of like, very specific.

• 54:28John Coogan?

  100%.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm creating a full stack solution for end customers, or is I'm creating AI agents to help you manage your AI agent infrastructure company?

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  And it was like, well, what about, I think we need more actual end state agent companies that are selling to everyday consumers.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Everyone talks about selling shovels during a gold rush. No one talks about selling just the wood shaft that goes into the shovel. I don't even sell the shovel. I'm a particular slice of the supply chain in the shovel, in the shovel supply chain. I'm so deep in the shovel supply chain, I sell the screwdriver that makes the screws that go, that assemble the shovel. That's my business. I'm seven layers of abstraction away from the gold.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  I sell the shovel making machine.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Yes, the shovel making machine. That's where you want to be.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of wrappers, I wonder, I wonder if anybody's building a wrapper company to help people wrap presents. I'm assuming that all the different LLMs can do this pretty well. You take a picture of an item, they, they can, you know.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Could they do that? That's sort of like your, your Rubik's Cube benchmark. Because it requires shape rotation, which the models have been notoriously bad at.

• 55:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  I wonder, can they actually give you instructions on arbitrary sized present, the best way to wrap the present?

• 55:44Speaker 05

  That would be an excellent demo.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  We did a Snap demo today. I was wearing the specs for how to have Evan on.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  And I asked my specs, I said, can you count the presents under the Christmas tree? And it nailed it.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  Yes, fantastic.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  These are the important problems. I think it's about time.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  Yes, let's bring in Evan from Snapchat. Welcome to the stream. We're going to walk him in. Let me tell you about Fall, a general media platform for developers, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Having great fun.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  No way.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Go for the tree.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Please have a seat there.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  And suit it up. Suit it up. Look at this.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  My wife told me to wear a suit. She was like, it's part of the...

• 56:30John Coogan?

  It is, it is. You know, we put on these suits sort of as a joke. It was sort of a, I mean, you're one of the, you're one of the many tech people who maybe popularized the T-shirt. And I wore the T-shirt for my entire career in technology. And we were like, we want to stand out. Everyone else in tech podcasting wears the T-shirt. Everyone wears the T-shirt, whether you're CEO of a public company or a podcaster, you wear a T-shirt. We're like, how do we stand out? Let's do the opposite. Let's wear the suit.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  It's like instant credibility too.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, the funny, so the funny thing, when, when some of our videos end up going viral in parts of the internet that, that aren't kind of familiar with what we're doing, there'll be comments of people like, look at these guys in suits. They don't know, why, how are they talking about software? They don't know anything about tech. It's like not getting the bit.

• 57:15John Coogan?

  It's very funny.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, super, super excited to have you on today. There's so much, so much to talk about. And I don't even necessarily know where we should start.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  I mean, I'd love to start with the demo that we got just an hour or two ago, Spax. How are you thinking about hardware these days? What's the state of the organization? How much of your time are you spending on it? Because you have a monster business to manage. You have earnings calls. There's so much going on. How do you, how are you splitting your time? What does that team look like? What are your ambitions for hardware these days?

• 57:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it's a really exciting moment for Snap because in 2026, we're releasing the first consumer version

• 57:52John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 57:53Speaker 05

  of our glasses. Obviously back, you know, maybe now more than 10 years ago, we released camera glasses. You know, we kind of stepped our way into building out.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  What was the actual... First release of that, public release?

• 58:04Speaker 05

  I said probably 2016 broadly to the public.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Spectacles.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  Weren't they yellow?

• 58:10Speaker 05

  Uh, the original, they had a little yellow accent.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yellow, yellow.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  To flag the camera.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  Because back in the day, people were, you know, and I think this is still a concern. People were very, you know, worried about privacy.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  So big, you know, yellow ring around the camera and a light to let people know.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  There were a bunch of really cool, uh, like little touches, like I, I remember the ability to, to film. It was basically a square sensor, so you could film horizontal or vertical. And, and just those little touches. I'm wondering like, do you think those like small little wins are what help us break through to, you know, a world where everyone's daily driving some sort of augmented reality device? Is it a game of, of inches on the product feature side? Or is it just like more deeper in the supply chain? Once they're 50 bucks, everyone's going to be doing it. What do you, what, what's critical path to getting to bone level prevalence in face wearables?

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I think there are going to have to be major breakthroughs in terms of the utility people get out of the, the product. I, I think the biggest challenge, and we learned this very early on with camera glasses. It's just not that much better than taking a photo with your phone.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:17Speaker 05

  Maybe you're rock climbing, you're on a jet ski.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  You want to, you know, make a video.

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 05

  Hands free. I, I think that's a totally reasonable use case.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 05

  But that's not an everyday, all the time use case. And so a lot of what we did, taking those early learnings, we sort of proved out people were willing to wear a camera. They were willing to wear, you know, glasses that had a computer inside. But then we just shifted our focus entirely to the platform and to driving more utility. So I, I think, you know, the, the latest version we put out in 2024 that you got to try for developers, which is very focused on all those platform components.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  So the developers could build all sorts of amazing. Now developers have built hundreds of these lenses. You probably got to try a couple of them.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 05

  Um, and so I think it's really about driving utility.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, uh, it's, it's, it's always frustrating when you're in a, you know, a technology. You're in like a technological platform shift. And I've seen this with, with, uh, with virtual reality where. It's like so amazing and then the demo is like, well, it's really good on a plane. And you're like, I'm just not on the plane that much. It's sort of the same thing where like if the demo is

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  It's really good if you're watching a movie alone.

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's like, well, actually, I want to watch a movie with people. And so the theater does work or the TV works. I'm wondering about how much AI is an accelerant in delivering value in the wearables context? Because I imagine it's useful for developers to, you know, write software faster now. But also, are you, are you, do you think that that's going to be like a relevant precursor to, you know, mass adoption is the AI

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'll give you an example. So like the live translation functionality and, and what's very cool about specs is like having, having the, the basically the, the heads up display like centered. So I can be talking to you and be getting like live translation, which to me is like the kind of thing that feels very sci fi and to be able to get it in a demo today. That feels like the kind of thing that AI is, is a, is a real accelerant for. And you can imagine being in a situation where you actually have multiple effectively like subtitling happening all the time. But maybe on that note, I guess, uh, from, from my understanding, you guys are not saying we're going to build the hardware platform and we're going to build a foundation model lab.

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  And maybe if you could talk more about that, because I think that's obviously quite a bit different than some other hardware players.

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so far we just haven't seen a need to, to build foundational models outside of this sort of image and video and 3D areas where we think we can really differentiate and where there aren't as, you know, as compelling open source solutions. So, uh, and we also are very focused on being able to offer experiences to our entire community. So nearly a billion people around the world. If you do that with backend inference, it's just too expensive to be able to offer it. So a lot of our innovation, starting several years ago, was to be able to run models on device or with a hybrid solution where we can do some on the backend, some on the device.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  Uh, and so that's really where our foundational work has happened. I think, you know, as you look at the glasses, Near term, I wouldn't expect AI to be a major accelerant because again, I don't think it's meaningfully better than your phone.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  Right, and I think that's really the the bar that we have to clear. These experiences have to be ten times better than what's possible on your phone.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  And I do think over the long term, though, AI will be very, very meaningful.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 05

  And less because of the, you know, sort of chatbot style use cases today, but more in terms of the way that like we change how we use computers. So if you think about today, we're spending, what, on average, seven hours a day in front of screens.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  We're spending a huge amount of time operating computers to get work done. So like physically getting the work done ourselves. And I think what AI enables is a change in the way we relate to computers, where we're going to spend less time operating computers and more time supervising AI. And in that transition, the glass's form factor, I think, is going to be really compelling because it it essentially gets you away from this operational paradigm into the supervisory.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or another, I mean, potentially more near term example is like you're working on your car and you have this like AI assistant running permanently and so you have full ability to use your hands and make changes and it's kind of reasoning on the fly with you in a way that, you know, everyone's experienced like, you know, watching a YouTube video and like pausing it and trying to do something and then, you know, playing it again. And and I feel like I feel like there are some very near term.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  How is that shift like manifesting itself in your daily life as a CEO? Like, I've found that since the dawn of ChatGPT, there's been this like urge for folks to like send ChatGPT written stuff to me. And I've always said like, just send me the prompt and I can kind of rework it in my brain. Like, just send me the bullet points. I don't need to turn it into a paragraph. But I'm wondering if if you can give me some color on how you're seeing like AI change your your workflow or the folks that you work with on a daily basis.

• 1:04:05Speaker 05

  I think it's a really great thought partner. Like, I love to test ideas or try ideas or like I love to run simulated focus groups with AI, which is really fun. Like, what do you think different types of people will say or respond to, you know, in terms of like a product or idea that we're working on? So. I love it as a, you know, of course, for all the visual and, you know, the visual stuff, video generation, I can test out ideas really, really quickly. I haven't actually found it yet to be particularly creative, but as a creative thought partner, it's fantastic.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. How do you think about the instantiation of AI features within the core Snap product? It feels like there's an immense amount of energy all over AI with like, super intelligent, it's gonna do everything, it's gonna make the full video, it's gonna make the video and the audio. And then, when I see, it's like, yeah, you get like, one or two viral videos out of one of those generators. But the much cooler thing is, I think, when there's AI riding alongside the rest of the creative suite. How are you thinking about setting up creators for unique experiences that are like, AI-enabled, but there's still a lot of that creativity that's coming from them?

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think AI has been a core of the Snapchat experience for such a long time, but we've never described it as that.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, slam. Like, the original, like, actual, like, location mapping, the AR stuff.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  And even all the transformations that are happening in our camera, right? A lot of the real-time on-device, you know, generative transformations and these sorts of things. People just laugh and have fun with their friends doing it. They're not thinking like, oh, this is some, you know, AI-enabled.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, face tracking has been in there for so long, and that's always been AI, I'm sure.

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think there is a lot of opportunity to, you know, rethink the way that people build lenses. So that's been really, really powerful. You know, in the past, you know, developer, it would take a really, really long time, you had to build the 3D assets yourself. I think there's a huge democratization that's happening right now, because anyone, you know, we have a tool called Easy Lens, you can, with a prompt, build all sorts of amazing experiences in AR.

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the, like, the economic flywheel there? How do you think about allowing folks to monetize that, build businesses, like, come, like, what is your current mental model for the, for the economy that's occurring on the platform?

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  Well, one of the things we've thought a lot about is that there are a ton of models that are being created, but very few people actually have customers. We have a ton of customers, and so what we've done is created a service called Lens Plus. So if you're a developer, you can publish your lens to Lens Plus. That means it's behind our paywall. People get free generations, they can use some lenses for free for a certain amount of time, and then they convert to paying customers, and we revenue share with those developers. So I think, interestingly, Snapchat's become a bit of a front door, right, for folks who want to deploy their models, or deploy a specific lens, or, you know, sometimes people are even building more advanced game experiences instead of Snapchat, and with Lens Plus, they get all that monetization for free, essentially. We do that for them.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, how do you process, like, the whole, like, the metaverse boom and bust, and maybe it's going to boom again? Just this idea of, like, just adding more and more functionality until you're effectively in, like, a game world, unlimited content? Do you think that, like, is that, is the primary driver of giving people the ability to make games just better AI tools? Are there other things that you are actually thinking about integrating there? Or do you think that, like, just partnering with all the models will eventually give people the ability to build whole game experiences?

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  Well, it's interesting. The reason why we love games, actually, the same reasons why we hate VR, right? Which is, games actually bring people together in really interesting ways, and we see that on Snapchat all the time, right? It can be a conversation starter, or a way for, you know, a way for two friends, you know, I play putt-putt with my wife on Snapchat, right? And we just send them back and forth, it's fun, right? It's a way to connect. And so I think for us, games on Snapchat are really about, you know, that, like, spark of connection between people. We've invested zero dollars into VR, right? Because we essentially think that it takes people out of the real world, and away from the places, the people, you know, everything that they love. And so our view is that VR has a very, very limited and low-use future, because people love the real world. And so our bet, you know, for the last 11 years, has been exclusively on augmented

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  reality, on, you know, in trying to enhance the human experience rather than replace it with VR.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there any, is there anywhere where... Where you think VR does make sense, like are there specific like B to B use cases or like some sort of like, I don't know, like maybe enterprise is where all this stuff like goes to die, but I'm wondering if there's any, if there's any

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  But I guess the question is like, I think people assume that VR eventually will be good enough that a huge swath of the planet will be engaging in it a lot, like at least that, at least like that, my, my personal theory and maybe you believe differently. It sounds like you're even okay with a scenario where even if it does work, you're like, other people can kind of play in that and we're happy to kind of exist in this hybrid world.

• 1:09:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, just philosophically, like that's not a world that we want to support in any way, shape or form, you know, I think what's really important is actually trying to create products that foster that human connection, right, and in doing so in person. I think we're in a moment where people are really valuing that, right, and they want more of that and they're thinking about how to get, get more. And I think AR is coming about at, at a really important time when people are saying, actually, I'm spending a lot of time in front of a screen. I'd like to spend more time together with my friends. I'd love to do that in a way that's more fun or entertaining. Our kids, even, you know, our kids are, at least three of them are still pretty little, but like when I see them playing around with those specs, even though they're clunky and heavy or whatever, they're outside, running around, playing together. And you're like, that's a different vision for computing.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you mean, you should, you should have seen us doing the demo this morning. I was running laughing drawing. I was playing this, this drawing game that you guys have where I was drawing and, and the ability to have this like shared space and have like permanence in the kind of, in the, in the different like visuals that you're creating on, on a scene was, is just really cool.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Do you think AR specifically means pass through? Or can, or if I'm doing reprojection, I have cameras on the outside of a VR headset and I'm reprojecting that and it's indistinguishable for the user, does that count in your mind? Is it a meaningful distinction?

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Uh, in, in our mind, it doesn't count. So you're describing pass through on, on VR where, you know, you, the cameras in very high fidelity.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  There was this quote from Palmer Luckey where he was saying like, why would you ever, you know, try and like recycle photons? Just create new photons, take a video of the outside world, re-project it inside. And the benefit of that is that if you're in a very bright World or you're in a bright space, you can dim that and put something brighter on top of it. And there's certain, like the additive nature of physics around light make it so that there, it does seem like there's limitations to pass through augmented reality, even though the latency is zero and it's the real world and there is something that's better. I just know that you might be grappling with it.

• 1:11:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've definitely seen some real challenges there. So the big difference obviously is between pass through and then see through, see through glasses that we're working on.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 05

  You know, I think Snapchat's actually a really good example of pass through. So it's a screen.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  And we do have, I think, the best pass through AR technology in the world, right? So we are able to real time render out those experiences.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  Through the phone. I think the question is, do people really want to wear a screen on their face in front of their eyes? And then, you know, if you think about the compute that's necessary to re-project the world, right, and the power required to, you know, power all of those pixels, right?

• 1:11:46Jordi Hays?

  And it has to be like real time.

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  And it's got to be real time.

• 1:11:49Jordi Hays?

  You can't have like a half second of lag, otherwise you're just stumbling around.

• 1:11:52Speaker 05

  Exactly. So when you put that all together, you're just stuck in headset lens. And I think it's just very clear that like, people don't want to wear giant headsets all day long. I think that's, that's.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. In terms of stuff that they do want to wear, obviously, like, everyone wants something light, but in a world where field of view is somewhat restricted in the short term, I'm sure it'll get better, wider and wider, what's the trade off between center of field, center of, center view versus like Call of Duty mini map, like locked in the corner?

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  Well, I think what's really important is that you're actually able to control where objects are showing up in the world around you. So the big problem with the sort of heads up display style products, I mean, I don't love that if you're looking at the screen, you're looking at somebody's crotch, too.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  It's sort of weird.

• 1:12:36Speaker 05

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  You know, but, but the exciting thing about specs and it sounds like you saw earlier today is you can decide where, where to place things in the world where you want to draw. And I think that, that's a very big difference from these heads up display products.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  That makes sense. How do you think about, like, When the iPhone came out, there was sort of, I mean, it was a little bit expensive. We were talking about the 700 bucks. You could compare it to the price of a phone. You could compare it to the price of an iPod. You could, Steve Jobs called it internet communicator, right? So you could kind of bundle these few different products together. And you're like, well, I'm getting $700 worth of value, or later $400 worth of value. Do you think that there's an important sort of anchoring point for augmented reality glasses where consumers need to underrate it against an external monitor for their computer or a TV at home?

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Is there some sort of like economic trade-off point where, hey, I'm going to college and instead of getting a 42-inch TV and an external, you know, Apple display for my MacBook that I'm going to plug in, I'm just going to go with augmented reality glasses because it just makes more sense economically? Is that an important point?

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  I think that's one way to think about it, for sure. And, you know, the iPhone, when you add in the carrier subscription, was way more than that. So I think, you know, they were able to sort of have a $700 sticker price, but then, you know, I think some of the initial plans were like $50 a month and that kind of thing. Two or three years, I'm not sure. You know, that was a really meaningful outlay for that product. To me, I think, you know, the iPhone is maybe not the best reference point here. I think this feels to me a lot more like the Macintosh or like early computers. With the smartphone, you know, Steve essentially said, hey, everyone else is doing the phone wrong, right? You had a BlackBerry already, or you had a flip phone, or this kind of thing. And Steve was like, hey, y'all are doing it wrong. This is like what a phone should look like.

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  And I think glasses are a little bit different because, you know, we have some similarities in the sense that like on one hand you have these VR headsets, right, that are very capable but that are essentially unwearable. And then you have the, you know, really lightweight glasses that are very wearable but do nothing. And our vision with specs is to have a very lightweight pair of glasses that's incredibly capable, right? So VR sort of level of immersion and capability, but in a see-through lightweight pair of glasses. So I think this is a little bit more of a Macintosh-style moment where it's a new way to look at computing rather than a better version of something people are already familiar with. And that's a bigger challenge.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  So I do think, to your point, anchoring to, hey, a giant flatscreen display costs $2,500 or a laptop costs $1,500 or whatever it is, is an interesting way to think about it, but I think actually describing the utility of the product will be the biggest challenge.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something to be said for, if you just create a product that is incredibly fun and entertaining, like consumers will find, like, they're not saying, like, oh, I'm not going to get the laptop anymore because I can type on this thing. It's like, I'm going to, I have a device that is creating value in my life purely through fun and function, and it doesn't need to, like, replace anything.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  Who do you think the earliest adopters will be? Do you think young people will drive the ultimate breakthrough adoption of augmented reality?

