Microsoft Cloud Outpaces AI, Disney’s AI Dilemma | Samir Chaudry, Dan Wright, Flo Crivello, David Tuttle, Will Ahmed, Aneesh Dhawan

(03:34) - Microsoft Cloud Outpaces AI (33:41) - AI Coming For Consultants (01:03:35) - Disney’s AI Dilemma (01:17:52) - Timeline (01:42:09) - Dan Wright, Co-Founder and CEO of Armada, discusses the company's mission to build hyperscale data centers for edge computing, targeting the 70% of the world lacking AI infrastructure. He highlights their work with critical industries like energy, mining, and defense, emphasizing the deployment of mobile, full-stack AI data centers that can rapidly utilize stranded energy sources, such as natural gas, to meet the growing energy demands of AI. Wright also mentions partnerships with major entities like Microsoft and the U. S. Navy, underscoring Armada's role in providing distributed compute solutions in remote locations. (02:05:58) - Samir Chaudry is an American content creator and entrepreneur, best known for co-hosting "The Colin and Samir Show," a YouTube channel and podcast that explores the creator economy through interviews and industry analysis. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in content creation, emphasizing the importance of human connection and community in the evolving digital landscape. He also shares personal experiences, including the loss of his home in a fire and the birth of his child, highlighting resilience and adaptability in both personal and professional spheres. (02:33:14) - Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, discusses the recent launch of Lindy 3.0, emphasizing its enhanced capabilities in creating powerful AI agents with ease. He highlights the introduction of templates for various functions like sales, customer support, and engineering, allowing users to set up agents in under two minutes. Additionally, Crivello introduces the 'autopilot' feature, enabling agents to operate their own computers and handle tasks requiring login credentials, such as managing support inboxes or cross-posting content between platforms. (02:43:49) - David Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Rune Technologies, discusses the company's recent $24 million Series A funding led by Human Capital, with participation from existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Point72 Ventures. He highlights the deployment of their AI-driven logistics software, TyrOS, in military exercises, emphasizing its role in modernizing military logistics by replacing outdated manual processes with intelligent, autonomous systems. Tuttle also underscores the importance of integrating advanced technology into military logistics to enhance operational efficiency and readiness. (02:49:59) - Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WHOOP, a Boston-based wearable technology company, discusses the recent launch of WHOOP 5.0 and WHOOP MG, introducing new hardware, membership tiers, and features like the Healthspan tool, developed in collaboration with the Buck Institute, to provide users with insights into their biological age. He highlights the company's efforts to navigate FDA regulations, particularly concerning the blood pressure monitoring feature, emphasizing WHOOP's commitment to delivering wellness-focused innovations while addressing regulatory challenges. Additionally, Ahmed announces the upcoming Advanced Labs feature, enabling users to integrate and analyze blood test data within the WHOOP platform, further enhancing personalized health monitoring. (03:02:28) - Aneesh Dhawan, co-founder and CEO of Knit, discusses the company's recent $16.1 million Series A funding and its mission to revolutionize enterprise consumer research through AI-driven solutions. Knit's platform enables businesses to obtain actionable insights in days rather than weeks, significantly reducing costs and time. By integrating AI with human expertise, Knit ensures high-quality, context-rich research outputs, positioning itself as a leader in the evolving market research industry. (03:09:26) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io 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 TVP. Today is Monday, August 4th, 2025. We are live from the TVP N Ultra Dome. That's right. The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. We were recently featured in the New York Times podcast, their Headlines podcast, and they quoted that segment of the stream, and we snuck in an air horn. So we're bringing the air horn to Legacy Media. It was very satisfying. What a week last week. Absolutely insane. We did the Odd Lots podcast. That's out now. You can go listen to that Bloomberg Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. Had a great chat with them about the AI talent wars and who Mark Zuckerberg's

• 0:44John Coogan?

  white whale is in the Moby Dick analogy. We kind of settled on Ilya Sutskever, but we're going to read the book. We're going to have Joe Weisenthal on the show later and get to the bottom of the full metaphor of if we are living in Moby Dick world, who's who? Who's Ahab? Who's the whale? Who's? There's a whole bunch of funny side characters that I was trying to map out to different AI people. And I only got like halfway there, but I want to do that. Anyway, big news from Microsoft. This was interesting. So this is from the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft is an AI darling, but its core businesses are booming too. Did a bunch of reading into this. Also, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Say both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  I love this one.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  You know what, John? Switch your business to ramp.com. Love that. Quick note. Please. Microsoft. Yes. 4T. 4 trillion. They did it. Hit that gong, Jordy. Hit that gong, Jordy. Hey.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  We found a video of somebody playing a gong like much, much more professionally than we do where they like have different tools and they can bring out different songs. They can really make it sing. And so, you know, Late Night has the live band. I think live gong player might be in our future. I think that

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  I think

• 2:08John Coogan?

  if we ever, if it's ever discovered that T B P N goes bankrupt because of our incredibly high cost structure.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  It will be because we have the world's foremost gong athlete, gong player.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Gong artist.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Truly the greatest gong player of all time will be on staff.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  But you know why the Microsoft news are hitting that number is meaningful?

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Why?

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  It's because everybody has always said Satya is more of a, more of a two to three guy.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  People were saying that, yeah.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Saying, yeah, he's really good in that range.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  He's in that range.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if he's in the

• 2:40John Coogan?

  The four trillion club.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  In the four club.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Got it, got it.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  There's not a lot of guys in that club. There's one guy.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, Johnson Wong, and he's the founder.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  Founder mode, right?

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So is Satya in founder mode or is founder mode defeated? Because if a manager mode can take company to four trillion, you know, all bets are off. Put your company in manager mode. As long as you can recruit Satya Nadella to be your CEO, I think it's okay to step back.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Manager run companies can excel.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. So if you're like, I'm a little burned out as a founder. I want to take a break. I'm going to step back. I'm going to get a manager in, run the, normally very bearish. Just give Satya Nadella a call and you'll be okay.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Give him the reins.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  You'll be okay in that case. Anyway, this stream is made possible by Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Very exciting company. We're happy to partner with them. Anyway, so from the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft's blockbuster earnings last week, they blew out earnings. It was very exciting. They cemented its status as one of the biggest winners in the artificial intelligence boom. We knew this Satya had carved out just a massive amount of territory. GitHub Copilot, first real major breakthrough product that was monetizing on top of G P T 3.5. Great product, obviously led by Nat Friedman when he was there.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Last we heard it was at around half a billion in ARR.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  That was two months ago, so it's probably in the billions now.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably bigger. And then the crazy OpenAI deal, they got in very early. They, they have this massive revenue share. They have an ownership. They get a copy of any software that OpenAI writes basically or requires. That's kind of crazy. And so.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Satya did seemingly one of the best. Deals of all time for Microsoft.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Potentially, yeah. I think so. It's hard to, I mean, it's an awkward situation now and it's and it's a really hard decision.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Sam is renegotiating the deal.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yep. And Ben Thompson was noodling on this, like, should they take the money now? Or should they play it more like a venture style bet? What is the role of the CEO of a $4 trillion public company where the shareholders have different expectations? They're not seeing, if you hold Microsoft stock, you're not feeling like you're an LP in a venture fund.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  So if the CEO comes to you and says, hey, look, we're taking the cash flow now. We're going to dividend some of this out. We're selling down the position.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  We're thinking strategically about this as opposed to just, we want the IS multiple. We want to ring the gong on the deal. That could be reasonable. So obviously, we're tracking where that goes. But they also have Clippy, generational precursor to potentially all the AI agents, the original AI agent, Clippy, potentially making a comeback.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  The original super intelligence.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  The original super intelligence and very foreshadowed.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  That was the first time they had to move the goalposts, right?

• 5:20John Coogan?

  And this is why we're worried about getting paper clipped, because Clippy will become too strong. I mean, with the power of OpenAI and Microsoft Azure, anything's possible there. So anyway, outside the AI race, Microsoft is minting money from corporate customers spending on regular technology, long a sweet spot for the company. Many companies are shifting from buying their own IT equipment to renting it from Microsoft through its cloud computing service. They are also renting more standard issue computing stuff, hard drives for data storage, for example, to support their AI efforts. And so this is the key stat from the earnings call that the Wall Street Journal is highlighting. And then we'll kind of dig into this number and what it means, because there's a lot of different explanations for what could be going on. But Microsoft and the CFO and CEO didn't necessarily give all the context that we'd

• 6:05John Coogan?

  like to set this definitively, but I think there's some really good theories floating out there. So the quote from the Wall Street Journal is, "A large chunk of the recent strong growth in Microsoft's cloud business, called Azure, stems from that. More than half of Azure's 33% revenue jump in the company's March quarter came from non-AI services. While the company didn't give a comparable breakdown, a comparable breakdown of the cloud unit's 39% growth in its June quarter, it said that the core infrastructure business, Microsoft's lingo for its non-AI cloud business, was the driver." Jordy?

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Massive win for enterprise SaaS, just good old fashioned SaaS.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  So we had some theories.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  It's not SaaS.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's people migrating from on prem to.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  It's what's called infrastructure as a service.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  So there's software as a service. That's when you go and get Teams or you go and get a subscription to Excel in the cloud.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Or Outlook in the cloud. That's.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was saying, I was saying more, more traditionally someone else.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  People building. Yes, yes. Using, using it as, as infrastructure as a service. Then there's also platform as a service. That's like Heroku on AWS where you go and you deploy an app. You could think of maybe even like a Replit as like a platform as a service almost.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Where they're hosting you, but they're not just providing you the raw infrastructure. Azure's, Azure's core infrastructure business is essentially infrastructure as a service, IaaS is the term.