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  I think the earliest adopters will be our developer community. So we already have hundreds of thousands of developers who are building lenses for our platform. There are already tons of developers using specs today, building all of these sorts of experiences. And so our strategy is actually to start with that core of folks who are super passionate about this product. And I think they'll be able to tell stories about all the amazing things that they're building, which can then help us transition to more, like, mass-market-style adoption. So when a developer's building a lens, you can pop these on and stargaze, or, hey, you can pop these on and play lawn games with your kids, or, hey, pop them on and watch streaming video on a giant screen while you're playing or whatever you want to do, without having to shut out the world. I think that those sorts of stories are really...

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like Snap has been able to be remarkably resilient with young people in a way that a lot of other platforms, they just kind of like, they get their initial bucket of users, then they grow with them forever, and then they're monetizing when they get older. Is that, do you think that there's some sort of benefit of having a young cohort that potentially could drive just the product being seen as cool?

• 1:17:19Speaker 05

  You know, I joke around with my wife all the time. You know, it's cool to be uncool. Like, we're not aiming for cool. We're really aiming for value, right? And I think ultimately, like, that value cuts across all sorts of demographics. So I actually think companies-

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look at AirPods. I think are a perfect example of this. They were mocked early on. It was like, oh, look at this guy with his little earbuds in. What a bozo. And then all of a sudden, it was like $20 billion a year revenue line. And it just becomes totally normalized. And it was just because the function was there.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think being unapologetic about the value is so important. And so that's why, again, starting with our community that loves it, believes in it, you know, and has wanted a product like this now for decades. I mean, some of the folks on our team have been working on glasses-based augmented reality for 25 years. We've only been working on it for 11 years. So the community of people who have wanted this product for a super long time are going to be the most excited about it. And that's really who-

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  How do you and the team think about timing out these bets? Because obviously, you've been at it for 11 years. And to me, it seems from the outside that it's like trying to pull the future into the present, but at the same time, being like patient and not betting the company on like, hey, we need to make, you know, 10x the progress in the next 12 months. Otherwise, we're killing this product. Like, it feels like more, quite a bit more like steady and being open to,

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  again, like not being impatient, but patient at the same time. Is that accurate?

• 1:18:49Speaker 05

  I really love that question because I think that is exactly what has killed a lot of glasses efforts to date.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, we're going to raise $200 million, spend it all in two years. And then you're sitting there and being like, okay, we made progress, but it's not commercial.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  It feels like we're in an age of research for vision broadly, VR, AR, the entire category. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of experiments that need to be run. And there's no guarantee that it's going to be, oh, next year's the year, or five years. We don't know.

• 1:19:19Speaker 05

  This is one of the reasons why we thought it was so interesting to play in this space, because we have this huge advantage of being able to invest consistently over the long term. And that is a unique advantage, especially when we're talking about this amount of capital. We've invested more than $3 billion in glasses over 11 years, and we've been able to do that very, very consistently. And so, at the same time, we've seen companies, both large and small, start a glass initiative, shut it down, start a new one, fire the team, hire a new team, and just the whole time, we have built a team of incredibly talented folks with a very, very singular and focused vision, and we've done that over the

• 1:19:52Jordi Hays?

  Is that part of the pitch? I mean, over the summer, we saw insane talent wars. Snap is in a unique position, somewhat isolated down here in Southern California, which I think helps, but is part of your pitch to talent? Like, hey, this is not a program that we just started up and we're going to work on for three years, and then the budget might get cut by XYZ. Is durability and longevity a part of your pitch?

• 1:20:20Speaker 05

  I think that's definitely a part of it, but the most talented folks, they want to create the future, not copy the future. And I think we have a reputation now for leading in terms of innovation in this space. And the folks who are really deeply in this space and who are experts in this space know that what we're doing is leading. I mean, what you experienced with Specs today, there's no other product that a developer can just sign up for today and have that type of experience, doesn't exist. So I think folks who are really deep in this space understand our leadership here, and that's really helped.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the pure depth of different experiences in the product, too. We only had 20 minutes or so, but there were so many different pages that we didn't even get to and experiences, which was very cool.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  We've got to talk about copying, because, I mean, we didn't invent this.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  We didn't invent television.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  But we've had a lot of success with it this year.

• 1:21:12Speaker 05

  You've clearly innovated, right?

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  It's been part of this thing. Yeah, exactly. There's a little bit of innovation here, and then there's been a lot of copying, and it's driven us various levels of insane

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  It drives me more insane than

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  It drives it more insane than it drives me. But at the same time, there's no law that someone's breaking if they want to just do exactly what we do. That's the way it works. So how do you stay sane when people are copying what you're doing?

• 1:21:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, you know, in the early days, we had no choice but to just innovate as quickly as humanly possible because we were late to the social space, right? And Snapchat is not social media. We literally built the business as a response to social media. Messaging. Facebook came first, and Instagram came first, and Twitter came first, and we were using all these products, and we were like, these are not very fun. Like, this is not actually a great way to communicate with your friends. It's awesome if you're into like, status and building your profile and collecting followers. It's not a great way to just have fun with your friends. And so, we started building Snapchat, and I think, you know, there was just really a gravitation towards a service that is actually fun to use with your real friends. But as part of that, you know, because we're competing with such a giant companies, we

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  just had to innovate as fast as we possibly could in a category that is essentially owned by other players, right? Essentially owned by Meta. And I think, you know, part of that is understanding that, you know, one of the most important things you can do in that position is go and build a new category that's outside of the one that you're currently in. And that's what we identified with Glasses 11 years ago, that like, we wanted to help power this massive transformation in the way that people use computing, and then that if we invested over a very long period of time in very, very difficult things, and things that are incredibly challenging technically, and then built a platform, as you saw with lenses, all those different lens experiences, that those sorts of things are incredibly difficult to replicate.

• 1:23:04Speaker 05

  And so, while I think, you know, app features are easy to replicate, the work that we've been doing over the last 11 years and where we're going with Glasses is incredible.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  The example, yeah, the example for us is like, people see the overlay, so they'll copy the overlay and not realize that like, it's not, that's not what, you know, overlays have existed for decades, right? So, like, you, I find oftentimes when people copy, they don't actually fully understand what they're copying, so they take an element out of it, not realizing that it's not necessarily that element that makes the other platform successful. How have you thought about partnering with different AI companies and labs? You recently announced Perplexity. Partnership, which is, which I thought people were excited about.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  And then I feel like all this year, people have been, as, as some of the labs have, have added hundreds of billions of dollars of value, there's been speculation on, saw people speculating on, you know, you could imagine Sam Altman trying to buy Snapchat because he sees your user base. And I can see a lot of reasons why, why, why there's no price that would, that would make that appealing. But how have you thought about partnerships with different AI providers broadly?

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I think one of the things that's been really interesting, obviously Snapchat is so focused on messaging and right now, the primary way people are interacting with AI is messaging. And so we saw a huge opportunity to help bring, you know, more of these AI services into Snapchat, into our messaging platform. Because, you know, as I mentioned, whether it's the foundation companies or tons of businesses have built agents now, have built chatbots, but they don't have any distribution for them. And earlier this year, we launched Sponsored Snaps, which is a killer ad product for us. It shows up in the, in the chat inbox, highly effective. But the vision is to transition the Sponsored Snap from being something that, you know, you just view to now something you, you know, you can interact with and chat with. And so part of that was opening up the platform, starting with, you know, perplexity,

• 1:25:04Speaker 05

  with an exclusive deal with them, but you know, then over time, adding more businesses who are bringing their chatbots and their services to Snapchat.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Can you give me a little bit more of an example of that? Like if I'm Diet Coke and I, and I want to advertise this Sponsored Snap, but then you can chat with it. And so is it more like Q and A on an FAQ? You could ask questions about the product or is it more gamified than that? Like what does that?

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you think about someone like, you know, Walmart, they've spent a lot of time building out a service called Sparky, right? That you can use to learn about products or buy products. So what they could do is send you an offer directly to your inbox, ideally highly relevant to something you've already been looking for at Walmart or based on how you've been engaging with Walmart. And then you can follow up, have a conversation, you know, potentially even convert in the chat.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  And so that's like uniquely good in a chat app, like because you're in, you're used to that functionality, I suppose, as opposed to just kicking you out to some webpage where the UI is a little bit more foreign or like abstract to you.

• 1:25:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. I mean Snapchat's one of the largest messenger, maybe after iMessage, but the largest messenger, certainly bigger than WhatsApp, for example, in the United States. So I think, you know, in terms of people who are familiar with, you know, our messaging interface, that's where they go to have their conversations. Being able to have those conversations, not just with your best friend, but also with, you know, agents like Sparky, I think is an interesting opportunity.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  That's very cool. There's a whole bunch of news. OpenAI today shortened their vesting period. How do you think about aligning talent, aligning incentives for talent? You've, you know, this transition now, you're a public company. How do you think about whether or not a vesting cliff makes sense? We were going back and forth on it. I was saying that I'm so used to a one-year cliff, growing up.

• 1:26:41Speaker 05

  Coming from the private markets.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  The private markets. At the same time, there's a lot of people that show up and on day one, they're creating a lot of value. So how have you thought about incentivizing employees with stock?

• 1:26:52Speaker 05

  Our perspective on this has like really evolved over the years and we learned a ton. Actually, in the early days, we did something really different. We had a 10, 20, 30, 40 vesting schedule. So you would only vest 10% of your grant the first year, 20% the second, 30%, 40%. And the idea, and we were in LA at the time, the idea was to really make sure if you were joining Snap, that you were joining it because you loved it, you wanted to be there for the long term. It was very popular at the time. I think it's still very popular in the valley to kind of hop, you know, spend one year at a company.

• 1:27:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why do you four years when you can build a basket of?

• 1:27:20Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that can be real, that can put a lot of pressure on the culture, especially in a startup where you really, you know, I think it's so important that the team is all in on what you're, what you're building. But, you know, I think over the time, our view has just been like to take as much friction out of the compensation conversation, you know, as possible. I think like, a lot of this stuff is really frankly, frankly, like irrelevant, right? Like what really matters, obviously, if you look at retention and building a team, it's your leader, right? The people that you're working with, obviously, what you're working on, the culture, you know, and that long-term orientation. So I think a lot of this compensation stuff is sort of like details and the less complicated it is and the less time you spend talking about it or thinking about it, the better.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about other just lessons from becoming a public company? We like to joke with Eric Lyman at Ramp, one of our buddies, that, you know, he's maybe about to go out, what is he preparing to do? What are your recommendations for CEOs that you counsel about the process and the transition that the company goes through in the IPO process, just culturally?

• 1:28:22Speaker 05

  I mean, the most substantive change is that people's compensation changes on like a minute by minute basis, right? And like, that can be very distracting for people, especially in the early days. And when companies are newly public, there tends to be a lot of volatility, right? And so, I think it's just really important, again, to create a company culture that's not focused on that. Especially if you want to build something meaningful over the long.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  I remember hearing a story about Enron putting the stock price in the elevator. So like, the exact opposite of what you said. Like, literally orient the entire company culture around the stock price. So you come in, stock price is up, everyone's having a good day, stock price is down.

• 1:28:58Speaker 05

  How did that, how did that work out for them?

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  I don't think it worked out well. I don't think.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about setting, what about setting, you seem like, you know, through this conversation, you seem like very clear on your values, willing to say like, yeah, we don't want to do VR specifically, there might be money to be made there, but we don't, we wouldn't even do it on a, on a principles basis. How do you think about kind of setting vision internally with the team and externally with shareholders? There's been so many companies this year that, specifically in AI, that kind of like to talk about a vision around, let's say like curing cancer. But then you look at what they're actually doing in practice, and there's not always incredible, there's can, there can be like kind of a disconnect between those two things. And I feel like that, that, you know, it's confusing for people that are just users, spectators,

• 1:29:47Jordi Hays?

  shareholders, and then team as well. So how do you find that kind of alignment in, in vision?

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  What a great question. So, I think for us, like, one of the things we always, you know, remind our team is that as we look at leadership at Snap, you know, a lot of people think about leadership in this like traditional hierarchy, right? Where you have like leaders and then the team and so. We have at Snap inverted that, right? So if you're a leader at Snap, you're at the bottom of the pyramid, an upside down pyramid, right? And then you have the team that you're responsible for. And then you have our community more broadly, right? And that includes our partners. And so that's also how we think a lot about communication. So when we're communicating to the world, when we're communicating to investors, we always try to remind our team that like, our investors are a subset of our community, right? And so it's really, really important that we speak in, you know, language that people actually understand, right? Instead of talking about, you know.

• 1:30:39Speaker 05

  We can talk all day in fancy AI terms, right? But that doesn't really matter when it comes to communicating to your customer and the customer experience that they're having. And in fact, sometimes it can be more confusing. So I think as long as we put everything through that lens of, you know, putting our community first and foremost, and then communicating, you know, making sure that we're always talking to our community first, even if it's some investor update or, you know, something like that. Yeah.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  Do you have any book recommendations? Did you read any good books this year?

• 1:31:08Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  I got Christmas gifts for people.

• 1:31:10Speaker 05

  What's there? I'm like...

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  I know, it's a really wild question to just throw out at you.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  Well, what's highly relevant, I think, for this forum. There's like a, there's a great book that I read on, I'll have to find the name for you, but it's something about like, you know, it's, it's very academic, but it's sort of like the economic impacts of technological disruption.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  And it really, and it but kind of like textbooks, yeah, like textbook style.

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  But what's great is that it just shows like, you know, from the railroads to semiconductors, et cetera, like the patterns that emerge through these sorts of large technological changes. And I think it's so important because I think we just need to be reminding folks that like these sorts of changes have happened before.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Speaker 05

  There's actually quite a consistent rhyme and reason to what happens. And that means that all of us should be able to kind of think ahead and manage ahead, you know, through some of the consequences of, I think, what's going to happen through, you know, what will be quite a disruptive period of time.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you think it's underrated that AI can potentially really help with moderation on big platforms, like scaled platforms where for the first time you might be able to effectively like review every message that's going everywhere? Or is that, is that a negative thing? Is that a positive thing? We were just talking to Dave Bazooka at Roblox and obviously the, the potential of like screening every message seems like a really great opportunity for him. And I'm just wondering if like, there's so many like opportunities, but also like risks with this stuff, like how have you processed this idea of like AI as a moderation tool, sort of under the hood?

• 1:32:45Speaker 05

  So first of all, I do think AI moderation is already like very widespread.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:32:49Speaker 05

  Like, I think that's already best practice. I think virtually everyone's already doing that.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:54Speaker 05

  At least, obviously, we're, we've embraced that at Snap. I think it's very important. And I also think it's a really powerful tool, again, for customers, if they want to fact-check something, even if their friend told them, right? The ability to fact-check using AI today is pretty compelling compared to what it was in the past. So when people are talking about concerns about misinformation and this sort of thing, I think AI is a pretty powerful counterbalance to that.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Speaker 05

  What I'm more interested in, though, is the use of sequence models to find bad actors and to stop them before something bad happens.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:23Speaker 05

  So that, to me, is what I think the frontier of like internet safety is, you know, currently. It's certainly an area of research for us and something that we're really excited about because we have a lot of information about what, you know, bad actors try to do on our platform. We catch a lot of them, right? But with almost a billion people, it's hard to catch all of them, but we're trying. But what's really interesting is, you know, we can train sequence models based on those patterns. What sequence of events are bad actors engaging in? How are they using the platform so that we can predict, you know, when someone is about to do something

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:53Speaker 05

  that is against our terms? And so, to me, I think that's a lot of like the paradigm that we're going to see in internet safety over the next couple of years. I think right now, there's a big focus on, you know, features and trying to tease apart what sort of different features different platforms have. I think there's just going to be a massive shift to being able to identify bad actors even before bad things happen using tools like sequence models.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Are you seeing like the level of like bot activity, or at least people trying stuff, increasing? We've been talking to a lot of like cybersecurity folks and it feels like they, you know, the, all the, all the, the bad guys on the internet, all the black hat hackers have more tools, but then also the white hat hackers have more tools. And so it's sort of like a Cold War. But I'm wondering if like, do you feel like you're spending more time for just, just more headaches focused on, you know, defending against like endless bot armies? Or has that just been like a drone throughout the entire process, the entire career?

• 1:34:50Speaker 05

  I think for us, like if you look at cybersecurity, right? Some of the like most significant threats are actually, you know, our human vulnerabilities.

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:01Speaker 05

  And I think that's where AI actually is almost the most dangerous. Because today, right?

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:08Speaker 05

  Our team members can get phone calls from Evan.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:10Speaker 05

  Hey, I really need your help. I gotta investigate this thing.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  I need 200 bucks.

• 1:35:14Speaker 05

  Wire me 200 bucks or buy some gift cards really quickly for this creator event we're doing, right? Like that's like, and I think like the ability for for bad actors to use AI to exploit our human vulnerabilities is something that we really worry about and think a lot about.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  I mean, there were so many times when like the phishing email was clockable just by bad grammar or, you know, spelling mistakes. And it was like, that was enough of a tell. And like, one pass through any LLM and you get rid of all of those.

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  I think another thing that's going to become increasingly important, you know, as we look at cybersecurity is the interconnectedness of all of these services, right? Like a lot of companies today, especially young companies who aren't investing a ton in cybersecurity are using a huge number of vendors. And what's really interesting is, you know, today compromising a vendor and then using that vendor to compromise the, you know, core business.

• 1:36:05John Coogan?

  Sure, supply chain tax.

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  That's the sort of stuff that's really concerning, especially with phishing, right? So we saw an interesting one recently where one of our vendors was compromised. I received an email that looked like it was from the vendor, right? But it was actually a phishing email. And, you know, it's again, very hard to tease apart. So I think the interconnectedness in terms of cybersecurity is something that folks just don't talk about as much as maybe we need to.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  We joked about some news organization acquiring paperless posts and then just understanding where all the different people going to events.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Powerful people.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  I do have one kind of.

• 1:36:41Jordi Hays?

  More broad question, and then I know you got to jump, but Snapchat I think of as like country scale, or it's the size of a nation state. You're basically the governor of a basically the governor of a state or a country, and California specifically has gone through a really wild year. You grew up in the in the Palisades. I'm wondering if you were if you were like, what would you do? Like, how do you kind of like, how do you feel California is today as a state, even Southern California more specifically? I think, you know, we I live in Malibu, and John lives in Pasadena. We weren't affected by the fires, but there

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  was this like, extreme frustration during that moment, because it felt like, in many ways, the government had had kind of failed the citizens. I'm curious if there's anything that like, how are you thinking about the future of the state and how we can make positive change?

• 1:37:39Speaker 05

  Okay, well, we could spend another another hour on this. So I love California so much. Obviously, I was born and raised here. I think it's an incredible state, and it's so important to the future of US competitiveness, right? So I think that people talk a lot about the competition between US and China. I don't think people talk enough about the competition between China and California, right? Which is a really, really interesting relationship, because both China and California are deeply interconnected at the same time that we're competing a ton. So I think California is just unbelievably important to the future trajectory of the United States.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:38:07Speaker 05

  I think if you look at California today, I mean, you know, you obviously know all the stats, but like, highest unemployment rate, highest poverty rate, most homelessness.

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Housing crisis.

• 1:38:17Speaker 05

  Massive housing crisis.

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  The people moving, saying, I'm moving to Austin for quality of life. I love Texas. Texas is amazing. But it can be like, well, it can be like, I mean, it's very cold in the winter. It's very hot in the summer. If you're moving. Somewhere like that for quality of life, it just means that housing is, I mean, housing affordability is like top of mind for a huge percentage of people. And of course, here, that's, you know, most elevated.

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the affordability crisis here is incredibly concerning. I think one of the things, if we look historically at, you know, the way that our government has operated, we kind of, we tend to fall in this pattern, it seems like, of, you know, very heavily regulating our industries, which, you know, by the way, to some degree is important. One of the reasons why we love California, it's beautiful, right? It's clean, all these sorts of things we really love about California. But at the same time, we also then layer a ton of subsidy on top of that. So you dramatically restrict supply with very, very heavy regulation. And then, you know, we've got a very large economy, we've got the highest, one of the highest tax rates here in California. We put a ton of subsidy into that economy after

• 1:39:26Speaker 05

  dramatically restricting supply. And as a result, in all these areas, you know, especially things like housing, I think you have massive increases in pricing. And I am optimistic in the sense that I think the legislature this year is really starting to pay attention to it, right? There's some progress on sequel reform, for example. There's more attention being paid to, you know, how expensive is to building affordable housing here. When the government pays for affordable housing, it's about 30 or 40% more expensive than just market rate affordable housing. And so I think, you know, people are starting to pay attention to it. But another thing that's fascinating is I'm just not sure Californians are aware of how problematic things are right now, especially because our politics are so partisan. And I think if you look at the California voter base, they're saying, oh,

• 1:40:11Speaker 05

  well, at least it doesn't look like the federal government, so we're doing better here than, you know, than they're doing in DC. So I'm okay with that. But so I think, to me, part of the, you know, the journey over the next couple of years is California's really, Californians really waking up to the fact that we can do a lot better here in our state. And in fact, we've got to do a lot better, you know, the US wants to continue to compete.

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I went, growing up in, in the Bay Area and living in Southern California in my adult life, I went through a brief moment during 2020 where I started looking on Zillow outside of the state because it was like they shut down the beach. I was like, I'm living like half a mile from the beach and I can't, I can't go there. And I made the very specific decision. I was like, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna leave this. This place is too beautiful. I've had family roots here going back to the early 1900s. We need to stay and people need to focus on making it better. It's the greatest place on earth that I've been to and it's worth, it's worth continuing to invest in and steward. And I felt like the

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  fires were so symbolic too at the Palisades of like, you know, everything burning to the ground except Rick Caruso, the guy we couldn't elect as mayor, even though I believe, you know, again, I believe he genuinely loves this city and wants to see it shine. So anyways, we'll have you.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  Can we open this present?

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  We should.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  Because we could talk about politics for the rest of the show. What is in here?

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  We don't talk about, we don't talk about.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Oh, is this an ornament for the tree?

• 1:41:42Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  This is incredible. Ooh, I think this is gonna be a new, new tradition. I like this. Yeah, we, we, oh, this is amazing.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Wow, perfect. Thank you. This is remarkable.

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to the top.

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  2025 edition. Would you mind signing this?

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  We love collecting autographs. We love, we're building a museum of business. And then I think you got a chance to hang out in the front.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  We gotta put that up at the very top.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll let that drive. That looks fantastic. Yeah, congratulations.

• 1:42:19Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  One, one, almost one billion global Snapchatters, can we have you hit the gong to the...

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  You gotta hit the gong, too.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  You gotta hit the gong if you come to the, if you come to the Ultra Dome, please, pick up this mallet here.

• 1:42:31Jordi Hays?

  Hit it as hard as you want.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  As hard as you want.

• 1:42:34Speaker 05

  But you labeled it, too.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  That's our interview.

• 1:42:37John Coogan?

  In case you want.

• 1:42:38Speaker 05

  I just got that right. (Applause)

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Great hanging. Love to have you back on. Thank you.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  I really love the ornaments. I didn't even realize that that would be something that could happen, given that we have a tree. Like, this is going to be a thing now. We're going to grow an ornament collection.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ornaments as merch. Incredible.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  It's amazing. I love it. Well, that was a fantastic conversation. Thank you for everyone for listening. And let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. There is some Oracle news. What else is going on? I've just pulled up this hilarious video of Oracle pivoting to AI. I don't know if we should flip back to this. We have RJ from Rivian coming up just a bit.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Play this video while we wait for RJ to join.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  This is perfectly on brand for us.

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  I put this in there for you, John.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  So the news here is that Oracle, Oracle bondholders now sit on 9% of unrealized losses on 18 billion of debt issued.

• 1:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, don't focus on that, John. Focus on this video. Matt Turk says Oracle after pivoted to AI.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  80 years young.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  This guy looks, this makes me want to, this makes me want to own the stock. Because this really does feel like, this really does feel like the current state of Oracle.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  I mean, Larry Ellison looks fantastic. He's been on a, he's been on a tear. And, you know.

• 1:44:15Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is, this is, this is your future, John. After, we're gonna, we'll probably retire, then we're around 70. So we got, we got a good, we got a good run ahead of us still. But then you're gonna go and go back and hire an elite team and really make a run at the, at the Arnold Classic in the, in the vintage division.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, let's head over to Keller Clifton and Andrew Cote. Keller says next gen infra and the, the drone tower is really remarkable. Like, what is that? Uh, four, eight, 12 drones in one tower, all charging. These are of course the zipline drones that deliver everything from Chipotle burritos to, uh, I think blood transfusions and all sorts of stuff, uh, saving lives. Uh, and Andrew Cote says, we are not mentally prepared for just how cheap everything is about to become as robotics of all kinds explode into the market.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  Um, and Elon, Elon chimed in, he says, harnessing even a millionth of the sun's energy would make every human a billionaire in purchasing power. Wow.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I'm not sure Deadmau5 concerts are going to get, uh, any cheaper, uh, given that some of these robotics companies are hiring, uh, hiring in order, uh, for their holiday.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  But Keller is locked in. Keller is on tear.

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  Not hiring Deadmau5.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, maybe, maybe we should see. We, I mean, we don't know that he didn't. It's possible he did.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  It's possible.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  I have a feeling.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Anything's possible.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service automate the most complex customer service queries for every channel.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  Joe Longdale says, older friend, I admire. I'm having a real, I'm having real liquidity trouble. Me, you own over 45 million of shares in a private company. X, I started, you backed us early. Take 10 million off? Not sure. I don't like to sell stuff. Me, okay, FYI, it's QSBs. I'll think about it.

• 1:46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Jordi Hays?

  QSBs.

• 1:46:18John Coogan?

  Uh, in the chat.

• 1:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Nothing better.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  Ryan asks, are we going to cover Roomba? I'm, uh, do you, did you hear the, did you hear the news about Roomba? Finally filed for bankruptcy. Very upsetting because of course they were going to sell to Amazon.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  Chinese companies are buying up the assets at auction.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  I'm sure, um, it does seem like they are, I don't know, is GoPro in the same, in the same, um? In the same bucket. I don't know. How's how's GoPro doing these days? But yeah, Roomba. So GoPro is down to 150 million market cap.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  Up, of course, it was in the billions at one point. And Roomba, you know, you just get really heavy competition from international players. It it compounds and compounds and eventually there's nothing to do, but ideally hang out with the good folks over at Amazon, but that was of course blocked. And so they had to go their own way and their own way led to doom, unfortunately.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  But fortunately, we have an American company that's bringing it back. This is not an intro to our, this is an intro to Matic, the Roomba competitor or new company that that came came on the show and you have one at home. You have you have the the phoenix rising from the ashes.

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you know, you want to know why?

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  You have the reincarnation of Roomba.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Know why I believe Matic is really going to go all the way?

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  Is because my children,

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, my one year old.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Is constantly messing with it and it still works.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  Really? That's impressive.

• 1:47:58Jordi Hays?

  My one year old is just constantly

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Like moving it, putting it on things.

• 1:48:02Jordi Hays?

  Taking it apart.

• 1:48:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:03Jordi Hays?

  Putting it back together. And and not in a not in a very any type of more specific way. She's just kind of messing with it. And it still works. It still runs every day.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't, you know, some of some of these things. A device like that, you you the concern is always, okay, it works.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  But do I have to spend a bunch of time thinking about it and and kind of like managing this new robot?

• 1:48:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  And is it? And then at that point, should I just have a vacuum and and just use that?

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  This thing has just been running perpetually on a schedule reliably.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  I've had it. Running for at least six months now and it's really fantastic.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  I have an idea. Okay, so you turn your kids loose on Julius dot AI. We see if that still works. Once your kids have gone crazy all over the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insight in seconds. If it holds up, you know, I think it's a good sign. I think it's I think it's built for.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock says, I won Radio Shack's Innovation of the Month in like 2009 for making an Arduino Roomba. That is cool. Early, very early.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  I was hanging out with some some mutual friends of my kids last night, some parents, and you know what they had in the driveway?

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  Did you just call the parents of your kids mutual friends?

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  No, sorry. So my son's friends, parents. What do you say? Playdate. I went on a playdate. Okay, shoot me. I went on a playdate and and the parents of my kids, friends, yeah, the parents of my kids' friends, right? They had a Rivian R1S in the driveway and they're very happy with it. And I'm very happy that we get to talk to RJ from Rivian here in the studio. Welcome to the show, RJ. How are you doing? Thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us today.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 1:50:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, nice to be on.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would love to, I mean, first set the table on, you know, like how the year went, where the business is. And then, of course, I want to go into the new chip and and just self-driving broadly. But but how how are you describing the scale of Rivian at this point in time?

• 1:50:23Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, we're we've launched, as you as you just referenced, we launched a set of flagship products. We have an R1S, which is the best-selling premium SUV in the US, and then electric SUV in the US. And then we have a truck, R1T, and commercial vehicles. But we haven't launched our mass market product yet, which which is coming in the form of what we call R2.

• 1:50:45John Coogan?

  R2.

• 1:50:45Speaker 06

  And so that will dramatically expand the scale of the business. And I think a lot of the A lot of the, in some ways, challenge we've had is we're investing to be a very large business. So investing in vertically integrated technology to enable us to be a multimillion vehicle of your business. And the technology investment has to happen before the products come. And so we have huge fixed costs to develop all this tech, whether it's, you referenced it already, whether it's in-house silicon or all of our compute platforms, our operating system, of course, all the high voltage work. But that all comes together really nicely with the launch of R2, which is what really gives

• 1:51:27Speaker 06

  us this scale to support all this R and D.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Let's start with R1T. Electric truck felt very contrarian. It feels still a little contrarian. Truck buyers, not to generalize, but it's a very much like, I like my truck reliable with gas. I don't like this new thing. Did it seem like a risk to you at the time when you put, when you said, okay, we're going to do the truck first, we're going to do that so early? What gave you confidence that it would deliver and you could actually win that market over?

• 1:52:04Speaker 06

  You mean, the truck, the truck market specifically is such a, it's such a large market. And it's, and I think we often think of it as like one singular type of buyer, which is like the person who's loading up about 2,000 pounds of concrete in the back.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:20Speaker 06

  Majority of trucks used in the United States are actually used more like cars. So they're, they're used as a daily driver. The bed is used more for lifestyle activities. So you put a dirt bike in the back or, you know, kids toys in the back, that kind of thing. And so we said, we're not as a company trying to address the contractor use case. So if you're, if you want to load concrete and some blocks in the back of the truck, this is probably not the vehicle you want to do it in. It could do that. It's capable of. But that's not the brand aspiration. And it was one of the reasons we also made it really clear that we had both the truck and then the sibling vehicle, the SUV. And there's so much shared content between the two. But the other thing we wanted to do is just eliminate any questions of whether or not

• 1:53:03Speaker 06

  it was capable. You know, you'll laugh, but in 20, I guess 2019, I would get questions like, well, what if it gets wet? Can it drive through deep puddles? And like, so it was just like a very, very low level of understanding, I'd say, generally around electrification, what that can do in terms of off-road and capabilities. And so with R1, we made it really capable. So it's, you know, it can go extreme rock crawling. It can go drive through three feet of water. It can, you know, it can accelerate faster than, you know, most hypercars. So our current quad does zero to 60 in like, and a half seconds. It's sort of unnecessarily silly in terms of its capabilities, but it's a, it's a flagship product. So it's there to make a statement. It's there

• 1:53:48Speaker 06

  for, for building the brand.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  Yep. On, on the SUV side, have you been surprised by how, how much runway you've had in that market for full-size SUVs? Because it feels like a lot of people went after trucks very quickly, but the, the fast followers haven't really come after the R1S. And from, I mean, I grew up in a family with a Ford Explorer and I've always been

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels, it feels like one of those things that in 20 years, people will look back at this window of time that Rivian had to just dominate that full-size SUV category and, and feel like this was the biggest possible blessing that you guys couldn't necessarily plan for, but it kind of worked out nicely.

• 1:54:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's, uh, to your point, I mean, in the space of electric vehicles priced over $70,000, these are all depending on how you draw the boundary diagram. The way we look at it, we have about 35% market share and So it's the best selling electric premium SUV in the United States by a significant degree, significantly outselling something like a Model X, which is also in that same category. But it but interestingly, in the state of California, it's the best selling premium SUV, electric or non-electric.

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:55:09Speaker 06

  If you for those that are spending time in California, if you're driving around the Bay Area, they're just everywhere. So our hope is that with R2, it's a price point that starts at 45. It captures a lot of the magic and the essence that's in R1.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Speaker 06

  But at a much lower price point. So if we can have even a fraction of the market share that we have with R1 with R2, we'll be we'll be very, very, very happy.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Where did the headlight design come from? When I first saw it, I was like, it looks like cartoon eyes. It was not for me. And now it's completely grown on me and it's just completely been like, oh, that's just like, it's it's become not only like, I think of it as cool, I don't think of it as like cartoony or childish, but also it's simultaneously become iconic because I see it from a mile away and I'm like, oh, Rivian. And I feel like that's exactly what you how you wanted it to play out. But what was the thinking with that? Because it does feel bold and different.

• 1:56:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely. And, you know, getting to something that starts to feel iconic, it's always hard because you can't design something and it immediately becomes iconic. So I think it has to start with a really strong point of view and a strong conviction around a certain direction. So in the case of the front end, I mean, no, in 2018, 19, no one knew what a Rivian looked like. We didn't know what a Rivian looked like. So we were figuring out. So there's lots of different faces of the vehicle. And one of the things we arrived at was the realization we wanted it to look technically capable, but also friendly. And so often, if you go friendly, it starts to look like nice, but not tough. And so we wanted like, nice, but still tough.

• 1:56:49Speaker 06

  So it's a really hard balance.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  The original Waymos from Google were like a little bit too nice and they were like these goofy things and then they finally, yeah. But yeah, continue.

• 1:56:59Speaker 06

  So it was like, it was a lot of iteration and. One of the, I grew up a car enthusiast and so I've always been drawn to cars that now we would consider be iconic, but if you look at the history of those cars, often in the beginning, they're made fun of. And so, you know, if you look at the Volkswagen Beetle, uh, as an example, uh, that was thought of as, heck, even Volkswagen called it ugly. Uh, they leaned into it.

• 1:57:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, even on the, on the other end of the spectrum, the F40 was controversial.

• 1:57:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  And now it's obviously, you know, a car that a lot of

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of supercars start out like kind of mock and then we're not being daring enough or something. Yeah.

• 1:57:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we wanted to push, push the boundaries, but we also wanted to use really clean forms.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:40Speaker 06

  And the benefit of a clean form like, uh, you know, like primitive shapes, in this case, like half circles with, you know, it's like a, like a, um, like a stadium. It doesn't age. It doesn't, you know, it's a form that has been around for ages and so it feels very timeless and it, the way we integrated it very seamlessly, the hope was is that it would become something that's very recognizable. You see it on the road, you say that's a Rivian, and then that it could scale to different sized vehicles, different vehicle segments. So, yeah, there's still people that, that don't love it, but I'd say the vast majority of people who have been around it start, have either liked it from the beginning or as you, as you just described, have grown to really like it.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  I want to talk about R2, but first, I want to ask you about R0. Are we going bigger? I mean, if the numbers go, when the numbers go up, the vehicles get smaller. What do I have to do to get something that competes with like a Cadillac Escalade ESV out of you? Because I, I have a big family, I have two huge dogs and I want the absolute monster land yacht. And I'm just, my, my, my serious question is, uh, like, is there something about the physics of electric vehicles where it gets harder to make something that's really, really long or huge or big? Or is it more just like, that's more of a niche thing and maybe you'll get to it or the market will, will get to it eventually, but it's not the highest priority right now?