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  And that means, oh, you want some CPUs and some hard drives and some ethernet cables and moving stuff around data transfer.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Interesting thesis offline earlier.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  You comped it to people in the internet era, buying a computer. They hear about the internet. They're like, hey, I think this might be a thing. I should get a computer.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  They just buy a computer.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  And now you could see something, you know, where companies say, hey, this AI thing might be big. We should get on the cloud.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You want to set yourself up for it. And I think if you have a whole bunch of data in some sort of on prem. You know, you have a data center for all of your data in a bunch of hard drives and you have CPUs that can do the, do different workloads and data workloads. And maybe you're using some SaaS on top of that. But you realize that you're never going to be in a position to buy a hundred thousand H100s. And you're going to wind up being a leaser of that for some small.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Or just using other people's application layer.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. And so the integration that comes from being in the Azure ecosystem, that could be a driver. There's a few others. When I think about the, the core, the, the AI Azure services, I think of that almost as, you know, it is SaaS.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Like if they're, if they're, if you go to Azure and you say, I'd like to, you know, put my credit card down and I want to be able to use the GPT four API. And I also want to be able to use Lama three. And I also want to be, be able to use DeepSeek. And I want to be able to call all these APIs within my, within my product. I almost think of that as tokens as a service. Like it is SaaS, but it's something else. And I think these token factories, I think this idea of how much revenue are you generating from your token generation business is really what we're talking about when we, when we talk about Azure's, you know, core AI products.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Versus the infrastructure. But there's a bunch of interesting wrinkles that could be going on within the classic, you know, core infrastructure business. So this is of course is virtual machines. You just want a Linux box with a CPU to host a website. That's something that you do on Azure. Storage networking, okay, I want to store all my data. You could go to AWS and store it in S3. You could go to Google, store it in BigQuery. You could also go to Azure and fire up any sort of storage database or just, you know, raw, raw hard drives and then networking, moving stuff around. So this is the infrastructure as a service versus tokens as a service. They're higher, higher level AI APIs.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  But so GPUs are, so the question is like, why is there infrastructure as a service growing faster than their tokens as a service product? You would think that Microsoft is going to their enterprise clients and saying like, you need to build AI, you need to bring AI into your products and we have all the best APIs, so just buy tokens from us. And you would think that that would be the boom.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, couldn't the other factor here be that they are massively supply constrained on the GPU side?

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  And they have this, you know, multi

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars of backlog that they can't fulfill.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, they had a, you know, more kind of like predictability on the, the traditional data center cloud side.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  They were able to scale up to.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  So that feels like a, potentially like a pretty big driver here.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yes, definitely.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  But still shocking.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  And so, and so as companies come out and they say, okay, we are, we are scaling our, our, you know, hardware and software foot, our technology footprint broadly.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Going into this AI era, we're excited about this stuff. Well, we're also going to need more databases. We're going to need to put more data in those databases. We're going to need more CPU workloads. We're going to need more of everything. And Microsoft's like, yeah, of course, we can definitely get you a whole bunch more hard drives and a whole bunch more CPUs. We're not constrained on that at all. And the capex is keeping up, so they're able to service that. There's also an interesting thing where tons of AI stuff can technically be happening inside the core infrastructure bucket. You just don't necessarily know what, what's in there. So some examples are like, if you're, let's say you're a pure AI company, or you're doing, or you have a new AI workload, you could go to Azure and say, hey, I'm going to do a whole, I'm going to do my own AI thing,

• 11:55John Coogan?

  but I need a ton of storage for data because I'm going to be training on it. I'm going to need a bunch of networking to move that data around when I do a training run. So that could be driving core infra up. And then also, if a bank hypothetically spins up a huge cluster of H100 GPU virtual machines to fine tune an open source model like Meta's Lama 3, this would show up as core infrastructure, not Azure AI services. And so that's like textbook AI, boom, but it's just happening in the, in the wrong bucket. And then I also saw a post that potentially ChatGPT counts as Azure core infrastructure. Because they're not, they're not serving ChatGPT through the Azure AI API.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  It's not this like snake eating its tail or a boros. It's like OpenAI just came and said, give us a whole bunch of.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  The headline itself ends up becoming pretty misleading.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  Because, and again, this is, this was probably, you know, a lot of people were reading into AWS's.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Growth, you know, the reports that, you know, Andy or the comments Andy had given on AWS last week.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  And the big thing that AWS is missing is having a chat GPT building on top of.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  AWS, right?

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  There's no dominant consumer product, at least at that scale.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Chat GPT, I think the, as of this morning, somebody was estimating getting to a billion weekly actives this year, which again, those types of products don't, you know, the, the, the power law is like extreme, right?

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, so if you, I mean, I, I believe Anthropic is pretty tightly hitched to Amazon. And I think the next big cluster from Anthropic will be powered by Amazon for the most part. And so they're getting there, certainly on the, if they're building all the, all the infrastructure.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but again, that would show up on, on.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Core.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Token generation side, like more of the, the.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  No, no. So if Anthropic goes to AWS and says, we want you to build a huge data center to serve Claude code for us. That's going on, that's going on in infrastructure.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, got it.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Not, not actually APIs. But when you go to AWS and you're just some random company and you say, I need a database and I need some storage and I need a web server and I also need a bunch of tokens from whatever model you can serve me. And they're like, we got Claude. And then you're like, yeah, let's pull the Claude tokens into my app.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  It's a good model.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  That's token as a service, what?

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  It's a good model, sir.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  It's a good model, sir, exactly.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  One thing that stood out to me, that has stood out to me across this year with Microsoft is they've done more layoffs this year than the past three years before that combined. So 2022, 2023 and 2024.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  So this just shows the level that Satya is operating at is like the, the company has been on a tear this year, performing exceptionally well. And he's still thinking about how do we get more and more fit?

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  To be clear, literally every piece of Microsoft business is growing at a very, very solid clip. So Microsoft 365 Commercial Cloud Business, which houses remotely accessed versions of Word, Excel, other productivity software, that grew at 16% from a year earlier. So that's, I mean, that's like, it's not the most insane growth rate, but that's still crazy because you think about like, who doesn't have Excel that needs it? Like, who are these people who are like, you know what? 2025 is the year that my company's getting on Excel. We're doing it.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just crazy when you compare it to AWS growing at 19%. Obviously, very different scales, but you would think you don't want to be in the same ballpark as.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  And so that was the news of AWS. If you missed it, they beat earnings, they did very well, but they weren't growing as fast as the others, the other cloud platforms, Google and, and Microsoft. And so the Amazon stock traded down. And I mean, the narrative around AWS is different because Microsoft has OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and has GitHub Copilot, and is like, really moving things forward in the AI world. And Satya is seen as someone who goes in the DoorDash Podcast and talks about AI. And it's clearly like, really on top of it. Where, and, and obviously, Google has Gemini and a million different products and, and, and strategies around rolling that out and staying on the frontier.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  I mean, they have a frontier lab internally, and Amazon's just not there, either on the partnership side or on the core, like, training frontier lab side. And so it's a little bit, it's a little bit of both. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. We had a great week in New York celebrating Figma and the IPO. Stock's been up, stock's been down, wild ride, but we are still very happy to be partnered with Dylan Field and the Figma team. And I'm super excited to see what happens next because.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Truly, it was, Thursday was such, such an incredible day. Just getting the, if you didn't get a chance to listen, we talked with every. The seed lead investor, all the way through, of course, Andrew Reid, who led the C.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  And then capped it off with Dylan and also got to speak with Lynn Martin, president of New York Stock Exchange, as well as Chris, the CTO of Figma. So really incredible day and it's just very proud of the Figma team.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was awesome. In one sense, investors might prefer to see AI businesses driving growth. That, after all, is what has driven the company's valuation through the roof. But tech companies' stocks arguably hinge on too much on AI. To the extent that they can keep increasing other revenue streams, they are on more solid financial ground. Of course, none of that means anything if all of the growth is coming from OpenAI. But at the same time, does anyone really think ChatGPT is Yahoo anymore? Like, you know, they're generating, what, a billion dollars a month in revenue at this point? Everyone uses the app. It's installed everywhere. Like, that token demand is not going anywhere. That infrastructure demand is not going anywhere, so.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  On the other side, Amazon is down just over 9% since Thursday.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Since Thursday, wow.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  And then this morning, unrelated, they announced that they're shutting down Wondery, the podcast studio.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Really?

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  They acquired in late 2020 and cut 110%.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Why did, the market's way up, wow. Nasdaq's up 1.8% today after a brief sell-off on Friday. Good news.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Bear market is over.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were so over, but we're already so back. It's fantastic.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  Love when that happens.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Markets go up, markets go down, but the march of technological progress, the arrow points in but one direction.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  And its march is relentless. There is another silver lining for Microsoft. Non-AI sales can be substantially more lucrative than AI ones. Non-AI gross margins within Azure were around 73%.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  Wow, that compares to 30 to 40% gross margin for AI. He estimated because of the huge cost of setting up AI infrastructure. That makes sense. You get more margin on just a bunch of CPUs and databases that you've harnessed and built everything around. Also, you know, you still have that interesting dynamic where it seems like all of the cloud, the hyperscalers like, don't really compete on price because they're all pretty comparable, but they seem to all have really good margins. That's what it seems like.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  I'm not exactly sure if there's something else that's more fundamental going on.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  And the Coca-Cola dynamic is like, I don't know if we, it's hard to tell what conversations were off air or on air.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  But John last week, I forget when, was describing how you would think that Coca-Cola or Pepsi would decide to get aggressive on price to try to gain market share and get people to switch. But ultimately, that would just lead to a price war with both companies massively eroding their, you know.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Margins.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Margins and then.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Did all be RC Cola coded then?

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Every, yeah, every.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  So if you have a fierce competitor, consider entering an unspoken gentleman's, maybe a gentleman's agreement.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not even a gentleman's agreement. It's not, it is unspoken, but it is a nature, it is a natural game theoretic Nash equilibrium. Like, it is the natural state of things that both sides understand that to go to war would be mutually assured destruction. And so they don't even need to talk about it. And so instead, they both agree to keep prices where they are and instead compete on marketing. Compete on marketing, really?

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they don't form, they don't reformulate that often. They mostly compete on, on, on marketing. And that allows them to have this like continually compounding business. And that's why it's in the Warren Buffett portfolio. Coca-Cola, he's been in there for a long time. And Pepsi's been doing well too.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  And he was a DAU, of course.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  He was a DAU of Coke. Diet Coke or Coca-Cola? I think Coca-Cola?

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  No, Diet Coke.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Oh, he's a Diet Coke guy? I feel like he was a Coca-Cola guy.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Warren?

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, look that up. I want to know. Anyway, I'll keep reading from this Wall Street Journal report. Luckily for Microsoft, demand for lucrative non-AI services appears to be reasonably strong. Measures of broad IT spending.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're right.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  There we go. You know why?