• 1:59:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I love this question because we have, uh, we as a company have so many different ideas. And so you can imagine, there's like 50 different concepts or ideas we might have for a vehicle. We have to pick a few things to do. And so when you then look at the electrified space and you say, what's, what's going to sell at volume for a flagship product, we started with something that was larger, but as we move into mass market, the, the, the, the size of the market that exists for these very, very large vehicles, things that are bigger than R1 is very, very small. So there's not a lot of customers, you know, it's like maybe 10,000 units a year, if that. And then you look at

• 1:59:42Speaker 06

  just the, the biggest segment by far is a two-row, five-passenger SUV. And I'd say there's probably like one highly compelling choice today under $50,000 or hence the Tesla Model Y.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:53Speaker 06

  And so it's like wildly underserved. You imagine there's 300 different choices in the, in the combustion world and you've got like maybe one, there's many choices, but there's one that's highly compelling, which

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  How, how molded, like how, how people wake up every day and they, they tell themselves they're buying the car that, that they want, but in reality, there's like a regulatory environment that, that forces manufacturers to make certain decisions and trade-offs and, and push different vehicles. You usually don't want seatbelts in your car, right?

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  No, inside joke. The, but, but with the new, with the CAFE regulations going away, people are talking about America being flooded with these mini trucks. K, K trucks. I'm not, I'm not convinced that, that there's actually that many buyers of, of those vehicles in the US. Maybe, maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but how, how much do you feel like the, the popularity of different vehicles is really just downstream of choices that manufacturers have had to make because of, for various regulatory reasons?

• 2:01:04Speaker 06

  Boy, we have this discussion all the time. I mean, the, the causality of demand is interesting because it's, you don't have an infinite set of choices. So the board demand starts to look like what supply looks like and

• 2:01:19Speaker 06

  We see this, we believe this is going to happen with R2, where there's very few choices in, I'll take, let's talk about it in detail. So Tesla launched Model Y, very, very successful. It's a, it's a non-traditional form factor in terms of a midsize SUV. It's more, it's very car-like. Yeah. That has its advantages, but you've found a lot of people that are coming out of more traditional SUV form factors into that, but they don't have another choice. And so what we saw happen is a bunch of other manufacturers create their own version of a Tesla Model Y. So the form factor is very similar to a Model Y. You know, if you look at the side view of it and draw a line over the profile of it, it looks, yes, it's a Model Y, it's like different OEMs versions of that,

• 2:02:03Speaker 06

  which was actually the wrong conclusion to draw because you didn't provide customers with better diversity of choice, but rather you gave them a less good version of a Tesla Model Y. If you want a Model Y, buy the Model Y, not some other company's version of it. And so we were very clear on the need to have a very different point of view and not uh fall into that trap of thinking everyone is going to want that exact vehicle form factor and profile. Silhouette, yeah. And so I think that that happens all the time in automotive and it's sort of shocking, but if you were to think about, take like the sedan space. You have the BMW 3 Series, the Mercedes C-Class, the Audi A4. They're all like dimensionally very, very similar.

• 2:02:48Speaker 06

  And then you have, you know, the BMW 5 Series and the Mercedes E-Class and the Audi A6. And so you have like these interesting segments that are like very much because of this like hard to trace causality, you just have a lot of people building very similar things with different fronts, different rears, maybe slightly different surfacing, but the specs of the vehicle are highly aligned. And so I think there is an opportunity with electrification to reset some of those uh expectations and to reset segments, sizes, performance characteristics, some of the attributes. One of the things we worked on really hard in R2 was the rear seat like comfort or space

• 2:03:30Speaker 06

  is completely unlike anything else in the segment, so it's a lot of space. Yeah. But and then you look at all the cars in space and they're all like within fifteen to twenty-five millimeters of each other for rear seat legroom and you're like, why is, why are there thirty cars that have almost identical rear seat configurations?

• 2:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, when the, when the team sees something like that, are, are they like, are we missing some sort of like regulation? Requires like you ever and then, and then you kind of trying to figure out, wait, do we actually have? Flexibility, you know, I, I always, you, you end up wondering like, are we, are we missing something and then you realize?

• 2:04:06Speaker 06

  Well, the, the mechanical nature of cars means that everybody can buy everybody's products. So, every company like Rivian's are owned by every car company and they take them apart and they own all the other, you know, all the other things they're competing against. And so as a result, a lot of like the mechanical innovations, let's say, welding techniques or casting techniques, they sort of very quickly become state of the art. But the downside of that ability to buy each other's products and so easily observe them is you do have this funneling towards like, uh, consensus around different segments. And so we, we, we sort of lose some of the uniqueness between the different vehicles and see you're like for, for car enthusiasts, you find a lot of times car enthusiasts will say,

• 2:04:50Speaker 06

  oh, cars, they, they all look the same. They all feel the same. And so we, we try hard to change that, but there are certain expectations. I'll give you a really good example. Um, on our R1T, we did a ton of research and we looked at what people put into the bed of the vehicle. And if you're using it for lifestyle, you want to be able to fit it in your garage. And if you're putting anything, anything other than a motorcycle, which in which case you're a dirt bike, where you have the tailgate down, the bed length doesn't need to be longer than four and a half feet. Just doesn't, there's nothing that goes in that requires, unless you're doing like construction and you need to put some.

• 2:05:30Speaker 06

  And so we made the bed shorter with this articulating tailgate that goes next out. So it gives you, it's actually longer with the tailgate down. So it fits a really long motorcycle. But when it's up. It it everything fits in the, you know, it fits in the garage more easily. And so we we look at most, if you drive through a neighborhood, you know how you know who has a truck in your hood? It's because it's parked in the driveway. Most trucks don't in the garage.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:53Speaker 06

  Uh, and so we wanted to fit in 95% of the garage in the United States. We went through all this thought process. We built it and the standard size is five foot. And the amount of times I've been asked, why don't you make the bed five feet long? Well, of course we could have. It was just a decision. We made the decision. We wanted the truck to more easily fit in a garage. So those are like, you sort of, sometimes if you break the mold of like what's expected for dimensions, because customers, media, car journalists are so trained on a certain size.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:06:20Speaker 06

  The battle may not be worth it.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also there's like, there's the decision to purchase a car and you might just be looking at specs and you're like, five is better than four and a half. But then you're live, you live with the car for four years and you're like, oh, well, this is actually way better. I never needed that extra half foot. Um, yeah. Fascinating.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, where do you think Chinese EVs are overhyped or underhyped?

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  No, give us a white pill. Overhyped.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. So, so recently there's been a lot of excitement around them and fortunately we're not letting them flood our country uh, with them. Uh, but we had a guest on the show recently that had said he was in China a few weeks ago and, and he, there was one of the, I, I forget which manufacturer, but one of them were just like caught like side of the road burning on, on fire. He felt like they were potentially overhyped because they do have some features that are kind of scroll stopping. I'm thinking of the one that can jump, uh.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  The Yongwang U9.

• 2:07:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But, uh, but you know, given that, given that, uh, every manufacturer is free to assemble, I mean, disassemble any other vehicle and, and learn from it. Uh, what do you think American manufacturers can, uh, learn from what they're doing?

• 2:07:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I do think it's important to sort of, uh.

• 2:07:34Speaker 06

  Pull the, pull the curtain back on what sometimes I think gets presented as if it's magic, particularly around cost. So I think there's two things to take away from the Chinese electric vehicle space. First, there's over a hundred different brands and manufacturers in China. And there's only a small fraction of those that I would consider to be in the category of what I'm going to talk about, leading in technology and having really robust architectures.

• 2:08:01Speaker 06

  But the two things with that said, so if you, if you say there's more than five, less than 10 manufacturers that fall into the categories I'm about to describe, you have an interesting phenomenon where a lot of these newer companies in China, for the same reasons that Rivian or Tesla have very different software architectures, electronics architectures and incumbent OEMs, is they started with a clean sheet. And when you start with a clean sheet, you would very quickly arrive at a completely different technology topology than what evolved into cars over the last 50 or 60 years. And what I mean by that is,

• 2:08:37Speaker 06

  prior to like 19, early 1960s, cars were 100% analog. So there are no computers in a car. And the first computer to make its way into a car was ironically, was for the fuel injection system. And so for any of the car enthusiasts out there, this is like those original like Bosch, Catronic fuel injection systems that we started to see emerge 1960s and early 70s. And car companies at the time said, boy, we're rebuild engines, we design vehicle bodies, we assemble the cars. We don't need to make these little electronic modules. And so they pushed that work to suppliers, companies like Bosch or Continental, would make these little computers that run the fuel injection system. And then subsequent to that, over the currents of the last 50 years,

• 2:09:22Speaker 06

  a bunch of other things started to have a need for computers. And your seat suddenly became smart and there was a computer that went with the seat. Your air, your air conditioning became intelligent. There was a computer that went that, your sunroof had a computer. And before you knew it, the vehicle architecture was this proliferation of, you know, in some cars, 100 to 150 little mini, what we call electronic control units or computers that run these specific domains, like the domain of an engine or the domain of a door, the domain of a seat. And it's precisely the opposite of what you'd architect if you were thinking about it as a clean sheet. You would never say, I'm going to build a network architecture and software platform.

• 2:10:02Speaker 06

  There's 150 different software code bases running 150 different little mini computers, which communicate through this sort of klutzy can architecture. That might all be, need to be independently updated at various points in the car's lifecycle. It's just like, it's a total disaster. So what you'd say is I'd have as few computers as possible doing as much as they can. Yeah. And so, you know, the fancy way we describe that now is it's a zonal architecture. It's a computer that controls a whole zone. And so Tesla, of course, developed their architecture like that. We, of course, developed our architecture like that. And a couple of the Chinese did as well. And this, the real benefit of this, besides just taking a lot of cost and complexity out, is that you can make updates really easily.

• 2:10:47Speaker 06

  And so if I want to change, let's say, the sequence of events that occur when you unlock the car, I don't have to coordinate amongst 15 different suppliers. The supplier for the horn ECU, the supplier for the door lock ECU, the supplier for the, you know, the interior lighting ECU. I can do all of that in like a matter of minutes internally, because it's running on our own software platform and it's all of our own code. And so just the emergence of regular updates, improved features, features that respond to dynamic customer needs, I think is a really big shift. And in the West, there's two companies that have that, Rivian and Tesla. And then in China, there's, as I said, more than five, less than 10 companies that have that. And if you don't do a software-defined architecture well,

• 2:11:32Speaker 06

  the ability to do like AI integrated into the vehicle or an AI-defined vehicle is enormously hard. So you have to have all these ingredients to be able to do like the broader architecture well. Anyway, so that's one big difference. And that actually underpins, we did a $5.8 billion software licensing deal with Volkswagen. That, that technology I just described for network architecture, software OS, is what we license as part of a big partnership with Volkswagen Group. But the other is that the Chinese companies have just fundamentally lower cost structure. They have much lower labor costs. Their cost of capital is often free or more than free, meaning they get paid to build a plant or they get enormous government subsidies. And so you can just build a spreadsheet to look at this.

• 2:12:17Speaker 06

  It's not, it's not magic. They're building the cars, you know, not using some new type of material from outer space. It's, it's using very, you know, consistent materials, what we use in the United States. Consistent joining and forming techniques and putting the cars together very similar. They just have labor costs and capital costs are much, much lower than the United States.

• 2:12:37John Coogan?

  If you had to pick a gimmick that you do like, what's your favorite gimmick? Cause the jumping, the jumping car is a pretty good one. I showed that to my four-year-old and he was like, I need, I need that car.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I don't think it's good unless, unless they're jumping a human.

• 2:12:51John Coogan?

  Oh, they gotta jump a human.

• 2:12:53Jordi Hays?

  They gotta give me a demo where they jump a human.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  That's a tall order.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise it's just a cheap trick. I don't need to jump, I don't need to jump a paperclip.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Or a pothole. Hey, you do need to jump a pothole. You gotta, you gotta fly tire.

• 2:13:03Jordi Hays?

  I did blow out a tire.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  You blew out a tire this weekend. Anyway, favorite gimmick, if, like, if you had to pick one, what do you like? You know, there's like, there's the tank turn. There's, you know, a whole bunch of these different gimmicks. Is there, are there any gimmicks that you think are fun? Or maybe retro gimmick?

• 2:13:19Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, I don't know. Um, I mean, they're just fun to watch. I don't know if I, I, we haven't, again, we haven't decided to put any of them in there. They're, they're butt into our vehicles. We, we do have something called kick steer in our vehicles, which when you're operating, because of a quad motor, you can turn the vehicle on its axis.

• 2:13:35John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 2:13:36Speaker 06

  And it's sort of cool, but.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, even the gear tunnel to some, to some degree like stood out. It was like, like the gear tunnel, when that launched, that was definitely like a, like a, oh, well, like this is different than normal. This is not something I see normally. And I feel like there, there's a balance. Like you don't want to be all, all gimmick all the time, but you need a little bit of style and a little bit of substance. You need some.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta talk about, uh, we, we needed, clearly needed an hour or 90 minutes.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  I know, I know. I don't know if you have a hard stop.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta talk about, uh, some of your guys' new releases.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  The chip, uh, and some of the new technical decisions that you guys are making around self-driving.

• 2:14:13Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah, sure. Yeah, so last week, we actually finally announced it. Amazingly, it didn't leak. We've been working on this since 2020, early 2022. But we've re-architected our whole self-driving platform around what we call an end-to-end train model. And so the model is using the millions and millions of miles that are being accumulated through our deployed fleet of our Gen 2 vehicles, which launched a little more than a year ago, to build effectively a neural net or a foundation model for how to drive. And on our Gen 2 hardware stack, it's using an Nvidia platform. It's got around 200 tops of compute. We've got 55 megapixels of cameras, a nice array of radars, but it's a great platform for building a data flywheel

• 2:14:57Speaker 06

  and for delivering, ultimately, this will be able to deliver point-to-point autonomy. So you can put the address in the vehicle drive there. But to get to higher levels of autonomy, we've developed an in-house processor. Well, look at the timing. You guys did that perfectly.

• 2:15:14Speaker 06

  But the in-house processor is a significant step up. So it's 800 tops. It's got 35 billion transistors on silicon.

• 2:15:24Speaker 06

  The neural net's capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second. So this is like an incredibly powerful platform. And we brought it in-house just to, given the importance of vision, this is a vision-based robot.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:37Speaker 06

  The vehicle, we have other things we're doing in the vision-based robotic space as well. And so we came to the view that having our own inference was going to be really valuable.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Speaker 06

  But it took the better part of almost four years to build the team, develop it. These are things that take a tremendous amount of capital. We're working with TSMC on making it. But yes, we're excited about that. And then we also include upgraded cameras, and we have a new light arm, which is another sensing modality that sits at the top of the windshield, which will help us raise the capability of the vehicle ultimately to what we call Level 4, which is, think of it as the vehicle can operate empty. Or without anybody in the driver's seat, so it could like pick your kids up from school or, you know, drop you at the airport, these kinds of things.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Is LiDAR dangerous? I was telling Jordy that there was a LiDAR system that if you pointed your phone at it, it would damage the phone. And of course, you know, he said, well, if it's damaging the phone, can't be good for your eyes. How do you tell customers that, okay, our LiDAR is safe? Like, what are the, what are the parameters to optimize around?

• 2:16:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that, that was just, that was a poorly designed LiDAR system that was doing that. They don't burn out your phones. They certainly don't burn out your eyes.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:16:57Speaker 06

  But, boy, this is great. You're trying the mature. So, I mean, the beauty of looking at a LiDAR is you can use the LiDAR and the radar array to help train our cameras. Because again, this is a, this is, think of this as we're building a brain. We're building in all that on driving the vehicle. And it has the ability to see very, very far distances, much further than the human eye or camera could see, but also see in perfectly dark conditions or perfectly bright conditions. So. And it, imagine it helps with weather, like extreme weather as well? Yeah, well, the radar does particularly well where you have like optical occlusion. Yeah, like heavy fog or heavy rain or snow.

• 2:17:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:40Speaker 06

  And then the LiDAR does need light up sight because it is a laser. So the LiDAR is very helpful for training the cameras and training the radar system.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Speaker 06

  But it's, but it's also very helpful for long range.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Is, so, I mean, it seems like you've solved the inference problem, like you're, like the vehicle is ready to rock. Are you worried about, or is it a challenge to like accumulate enough data? Are you getting enough data off the current fleet that you feel like you're competitive there? Are you GPU rich or GPU poor in the, in the training phase? Are there, or is it, is it about the algorithms? Like, do you need more AI researchers? Like, what is the most, what is the rate limiting factor to actually delivering like something really top notch?

• 2:18:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, so, I mean, the first is building this, when you say data flywheel.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Speaker 06

  Every vehicle that we, every Gen two, so we launched in end of 2021, and that was what we called our Gen one vehicle.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Speaker 06

  In the summer of 2024, we updated it with a complete new set of hardware under the skin, but really, most importantly, changed the self-driving platform. And that, that's the beginning of this data accumulation platform. And what this is being used for is, there's a whole host of trigger events that we identify interesting or, or important information from the vehicles that are driving.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:05Speaker 06

  That gets back up through the cloud and then we process them, as you said, on a large, you know, a large pool of, of GPUs.

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Speaker 06

  And, yeah, this is, you know, we're talking like many thousands of GPUs, you know, enormous amount of investment in GPU spend here. But, um, but ultimately that's being used to train the model. And so we create this very large model that runs offline. And then we distill it into something that's a little bit tighter and smaller that runs real time in the vehicle on inference. And the beauty of expanding the inference capability with our Gen three platform is it allows us to run bigger models. And so as the model becomes larger and larger to understand all the nuances and sort of intricacies of driving,

• 2:19:51Speaker 06

  uh, the need to compress that to run real time, uh, you know, I should say the ceiling of what it can run and therefore the need to compress it is reduced. We don't have to compress it as much.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:20:03Speaker 06

  Oh, so, but this is, this is by far biggest investment category. Uh, it's been interesting because we've, when we first launched, a lot of the investment was going into like the fundamentals of the business of ECUs, base software, high voltage architectures, things like DC DC converters, all this stuff to make the car real. Now those platforms are pretty stable and we're now shifting a lot of those R and D dollars are going really almost, you know, entirely towards AI and our self-driving platform.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  You saw Luminar went bankrupt today. What do you think happens with that asset with their technology from here? Do you think there's? Do you think there's? I imagine there's a number. I can imagine a number of different types of businesses that would be interested in the technology and what they've built. But what's your read?

• 2:21:03Speaker 06

  That is hard for me to comment.

• 2:21:06Speaker 06

  It's not something we're looking at, but you know, I can't, I can't comment on others. There may be folks out there looking to buy it out of bankruptcy. I don't know.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Convertibles.

• 2:21:18Speaker 06

  Are we? You're selling my dad. My dad really wants a convertible.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  No, I mean, it, it, it, correct me if I'm wrong. The number one best selling convertible in the United States? Jeep Wrangler.

• 2:21:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, Jeep Wrangler is very popular.

• 2:21:35John Coogan?

  Is it possible?

• 2:21:36Speaker 06

  Why don't we do it?

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Why don't you do it?

• 2:21:38Speaker 06

  So it's so funny you ask this because we, I, I don't think I've ever said this before. Why not say it here? We, on R1, we had a version of the roof that was removable early on. And we actually tooled it and we decided not to launch it because it was just a lot of complexity.

• 2:21:57Speaker 06

  But in the fullness of time, at some point in Rivian's life, I'd love to have a version that has a top come off. If nothing else, just so that my dad will be satisfied.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  I'll buy, I'll buy, I'll buy one too. I'll buy one too.

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  Confirmed. Within the long arc of history, we are, we are launching a convertible. No, thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to see like how you guys would approach the removable top.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  I think it would be very interesting.

• 2:22:23Jordi Hays?

  Very, I, I, I don't like a lot of convertible designs specifically, but if you guys were thinking about it and saying like, well, what's the actual technology we have today? What's the best way to make it? So anyways, this was a super fun conversation and please come on again soon. We'll definitely reach out and, and have your team reach out as well if, if, whenever you have news.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on. This is a lot of fun. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  Let me also tell you about this post from nihilism disrespecter who says, so is the US economic plan really just build the machine? God Tyler, what do you think is the US's current economic plan? Really just build the machine?

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  I would agree. I think it is. I think that is basically the plan.

• 2:23:25Speaker 02

  We need to nationalize the labs.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Nationalize the labs? Why are we nationalizing the labs?

• 2:23:31Speaker 02

  That's the only way we can marshal the capital soon enough. It seems easy right now. Everyone's like, oh, it's so, you know, you can raise so easily. Give me, you know, three years.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  When you need 10 trillion.

• 2:23:41Speaker 02

  Or even what is it?

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  The $10 trillion training run.

• 2:23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, $10 trillion cluster. There's only a couple of ways you can get that.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I feel like there's a way that the government can foot the bill. Well, well, not fully nationalizing, right? There's got to be a way.

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, certainly, you know, maybe not nationalized, but there's a lot of ways where it's like, it probably does make sense in some sense to subsidize intel, stuff like that.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Well, react to this, the fact that Sergey Karayev, Karayev says it's the annual reminder, the years left to escape the permanent underclass. It was infinity in 2020. It was infinity years to escape the permanent underclass in 2021. And for the last four years, it's been exactly two years to escape the permanent underclass. Feels like the AI thing isn't actually creating a permanent underclass like it was supposed to.

• 2:24:30Speaker 02

  Just two more years, bro. Then this time it's actually different. Yeah.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  Just two more years. Anyway, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  Okay. So John, actually I had a question. So. I'm always curious, like, it seems like in self-driving,

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:52Speaker 02

  there's like Tesla, and then there's Kama.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:54Speaker 02

  And I think of those as kind of the leaders, right?

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:56Speaker 02

  But, you know, Kama, there's like the open source, there's Open Pilot.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:59Speaker 02

  So why, it seems like there just aren't that many manufacturers that are using Open Pilot? Is there like a reason, are they, is it like George Hart, he just like hates big manufacturers and he wants to keep it?

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Well, so, so, I mean, I'm not exactly sure the open source license. I imagine that the open source license says you can't resell this. Now, the question is, if you bake it into a car, I would imagine most, most companies, like Tesla sells self-driving as an upsell. So you buy a Tesla, it doesn't just give you the Tesla's full self-driving system for free, you have to pay and upgrade. I would imagine that Rivian matches that pricing model eventually. And so if you build on open source software that says you can reuse it, you can, you can use this open source software, but you cannot sell it, I believe that, isn't that the Apache license?

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49John Coogan?

  There's a few different licenses.

• 2:25:50Speaker 02

  MIT.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  One, uh, there's, I think MIT license, you can do whatever you want with. But there's one license that says you, you can use it, but you can't resell it.

• 2:25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, not for commercial use.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. Like, the license transfers down the chain. And so if you're giving it away, you have to get, if they give it to you, you have to give it to your customer. So you can't monetize that way. So there, there's that. There's also the possibility, again, this is just off the top of my head, but I would imagine that the, is it the NHTSA, National Highway Transport Authority? I believe that if it's coming from an OEM, from a vehicle manufacturer, and it's making claims about this is a level two system, the level three system, you can take your eyes off the road, you can take your hands off the wheel, that probably has to go through a certification that Kama doesn't necessarily have to go through a certification for.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  So you're in this scenario where if you're effectively white labeling Kama, maybe you don't, like, you're, you would be subject to more, a higher level of regulation because you're not a third-party product. So. I would imagine that you still like take a peek at the open pilot repo and see how they're doing it, but then ultimately you go and build your own sort of proprietary stack.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess also for, I mean, Rivian, they're using LiDAR, so it's like just not compatible.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, LiDAR, also just like way more cameras too, like the the open pilot system is built on two cameras on the on the front of the device and then one on the back that looks at the driver's face. And so you have a wide angle and then sort of a telephoto that will show you the road far away and then the full surroundings. But most cars, Tesla, I'm sure the Rivian, will typically have cameras on both both side mirrors. They'll also have cameras on the back, cameras, you know, multiple on the front. So you just get way more data. And that's why I think he was pushing this concept

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  of like, we're like, the autonomy compute module three ACM three is capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second. It's like, why do you need so many pixels? Because you have multiple cameras that are feeding you 30 frames a second, 60 frames a second. And so you need to be processing all of that. Whereas Open Pilot is not designed for a camera that's mounted on the bumper, because it doesn't have a wire that goes to the bumper. It's just a phone that's stuck to the windshield effectively.

• 2:28:21Jordi Hays?

  One more note, I believe Rivian uses Luminar as a supplier.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  And so hence why he couldn't comment.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  But he said he wasn't looking at buying.

• 2:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is, but I mean, they supply it for Volvo.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  They might be using a different one going forward.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? But they just made that announcement. So potentially, but I'm sure they have a variety of vendors that they're speaking with, but.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Interesting. Oh, well, well, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. How did you sleep last night? Did you? Are you back in the game fully? Holiday season's upon us.

• 2:29:01Jordi Hays?

  I slept.

• 2:29:02John Coogan?

  Holiday parties are here.

• 2:29:03Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  I got a 93, though.

• 2:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Saturday.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  Caught up. Saturday was rough. The holiday party came through. I made it out with a 69. Not good.

• 2:29:12John Coogan?

  Avoid them. Avoid the VC holiday party entirely. If you care about your sleep, go to aidsleep.com.

• 2:29:18Jordi Hays?

  I got a fifty. I got a fifty-four.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Fifty-four on the night of the VC holiday party. Rough.

• 2:29:24Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Uh, fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized at aidsleep.com. Um, well, we have our next guest in the restroom waiting room, Scott Kupor. Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, Scott. How are you doing? Great to see you again. Thanks so much for hopping back on the show.

• 2:29:42Scott Kupor?

  I did not wear my elf outfit for today, but uh.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  No. Uh, we, we were, we were this, uh, just to do a little inside baseball, we were this close to putting on full Santa suits. And then the team said, you know, we're, we're, we're talking to a, you know, US government official.

• 2:29:59Scott Kupor?

  I was gonna say, I thought, I thought I was being aggressive. I went sans jacket today. I'm like, I took my.

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  Very, very casual, very casual, but you're a serious guy. You're a serious guy, so.

• 2:30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you, so you're originally, yeah, but uh, anyway, uh, give us, uh, give us an update on what's new in your world.

• 2:30:17Scott Kupor?

  Yeah. So we just announced a really exciting new program today that I'd love to tell you and your listeners about.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:30:21Scott Kupor?

  Uh, it's called US Tech Force. Uh, so this is, woo, all right. This is a two, two, two-year program where we are recruiting a thousand engineers, product managers, data scientists, AI specialists into government. You'll work in government for two years. Uh, literally every agency in the government basically is participating in this. So if you want to work at Department of War or Health and Human Services or State Department or IRS, whatever you want to do, like we've got opportunities. And the whole idea is how do we modernize the entire, you know, federal government infrastructure? So we've got a real challenge in government. Number one is just, obviously we need more smart people who've got like modern software development, modern AI expertise.

• 2:31:00Scott Kupor?

  And then we're also really have not done a good job of recruiting early career people. So, uh, if you look at kind of people earlier in their career, only about seven percent of the federal workforce is early career. And at all of the companies, all the companies that you guys, you know, talk to on a daily basis, I bet you that number is like twenty-five or thirty percent. So we are by at least a factor of three to one in a real world of hurt in terms of being able to recruit and retain, uh, early career people. So this is a two-year program. We're doing this in partnership with about 25 of the tech companies that you all know and love. So Coinbase, Robin Hood, Databricks, Snowflake, Nvidia, XAI, OpenAI. And what those companies are doing is they're going to help us kind of create a program around this. So in addition to working in your day job in government, we will have a speaker series

• 2:31:45Scott Kupor?

  with, you know, we'll get Sam Altman to come, you know, talk to you and tell you about what it's like to work at OpenAI. We're going to do career development. And then at the end of the two years, these private companies have all agreed to kind of participate in a job fair where we're going to showcase all the work that these guys have done. And you know what? If you want to go in the private sector, God bless you, go do that. If you want to stay in government, we'll find a job for you. But we're not asking you to make a 40-year commitment. We're asking people to do, you know, do good for their country for two years, solve some of the world's biggest and toughest problems, and then we will gladly help you in terms of your private sector career opportunities.

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  A thousand people, how, assuming this goes well, it feels, you know, extremely critical in this moment. Is this something you want to like 10x, you know, for the next two-year period? Where does this go?

• 2:32:30Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. So I think there's two big opportunities here. One is just, look, there's way more demand than for a thousand engineers in government. So yes, if this is 5,000, 10,000, I think we'll still be barely scratching the surface of what the needs are. And then more importantly, what we're trying to do is we're trying to do a more efficient way of hiring by centralizing a lot of the hiring. So at my department, OPM, we're going to do all the outbound recruitment. We're going to do all the initial screening. We're going to do all the initial assessments for people. And then we're going to hand the agencies a list of, you know, here's a thousand people who have passed like the technical qualifications you told us were necessary for the job. Now you all, quite frankly, compete against one another and convince these people why they should work at HHS versus Department of War or others. And if this works, I think this is going to be a model for how we do kind of centralized

• 2:33:14Scott Kupor?

  hiring going forward in the government. So we hire a ton of program managers, HR people, financial analysts. Like, there's no reason why an applicant should have to know that 40 different agencies are hiring for a program manager. All that person should need to know is like, my skills are in demand by the US government. I'm going to centrally apply to this, to OPM. And then my resume is going to basically get circulated to all the interested agencies. And then, you know, I basically kind of have my pick of the litter of figuring out which one is best aligned with my career objectives.

• 2:33:43John Coogan?

  Okay, um, walk me through how, um, how someone in one of these roles in part of the tech force could actually have an impact. I, uh, I worked at the Census Bureau, maybe 15 years ago. Uh, yeah. And, and I would, I would have been like a tech force person. Like I came in and they gave me a, like a stack of papers and a pencil. And they were like, we do stuff on pen and paper here. And I was like-

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, John worked his way to managing a team of like 100 people very quickly as a college student.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  It was a very, it was a very funny story.

• 2:34:16Jordi Hays?

  He made the most of it.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  But, but, but, but our job was to go around on a map and, and, and interview people in different houses. And I was like, we should use Google Maps. Google would just put all of the, put all the addresses that you need to go to into Google Maps and then you know exactly where you need to go that day. Uh, and of course they were like, no, no, no, we don't have a deal, right?

• 2:34:33Scott Kupor?

  That's heresy, my child.

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. So like, I didn't necessarily have the authority to just tell the entire, you know, organization as a, we're using Google now. Also, there's probably some sort of privacy thing. There's a whole bunch of reasons why, you know, you can't just fire it up. But how, how do you, how are, how do you empower like the tech force folks to actually have like a positive impact that like reverberates throughout the organization?

• 2:34:57Scott Kupor?

  Yeah. So you are a hundred percent right. And this is why a lot of these programs traditionally have not accomplished what we'd hoped it'd accomplish. Cause what happened is someone like you, a smart guy, let's assume that for a second, right? A smart guy, a smart guy gets rocked into the blob that is the US government basically, right? So you're right. Like you will just, you basically have no authority. You have no ability to get things done. So what we're doing here is there's two critical differences we're doing here. Number one is if you are one of these thousand folks, you are going to go over as a team to an agency. So I can just, I'll give you an example. Uh, you know, for example, at IRS, you know, they probably could hire several hundred of these people. I don't know. Uh, so there are going to be several hundred people who will be part of this team. So number one, you're going to be part of that group. Number two, as I mentioned, we're going to create a programmatic piece around this. So your buddies who are

• 2:35:41Scott Kupor?

  at HHS or your buddies who are at State Department, you're going to see them, you know, once a month, twice a month at a speaker series, at dinners and stuff like that. So you're going to get- Real good networking across pollinization. And then thirdly, to avoid the problem you're talking about is we're not going to drop you into the blob. We're basically going to have you as a full unit at basically reporting into kind of, you know, senior political leadership in those organizations. And they're going to decide what you do. So you're not going to come in here and like manage a contractor, which is unfortunately, you know, a lot of what does happen inside these organizations. But we're going to create basically a separate team that can do a lot of the bespoke development that has cover from the most senior political people in the organization. So you're totally right. And your experience is not unusual, by the way. That's, that's a lot of what I've heard from people as we try to figure out what to do.

• 2:36:25Scott Kupor?

  And so our hope is that by combination of those things, we can avoid that problem. Cause look, for this to work, like what I'm trying to test is two things. One is like, you know, can we actually solve the modernization problem in government, which I'm quite convinced with smart people we can. And then two is we demonstrate that the work you do here is valuable, not just to the government, but valuable to the private sector, such that if you want to go get a private sector job, the private sector looks at what you did and says, wow, like those skills are generalizable to whatever, Google, Facebook, you know, Coinbase, you name your favorite company. Uh, and so we've got to make sure that the people here are successful.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think are the most overlooked agencies, interesting kind of corners of the government that are going to be hiring through tech force? I think we, I, I think, uh, uh, the guy from Gumroad, I saw him, he's at the IRS. Yeah. Uh, we've seen Doge people over at the treasury. Yeah. Uh, but, but what are some kind of overlooked opportunities?

• 2:37:22Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, so there's real, I mean, so like there are really good people, quite frankly, across the board. But yes, look, the obvious ones, of course, are Department of War. You know, it's really cool to do drone stuff and that's awesome. And some people want to do that. But you know, like interior is doing a bunch of actually very cool stuff. Um, uh, energy. So if you're interested in energy, um, you know, they're doing a bunch of like supercomputer like stuff to basically, you know, make sure that, uh, they can have, you know, like quantum computing work and stuff like that. They've got to solve like the broad energy good problems. That's pretty cool. You know, CMS, so Dr. Oz over at CMS is trying to redesign kind of how consumers interact with CMS. So, uh, you know, something like, for example, an integrated position directory, which I know sounds like very commonplace these days, but like that doesn't exist.

• 2:38:05Scott Kupor?

  So there's kind of a combination of what I would call like backend infrastructure stuff. And then the other part of this that's going to be really cool is, you know, My friend and yours, I think you guys know Joe Gebbia, who's one of the co-founders of Bear B and B. Yeah. Who's been sitting literally just behind me in the office here at OPM, helping us redesign our retirement services application. He's now starting this whole thing called Design for America, right? Which is basically this very broad, like, you know, design-oriented relook at all the applications that are customer-facing in government. So you can think of this also as an opportunity to take the work he's doing on the front end, coupled with a lot of the modernization stuff that has to happen on the back end. And, you know, collectively, I think we can really transform kind of the way government services are delivered and, you know, quite frankly, provide a much better service to the American people. Fantastic.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:38:51Scott Kupor?

  Where can people go to get started? Is there just a web form to apply? Yes, there is. Yes, it turns out we have a web form. There we go. You can go. Joe Gebbia? Designed by Joe himself?

• 2:39:01Jordi Hays?

  By Gebbia?

• 2:39:02Scott Kupor?

  Exactly. Actually, Joe Gebbia.

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:39:05Scott Kupor?

  Yes, exactly. There we go. By the way, it's a, I just learned it's Gebbia, not Gebbia. Unless he's pulling, unless he's pulling a fast one on me. Can you imagine? We often correct our pronunciation. Yeah, Joe Gebbia. Joe Gebbia. So you go to TechForce, you can go to either at US TechForce, which is our X handle, or you can go to techforce.gov. Cool. Or you can go to my Twitter, at SKU POR. All those places will point you to the right one. Apply. Tell your friends, tell your family. This will be a great, like, dinner conversation over the Christmas table to say that, you know, you're now coming out of the closet in terms of working in the basement and you're ready to, ready to kind of get a real job. I love it.

• 2:39:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm very, I'm very excited about this. I mean, I can see, I'm excited for people like all over the career kind of spectrum, people that have done 20 years in industry and see an opportunity to come back and serve the country in this way. And in the future, young people coming out of college that are highly motivated, have a skill set and can apply it and, you know, across all these different touchpoints. Very exciting.

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 2:40:15Scott Kupor?

  Thank you guys so much. Yeah. Have a great holiday season.

• 2:40:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to get the update. Cheers.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about getbezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. And let me also tell you about Wander.com. Book of Wander with inspiring views. What a great place to go for that. We're getting to the holiday ad reads. Hotel-grade amenities, dream beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. You know the other really good gift this holiday season?

• 2:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Hit me.