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  He was a regular Coca-Cola guy.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  You know why? It's because it has corn syrup in it. It's literally corn grown from Mother Nature, from the earth. And then syrup, it's what you put on pancakes. Like, it's the most wholesome combination of foods you could imagine. Maze, this is something that's been grown in America for generations, for centuries.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Corn is so popular in Nebraska, right? It's grown everywhere.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  It's culturally insignificant.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  And the syrup that you put on pancakes, it's the most American, most wholesome ingredient. It's not this like refined sugar, this crazy stuff from somewhere else. No, it's American.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  American. Corn syrup.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  There's nothing, it's Lindy. Corn syrup.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Corn syrup.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Sea oil. Sea oil. Sea oil haters are in disbelief.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  In shambles. That we need to return to corn syrup. None of this, none of whatever's in this Coke syrup.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your grandpa was drinking corn syrup.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, and it's too good for you? Because you read a couple of posts on X.com? Think you understand something better than corn? Delicious corn, corn on the cob? Something you have on a barbecue? Oh, now it's too good for you? Can't possibly have corn? What's next? No apple pie? What's next? No, no rotisserie chicken? No turkey on Thanksgiving?

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's gonna listen to the show for the first time today and just go raging DMs for you promoting corn syrup consumption.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  It's as American as apple pie.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  And Warren Buffett knows best. He's doing great.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  End of one study, sort of a Brian Johnson.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  He's sort of the Brian Johnson.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  He's the original Don't Die.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And he's been going fantastically on that front.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  He's great. Anyway.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Measures of broad IT spending were fairly muted at the start of the year as companies ponder the impact of Donald Trump's tariffs and concerns bubbled about the health of the global economy. Attitudes appear to have improved somewhat in the second quarter, though a UBS survey of cloud computing customers in July showed a clear improvement in tone about spending. Most were moving forward with efforts to migrate computing work to the cloud. They're like, this internet thing is real.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  It's real.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  We gotta put the data in the cloud.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  We held back as long as we could.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  We could. But it's 2025. We have no more excuses. The tariffs, it's come and gone. Now's the time.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  We were resisting the 21st century.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  But we're a quarter of the way through.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Put the data online.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  It's not going away.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  So let's, let's use the computer in the, online, in the cloud.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Put the docs in the cloud, bud.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Put it in the cloud.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Just put the docs in the cloud.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Put the fries in the bag. Anyway, and put your compliance process on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. In the longer term, there is little question that cloud computing is going to grow in ways that play to Microsoft's strengths. Its rivals, mainly amazon.com and Google, are growing quickly too, but don't have all of Microsoft's broad corporate software offerings that enhance its cloud footprint. Even outside of AI, Amazon on Thursday said its cloud unit grew at 17.5% in the June quarter, disappointing investors and forcing CEO Andy Jassy to answer questions, to answer questions about Azure's outperformance. Why are you getting beaten?

• 24:50John Coogan?

  You created this category. You created this product. Why is Sachin Adella?

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  You are cloud.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  You are the cloud. You are the cowboy of the cloud. And you're getting, you're getting put out to pasture.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Recent quarterly earnings in Azure's favor were really just moments in time, he said.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  Look at that chart, John.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  The, uh, oh yeah. Wow, that is worse than I thought. I wasn't sure we had that pulled up.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it would have been hard to predict five years ago that we'd be sitting here with, with Microsoft at four trillion and, and, uh,

• 25:25John Coogan?

  With Amazon on it.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  I think 2.2 trillion.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  2.2.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  2.27.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  2.27, okay. So almost double.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Still magnificent, but.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Still magnificent, but you gotta keep fighting. Gotta keep fighting. Uh, the company's stock fell 8% Friday and it looks like it's still sliding.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Down even more.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  The question for Microsoft's investors then is less about its prospects than its valuation. The company's stock is up nearly 40% since the beginning of April, pushing its forward price earnings multiple above 33. That's a bit richer than Amazon and a large margin above Google, which is trading at a multiple of roughly 18 times. That should be easier for investors to digest because while Microsoft's AI growth is real, it is far from the only thing going right at the software giant because they got Excel. They got core infrastructure. They got AI, APIs, they got tokens as a service, infrastructure as a service, and software as a service. They got the royal flush. It's going well over at Microsoft.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  They won't need to call McKinsey, but maybe, maybe, amazon.com will. And that brings us to our next story.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, before we gotta jump in, uh, quickly.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub shift higher quality software faster. I'd love to do an ad read, Jordy.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Very clean. We got to hang with Merrill.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yes, I got to hang with him.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Last Thursday, which was fun.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Which is great.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  He came, uh, with a tux.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  He looked fantastic.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly sharp.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Yes, it was great.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  Great sign of respect in our culture. Uh, well, American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. is up 23% today after, Trump came out, uh, with a lot of, uh, a lot of excitement for the advertisement, uh, this morning. I'll let people go read it, but he did describe it as the hottest ad out there. And it certainly struck a chord last week. But anyways, let's jump into this next story.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Really quickly, before we go that, the battle for the Mag 7 is is heating up. Microsoft is now in the four trillion club. Let's go to the poly market for the largest company at the end of 2025. Nvidia has a solid handle on it. They, as of December 31st, they are expected to be the largest company in the world at 63%. Microsoft is at 28%, but climbing up from 22% earlier. Apple has been falling. They were the largest company, and now they are falling down to just 6% chance. And of course, Tesla's hanging out there at 3%. Anything could happen with Tesla. One crazy move, one naturally aspirated V12 Cybertruck, and boom.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  It's all it would take.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  It's a $5 trillion stock.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  What about a V12 Optimus?

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Like a gas-powered.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Okay, I have a pitch for you. Richard Mill of cars.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  A Richard Mill for the for the streets.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Richard Mill for the streets.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  Instead of a racing machine.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Basically, the pitch is that now it's routine. I would say most people, if they if they put their minds to it, they'll be making $100 million a year. Seems like that's kind of the benchmark for like, you did okay in life. $100 million a year. Even even a million-dollar Ferrari is not really going to stand out. That's three days of income, right? So we need we need a car brand to come out where the floor price is like $20 million.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bugatti doesn't quite get you.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  And the thing with the Bugatti is that it's like this hypercar, 2,000 horsepower. It's so extreme. The whole point of the Richard Mill is that you can wear it to the gym. But it's $250,000. So I'm looking for something that's like

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  A daily sedan.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Twenty million dollar, yeah, twenty million dollar sedan, twenty million dollar minivan, twenty million dollar

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Pickup truck.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Just crossover, just midsize SUV, thirty million dollars. This is what we're gonna do in here. This is what we're gonna do. Cause a lot of these, a lot of these AI researchers, they don't, they don't wanna pull up in a Bugatti.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  But they have the money to spend.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Something a bit more understated that still says to the right audience, I spent tens of millions of dollars on my daily.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. That's definitely what they're going for over at MSL. If you pull up to Meta Superintelligence Lab, like you don't wanna flex, but you want people to know, you know?

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  We need, we need satellite imagery of the, of the MSL parking lot.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  That would be funny if it just looks like a car meet.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Everybody has like a SVJ.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Conex. LaFerrari.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  F40.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Somehow I think it won't be that at all. It won't be that at all. But do you think that there's actually an opportunity to start a new car company that, that it takes the Richard Mille approach and is 10 times what the luxury cars are? So like, maybe it's not 20 million, but like, you know, a G-Wagon is, is a functional car in the $200,000 range? Something at two million.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  The thing with RM is they made something that was light and incredibly durable. And that was effectively.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  You don't think you can make a light and durable car for $2 million, Jordan? What are you talking about?

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  World's lightest.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  What are you talking about?

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that'd be, that'd be interesting. It just drives like in a go-kart. It's just totally insane.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like it came out with.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  You necessarily need to optimize for performance.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  It was aesthetically in an entirely new category. It was, it had the perfor, it knew levels of performance.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  Within the category broadly from a, from a durability standpoint. So I think.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  I think with the RM, it does stand out. It looks completely different, but it's still in this weird watch world where to just a completely average person, it's not as bold as a Cybertruck. It doesn't, it's a, it's still an if you know, you know type, type accessory, right? And so that's where you need to target. It needs to look kind of like, is that a BMW or an Audi or a Model Y? It's like, i- it blends in a little bit.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think one, one reason, not, not to crush your dreams.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Please.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  One reason, potentially many, that this, this is not as exciting as it sounds. I mean, I, I want to drive it, to be clear.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  But I think that the automotive regulations around, you need to have a seatbelt like this. You need, the seats need to work like this. It needs to be able to handle this type of.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe there's some sort of like, you know how Steve Jobs famously bought a new 911 every single year?

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  It was every 90 days, I thought.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Every three, yeah, I think you're right. Every three months, Steve Jobs would buy a new Porsche 911 so that he didn't ever need to have a license plate on it. Just for anonymity, I suppose?

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  So he would never be identifiable.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Which is potentially an incredible excuse for being just like, I like to drive brand new cars.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  What, what is, what is breaking in three months on a 911?

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  The new car smell goes away by that point.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Maybe he just really loved new car smell. He's like, I could never do a new car smell air freshener. Uh, that's, that simply won't do.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be the real thing.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  And then later in life, I believe he switched to Mercedes. And I think he got the SL63 or something equivalent to that. So like the, the 911 equivalent of in Mercedes world.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Great taste.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Um, but yeah, maybe that's the hack. So, so you, you find something that would never be approved, but you do some crazy thing where you bring it in on show and display and you can only drive it a few thousand miles a year, but then you're swapping them out. And so you're kind of doing like a subscription. And so your real cost to own is in like the five million range. Um, but the beauty is that you're getting something that's just complete regulatory and run around the rules so that you wind up with this very unique, very different, uh, you know, experience, but only made possible at the extra high end.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  I think at that point, helicopter.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe helicopter is the move.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's get into the next story. Uh, the journal says AI is coming for the consultants. Inside Mackenzie, they're saying this.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Mackenzie?

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, McKin.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got a case of the Mondays.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  McKinsey, McKinsey.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  They say this is existential.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  This is wild to put on the record.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Buddy, yeah, I was talking with a buddy. We were talking yesterday, or not yesterday.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last week and he said, word for word, adopting too much AI will hurt our bottom line.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  And that totally makes sense, but it's not something that lawyers are actively saying out loud because you don't want to be the law firm that's anti-tech.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  If you go out as a big, if you're, you know, one of the, one of the top hundred law firms and you're like, yeah, we, we're excited about the potential of AI, but we won't be in top, adopting it internally because uh, it uh, you know, naturally it's going to hurt our profits, which uh, you can just translate to, we're just not going to be able to bill our clients for the same number of hours. And so that statement made me bullish on, why am I blanking on the, the name of this company? We had this company on, not Harvey, the other one that is uh, doing just like contract, like NDAs and, and a few other types of contracts, but they're an actual law firm.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting, yeah. Kind of the Atrium Clearspire model.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Similar, similar to that.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Fascinating model. I don't know if you remember this, but Justin Khan, when he started Atrium, had a very complex corporate structure where the company was half a law firm, an LLC, which is the traditional corporate structure for a law firm and employed lawyers. And then there was a tech startup C corp that was bound together with a master service agreement or something like that. So these two companies were combined to be a tech-enabled law firm. And it was, it was probably a good idea, just a little bit too early. But interestingly, there was another attempt to do the exact same thing 10 years earlier called Clearspire, and that didn't go well either. And it was start, started, uh, started by uh, some all-star lawyers and some technologists

• 35:53John Coogan?

  and they came together and they were like, let's build this AI enabled law firm. Maybe now is the right time to build the AI native law, AI native law firm, but I don't know that they need to be. They need to be doing technology development. I think that the I think that the the next world might be you have a power law winner in legal AI tooling. Maybe it's Harvey, maybe it's someone else or a combination of firms. And then you have a very, very small term, a small team of high EQ deals, guys, lawyers, who are phenomenal at the human element, thinking creatively, coming up with crazy structures, understanding.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with the battle of the forms, this idea in in law firm in in like in the legal world?

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Not familiar, but I can guess what it what it what it looks like.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Basically, if you talk to most lawyers, they will tell you that you can express almost the exact same legally binding theories or like like rules in a contract or bullet points in a contract. Everything you want in a contract can be expressed both in one page or a hundred pages.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  And so which one you choose to send to your counterparty is like an aesthetic choice. It's like it's like for certain for certain deals, you want to send the hundred page contract because you want to send the send the message that like we're taking this really seriously, we're thinking of everything. But for other people, you're more like, we want to show that we're moving quickly. We want to use the safe. We want to use and and structurally, it can be the exact same deal. And so a good lawyer will know when to when to send a lot, when to send a little, when to slow a deal down, when to speed things up. And so you get a bunch of folks who are great at that type of legal thinking, the creative thinking, the human element, the the relationship building, the golden retriever mode.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  And then you and then you empower them with the best in class legal research and analysis tools to actually instantiate and do all the grunt work. And then separately, you have a company like Harvey that's building the tooling that then sells to the team of, you know, humans. And that law firm will have a very different cost structure, very different dynamic, might even look like an older school law firm, where it's just a few partners and

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  One thing I know, lawyers are not going down without a fight. They're like, we're making 90% less per case. We're going to initiate 10 times as many lawsuits.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  That might be the equilibrium here, for sure, for sure. Well, if you're planning to manage your lawsuit or build a legal AI company, get on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  Good transition, not great. We're not recommending you use Linear to manage your lawsuit, but if you are building

• 38:51John Coogan?

  Use it for everything.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John's very in favor of using Linear for everything, including workouts.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Haven't you seen those people that do art in Excel? Then they zoom the grid way out and they color each cell is a pixel.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Linear really is a canvas.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  I think it should be. I think it should be. Anyway, let's go back to McKinsey. Companies pay dearly for McKinsey's human expertise, and for nearly a century, they have had good reason. The elite firms, armies of consultants, have helped generations of CEOs navigate the thorniest of challenges, synthesizing complex information and mapping out what to do next. Now, McKinsey is trying to steer through its own existential transformation. Artificial intelligence can increasingly do the work done by the firm's highly-paid consultants, often within minutes. That reality is pushing the firm to rewire its business. AI is now a topic of conversation at every meeting of McKinsey's boards, their board of directors. The firm's global managing partner has said this.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  The Bob Sternfels, I wonder the nominee of determinism there, do you think he's a very stern individual? Or do you think he's really friendly and fluffy? We should get him on the show and just chop it up with him and just throw him tons and tons of jokes.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  I don't need to have him on the show to know.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Like you guys should be doing so much better. You should be more serious. Immediately stern stern mogs us. The technology is changing the ways McKinsey works with clients, how it hires and even what projects to take on. And McKinsey is rapidly deploying thousands of AI agents. Those bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients. What do you think about building PowerPoint decks using purely AI?

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  We were talking about this this morning. I think that AI can do a tremendous job making you a generic deck. Template or just market analysis and turning that into page by page kind of analysis that you could. Generate slides against. But I think just just grounding it in something more specific, I think if you asked. If you were just trying to build a pre seed or seed or series A or series B, really any type of fundraising materials. That are or even like. Fund like a deck for a venture fund raise. It's it's going to produce something that will will not have you.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Looked at very seriously will put they will put together something that maybe. Like the most basic McKinsey associate would put together in terms of like. These are all the different types of slides you can have and you know, here's data and here's. Research that that support these things, but the best decks. Take you on a journey and I. My framework for making decks is you basically want. In a fundraising context, you want every single slide to have. Like a very short sentence. That takes like walk that's walking somebody down this path that you're taking them on.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  Where they just agree, agree, agree, agree, agree. So they get to the end. And if at any point in that deck, they've read a headline and they're like, I don't agree with that or that's dumb. You're screwed. But usually if you've you know, thought through.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  Or I'm confused or I'm bored.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Confused. Yeah. If you're bored or confused.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  That's that's that's C tier. B tier is disagree.

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  Dex Dex just get looked at. It's not about like the supporting content. It's about like the high level like narrative arc through the deck. And getting somebody to. Click through enough times to through enough pages to actually care about what you're doing. And I think that maybe there's some like really incredible prompting that you could do to try to come up with something like that. But I haven't been able to.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just think the models aren't there yet in terms of like putting disparate information together, coming up with novel insights, contrarian thinking, independent thinking, all of that stuff is where the models fall down. But that's fine because they're fantastic at a bunch of other stuff and anything that they can RL on is fantastic. And so I would think about it like, you know, we already did the Figma ad read, but we're going to wind up doing another one. But I mean, they have a tool for building decks and obviously you've built decks in Figma for years. And when I think about as that tool becomes more AI native, I don't necessarily want it to try and one shot a prompt from build me a deck that convinces you that TBPN is a growing media company or something like that.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  I want, I want a prompt to be like, go through and make sure all the text is centered. And then it just clicks through every deck and does the grunt work of centering every piece of text. Or there's so many times.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  You put all the content in and you say, generate other variations of this slide.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Or make sure all the black font is actually the correct color of black because I've updated that, like the style guide. And, and then pull in this data and then keep the data up to date. Like all the grunt work that happens, that should be the, that should be the domain of AI. And for a long time, that's been the domain of the low level management consultant. The person who is at a wedding and has to leave because their boss told them, hey, you gotta update slide seven. Yeah. Hey, yeah, there's a missed comma in this deck and I'm about to go present and it needs to be flawless. And so McKinsey is, is continuing saying there, they've reduced the headcount from 45,000 people in 2023

• 44:26John Coogan?

  to 40,000 through layoffs and attrition, in part to correct from an aggressive pandemic hiring spree. It's also roughly rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents, which is very like, that's not apples to apples at all. You cannot just, you cannot.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  It's also funny to be thinking about like the whole point of agents or that like anybody in a team can like spin them up and get value and shut them down.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  And they're not necessarily perpetually running. So just to, to come out and be like. Yeah, we have 12,000 agents on our team.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, how many?

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  We rolled out 12,000. It's like, okay.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  How many Google Chrome tabs do you have open? Tell me that, too, because that's useful. Like, yesterday, I used Agent Mode to do some, like, really deep research. And then I wound up, and then it, like, was kind of working. It had this cool interaction where it asked me a question, and I just wasn't online for that. And it just typed for me, "Continue," and then it just kept going. And so it wound up putting together a really, really thorough result, but it took a long time.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  Are you sure it wasn't a ghost in the machine?

• 45:26John Coogan?

  It was a ghost in the machine. But it was weird that it was, like, typing for me, but it was actually a great UX, because I would have forgotten about it. But then I just went to 4O, like, in the interim, and got, like, basically the same answer, because, like, I didn't ask that complex of a question. And so I kind of, like, overestimated. I was like, "I need the nuclear bomb for this one. This is the most brilliant question you could possibly ask." And it was, like, something that, like, probably Google-able.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  I think the thing with management consulting is that it will... The question... This question has come up forever. Is the value of hiring McKinsey actually the strategy that you get or the advice that you get? Or is it outsourcing, like, critical decision-making or backing up critical decision-making? So that the management can say, like...

• 46:18John Coogan?

  I don't want to do layoffs, but McKinsey told me I had to.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Yep. It's a lot of cover and not...

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  Or I didn't want to go into the cloud of McKinsey.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot of defensibility. It's a lot of, like, internal office politics, it feels like. But I do think that there is... I think that that narrative is a little bit overblown, and I do think some of the top McKinsey folks are actually great at business strategy. It's just that, when you think of McKinsey, you think of kind of the mid-tier junior associate who's still just kind of learning. And of course, you're not going to get that much out of that person. So my question for this... So the key quote in here is that Katie Smaj, Smajay, a senior partner that Sternfeld tapped to lead McKinsey's AI efforts early this year, said...

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Do I think that this is existential for our profession? Yes, I do. I think it's an existential good for us. But of course, that read as they think it's an existential existential threat potentially, if they don't get it right. And so consulting is emerging as an early and high profile test case for how dramatically an industry might must shift to stay relevant in the AI era. McKinsey, like its rivals, grew by hiring professionals from top universities, throwing them at projects for clients, and then billing companies based in part on the scope and duration of the products. So my my analysis of this was that, OK, so clearly McKinsey is going to change. The question is, like, in the medium term, like, pre-superintelligence, like, how does it change?

• 47:47John Coogan?

  And what's interesting is that, like, when you look at the hordes of, like, 80-hour weeks from, you know, junior analysts on a McKinsey team, like, the typical, like, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Ivy League grad, doesn't exactly know what to do, maybe, goes into, you know, the big three, Bain, BCG, McKinsey, is just kind of a junior consultant, and then after, like, two years, it's like, go to, go get your MBA, and then maybe come back or do something else. Those 80-hour weeks, like, what they are doing during that time, there's a lot of hurry up and wait, but there is a lot of actually hard work, pulling data, doing deep research, doing stuff that can be done by AI. But it also serves a as a as basically like an extended interview. It serves as a benchmark for, is this person a grinder? Are they a creative thinker?