• 2:40:46John Coogan?

  A billboard. Adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plant, buy, and measure out-of-home with precision.

• 2:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Put a billboard under the Christmas tree, or at least a credit for a billboard.

• 2:40:56John Coogan?

  Yes, absolutely. Well, we have our next guests, Colin and Samir from, of course, The Colin and Samir Show.

• 2:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Two living legends.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. They're gonna come and sit down here. Good to see you guys. Welcome, welcome. Here live. Good to see you in the UltraDome. Good to see you, Sam. How you doing?

• 2:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you guys in person.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, man. Finally.

• 2:41:22Samir Chaudry?

  Can I raise this? Because everyone just became very aware of my height when you shook my hand.

• 2:41:27Jordi Hays?

  No, that's John's the tallest person here.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  I have the worst frame. I said, "Look at the camera."

• 2:41:32Samir Chaudry?

  I look like I'm under the desk right now.

• 2:41:34Speaker 09

  You guys, do you lean back?

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  Stay off the wide. Stay on the tight, guys. Stay on the tight.

• 2:41:41Samir Chaudry?

  You read my rider.

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know, I know. For a while, that wide was a 15-millimeter or something. And it looked insane. I looked way bigger than the guest. Now it's like evening out.

• 2:41:52Speaker 09

  What an incredible holiday vibe here, guys.

• 2:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this signed.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  We got a signed holiday event.

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  That's going straight to the top. Straight to the top.

• 2:42:03John Coogan?

  We were very, very close to being in full Santa suits. I had it out.

• 2:42:08Jordi Hays?

  It is Christmas week. You can see our little elf.

• 2:42:09Samir Chaudry?

  He's in it. He's in it.

• 2:42:11Jordi Hays?

  With the bells.

• 2:42:12John Coogan?

  I think we will be doing. I do think we will be doing the Santa outfits tomorrow.

• 2:42:19Jordi Hays?

  This is maybe the last time we wear suits this year.

• 2:42:20John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  The rest is.

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, it's been a wild year for us. It's been a wild year for you. What have been the standout moments for you this year as you look back on it as two creators?

• 2:42:33Samir Chaudry?

  I actually think we're in a standout moment right now in everything that's happening with Netflix and Warner. And like the conversation around that. I actually think has a lot to do with YouTube creators and what has happened with YouTube.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:42:46Samir Chaudry?

  And I think between that and then what we just saw with Disney and Sora, I think these are two topics that we, it's worth getting into and giving our perspective as creators of what's happening.

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like the notable thing is in all the antitrust debate and conversation, everyone's like, "Look, look at YouTube."

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  YouTube's smoking it up.

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Look at all that watch time.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Do you buy that? Do you buy the YouTube, like, because there is a narrative in Hollywood that Warner Brothers and Netflix are too powerful together, it's too crazy, and then a lot of people are saying, "Hey, YouTube's like running away with the whole game." This is a sideshow. Where do you stand on it?

• 2:43:21Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, I mean, look, Greg Peter said that as a quote, right? That like, even if you put these two together, it's still smaller than YouTube. Which is such an interesting justification of why the deal should go through. But I think the reality is, like, Neil Mohan was just named Time CEO of the Year. And I think his positioning and what YouTube has done really well, two guys who've been on the platform for 15 years, his positioning is they build the best stage. Essentially evaluate it like an open mic night for the internet. It's just, anyone can go on there and see. You literally don't know, we don't know if like the greatest piece of content could be uploaded today, YouTube has no idea. And I don't think you can compete with that. The fact that they don't pay for content.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:07Speaker 09

  The fact that people will upload with the chance of getting distribution and not even looking for the economics. The economics are there. Like, if you can create content, obviously, that gets millions of views, like, there are many ways to monetize, but that's pretty dangerous in a good way for YouTube to sit in that place where like, someone can just, there's a guy who spent two years making a documentary about bird watching.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:30Speaker 09

  And was like, "I'll just put it on YouTube for free." And it's incredible.

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Who's this?

• 2:44:33Samir Chaudry?

  His name's Owen Riser. It's an amazing documentary. It's called Listers. It's it has like almost 3 million views now. And he didn't know how he wanted to monetize it. He had offers from streamers, but just didn't want to do it. Put it on YouTube and put his Venmo link in the description.

• 2:44:48Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:44:50Samir Chaudry?

  And he, in the time we talked to him, which was like 2, 3 weeks after we put out the doc, he had been Venmoed $75,000.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  Whoa, that's amazing.

• 2:44:58Samir Chaudry?

  Which is unbelievable, but like that, that, this model of just kind of like, I don't think we talk enough about the fact that you can just upload a video or what we're doing right now is just being, it's just live. Right? And like to do that 20 years ago was impossible. And so I think it's going to be really challenging when you're Netflix and you're, you know, spending money on something like Stranger Things. And like you're, you're placing a bet, you're placing a bet that you think the audience will like it based on historical data or based on packaging actors and like old school Hollywood, you know, technique. Whereas YouTube's like, yeah, like I think you'll like this. And if you don't, I'll just get data to figure out what you'll like next.

• 2:45:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I think that's why, that's why Netflix and Paramount value this IP at, to such an extreme degree. Because that's the one thing I feel like YouTube hasn't done is like creating really valuable IP, I think, takes decades. Like you have to build it up.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  It seems like no amount of money can just create a new Superman or a new Spider-Man. And it feels like we would have gotten that out of YouTube, just the broad economic forces, where we certainly would have got it out of Netflix. And we have it a little bit with Squid Game and Stranger Things, to your point, but it just, with all the tech money, all the money, there's so much of incentive. But there's just no shortcut for, okay, this has been, my, my dad watched this and I watched it with my dad. And then I watched it with my kids. And like, I'm going on Generation Free to Star Wars right now.

• 2:46:24Jordi Hays?

  When I think about, when I think about YouTube IP, I think of like Miss Rachel, which is like, like I think at some point she could trade herself out. And have, and have an actor like.

• 2:46:35Samir Chaudry?

  I think about Dude Perfect and Good Mythical Morning.

• 2:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:39Samir Chaudry?

  So get Rhett and Link with Good Mythical Morning. They're on 3,000 episodes right now of a morning show that people have grown up on. It's been around for near 2 decades now. Like it's daily. I think there's, there's a lot of value to what they've built. They've built like a big. Company with writers and like they could either someone else could take over that show or they can sell this catalog of relatively evergreen content. Dude Perfect is expanding right now. They've been around also for almost two decades. They just launched Dude Perfect Outdoors. They launched a new podcast like they can expand that universe pretty well. So I do think like really good IP is building on YouTube. It's all gonna take time, but again, the amazing thing about the platform that is YouTube is that, you know.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  I guess the question is like, like you pointed this out to me the first time you were on the show was that there are, there are, I forget exactly the stat, but it was something like, like there's a ton of young kids where their favorite person is someone no one else knows. And it's sort of a referendum on like the NIMSELF phenomenon that you can be niche, huge in that niche, like you are getting stopped for a signature by that fan?

• 2:47:46Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:46John Coogan?

  Or never heard of them. Like, like, you know, just a bunch of people that are like,

• 2:47:50Samir Chaudry?

  I mean, the four of us could walk down the street here.

• 2:47:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:47:53Samir Chaudry?

  And there could be people who are like, holy shit, it's John and Jordy.

• 2:47:56John Coogan?

  And then have to explain everything about what you do to the next person.

• 2:47:59Samir Chaudry?

  The opposite.

• 2:48:00John Coogan?

  Whereas that's not true for Spider-Man. That's not true for Star Wars. There's certain things that have broken through to its, its household name level. And I think Mr. Beast has done that for sure. Dude Perfect, yes, to some degree, but it just feels like it's a function. It's not saying that it can't happen. It's just a function of time more than money or anything else. And I think if Dude Perfect 20 years, super impressive, incredible. But it takes 50 to be a 50 year old property. Like, there's just no, we had the acquired guys on the show and, and we were talking about like, why should we ring the gong for you? What is it? And, and the metric that I was the most like envious of was they've been doing it for 10 years.

• 2:48:38Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  And it's like, it's like.

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder if it's actually a function of you need like three generations to grow up on the content in order for it to be durable IP.

• 2:48:49Speaker 09

  That is true. We're just getting to the point where there are creators like Rhett and Link or Dude Perfect that are going towards 20 years. Yeah. Right? So we're seeing these creators do this for the first time.

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:48:59Samir Chaudry?

  Well, I think on this, like, on the point of Netflix, YouTube, Warner, like, we'll see what happens, but I do think it's interesting that Netflix, in order to compete, is, it needs to acquire a bigger catalog.

• 2:49:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:10Samir Chaudry?

  And maybe, maybe, maybe with what they're doing, they're starting to also offer deals to podcasters.

• 2:49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. At what point, at what point do they just open up the platform and say, here's an upload button?

• 2:49:19Speaker 09

  I think 2026.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:49:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Whoa!

• 2:49:22Speaker 09

  I think there's gonna be a creator program.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:24Speaker 09

  Of some sort, because even if you look.

• 2:49:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe that's more curated, but, but.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  I've heard you can do that on Amazon Prime.

• 2:49:29Samir Chaudry?

  Yes.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure if you have a documentary, you can just upload and say, I'm gonna charge 20 bucks.

• 2:49:33Samir Chaudry?

  Markiplier did it. Yes, yes, you can do that.

• 2:49:35Speaker 09

  I think if you look what Netflix did with Mark Rober, massive YouTube creator, they took his top 10, basically greatest hits from YouTube, repackage them, they're on Netflix right now, and it was a top 10 show on Netflix, number one kids' show.

• 2:49:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:49:48Speaker 09

  They also signed a deal with him to make a new series, a reality show.

• 2:49:51Samir Chaudry?

  He also did a Christmas special with Elmo, directed by another creator, Daniel Thrasher, so very cool, very cool.

• 2:49:57Speaker 09

  But that shows me that they have an openness to content that I don't think they would have been open to a couple of years ago, that maybe they wouldn't have deemed premium enough.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:50:06Speaker 09

  Right.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  But, I mean, at a certain point, like, just, even just the ad sense is, if you just took the ad sense from a Mr. Beast video, like, that's enough to go shoot a Hollywood. That is the budget of a Hollywood 20-minute production.

• 2:50:17Samir Chaudry?

  Here's the other, the other. Maybe, but that's, yeah, maybe. I think, um.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  It just feels like there's enough, there's enough money.

• 2:50:22Samir Chaudry?

  I think Jimmy's ad sense is very different than other people's ad sense.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:50:24Samir Chaudry?

  I think what you guys have probably experienced is sponsorship dollars are.

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:50:27Samir Chaudry?

  Are gonna drive, you know, the, the, the majority of production budgets.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:50:31Samir Chaudry?

  But, uh, my, my concern with Netflix, and, and as they move into podcasting, is like, their appetite for niche communities, because they tried this with fitness at one point. They did a partnership with Nike where they were trying to compete essentially with Peloton. They're like, maybe people will come here to work out. The audience was too small. And like, they don't do well with niche.

• 2:50:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:49Samir Chaudry?

  And our world, like we just talked about, is like, it's, choose your own adventure from a media perspective, and YouTube is great at that.

• 2:50:57John Coogan?

  Their magic is creating selling points.

• 2:50:58Samir Chaudry?

  Well, here's what, here's what, um.

• 2:50:59John Coogan?

  Like, like, taking K-pop Demon Hunters and making it a national conversation, making Squid Game a national conversation.

• 2:51:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the big, exactly.

• 2:51:05John Coogan?

  That's the game that they're in.

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  The big thing that, uh, that Netflix is missing, and maybe their opportunity to grow watch time, is there's nothing real time on Netflix at all. So much of the time that I wanna watch content, it's like, I'll watch some. Geopolitical like creator on YouTube or watch like what happened F1 commentary reaction, right? Netflix does has nothing for me if I want to kind of understand what happened in the last 24 or 48 hours, right? And I just feel like a lot of watch time on the internet is that kind of more real time. There's like evergreen entertainment content that Netflix is dominant in and YouTube, but YouTube has both. And so I think that can explain some of the differential.

• 2:51:46Samir Chaudry?

  I think this actually it it it the conversation moves nicely into the Disney Sora thing and largely because something.

• 2:51:54Jordi Hays?

  What was your immediate reaction to the news?

• 2:51:56Samir Chaudry?

  To Disney Sora?

• 2:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:57Samir Chaudry?

  It's like it was gonna happen. I'm surprised they're the ones who did it, but I think what what Colin and I have been kicking around is like the video gamification of everything where even if you look at prediction markets, right? So like you guys obviously have a partnership with Polly Market and you look at Kalshi, Polly Market, like everything is a video game, right? And if we look at the early origins of YouTube, it was video games. So look at the early origins of Twitch, it was video games. And I think our expectation as audience members is that all of our media is interactive. We can play with it. We can touch and feel it and it's only getting increasingly more interactive. So the Disney Sora conversation, especially like as generative AI has come into the picture, it's like generative AI itself is entertainment.

• 2:52:39Samir Chaudry?

  So me generating images and videos is time I'm spending entertaining myself, right? It's not just utility, it's entertainment.

• 2:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:47Samir Chaudry?

  And I think obviously if you have this IP, you guys just talked about like it takes 50 years to build IP, look at Disney's IP, it's hundreds of years. You have this IP, how do you how do you monetize it? Well, what's really interesting, my assumption, I haven't read into this, if this is what's happening, but with Sora is that if you use one of the 200 characters that's licensed to Sora over the next three years, there's likely some fraction, you know, micro payment going back to Disney. And if it's not, I think that will be the model where essentially, yeah, I'll give you Mickey Mouse, just give me like the a fraction of a penny every time someone uses Mickey Mouse. Now, like from an audience perspective, it's interactive media, it's more fun for me to to prompt and generate Mickey Mouse in the context that I want him.

• 2:53:28Samir Chaudry?

  And then for Disney, like, they have these, this IP that can be generating like very small amounts of money, but you'd scale that out to like thirty million people using it, or twenty million people using it. It's like, that gets pretty significant.

• 2:53:39Speaker 09

  It's kind of their move towards UGC in the same way that Netflix needs to open up a creator model.

• 2:53:44Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:44Speaker 09

  Let's open up our IP for a lot of creators. And like they said, some of it's gonna come to Disney Plus.

• 2:53:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I, I think it's, uh, I, I thought it was smart for a lot of reasons. I think, I, I think OpenAI specifically needed some competitive edge around, uh, I think people were, Banana Banana has like really broken through. I have two account, I have account, I have an account that I just have free models for the different labs. So I did the same prompt yesterday with Gemini and ChatGPT for an image generation. And Gemini was like ten seconds, ChatGPT on the free plan takes like, I didn't even come back. I didn't actually go back and see it, but it took like multiple minutes. And so having something that, uh, gives them a reason to drive a bunch of new paid subscriptions, I think.

• 2:54:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and like specifically get the next generation, uh, Disney products are like a drug for children. They're addicted, right? Um, and, uh, and I think it's like adding a personalization layer that didn't really exist for Disney. Like you go to the parks and you could like do as, uh, uh, have a meal with a character or whatever. And that was personalized or take a picture or something like that. But I think if you're Disney and you're trying to drive more signups to Disney Plus, more retention, more park visits. I think it's actually smart, cause if you put, uh, the only thing my three-year-old knows about AI, and he doesn't even call it AI, but he's like, make a dino picture. He just, that's like stuck in his head, uh, cause it's such a fun experience of like, we take a picture,

• 2:55:14Jordi Hays?

  we take a selfie and then we just make it, make us look like dinosaurs or whatever. He loves it, right? So Disney doing that and getting, uh, you know, I'm sure a lot of people will say this is like terrible and shouldn't happen, but getting a bunch of young people to have that experience of like making a Disney part of their like everyday experience in life, I think is gonna be, have like powerful downstream effects.

• 2:55:34Speaker 09

  I feel like, um, Sora was a bit of a Napster moment for visuals. Like Sora came out and sort of broke the mold of what we'd expect. And a lot of people started using the IP anyway, and we were like, wait, you're supposed to pay for this stuff.

• 2:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:46Speaker 09

  Right? And then like a new model of streaming has emerged. And I don't think artists are particularly super excited about that model, but they've adjusted. Right? And I think this is another moment. Where it's like, oh, okay, the way that we monetize this art has shifted because of technology and it has just happened. And Disney in a way is now, I think, just coming over me like, this is already happening. People are already using our IP in ways we didn't want them to on Sora. So let's just get involved.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  Some control.

• 2:56:13Speaker 09

  And create the new model. Let's come up with the new model for how we monetize.

• 2:56:16Samir Chaudry?

  I actually think, even if you look at what you guys are doing with this show, like, I always think about a live show like yours as like your open source, you're giving open source material to the internet in a way, right? People can clip this and, and play with it and, and interact with it and talk about it and retweet it. And it's like, it's, it's a playable medium. And I would assume that there's some, some clips of this show that have extremely high viewership that no one in this building made.

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:56:42Samir Chaudry?

  Right? And so that.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Some of the, some of the clips with, yeah.

• 2:56:45Samir Chaudry?

  The best performance.

• 2:56:46Jordi Hays?

  If you probably took like, individual assets that got the most views, probably at least five out of the top 10 were posted by other people that were just.

• 2:56:55Samir Chaudry?

  The most viewed clips of the Colin and Samir show are not made by our team.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:57:00Samir Chaudry?

  For sure. If you go on TikTok, search Colin and Samir show, you search some of our interviews, like, they are all clipped by other people in ways that we wouldn't have.

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Or it's even reframed.

• 2:57:08Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  It's no longer reframed around your show, it's reframed.

• 2:57:11Samir Chaudry?

  Totally.

• 2:57:11Speaker 09

  We can't even compete with our own clips.

• 2:57:13Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:14Speaker 09

  You know, we tried doing like, oh, man, that person already put it out.

• 2:57:16Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:16Speaker 09

  And it's got more views.

• 2:57:17Samir Chaudry?

  We, we tried to compete with the internet for our own clips of our own show and we couldn't compete. And that's where I think the perspective of like Disney and Sora is like, yeah, just like, here's material to play with.

• 2:57:29John Coogan?

  Content ID type system will come for clips and from AI.

• 2:57:33Samir Chaudry?