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Like, they have to do the baseline. They have to do, they have to be very detail oriented. But then also, it's a question of, while you're there, can you actually develop a relationship with a Fortune 500 CEO? And that happens. Like, I remember this crazy, crazy story of a woman who was at, this is a crazy story. So she was, I think I've told you this before. So she was at, I think McKinsey, and she went to do some consulting in a Middle Eastern country, maybe like, what was it? It was something in I don't want to be too offensive, but it's one of like the Borat countries. I think it was like Kazakhstan. Is that the one where he's from?

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  That's Bor- that's where Borat is.

• 49:12John Coogan?

  So.

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  The character.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  The character's from Kazakhstan. So she goes to Kazakhstan.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Sacha Bear Cohen, that's where he went.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So she goes to Kazakhstan and Kazakhstan has a number of state-owned assets. And one of the things they own, I believe, was a cigarette-making facility. So they built a factory for making cigarettes for the-

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, the heater factory. National tobacco. We need to secure heater production. It's critical to national security.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, no, I mean, I mean, basically, like, like, when you are a big tobacco company in America, everything is privatized, except for like the roads here. Basically, we're like the most privatized country. But when you go to, when you go to a foreign country and you're like, let's set up, you know, we'd love to set up business in your country. You have a bunch of hard workers who can work on this manufacturing project. The government just says like, okay, we will be the customer. Like, we will be the service provider. We will be the counterparty to your, to your request for certain services. We will provide those and we will own this and that will be tax revenue for our government. And so that's what had happened years ago. This country had built up this cigarette manufacturing business.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  And then, once you build up the business, the privatizing that can also be very lucrative because then you get all the cash upfront. And so if you want to, if you want to raise a bunch of money for your government and then maybe build some roads, one thing that you can do is you can sell the assets that you've developed. And so they brought in McKinsey to discuss, how could they package this cigarette manufacturing building or factory or series of factories into an asset that could be sold to either a private equity firm or to big tobacco?

• 50:51Will Ahmed?

  I see a large IPO on the horizon.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Basically. I mean, this is what happened with, like Saudi Ramco was going to go public.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Where do you, where do you think, where do you think Kazakhstan's nationalized cigarette infrastructure, what do you think it would trade at if it went out on?

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Probably a pretty low multiple, honestly.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  The very real meme stock potential there.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Can you imagine that? It'd be crazy. Anyway, so they bring in McKinsey and this woman's on the team. And she does the whole analysis and says that like, okay, if you package it up this way, you could get this multiple, you could sell this, and then that would bring in this amount of cash that you could go and use and you could reinvest in roads, infrastructure, you could build their airport.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  Data centers.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could build anything, right?

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Foundation model lab.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  This is pre all that. This is maybe like 2005 or 2010. So she does the deal. It's massively successful, comes back, applies to Harvard Business School. And she needs a letter of recommendation. So she goes to like the prime minister of Kazakhstan and is like, hey, I helped you with that deal. I helped you privatize your cigarette factory. Can you write me a letter of recommendation? And I had the chance to read this letter of recommendation and it was one of the funniest things I've ever read. Because it presupposes. It was a glowing endorsement. It was like, wow, she was incredible. She helped us with this deal.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Does it just assume that she's getting in?

• 52:14John Coogan?

  No, it doesn't assume that she's getting in, but it is worded in the craziest way possible. It basically presupposes that it was unthinkable that a woman could do this and.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Oh, huge cultural bias because, you know, it's like developing nation. And so this country, this prime minister is like, I was very surprised when she joined the team because I'd never worked with a woman before.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  And I didn't think.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  2005?

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, and I didn't think that she would.

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  So Borat, the whole, the memes.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  I don't want to say it was Kazakhstan because it could have been any other country in that area, but you can just think of it as generic developing nation.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  But Sacha Baron Cohen was making jokes like that in Borat.

• 52:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, and so I saw, I saw a real instantiation of like the joke that he was telling, basically. And so the, the, the, the letter of recommendation Harvard Business School, it starts with like, with like, it was mind blowing that like a woman showed up to this meeting. I didn't think that was possible and, and I didn't think that she would be like actually contributing, but then she was really helpful and this like surprised me. And so like, you should definitely let her into Harvard Business School. And then it ends on something that sounds like a vague threat. He's like. Great, great, great, uh, great sorrow will befall Cambridge if you don't let her in. And it's like, and it was clearly meant to just be like, like you're, you'd be, you'd be making a mistake.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Missed opportunity.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  You'd be a missed opportunity, but it was worded in this very aggressive way that sounded like a threat. It was wild.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I guess, uh, anybody that's trying to get into HBS.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Get a, a prime minister of a foreign government to write you, to make a threat to the college.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  And, and the funny thing is that, is that you, you could do that.

• 53:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  You could do anything. So you could read, you could read into it as like, okay, this, this country is developing, like they clearly have different cultural norms. They're not the most like, uh, forward thinking in terms of women in the workplace. But instead of like, instead of getting like dragged down in that, HBS clearly saw that like, she basically went to a developing nation and like rizzed them. Like insanely and got a phenomenal deal done and made a ton of money for her firm and also for the country. And it was just this like win, win, take private.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Uh, and she got in and had a very successful career. And, uh, yeah, this is a funny story of, of what can go right with McKinsey, but it brings me back to the question of, you know, there's a world where she would just be the, like the PowerPoint person, and that's clearly not what she did with that opportunity. She went there and actually interacted with the prime minister and the top, top economic advisors to this developing country. And wound up driving a lot of value, and I'm sure there were other folks on the team on the client side. But she developed such a relationship that she was able to get this like silly, but glowing.

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Recommendation letter. And so, and so.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Recommendation threat.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Recommendation threat. Yeah. Yeah. That's the real alpha. If you, if you're, don't write me a recommendation letter. Threaten the person that I'm applying the job for.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  I would write a recommendation threat.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  For anyone on the team.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  For Tyler.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Anyone on the team. Yeah, for sure.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Great. You, you, your next training run will fail unless you hire.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  If you do not hire Tyler Cosgrove, you will effectively curse your bloodline.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  I would happily put pen to paper to say that. Anyway, so the 80 hours a week, it's not just AI agent work. Like, you could not have an AI agent do what she, that example, like, do what she did. Fly to a developing nation and actually sit in the room with someone who, who was just on the cusp of learning what a take private was and the value that could be created and convince them that this was a good idea. And so I think that these 80 hour weeks, they're gauntlets and they're used to identify top performers that can still lead the firm. And the question is, if you, if you don't have people doing the hard work and you're

• 56:13John Coogan?

  not in, in like, a lot of these things, we were talking to Danny Reimer at Index, we were like, is ventures, is your model a mentorship business? And so even if you can like outsource to AI agents, these low level tasks, you still need to like build the next generation of talent in your firm and figure out who the top performers are. Now, maybe you can collapse that to an eval. Like, the reason that she got hired at McKinsey, I'm sure was because she went to Harvard undergrad or something and had like perfect SAT scores and like a bunch of, and like, all of that might be able to be distilled such that, you know, if you just ask Goldman or McKinsey to just say, take the top 10% of your class, don't hire the bottom 90%

• 56:56John Coogan?

  and then immediately put them on the executive track and they'll be your managing directors. Like, maybe that's, maybe it's all predictable, but you do have a lot of churn where some of your top performers are going to leave and start companies. Some of them are going to go to big tech. Some of them are going to just burn out and want to be like teachers or something random. They might want to change, change trajectories entirely. And so even your top performers aren't necessarily going to matriculate into the partnership leadership. Like, leading the firm is a separate thing.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting, it'll be interesting to see, like, if there's new archetypes of people that thrive in management consulting, right? Because like, the right person that thrives in the first, whatever it is, five years of just insane grunt work and just like toiling over documents and stuff like that. The person that thrives in that oftentimes clearly can like rise above it and excel and... Client side, firm wide, kind of, you know, running the firm itself, et cetera.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  But there's also probably other people that would never make it through the first five years, but would just absolutely crush, you know, you know,

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  on, on, uh, for, for the sort of, the majority of the career.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  And I think that does happen every once in a while. There are people that lateral from entrepreneurship or tech into a big three consulting firm at the top. So they're never the low grade analysts grinding. They might have grinded somewhere else, though. Like, pretty much everyone grinds at some point. And I think that's kind of the, the, the part of the takeaway of founder mode is that the founder has, has been grinding in the exact context. And so you talk about like Dylan Field working on WebGL in the trenches of Figma. And then, you know, that enables him to speak with a different level of, of authority when he's managing a massive company that's now public.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  And so there's, there's, there's a world where like the, the grind is relevant to what you wind up doing. But the big question is just like, if, like, there is a risk, like, how do you, how do you identify these killers early on in the interview process? What does it mean for retention? And then the other question is like, today, if you, if you leave McKinsey to build a new consulting firm, you might be able to take some of your top clients with you. Like, if they put you on the Coca-Cola account and you wound up being really, really impressive as an analyst, and you spent a lot of time with the CFO and the CMO or whatever, or COO or whatever you were working on, and you built that relationship and, and they see you as

• 59:28John Coogan?

  a critical consultant, even though the managing director or the head was the one who closed the deal, they might be willing to take a shot on you if you leave and start your own firm. But then you still have to spin up all of your own analysts to actually do all the work that you were doing before with your team. And so that takes time to hire and train. But in the future, if you leave, if you're, if you're, if you're really high performing and you leave and you can just be like, let me get a, an account on ChatGPT Pro or whatever, and then I effectively have 40 consultants on my team on day one.

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  12,000.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  12,000, exactly. I would, I would imagine. That leaving to start your own firm and going like sort of solo and just leveraging just the relationships, just the ability, just your innate ability could be like extremely high leverage much earlier in your career.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  And so, because you don't have to do the, the, the thing where like you leave and you say, I'm taking everybody with me, you know, you, you can just leave and be like, I'm taking the AI agents with me because they live in Azure and I'm just spinning up new ones.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, the, the real question will be, is there IP, like real IP to develop around the agents or can you use ChatGPT out of the box to say, pretend like you're a McKinsey analyst and make me this, you know, 20 page report. I need sections on this, this, this, and this.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Use the entire internet as a data source as well as these materials from the client.

• 1:00:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  And give me this report and then, yeah.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Well, here's an idea for a consulting firm, leave McKinsey, go to companies, tell them to implement fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. That's basically your hero slide. You just show them the website and you say, pay me a million dollars and I'll help you implement it.

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Just kidding. Of course, you can implement this yourself. You could start a free trial.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  McKinsey is private.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:01:25Jordi Hays?

  But Accenture is not.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  And they have traded down 35% in the past six months. Bookings are slowing.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  They had a big government. They had, they were impacted by Doge moderately, but McKinsey does have the benefit of being private and being able to, to, you know, make hopefully some, some longer term decisions. The scale of Accenture is insane. Guess how many employees they have?

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Forty thousand.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Close.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Okay, how many do they have?

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Seven hundred and ninety one thousand.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  What? Seven hundred thousand? They're, they're 20 times bigger than McKinsey? Is that a real number?

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  There's more people that work at Accenture than the population of San Francisco.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Oh my God. Where do they hold their Christmas party?

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't even, yeah.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  I don't even know where a million people congregate. Like, is that like Mecca? They have to go to Mecca? Haven't you seen those, like, a million people praying in one area? I think that's where they have to go.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Even Coachella, Coachella has a daily capacity of 125,000.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  They can't even do Coachella. What, what, where, where can a million people? I mean, I guess there was the Million Man March, so they could, they could march on Washington DC. That's what they could do. They could take over all of DC.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  This is their new, they, they just do rotations and they basically do like a daily walking ultra marathon, where they just walk through and they just completely shut down pounds and they all wear the company merch.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  They've probably never been in the same place. They've probably never had a Christmas party with everyone.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  They should use, they should use Restream for their all hands. They need some real infrastructure there.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Um, anyway.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  That is absolutely wild. How many?

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  If you're selling something, I have some consulting advice for you. This one's free. Get on numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  The team just erupted in applause.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  We love it. We love it.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what else we got, Sean?

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  We got Disney. Uh, my question, is AI a sustaining innovation for Disney? Or is it a disruptive innovation? Where will Disney be in 10 years in the medium term? Obviously, you're going to be able to generate a lot of AI slop. You might be able to infringe on their, on their IP. They might get paid by Google Vio. When you generate a Mickey Mouse AI slop edit, they might get a little, a couple pennies? But will it be good or bad for them?

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Children's, you know, I could see them making a product that allows you to make a, you know, book or a story for your kid that actually, uh, you know, and they get, they get some type of revenue.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  They should get revenue and I think that they will through the courts, especially because as like big companies, like you're not so, it, it, it's not this crazy, oh, there's like a bunch of kids doing random things. Like, they never had to go after the, the street artist on Venice Beach that would draw a picture of Mickey Mouse. Sell it to you for 20 bucks. They that was never material to their business. They had to go after Napster.

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  I went to Venice Beach.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:37Jordi Hays?

  I got them to draw me as Mickey Mouse.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  And then I performed a citizen's arrest. I respect IP. I'm an IP respecter.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Citizen's arrest.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Citizen's arrest. You're going to jail, buddy.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  This is for Bob.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  This is for Bob Iger. Yeah. So, big question. This feels like a moment where you want to be in founder mode. Bob Iger is one of the greatest CEOs of all time. How will he navigate this? The Wall Street Journal says, is it still? He's not the founder. The founder died in 1966. Walt Disney.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  But you're claiming that he's still.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  He might be able to turn it on. Satya Nadella certainly was able to do it. He's navigating the AI. The AI shift flawlessly. We'll see what happens with Bob Iger and Disney. Wall Street Journal says, is it still Disney magic if it's AI? The stakes are especially high for the studio caught between how to use artificial intelligence in the filmmaking process and how to protect its famed characters against it. So there's a little anecdote that we'll kick it off with. When Disney began working on its new live action version of its hit cartoon, Mulanah, executives started to ponder whether they should clone its star, Dwayne Johnson. The actor was reprising his role in the movie as Maui. A barrel-chested demigod. Have you seen Mulanah? No, you have not. Of course, we know this.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  For certain days on set, Disney had a plan in place that wouldn't require Johnson to be there. All under the plan they devised, Johnson's similarly buff cousin, Tanua Reid, who is six foot three, 250 pounds, would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deep fakes of Johnson's face that would be layered on top of Reid's performance in the footage, a digital twin, essentially, digital double, that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once. Obviously, that's better.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Calls up his cousin, you want a job? I need you to be me.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, hit the gym, buddy. Better be jacked.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Get on a cycle.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, these, these, uh, these movie schedules are famously tight. Three months in and out, crazy schedules, and then you move on to the next one. There's that famous Henry Cavill story where he filmed Superman, rapped, moved on to another movie where he had to grow out a mustache. He grew out a mustache and a beard. And then they said, hey, we gotta do some reshoots. You gotta come back to Superman. And he came back, but he couldn't shave his mustache and beard, so they had to change it in, in CGI. And it looked terrible. Probably not a problem now with, with deepfakes. That's actually a good use of AI and, uh, something that probably shouldn't be very controversial, but obviously everything in AI is controversial right now. Um, but we will continue with Disney.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  They say, what happened next was evidence that Hollywood's must discuss, much discussed, much feared AI revolution won't be an overnight robot takeover. Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed. What security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns? They worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every, uh, that the studio couldn't ultimately claim ownership over every element in the film. If AI generated parts were in there. So if there's AI training data from a DreamWorks film in there and they use the DreamWorks training data to make a Disney film, even if it looks like Dwayne The Rock Johnson. DreamWorks might come knocking and say, hey, give us a royalty.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  I think that's the risk, but the lawyers are having fun, maybe. Uh, full employment for lawyers over at Disney, clearly. Uh, Disney and metaphysics spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract to work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer. They went and shot it. A deepfake Dwayne Johnson is just one part of a broader technological earthquake hitting Hollywood. Studios are scrambling to figure out how simultaneously they can use AI in the filmmaking process and how to protect themselves against it. Is it sustaining or disruptive or both? Can't be both, but we'll see. While executives see a future where the technology shaves tens of millions of dollars off a movie's budget, they are grappling with a present, with a present, present filled with legal

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  uncertainty, fan backlash, and a wariness toward embracing tools that some in Silicon Valley view as their next century replacement. And if you are trying to sell an AI tool into Hollywood, you gotta get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level, and you can get started for free. So, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is surveying members on how they use the technology. Studio chiefs are shutting down efforts to experiment for fear of angering show business unions on the eve of another contract negotiation. And no studio stands to gain or lose more in the outcome than Disney, the home of Donald Duck, Belle, Buzz Lightyear, Stitch, and countless others, which has churned out some of the most valuable and protected creative works in over the past century.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  So, my take on this. So, two years ago, I was hanging out with the founder of a very large generative AI image generation company. And he was telling me that by 2025, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection could generate a full Hollywood movie about anything they want with a single prompt. And it was a hilarious conversation because we were on a Zoom call and his internet wasn't working. And it was the classic example of like, the technology is amazing, but we got a lot of stuff to iron out. So, anyway, extremely aggressive timeline, but obviously, things are going to change for Hollywood. So, my question is, will Disney benefit? It feels like a moment to be in founder mode, but Walt Disney died in 1966.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  So, basically, everyone believes that Meta will benefit from AI, even if they miss the train on owning the next dominant consumer tech platform. But if Disney got really AI-pilled, what would that look like? I don't think they need to train their own foundation model, just like they don't need to train their own, they don't need to build their own cinema cameras. They can just use IMAX when they, the time calls for IMAX. They can use Blender when the time calls for Blender. They can use Houdini when the time calls for, when the... When the shot calls for some high level VFX.

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  But they do need to rethink how they structure their business and negotiate with unions and underwrite content. They might need to go more risk on, not just from a brand risk position, but taking more smaller bets. We're in this weird barbell world where everything seems like it's either 100 bucks and it's shot on an iPhone. It's a viral like TikTok or it's a hundred million dollar blockbuster with like 50 million dollars of VFX. Actually, that's kind of a low number. It's usually like 300 million dollar production with 150 million dollar VFX. And then no one sees it and it's a flop, but then they they hit every once in a while and they're great when they're good. But it's this weird like venture style betting at the high end, but there's nothing in the middle. And maybe that's like the death of the art house film. But I'm just wondering if in the age of AI, like maybe

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  there's this interim step where Disney ladders down a little bit and gives like 10 filmmakers 10 million dollars each and says, hey, you're still required to deliver a 90 minute full film, but you're doing it for 10 mil and it's not quite Blair Witch level production, one notch up. You got to be creative. This is what me 24 is doing.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm really bullish on this idea that the, you know, historically, like a TV show would film a pilot episode and they would use that to get the budget to shoot an entire season. And you can imagine now, you know, even for film, you can just make, you know, make the trailer ahead of time with AI. The other advantage that I think Disney has that's very real, just going in and why they're just broadly seem to be positioned very well here is that I think that I think that broadly like content customization will probably take off because you could Disney can make a film

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  now and then you could make millions of different variations of it that become interactive with like the underlying fan. So like imagine. You're watching Moana, but like your kid is in the film, is a character in the film. And you can now do that at scale, right? And how much more would you pay as a parent to have something like that?

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  I have a funny story about this.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  But last thing I'd say, so customization and just like democratizing, like, like basically making, making, being able to make variations of films.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  I think is going to be big. I think just the, the time, it's the same way you, it's, it's so difficult to make a new luxury brand.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's so difficult to create, it's easy to create IP. It's hard, extremely difficult and time intensive to create valuable IP. And Disney's advantage is they have this sort of like 360 and that they can make a film and they can bring it to Disneyland. They can bring it to a cruise. They can create physical products around it. And so they develop IP in a way that, that new entrants are not, you know, they don't have the benefit of like having a Disneyland where they can make new experiences that, that increase the value of that IP, right? So I think.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  So two things. One, if I were to go back, one of my favorite Disney properties is Star Wars, A New Hope, the very first film. If I went back and was like, let's customize that for me. I don't know that I would make any changes. Like, do I really want a scene where Han Solo breaks the fourth wall and says like, hey, John, like I'm about to go, you know, save Luke at the Death Star. Like that doesn't improve the product for me. I actually like that it's just the vision of George Lucas. So I don't know about customization being better for me. I don't know what I would change.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  But here's, here's an example of how to make like a magical experience for a kid. It's like, imagine after a movie ends.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  A kid could interact with a character and ask it questions in real time, like about. About the story or