  I think, I think it has to. I mean, I think, I think YouTube has precedent with content ID. I think, I think we'll all as creators live in the world where we're like, yeah, you can use my, same way that Sora kind of showed it. It's like, yeah, you can use my face. But I think there will be, there have to be a, a revenue share model. Like, I think for this to work properly, and maybe nobody cares about this, but.

• 2:57:54John Coogan?

  Well, it's not just revenue. So it's, it's like multi-share because it can't just be what it is. I don't know exactly if it is this way currently, but there's the, there's the thing about like, I could be using some clips from. Your show and clips from this show and this, but as soon as I put Mariah Carey's like, you know, Christmas song in there, like she's getting 100% of the revenue when she owns it, right?

• 2:58:14Samir Chaudry?

  Right.

• 2:58:14John Coogan?

  Uh, and there's like only one claimant right now. Um, but they'll need to be like slices where it's like, okay, your face was on screen for this.

• 2:58:21Samir Chaudry?

  I don't want to say it, but I'll say it. It feels like web three was starting to get onto this with fractional ownership, right? Where you can tokenize yourself in a way of like, yeah, if this token is used, I receive X percent.

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. You may or may not actually need the blockchain underlying, but like this idea of fractionalization makes a ton of sense.

• 2:58:37Samir Chaudry?

  But there was an idea of that where like Grimes gave her voice out, right? And like, it was like a 50 50 rev share if you used her voice. And like, I think that maybe will happen, but I, I also think just the internet and like YouTube specifically, I think will look pretty different in that not only will we say you can use my IP in my face, but I think you'll take like the full length episode of your guys' show, or let's say our show. And I think you'll just type in, you know, I got seven minutes. Can you just give this to me in seven minutes? Like you can use their voice and like their style of animation, but just like, give me the, give me the seven minute version of this.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:10Samir Chaudry?

  I, I think if you, if you've ever played with notebook LM, you start to see like how like manufacturing your own entertainment where I could, I could go, give me TBN, give me Colin and Samir and give me acquired last episode, but like summarize it all for my 21 minute drive.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:27Samir Chaudry?

  Right? Connected to Google Maps. It's like.

• 2:59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm always, I'm always interested in where that lives. Like, does that live in the consumer side or on the platform side or on the creator side? Cause like, we literally do that. We have a 20, 20 to 30 minute cut down of the three hour show.

• 2:59:43Samir Chaudry?

  Right.

• 2:59:43John Coogan?

  That we cut down, we edit.

• 2:59:45Samir Chaudry?

  Diet TBP.

• 2:59:45John Coogan?

  Diet TBP. Right. It's very, yeah, we, it's been.

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because I've seen other people create.

• 2:59:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:51Jordi Hays?

  Seen other people create like diet versions of their show now. And when. When we were first like conceptualizing the show based on people's feedback of like I want the show in 20, 30 minutes. I was like, oh, we'll just call it diet TV PN. It's like all of the flavor like, like way, you know, way less calories. And John was like, diet? Like, does that make, does that make any sense? But it is a good.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  It's like not an industry term.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  It's not an industry term, but it's.

• 3:00:18Samir Chaudry?

  No, but it makes, it makes more universal sense. But anyway, I think you'll be able to make your own version of diet.

• 3:00:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:00:23Samir Chaudry?

  And like, but you'll have to say yes to that. And again, there will have to be some new way of like, yes, so long as I'm compensated when that happens. But if it is you, us, you know, Ben and David and you guys in one episode like, also the question is who's weighted heavier?

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:42Samir Chaudry?

  Right? Is it acquired? Cause they're like the luxury brand of, of, they're the Rolex of the space.

• 3:00:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's funny.

• 3:00:49Speaker 09

  You may not even have to ask the platform to do it from an audience perspective.

• 3:00:52Samir Chaudry?

  You think the platform just does it?

• 3:00:53Speaker 09

  I think at some point, yeah, they're like, nah, we know better than you based off of what you've already told us in your behavior.

• 3:00:59John Coogan?

  Potentially. But what, what, what's odd is that the AI models, they're really good at a lot of things, but they, they have not yet been good at clipping. Like, like you don't want to go up against the internet, but I would say, you know, if there's five mega viral Colin Samir clips that, that you guys didn't clip, they were, those were clipped by humans though.

• 3:01:16Samir Chaudry?

  Those are humans.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  Those were not.

• 3:01:17Samir Chaudry?

  Hundred percent.

• 3:01:18John Coogan?

  Because as soon as someone could do it, they would definitely run, oh yeah, run, run the prompt over all their content.

• 3:01:23Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  Let me put it out. I'll, I'll try and monetize it.

• 3:01:25Samir Chaudry?

  There's decent platforms that can get you like 65% of the way there. But yeah, you're right.

• 3:01:30John Coogan?

  They're good as tools. They're good as tools alongside the human, but the editorial, it's an editorial question.

• 3:01:35Samir Chaudry?

  There could be this show generated by AI, right? Like, I'm just saying, if you just look at the technology, like we could ingest news and figure out how to give it in like an audio.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:48Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, form contextualize, but it's not, it's not as fun. It's like that has no, I'm not.

• 3:01:53Speaker 09

  It's also nowhere near as special. Like there is something very special about what happens here day to day.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:58Speaker 09

  The set changing and like feeling like you're here in the moment.

• 3:02:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:02:01Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah. I think to clarify, like I, if anyone's listening to this being like, oh my God, they're like, this is the dystopian world content. Like there is no world where I see like this, your guys' show as an example is like, there is more room for interesting creative now than ever. Uh, if you are thinking about what is. This is maybe a bizarre way to put it, but what is like a uniquely human format? Yeah. Uh, it's why we've invested more in live events. Like we did our first big live event in New York in September and. That was with Google, right? They were a sponsor. Yeah. And it was super fun and it was great. And there's 500 people in a room and, and I think. You feel like that is, there's going to be a rise in live events for sure. Obviously, I imagine you guys are going to do some. We haven't cracked it, but.

• 3:02:45Samir Chaudry?

  You'll do something where people can show up and people will die to show up to it. Yeah. Acquired, obviously, had 6,000 people in the Chase Center like. I think, uh, good creative will always win, but I do think back to the Netflix conversation, the, the question is like. Who is the arbiter of taste in all of this? And I think the, the old Hollywood. Uh, world is like Hollywood is the arbiter of taste. We're going to show you what good is and Netflix is that, right? They're going to. Curate stuff editorially. I think that still matters. I don't want to suggest it doesn't matter. I enjoy that. The other side is that the audience is the, the arbiter of taste and the curators of what's good. And that's the.

• 3:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would be, I would, as a Netflix subscriber, I would be excited for them to have a. Corner of Netflix that's just history content from independent creators. Just like effectively like providing.

• 3:03:33Samir Chaudry?

  Like Johnny Harris.

• 3:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, stuff like that because I, I've been on YouTube, uh. To fall asleep at night, I can't watch anything tech or business related because it just kind of like.

• 3:03:42Samir Chaudry?

  It riles you up. I get it. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:43Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of ideas. So I have to just like, it's gotta be like 30 years old. Like it's gotta be like history. And something I've noticed recently is like, there's a bunch of channels getting a lot of views that are getting served in the algorithm. Uh, that are clear and I only clock that it's AI because they'll use images and then they'll be like a talk track. And there's a bunch of creators that have just nailed this format over the years, but I'm starting to hear like. This battle wasn't just a, a fight. It was, it was a turning point in history and like very like clockable as AI. And so now like in the same way on Amazon as a consumer, you're like. I just want to buy stuff on Amazon that's from brands that are over 50 years old because then I know that it's not like, I know that it's not like somebody just.

• 3:04:28Samir Chaudry?

  That's how I feel about TikTok shop. I'm, I sometimes will get caught with a product that I'm like. Hmm, maybe I want that, but if it's on TikTok shop, I'm like, I don't.

• 3:04:37John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 3:04:37Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Blank disendorsement.

• 3:04:40Samir Chaudry?

  Wait, is that not, but like, do you guys not?

• 3:04:42Jordi Hays?

  I've no, we don't have TikTok on our. No, no, no, we don't.

• 3:04:45John Coogan?

  No, no, no. I don't even have TikTok installed.

• 3:04:49Samir Chaudry?

  These guys are in deep negotiation with TikTok.

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 3:04:53Samir Chaudry?

  I've never been met with silence for that.

• 3:04:55Jordi Hays?

  It's the opposite. Actually, we're bad.

• 3:04:57Speaker 09

  The hardest digs of this year.

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  No, we're bad creators. We don't have TikTok on our phones. We got some, we have one friend that sends us TikTok links and I've never watched any of them.

• 3:05:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Not a single one.

• 3:05:07John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 3:05:07Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, we gotta, when Larry comes out and says like, I fully control TikTok now. It's mine. I've got it here on my phone.

• 3:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:16Jordi Hays?

  I trust it. You can trust it. Then I'll, I'll give it a spin.

• 3:05:19Samir Chaudry?

  You know what it is? You guys don't have TikTok, so we'll tell you about this. There is like AI creators now.

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:25Samir Chaudry?

  And that is very bizarre and dystopian to me because they, even me, and maybe I'm getting to that age where I'm part of the cohort that can't tell, but I can't tell.

• 3:05:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:36Samir Chaudry?

  And.

• 3:05:36John Coogan?

  Oh, so you're not talking about like, there is a creator that creates various animals being pulled over at DUI checkpoints and like, that's their shtick?

• 3:05:43Samir Chaudry?

  I'm talking about like an AI generated human.

• 3:05:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:46Samir Chaudry?

  Creator.

• 3:05:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:47Samir Chaudry?

  Looks human.

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:48Samir Chaudry?

  There's this.

• 3:05:49John Coogan?

  And are people in on the joke or no?

• 3:05:51Speaker 09

  It's just the pace. They're not.

• 3:05:51Samir Chaudry?

  They're not.

• 3:05:52Speaker 09

  It's the pace and, and the, the tools really have opened up a world where it is easy to create. I mean, I've like, I've seen these and I've been like, let's see if I can make one.

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  Is that sort of the biggest, is that sort of the biggest trend of, of 25, you think? Or I, I, I'm super interested in like, at a more tactical level, what's changing on YouTube? Like, um, because obviously we've been through like the eight minute shift and then the 20 minute shift and, and then, uh, you know, like clickbait to like the counter, switching to ABD and all the, all these different little moments have happened. Like, were there any, is, is it fair to say that AI is like the biggest, the biggest change in 25? Or was there another kind of meta shift that you sort of noticed?

• 3:06:31Speaker 09

  It's one that we talk a lot about is the, the shift from, you know, podcasts being the meta, when you think about the last presidential election.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:06:39Speaker 09

  To, you know, obviously like podcasts played a major part. Uh, if you look at the amount of podcast appearances and viewership that Trump got versus Kamala Harris, like it's just. The graph is unbelievable.

• 3:06:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I had this whole take during the election that it was about watch time, too. Because the crazy thing is that she not only would she would would come and go on like a smaller show with a smaller audience, but she would only do a 45 minute hit and Trump would be there for three hours. And I'm like, we know A V D, like, watch time is important.

• 3:07:06Samir Chaudry?

  We actually clocked and we wrote down how much time and I think for Trump it was like 16 hours available or maybe more and for Kamala it was like under two.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  And it's just like as a voter, if you want to just sit and be like, I want five hours of content from this person to make my decision, I'm going to listen to five hours of both and there's not five hours of one, that's a tough sell. Anyway, that looks extremely real. That I would never guess.

• 3:07:33Samir Chaudry?

  I don't know if I can show a camera. I don't even know what camera is looking at me right now.

• 3:07:37John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 3:07:37Samir Chaudry?

  There you go. I don't know if you can tell, but like the.

• 3:07:40Jordi Hays?

  So here's the thing that's gonna happen is people are people are gonna start to realize if this person has didn't post at all before 2025, they're not real. Because I feel like this year, the models.

• 3:07:51John Coogan?

  This is the comment section. Where were you in 2019?

• 3:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Check the early Instagram.

• 3:07:56Samir Chaudry?

  My understanding of how things have changed on YouTube is that like if I if I was to zoom back to when I first got on the internet, I think the amazing thing was like it was all information. We could access information in a crazy way. Like, at least when I was a kid, we would go to like the library and go to the library and try and find like a book about something. And that changed when we could search Ask Jeeves or Google or AOL or Yahoo and like we could just find out things and that was crazy. And I think the information era was capped with the rise of social media and like Facebook specifically. When Facebook came about, it wasn't just information about the world or fun facts, it was information about people.

• 3:08:39Samir Chaudry?

  And information about people was like really interesting and had gossip connected to it and had like voyeurism connected to it. It was just like this fascinating world that mirrored celebrity culture and that then ushered in the next era, which was the attention era. And the attention era was kind of brought all the way forward by, you know, someone like Mr. Beast, Jimmy, who was like, here's human psychology and here's how these algorithms, what they favor, what what are the incentives of the internet and let's push that forward. And that's like we got to that point with the meta of YouTube being all about information and attention. And I think. This next era that we're in and the biggest shift that's happened in YouTube over the past year has been a shift towards perspective. Information and attention void of perspective

• 3:09:22Samir Chaudry?

  is just completely uninteresting. And I think that that actually wasn't the case. If you're talking about like history YouTubers, we were talking to this car creator, James Pumper, he used to work at Donut Media. And he was telling us like he could, at Donut, they could get a million views of like the entire history of Volkswagen. But that, he can't do that anymore. He has to add perspective to it. The title has to be like why, or how Volkswagen-

• 3:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Why Volkswagen is Cook.

• 3:09:43Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, or how Volkswagen turned their back on us, right? And that has perspective suggested. And I think we can access information now very easily through LLMs, through search, through anything. We can actually also access like attention driving things. Meaning like scrolling TikTok captures my attention. I don't think I'll like remember any of it, or it just won't matter, but it can fill my need for something to capture my attention. But but perspective, I think is the thing that makes it stick in your brain of like, I'm coming to these guys, to Jordi and John for their perspective. I can get this information at other places. And so I think we actually saw that quite a bit on YouTube where the

• 3:10:25Samir Chaudry?

  Mr. Beastification, the kind of like big idea that drives a ton of attention is like still kind of interesting, but it's not as interesting as it used to be. And-

• 3:10:34John Coogan?

  It wasn't a growth area.

• 3:10:35Samir Chaudry?

  Someone like Marques Brownlee, who does the smartphone awards. You're like dying for his perspective on what was the best phone of the year. And I think he has a lot of longevity because his content is rooted in perspective. Emily Sundberg's another great example, like that's perspective. And so I think perspective has always mattered, but it feels like that era has really been pushed on YouTube.

• 3:10:56John Coogan?

  Using Marques as an example, do you think that which which offers more perspective? Or like Waveform Podcast, his podcast, where he can kind of riff, it's unscripted, versus a review where he has the requirements to tell you the price, the value, the specs? Does he have more, a longer leash to give more perspective in the unscripted format? Or is there an equal amount of perspective because he is who he is and he brings his perspective everywhere?

• 3:11:25Samir Chaudry?

  I think Marquez in the face to camera is the is the best perspective.

• 3:11:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:11:29Samir Chaudry?

  Marquez. And people had problems with that, like last year with um humane.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:11:34Samir Chaudry?

  People felt like his perspective was carried so much weight that it could.

• 3:11:39John Coogan?

  Bankrupt a company.

• 3:11:39Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:40Speaker 09

  Same with.

• 3:11:41Samir Chaudry?

  Same same with fiscal.

• 3:11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:42Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah. The car.

• 3:11:43Speaker 09

  And so.

• 3:11:44Samir Chaudry?

  But I think that also goes to show like how much his perspective matters and how much someone like that's so.

• 3:11:49Speaker 09

  And he's I remember he said he said a bad he told us a bad review doesn't tank a company, a bad product tanks.

• 3:11:55Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:11:57John Coogan?

  But.

• 3:11:57Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, I mean, all that to say again, like, I think if you're.

• 3:11:59Jordi Hays?

  I would be wearing a humane pin.

• 3:12:01Speaker 09

  If it were not for the review.

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  I mean, it can accelerate.

• 3:12:05Samir Chaudry?

  I think if you look at like, even if you look at like Ryan Trahan and like his videos, they they lead with like something like a really fun idea of like, I stayed in one star hotels.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:15Samir Chaudry?

  Or something. But then his perspective gets layered within 30 seconds on top where he's like his. His job is to leave a five star review at this one star place because like he wants to find the good in the world and that even that is like perspective.

• 3:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:27Samir Chaudry?

  Right? And so I think um I think POV is like, that's the era we're in on the internet. Like, if you're just.

• 3:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:34Samir Chaudry?

  Delivering me information.

• 3:12:35John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 3:12:35Speaker 09

  And POV can be style, it can be tone. Like, I think you guys are a great example. There are a lot of people talking about what you're talking about.

• 3:12:41Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:41Speaker 09

  They're not talking about it in the style that you're talking about it with the same tone.

• 3:12:45John Coogan?

  When I think about the Mr. Beast copycats, I think like there's distinctly a lack of perspective and a lack of view. It is just like, okay, yes, like. If Mr. Beast does this and you clone it and rotate that piece, like you have a slight iteration that's enough to get the views. But it wasn't actually something that was like inspired or trying to push.

• 3:13:04Samir Chaudry?

  I think you can navigate how to get views right now. Like, you can navigate how to get attention on the internet. If if you study it, if you study it enough, you know, you can navigate it, but it doesn't mean people will remember you.

• 3:13:15John Coogan?

  What's the state of the thumbnail industry, the thumbnail sub industry?

• 3:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, on on that note, I feel like there's this emergence of the creator with short form video being so powerful for discovery. There's an emergence of a content creator that might have 200,000 followers. And no viable business or even path to a viable business because they have like a bit that they run. That's really funny. And so they can get attention in a certain audience, but then. Like the pathway to monetizing it, you see this with like certain kind of. Accounts on Instagram where it's like your pathway to monetizing is like. Online casino advertising.

• 3:13:53Samir Chaudry?

  Exactly.

• 3:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so that's kind of like, that's kind of like UBI for people that are funny online. It's just like you can.

• 3:13:59Samir Chaudry?