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Have a conversation with them and that's what I'm talking about, like bringing that IP to life.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Totally. Right now that exists and I was obsessed with this when I was a kid. I would, I would, I would watch Star Wars and then I would read the, the, the books that in the expanded universe. And I remember even having books that were just like encyclopedias of every single ship. This, uh, you could read into this a little bit more, but, uh, we'll leave that where it is. But I, but I would learn every single, every single ship. This is what a Star Destroyer does. And he would have all this backlog and stuff. And so, yes, I agree with you. That's very cool. You finish the movie and then you can just interview Luke about how this, how does the lightsaber actually work? And he can talk about the kyber crystals. That would be very cool. On the flip side, uh, I had a very funny experience. Uh, I was watching a horror film in high school with a couple of friends and I grew up in Pasadena.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  And this horror film just happened to take place in Pasadena. Like that's where they set the film. Because Pasadena, California is just like a place where you set films. It's just a real place. So if you've seen Kill Bill, which I know you haven't, uh, but Kill Bill, uh, by Quentin Tarantino, uh, there, there's a scene where, uh, where Uma Thurman just shows up. And it says at the bottom Pasadena, California, because like that's where the character went. It exists in the real world. But this horror film that took place in Pasadena was terrifying because I was watching it and I was like, this is happening here and it's night and it's dark outside and like I now I'm so much more immersed.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  And so I was thinking back then that you could use like the IP address of the, of a, of a connected, I think we were watching it on like a PS3, like a DVD player. Like you could, you could use the DVD player to dynamically change the location of this, of the establishing shot. So you're like, this whole horror film is going to take in, take place inside of like one house where there's like a monster in the house. And it's going to be like the usual, like they're upstairs, they're downstairs, there's blood, there's, you know, someone's running and chasing, like it could be any town USA. But they usually, they usually establishes like this is happening in Amityville. This is happening in, you know, some random town, uh, Lake Placid, right? But they could easily just dynamically change that with a few establishing shots to just show you, okay, it's happening in Malibu.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  All right. And now it's a lot scarier for you. So I think there's something interesting there, but again, it has to be the work of like an autour.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  It's, yeah, it's not something you can copy and paste either because it works for some shows, but then others like the place is so obviously. The place that it would throw you off as a viewer.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I do think that the that the fully AI-generated, fully custom content, that will exist, but it will exist on independent third-party platforms. It won't be the domain of Disney. This will be something where if you, in the future, if you really want to see like, you know, AI-generated stories about surfing in Malibu, like, there will be an endless stream of those, and you will be able to go and experience that particular content. And you can already kind of experience that because there's probably some Instagram person who makes really great content about surfing in Malibu. And if you follow them, you get that vibe, and that might be what you're into. And you can kind of like, and it's handled just by the great democratization of creativity.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  And we should talk to Samir about this later. He's coming on the show, so we can talk about the future of content creation and whatnot. But, anyway, let's talk about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go check it out. Anyway, let's hit the timeline. Let's go through the hottest posts on the internet.

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Finally, the moment you've all been waiting for.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Last Friday, after we wrapped the show, it was a timeline in turmoil over in DC. I believe that the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was fired. This was after a negative job report. It was very controversial. People were not very happy about this because this is the data that we use to judge the health of the economy.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Insane, insane whiplash, too, because Big Tech, you know, Thursday, printing, Figma.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Massive gain.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, biggest gain in a very long time. And then it turns out the real economy, or at least the statistics coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, were not looking great. And the prior two months.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Got revised down. And so, we are still adding jobs, but mostly in healthcare.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Fororet Accenture. Although I think they're cutting as well.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so broadly, the US economy feels strong, but we are having some unemployment upticks. And so that's always a, you know, a canary in the coal mine. But Ray Dalio chimes in with his take.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Also, I believe like tourism is down pretty much across the board.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's a lot of debates about, people immediately were digging into what's driving the job losses. Is it, does it have anything to do with Trump's immigration policy? There were a lot of different, a lot of different ideas as to why the, why the job numbers are what they are? And how, how bad are they? Obviously, you can see in the market, the market tanked on Friday, but then is up today. And so there's, you know, there's not necessarily consensus now that we're like entering a recession or anything like that. But it's certainly something to watch and something to dig into. And obviously, we want high quality data about everything from GDP to CPI to unemployment.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  And so Ray Dalio is breaking down his argument for firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He says, "That's because its process for making estimates is obviously obsolete and error prone. And if there's no good plan in the works, and there's no good plan in the works for fixing it. The huge revisions in Friday's unemployment numbers are symptomatic of this, especially because the revisions brought the numbers toward private estimates that were in fact much better. I assure you that this is something that I know a lot about because of how I use data to follow the economy and bet on where it's going. Of course, if the way most people in the media are conveying President Trump's motivation for the firing is correct, such as the New York Times saying, quote, "When President Trump

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  didn't like the weak jobs numbers that were released on Friday, he fired the person responsible for producing them, that would be a big problem because leaders manipulating numbers that distort the truth to suit their political objectives is a classic sign of the loss of a functioning system with the rule of law and checks and balance. And the loss of these things leads to the loss of confidence." That underpins our whole economic and political system. So it'd be good if President Trump made his thinking clear. In any case, we do need big renovations renovations to the ways the government estimates what's going on in the economy to make them more not less accurate. And so this is interesting because Ray Dalio is not a perma bull on America by any stretch of the imagination.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  He literally wrote a book about the changing world order that was basically like, America's cooked. I mean, to some extent, he was like talking about the rise and fall of nations and he's been very bullish on China and sees China as a rising nation. So he is not someone that is just constantly ringing the gong for America's, you know, unrelenting progress. And so this is interesting take from him. And then, and then, I mean, I have personal experience with how the, how the government collects data. I didn't work at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I worked, I worked at the Census Department.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  From the people that bought you, that brought you the Department of Motor Vehicles comes Labor Statistics.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I always in, in, in the year 2000, the economy was ripping and I believe the census was done by volunteers. Because it wasn't, it was just kind of like, oh, let's, let's get a poll of people. But then in, in 2010, the economy was in a recession after the great global financial crisis. And it was seen as a stimulus program. So people were making like 20 to $25 an hour, which is very good back then to go around and survey people. But the survey data is a little messy and I was always wondering.

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  Have you told this story on the show before?

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  I don't think we have time today, but we should at some point. But, but basically my, my takeaway was always, was always like, couldn't we just ask Google? Like I have a feeling that the big tech companies know not just exactly how many Americans are in each, each jurisdiction. But they know everything about them, their IP addresses and their geolocations. Like the big tech companies truly know so much. And I know you're going to say like, well, not everyone uses Facebook. And, and that's true. But if you aggregated data across like most of the cell networks and most. Of the web services, like you could get a very accurate reading, much more so than

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  just randomly going door to door and seeing like, oh, this person opened the door and talked to me, which is like how the census currently works. And so it is interesting that that the unemployment numbers were, the government numbers were less accurate than the private estimates, which are just like, because obviously every hedge fund wants the data and they want the data earlier than the government puts it out. And some traders obviously trade on top of the BLS statistics and those are important, but the private estimates are better. And so interesting to see where this goes, how much modernization can be done, how much, and then there's always the question of like privacy, if you're like tracking everyone, because it's like, there's a lot of people out there who might say, I don't want the, I don't want the government to know if I have a job or two jobs.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of big data, Palantir announcing earnings, I guess in, I'm assuming in 30 minutes. Another post here from Buco, Bucko Capital Bloke, he says, Trump, we need to cut BLS. Turns out the job market is weak. Trump, no, not like that. Another post, interesting data point here, Derek Thompson says, spending on services, especially travel and tourism, has declined for three straight months for the first time since 2008. And expanding when Trump, the US economy is showing strains of weakness. Outside of the pandemic, the

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  employment rate for college graduates over 25 is rising fast and is higher now than any year since 2014. Job growth in the past three months is the lowest since 2010 and spending on services has declined for three straight months for the first time since 2008. How are companies, individuals and the government supposed to deal with an economy slipping toward recession? If we're, if we're smashing the tools, we need to know how fast we're falling. In a tempest, it's unwise to ransack the navigation system. That is Derek Thompson's take. What else we got?

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  We got Aidsleep, Aidsleep.com, get a Pod5, they have a five year warranty, 30 year risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Continue, Jordy.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  It was absolutely brutal having to cover the Figma IPO without sleeping on an 8th and 9th and 14th and Ramp, and Ramp Series Z too.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  These are big days.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. But green shoots for us.

• 1:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Code TBN, of course, if you want to make the switch.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Benji Taylor says, "People are finally starting to realize how few truly great designers there are and how disproportionately valuable they are."

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  If you missed our interview with Dylan on Thursday, he said that design is becoming an enduring edge for companies. We've seen this with companies like Linear, which came into a crowded category and is dominated by just building a truly thoughtful product.

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Jordi Hays?

  And this is something-

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  People love to like reduce design to nothing. Oh, cursor or wind surf, these are just forks of VS code. And it's like, yes, but like if it was truly perfectly competitive, why is there a, why is there a split in revenue at all? Why isn't it just 50/50? Well, like, there's probably some design and differentiation in the product that you don't realize until you're actually a DAU of these, and that is what's driving the adoption.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep. But yeah, I have worked with hundreds of designers across my career, and there's only a handful that when people come to me and say, you know, "I want to recruit a founding designer," or something like that.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Jacoby!

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby. Jacoby in the comment section.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, he's there?

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no. He's in the comment of Benji's post.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to design something, design a billboard. Put it on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  We didn't make it to our billboards in New York.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  We didn't.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  But I felt like I'd been there because so many people had shared them.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Still low-hanging fruit in billboards.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Anjane says Mistral, Eleven Labs, Black Forest Labs, Lovable, Helsing, Granola, European AI scene is on fire. So I just wanted to give some credit.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Like this top comment, not to mention lovable. And then Anj just says reread the list like it's literally the fourth one. Uh, that's very funny. Anyway.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  And I know all these companies.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  This is, this is, this is bait though. This is bait for us.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  It's.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Because you, you, you know, I, I refuse to step foot on the old continent. And so by posting something like this, this is just, this is trying to get me out of golden retriever mode, out of being nice. This is trying to bait a dunk from me because nothing makes me more upset than anything that's not America.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, one thing I would say, I think you can be happy that the cap tables of these companies are majority US.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I'd like the cap tables to get a hundred percent American owned and then I'd like the companies to relocate to America.

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What about the teams?

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Everyone and all the customers.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  Just citizenship. Uh, Eleven Labs is also, Eleven Labs, uh, from my understanding, uh, is primarily based in New York.