  That is a hilarious take. That's unbelievable. Uh, and I, I totally agree with you, but that, that's.

• 3:14:05Jordi Hays?

  And I actually somewhat appreciate it because there's this guy.

• 3:14:08John Coogan?

  There's a guy who actually is sponsored by steak and he's hilarious.

• 3:14:11Jordi Hays?

  There's a guy who is so funny. I just want him to, uh, it's like.

• 3:14:15John Coogan?

  Get a better sponsor.

• 3:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Agent, something. Uh, well, I don't care what sponsor he has really. I'm not, I'm not, I don't, that's, I don't buy products based on like some guy that I see for 10 seconds. Uh, but I do, yeah, this like sort of UBI for people that are funny online right now is like gambling. And it's dark, but at the same time, there's a dark side to it, but it is.

• 3:14:40Samir Chaudry?

  What's the light side to it? Just that people are making money?

• 3:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, the light side is that, is that on a personal level, I get enjoyment out of it. And I'm like, he's providing it. It's effectively a free product.

• 3:14:49John Coogan?

  Same thing happened with sports, uh, sports podcasting. There was like a massive bubble in sports casting. The, the, the, the white pill is that like, there's a lot of people that have jobs, podcasting and that's a pretty fun job.

• 3:14:59Samir Chaudry?

  The Chinese micro dramas, right? Like Chinese micro dramas, like Real Short. Actually on the drive over here, saw ads for Real Short, like big billboards for, for Real Short. If you're unfamiliar, it's like, it's if soap operas were on Tik Tok.

• 3:15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:11Samir Chaudry?

  You know, it's a swipeable feed, but.

• 3:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the crazy thing is that those have been so successful and it's to me very much the same idea as Katzenberg's like short, short form play.

• 3:15:21Samir Chaudry?

  No, it's not the same idea. Dude, that was when we went into, I, I'll never forget walking into the Quibi pitch meeting, uh, where they, they invited a bunch of creators to come pitch shows. When, when we walked into their office, like the, the, the play there was like, spend a ton of money on content. Like they were like, we have a Spielberg movie and an Aaron Sorkin movie.

• 3:15:39Speaker 09

  It's like a hundred thousand dollars a minute for some shows.

• 3:15:41Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:41John Coogan?

  And what is it on Real Short? It's, it's, it's higher than Tik Tok, right?

• 3:15:45Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah. I don't want to totally discount what you said. You're right, Jordy. That like, what they said in the meeting, I remember, I'll never forget it. They were like, I was like, when does someone watch this? And they said, when someone is waiting for the bathroom, like in line for the bathroom, they'll, they'll, they'll flip it on and watch like seven, a seven minute increment of a show. And I remember being like, but people watch, people look at Instagram during that time. Like, how are you going to pull me into the.

• 3:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, so yeah, I guess, I guess, I guess it's hyper, it's hyper, it's hyper competitive, uh, for that time, but I think there's something to be said for.

• 3:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Slow content that's made in a slow format, which is like with production. I've been thinking about like fast and slow content. We make fast content.

• 3:16:29Samir Chaudry?

  From a production standpoint?

• 3:16:30Jordi Hays?

  From a, from a production standpoint. Like there's people that make content. John's content on tech historically was slow content. It's been two, three weeks making a video. You put it out, you get a bunch of views. We're the opposite, very fast. We're making three hours of content a day with like three hours of prep a day. And I think like taking the, taking a, a form factor like short form video and then putting a different type of content through it, which is this more cinematic, highly produced content. It works in the form of like real, real short.

• 3:17:06Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, but they're spending.

• 3:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Fundamentally.

• 3:17:08Speaker 09

  They're spending a lot less.

• 3:17:09Samir Chaudry?

  Spending way less.

• 3:17:10Speaker 09

  But also they're formulating in a way where they're earning your attention every 60 to 90 seconds. There is a hook every 60 to 90 seconds to get you to keep watching.

• 3:17:17Samir Chaudry?

  You guys know how the economics works? No. Okay, so how it works is like if you download Real Short or Drama Box, basically they're spending like typically $200,000 for a 90 minute show. Right? And it's, that's cut into like a hundred slices. And how, what's happening is you, when you download Real Short, you're getting like tokens. So it's kind of like Robo, Roblox money, like Roblox, right? So you're getting these tokens and you have to buy more and the first 11 swipes are free. You go past the 11th, you gotta make a payment. You gotta spend tokens to keep watching. Every swipe, you're spending tokens. Interesting. And you know, there's, we interviewed a director on our show, uh, who's directed 20 of these. And he is acutely aware of the fact that like some of his content has been viewed by 30 million people.

• 3:18:02Samir Chaudry?

  And when you're making micro payments, again, at that scale.

• 3:18:05Speaker 09

  Making 30 to 40 bucks if someone finishes.

• 3:18:07Samir Chaudry?

  And it can be upwards of 30 to 40 dollars if someone finishes the movie. Huge. So these, and, and the max budget is 200,000 to make these. Now, the content itself is like, you know, it's not, it's, it's not, it's soap opera content. It's not, you know, it's all speaks to like the most aggressive, you know, just. Versions of what people want on the internet, but um, the silver lining, the reason I brought this up, the silver lining is that people in Hollywood are working, people who are directors, writers, cinematographers, this is where they're working.

• 3:18:39Speaker 09

  I mean, it's by no means a perfect model in terms of like compensating actors and people working, but they are working.

• 3:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:46Speaker 09

  There are opportunities.

• 3:18:47Samir Chaudry?

  So I can unlock coins right now on Real Short. If you want to read, if you want to read some of the titles on Real Short right now.

• 3:18:52John Coogan?

  American Sniper, the last round, okay, I was actually gonna ask like, uh, you know, is it all romanticy romance?

• 3:18:57Samir Chaudry?

  I think it's mostly romance.

• 3:18:58John Coogan?

  American Sniper, that's that, the last round, that does seem like something I would watch.

• 3:19:02Samir Chaudry?

  Okay.

• 3:19:03John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm down for that.

• 3:19:04Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:05John Coogan?

  Uh, step aside, I'm the king of capital. That also seems directly targeted.

• 3:19:07Jordi Hays?

  John gets one shot.

• 3:19:08John Coogan?

  Did you, did you prep this for me?

• 3:19:09Samir Chaudry?

  It might have a geo tag on it.

• 3:19:11John Coogan?

  It seems like it does.

• 3:19:12Speaker 09

  Maybe, John, you get into acting in these.

• 3:19:14John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, some of these are, are a little, uh, a little scantily clad into, maybe this Christmas, the billionaire married a homeless girl? That's kind of interesting.

• 3:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Holds you in? China, didn't China just?

• 3:19:26John Coogan?

  They just banned that.

• 3:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:28John Coogan?

  They did? That's right. China banned.

• 3:19:31Jordi Hays?

  There was a, a ton of, I mean, there's, there's a very popular type, like, format for a show.

• 3:19:36John Coogan?

  Basically the Hallmark movie.

• 3:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, very successful guy marries or falls in love with like, a, a very normal, a normal woman. Um, and apparently China is like, has a top-down mandate to like, not do this kind of content because it's creating unrealistic expectations.

• 3:19:57John Coogan?

  Wow, interesting. Oh, I'll be, I will definitely just be randomly plucked from obscurity by a billionaire.

• 3:20:03Samir Chaudry?

  Interesting.

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  And, and it's like, well, like, statistically, that's not gonna happen, so maybe, like, marry your high school crush and have kids and build a family, uh, instead of just waiting around for a billionaire to come pluck you out of obscurity, because you've seen so many of those stories, which is like a fascinating problem to have.

• 3:20:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, amazing that stories are that popular, that it's gotten to that point.

• 3:20:22John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally, yeah, I, I do wonder, like, I mean, we've had so many discussions about the, like, the downstream effects of TikTokification or YouTube-ification or whatever, Mr. Beastification. Uh, I, I wonder if we're gonna be having that discussion in a year or two, because it feels like people are just learning what Real Short even is.

• 3:20:39Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, for sure. It's early, it's early stage.

• 3:20:41John Coogan?

  Obviously, the business is working now. What happens to a generation raised on it? Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know.

• 3:20:47Samir Chaudry?

  The last thing I'll say, just to close the loop on like what I think big metas that have changed on YouTube. Another one is length of content and serialization. Meaning like creators are approaching YouTube as if they're making a show, like a series that you can binge. Cleo Abrams is a great example. Like Huge If True is a show. It has a format to it. It has an intro card. That could, similar to Mark Rober, be pulled onto Netflix as an explainer show.

• 3:21:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:21:13Samir Chaudry?

  That explains cool science formats. And from the era, even when I was watching you as a YouTuber, like we all weren't looking. We knew we were making content that fit a format that was, you know, should have been repeatable if we were at our best. We weren't making a show.

• 3:21:28John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:21:28Samir Chaudry?

  And now people are making a show.

• 3:21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:30Samir Chaudry?

  And a YouTube channel is a TV show.

• 3:21:33John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 3:21:33Samir Chaudry?

  Largely because it's watched on connected TVs, right? Even our show, over 50% of our watch time comes from a connected TV.

• 3:21:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:21:40Samir Chaudry?

  And our average V-iteration is 48 minutes on TVs. But you look at like Mark Rober. Thank you, guys.

• 3:21:45Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong. Hit the gong.

• 3:21:47John Coogan?

  Did you hit the gong for that? For the obscure YouTube metric that only the real ones recognize? Hit the gong.

• 3:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Whoa. See, that's how you hit the gong.

• 3:21:57John Coogan?

  That's a great.

• 3:21:57Jordi Hays?

  That was the hit of the day. Hit of the day.

• 3:22:00Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, but like Michelle Carre, Challenge Accepted. If you guys are unfamiliar with that, it's a show about taking on big challenges. She hung out outside of a military airplane, recreated Tom Cruise's stunt. But that's one of many episodes that fall in the same format that are 30-plus minutes in length. Yeah.

• 3:22:16John Coogan?

  So help me square that with what I regard as YouTube's sort of organ rejection to overly serialized content. And I'll give you an example. Johnny Harris, we're all fans here. Bunch of really great, it is a show, there's a bunch of great content. But then when he goes and does, you know, I'm doing a three-part series, it seems like YouTube's like, we don't want your three-part series. We don't want your four-part series. And it feels like part two is the death knell of a YouTube title. And you should never put part three, part four. And they say, hey, we have playlists for you.

• 3:22:51Samir Chaudry?

  My suggestion is not doing, you know, part one, part two, part three. Although a creator named Preston Goze did an amazing series about building a mini truck for abandoned railroad. That's three parts and it worked. It's great.

• 3:23:03John Coogan?

  But you agree with me that it does feel like it's counter.

• 3:23:07Samir Chaudry?

  Two in the, in the title.

• 3:23:08Speaker 09

  It speaks to a packaging problem, obviously.

• 3:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:23:11Speaker 09

  You know, on Netflix, the show has title art.

• 3:23:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:23:15Speaker 09

  Right? And that's what gets me into it. That's where I get the recommendation from. And then once you get in, I don't really care what the artwork is for every individual episode.

• 3:23:22John Coogan?

  It's like, it's almost, it would almost be better if you're, if you're doing like a four part series, four, four 40 minute episodes or something. Just drop a four hour YouTube video. I, I saw somebody watch a 10 hour video just on Star Wars episode one. Did you see that one, right?

• 3:23:35Speaker 09

  I think you'll see the UI changes come to YouTube.

• 3:23:38John Coogan?

  So UI thing.

• 3:23:39Speaker 09

  I think so. It'll start to feel.

• 3:23:41John Coogan?

  Like super chapters almost where it's like, but it needs to live in one place. Cause it feels like just if, if the algorithm even has a bad day and it serves you part three, before it serves you part two and you're on, you're on part two, you're going to be like, what am I doing? I'm not clicking.

• 3:23:55Speaker 09

  I know this is, can seem minor, but they're either testing it or it's rolled out where you can now upload 4K thumbnails to YouTube. And I think just higher resolution thumbnails. I think a lot of that is because now people are sitting and they're watching on their TVs. And like, if it looks like crap, when you click on it, they are, they are ushering this move across the platform to be ready for consumers to be sitting on their sofas and choosing what to watch.

• 3:24:20Samir Chaudry?

  I'd imagine someone listening would be like, but, but didn't you just say that like, anyone could upload to YouTube and anything could happen? This feels like a high lift to make like a show, right? And it is.

• 3:24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:24:29Samir Chaudry?

  But these creators have all been on the platform for a decade. So the suggestion for me is that like, this is happening. If you watch like Hot Ones is a TV show, right? Um, so I think you've seen it. It's, it's happened over a decade, but it is like, if you're. Exploring what is the now of YouTube. That is the now.

• 3:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:45Samir Chaudry?

  Like it is, people are making premium shows that are watched on TV.

• 3:24:50Speaker 09

  And then the question is, does Netflix come in and repackage and license those episodes?

• 3:24:54Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, or open the doors to a creator program, which I do think is a very, very realistic path. It's not going to be anyone can upload, but it it's probably going to happen.

• 3:25:04John Coogan?

  So what's the state of the thumbnail artist today? Is it all AI? Are there people that have graduated from YouTube thumbnail artists and now they're doing Netflix thumbnails? Because I imagine thumbnails are important on Netflix too, right?

• 3:25:16Samir Chaudry?

  Oh, they're insanely important. I mean, every time you log, if all of us logged into Netflix right now, we might have different versions of the same of same thumbnail. No, I mean, I said it last time on the show. It's like they're the gatekeepers to viewership. But I think thumbnail artists are more like strategists now than than pure like designers, right? Because it's more of thinking through the strategy of what what will get peak someone's curiosity enough to click. I don't think we need to be like hyper, hyper designed all the time, but there's there's some really great artists out there. There's actually, I mean, when I think about this, there's a thumbnail that comes to mind, which is.

• 3:25:59Speaker 09

  Stuck in your brain.

• 3:26:00Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, it's stuck in my brain. It's a really good thumbnail from a basketball YouTuber named Jessor.

• 3:26:04John Coogan?

  Oh, I know Jessor.

• 3:26:05Samir Chaudry?

  And he went to go tour the new LeBron Nike facility. And it's like kind of a similar thumbnail to Mr. Beast where he's like hanging out of a helicopter and you can see this like gold LeBron statue.

• 3:26:16John Coogan?

  Iconic.

• 3:26:17Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, it's like a classic.

• 3:26:18John Coogan?

  Two pixels.

• 3:26:19Samir Chaudry?

  And it has 6.3 million views, but I mean, I don't, I watched some of Jessor's videos. I like his like guess the NBA player.

• 3:26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:26Samir Chaudry?

  Videos are awesome, but I looked at that and caught my eye and I clicked it. But what's amazing is that it pays off in the first second. You watch it and you're like, oh yeah, there's a gold LeBron statue and this is a brand new Nike facility I'm in. And so.

• 3:26:37John Coogan?

  So AI could create that thumbnail for someone else, but unless you actually did it.

• 3:26:42Speaker 09

  You gotta do.

• 3:26:42Samir Chaudry?

  But unless you're Jessor and you pay it off upon hover, because it's also like things autoplay on YouTube. It's not.

• 3:26:48John Coogan?

  The hover is.

• 3:26:48Samir Chaudry?

  The hover is a very big deal. That it's why that now for. You can't clickbait someone because a thumbnail is proven over a hover before you even click. It's like, did this really happen? What does the video look like?

• 3:27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:27:02Samir Chaudry?

  And the fact that he's standing there, that's a strategic move of being like, if I'm gonna make this thumbnail and design it like this, it can't be so hyperbolic. It has to be pretty real.

• 3:27:12Speaker 09

  You gotta set the expectation with the thumbnail and then match it, right? For like the bird watching doc, listeners, the thumbnail looks like a movie. It's like very lo-fi, but there's text on it that reads very much like a movie that was shown at Sundance or something. And then you click on it and you're like, I had no idea this was gonna be so incredible.

• 3:27:28Samir Chaudry?

  There's a very distinct smell in here. It's not a bad smell, it's a good smell, but it's a very distinct smell.

• 3:27:34Jordi Hays?

  People say that it smells like rubber.

• 3:27:36John Coogan?

  Rubber.

• 3:27:37Samir Chaudry?

  I would say if anybody in this room has ever been to India, it smells like India. Like when you get off the plane in India, this is kind of what it smells like.

• 3:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, let's go.

• 3:27:46Samir Chaudry?

  So.

• 3:27:46John Coogan?

  You know, there's someone in the technology world that just got fired for saying that exact thing.

• 3:27:51Samir Chaudry?

  No, really?

• 3:27:52John Coogan?

  This is a whole drama.

• 3:27:53Samir Chaudry?

  Who?

• 3:27:53John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, the CTO of Klein was, uh, was talking about a hackathon and then it was, uh, it was a lot of men in the room and it went all back and forth and it turned into dust up on both sides.

• 3:28:04Samir Chaudry?

  I'm talking about like a childhood nostalgia for me of landing in India.

• 3:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:28:08Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, that should I?

• 3:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, guys, so, uh, as much as I would love to continue this conversation, the good news is we are.

• 3:28:16John Coogan?

  Yes, we are.

• 3:28:16Speaker 09

  That's right. It's true, yeah.

• 3:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm not sure when it's gonna release, but we should wrap up.

• 3:28:21Samir Chaudry?

  Slow content.

• 3:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Slow content.

• 3:28:22Samir Chaudry?

  Slow content.

• 3:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Slow content.

• 3:28:23John Coogan?

  Fast and slow.

• 3:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, thank you so much for coming on.

• 3:28:26Samir Chaudry?

  Thanks for having us, guys.

• 3:28:27Jordi Hays?

  We can close it out.

• 3:28:27Samir Chaudry?

  I love the show.

• 3:28:28Jordi Hays?

  And we'll be back tomorrow.

• 3:28:30John Coogan?

  We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in today.

• 3:28:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll be in properly dressed for the, for the season.

• 3:28:35John Coogan?

  We will, we will. Finally, finally.

• 3:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Finally. So thank you for tuning in with us today.

• 3:28:39John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:28:40Jordi Hays?

  We love you. See you tomorrow.

• 3:28:41Samir Chaudry?

  Goodbye.

• 3:28:41Jordi Hays?

  See you guys. Cheers.