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  Hmm. A little truth zone going on.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, I think Anjane would know better considering Andreessen is an investor.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Rune says.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  This is funny.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  It's true what the misinformation is saying about us. We indeed have Lilith. Progenator of human life locked up under the Mission Bay headquarters.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Don't read the comments on this one.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  We're skipping over the comments.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Very funny. But anyway, uh, yeah, there was a GPT five article that went out and, uh, this is Rune kind of putting in the truth zone and saying like, hey, we're just grinding and we're building and, uh, you know, uh, tell your story a different way, basically.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Bay's Lord says, I propose we create the Terence Tao Institute for Math and Science and fund it with tech money. Uh, Terence Tao, uh, got his funding at UCLA. Cut, not specifically, but, uh, but, but funding was cut broadly due to UCLA's reaction to.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. He was sort of collateral damage.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  In, in a, in a, uh, in a political fight between UCLA and the current administration. And so I think someone should step up and keep funding him. I think there's certainly value in having him do extremely undirected research.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  He could land at a lab and do cool stuff.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  I was saying that he should join Vlad's.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  That would be very cool. Yeah. So Vlad Tenev, founder of Robinhood, has a new foundation model company or AI lab focused on math and he's got the money to provide Terrence Tao with everything he needs and more. And I think this would be a great use. And if it doesn't happen soon, we're going to start nagging every billionaire into doing it. We're going to create a, the shame on you list for billionaires who have not donated to Terrence Tao.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Noah Smith says, we now have a big story about why this time is different. Rapidly increasing debt funding one single sector, an opaque corner of the financial system that has recently grown. Systemically important lenders enmeshed in the new sector. And I just want to say, I really.

• 1:30:49John Coogan?

  I feel like calling top signals was like a two weeks ago thing. I think we're back at this point. I don't know why he's calling top on everything right now.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  I just hope that this time the music never stops.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Because I like dancing. And who doesn't like a little game of musical chairs?

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  But also, I mean, maybe this time there's enough chairs. Everyone just takes a seat.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  No one said if you're playing musical chairs, you, you have to stop the music.

• 1:31:13John Coogan?

  Also, yeah, I mean, musical chairs, you could still land on a chair. There's only one person gets, gets eliminated. So just don't, don't be that person. Don't, don't.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Be that, that guy, pal.

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Don't put yourself in the, in the FTX bucket.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Do we have time to, to go through this?

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  We, we have 10 minutes.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  But I think there's probably more.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  Noah Smith on No Opinion. Will data centers crash the economy? This time, let's think about a financial crisis before it happens. The US economic data for the last few months is looking decidedly meh. The latest employment numbers were so bad that Trump actually fired the head of Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  We don't know that that's why, but it's a reasonable take.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  Accusing her, yeah, hi, his take would be, you know, she's been messing up the numbers a lot and we need a new approach, you know, kind of.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Accusing her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad, but there's one huge bright spot amid the gloom. Incredible AI denisator building. Boom.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  Look at the chart. Pull up the chart, scroll down. Capital expenditures quarterly were so close to touching a hundred billion across Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. You add in, you add in the independent CapEx that's going on, and you're easily in a hundred billion a quarter. You love to see it. A little disappointing Q1, but Q2, we came back strong, strong. Yeah, no one's really talking about the sell-off in Q1.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Noah says inference compute now represents most of the cost of running advanced AI models and increases in inference computer responsible for many of the ongoing performance gains. So compute needs are probably only going to grow as AI keeps getting better. Whoever provides this compute is going to make a huge amount of revenue. Whether that means they'll make a lot of profit is another question, but let's table that for right now. We reported earlier that Microsoft's margin on the, on the like token and inferencing side was something like thirty to forty percent.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  I would just zoom out and look at it as like, what's CapEx? We're talking about a hundred billion a quarter. What's token-related revenue? So add OpenAI, they're making three billion a quarter, Anthropic's making a billion a quarter. You know, obviously, there's, you know, core AI stuff happening in all the hyperscalers. But you add all that up, we're making like maybe ten billion a quarter in revenue right now on AI stuff, and we're investing a hundred billion. And so like, we're not right-side up on the trade generally, but there's no sign that, that, that ChatGPT will ever make less than a billion dollars a month. Like, there's just no sign that that's not gonna, that's gonna fall off a cliff.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the other, I mean, same dynamic, right? If you're building, if you build a, if you build a factory, do you expect to, to, to generate profit that month, that quarter, that year, the next year, potentially now?

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  I mean, this stuff depreciates like quickly because it doesn't stay on the frontier, but like the base workload for just generating tokens for GPT-4O, like reasonable questions and just asking just basic stuff, like. That workload could stay on those H100s for a decade and you can make that money back.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting that Apple, we covered after their earnings, Tim Cook called out that they're using third-party

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  like lenders to finance a lot of their CapEx and they're choosing not to

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  deploy too much capital themselves. So Noah says roughly speaking, Apple is choosing the former while the big software companies, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are choosing the latter. These spending numbers are pretty incredible. We covered this chart already. For Microsoft and Meta, this capital expenditure is now more than a third of their total sales.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  If you're looking to deploy a capital expenditure of your own, get on Bezzle, get Bezzle.com. Your Bezzle concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. It goes on the balance sheet. It's CapEx. It's personal CapEx. Do it.

• 1:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Here's Chris Memes of the Wall Street Journal. Mag7 tech firms have collectively spent a record 102, 102 and a half billion on CapEx in their most recent quarters, nearly all from Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. Apple, Nvidia and Tesla together contributed a mere 6.7 billion. Investor and tech pundit Paul Kedrowski says that as a percentage of gross domestic product, spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot com boom. And it's still growing. He also argues that one explanation for the US economy's ongoing strength despite tariffs is that spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it's acting as a sort of private sector stimulus program.

• 1:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the US economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Duda, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here's that chart from Kedrowski, who has been doing an excellent job following this story as it unfolds. So we can pull this up right now. Infrastructure CapEx as a percentage of US GDP by era and you could see railroads. We went pretty.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  What's weird is that is that he's showing telecom capex in 2020 when that was not like the boom time for telecom, obviously 5G and fiber infrastructure are being built out, but this doesn't surprise me. We gotta get this number up. We gotta get to 6% of GDP for sure. 50% of GDP, 100% of GDP.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  Has Dor Cash talked about this?

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. If you play out the scale is all you need thing, you wind up investing like 200% of global GDP eventually. And it's just like the math doesn't work.

• 1:37:00Jordi Hays?

  Mas is like, I can, I can come up with the money. I'm good for it. I'm good for it.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  I mean, technically, you could invest more than 100% of global GDP with enough debt.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  Like you can, or you could just save up for a decade. Like humanity could save up and then just deploy it all at once. Like, like, wealth is not the same as GDP. GDP is an income figure, and wealth is a, is a balance sheet figure, and capex is a deployment from, from the balance sheet, essentially.

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Not income.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean loosely, you, you should, you should benchmark GDP to, to, to revenue or something like that, more, more than just like, like GDP, like the US's GDP is not how much money the US has right now, or can spend. It's just how much money is flowing through the economy.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Noah says, I think it's important to look at the telecom boom of the 1990s rather than the one in the 2010s because the former led to a gigantic crash. The railroad boom led to a gigantic crash too in 1873 before the investment peak on Kedrowski's chart. In both cases, companies built too much infrastructure outrunning growth and demand for that infrastructure and suffered a devastating bust as expectations reset and loans couldn't be paid back.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:14Jordi Hays?

  And doesn't Tyler Cowen also have a bunch of writing on, on why these sort of booms and bubbles are actually, can have a tremendously...

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Tyler Cowen has written about it, but I think you're thinking of Bern Hobart, who wrote the book Boom for Stripe Press. Fantastic book. You should go check it out. But basically, it's just that you get, yes, you do get these gyrations, these market corrections, but the booms create new opportunity at lower prices because you have all this dark fiber. Who bought up that dark fiber? Google. And so we got Google post-crash, actually. And we got Facebook post-crash because the infrastructure was there and the railroads had been built. And you can see the same thing happening where there's a whole bunch of inference capacity that's out there. And then it's like, ah, yeah, we're really not using it all because we're kind of good with GPT-4 class models and we don't need to

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  inference at the 4.5 level and those monster models because it's kind of not worth it.

• 1:39:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm good with my McKinsey analyst agent.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  I'm good with this one. But then in the next 10 years, while we're kind of licking our wounds from the sell-off, somebody goes and figures out how to actually use that crazy, crazy higher amount of inference and the capacity is there, which is very cool. But anyway, if you're looking to take a vacation and go visit a data center, you got to book a wander. So you're sleeping in luxury while you're going out to the data center.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  You can find your happy place. You can book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  We should make our own map of wanderers.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  It's a vacation home, but better. Yes, that are closest to the data centers.

• 1:39:44Jordi Hays?

  To the big data center, if you want to do some data center tourism.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Sort of like a pilgrimage.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  Noah says, in the context of the telecom boom and the railroad boom, in both cases, the big capex spenders weren't wrong. They were just early. Eventually, we ended up using all of those railroads and all those telecom fibers and much more. This has led a lot of people to speculate the big investment bubbles might be, actually be beneficial to the economy since manias leave behind a surplus of cheap infrastructure that can be used to power future technological advances and new business models. But for anyone who gets caught up in the crash, the future benefits to society are of a cold comfort. So a lot of people are worrying that there's going to be a crash in the AI data center industry and thus in big tech in general. If AI industry revenue doesn't grow fast

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  enough to keep up with the capex boom over the next few years, a data center bust would mean that big tech shareholders would lose a lot of money. Like dot-com shareholders, you're not losing if you never sell.

• 1:40:43Jordi Hays?

  Like dot com shareholders in 2000, it would also slow the economy directly because big tech companies would stop investing. But the scariest possibility is that it would cause a financial crisis. Financial crises tend to involve bank debt. When a financial bubble and crash is mostly a fall in the value of stocks and bonds, everyone takes losses and then just sort of walks away a bit poorer like in 2000. Jordan Schulerick and Taylor survey the history of bubbles and crashes and they find that debt, also called credit and leverage, is a key predictor of whether a bubble ends up hurting the real economy.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  So I think we need to dig into this more. We need to learn more about private credit, have some folks on who are financing this stuff, analysts who are covering these.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  It's really been a golden era of private credit.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  It has been. And I think that there's another three hours of discussion here, but we have our next guest.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  We had one of the founders of Core Weave on. We should ask him to introduce us to a couple of the lenders that kind of financed that business and ended up printing.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just off the top of my head, I've been talking to a bunch of folks about this and it's not quite the same because you can hold private credit for a much longer time and there's a lot of the stuff is being funded off the balance sheets. They're just cutting a dividend or drawing down on a cash balance if you're a mag seven company. So there are a lot of differences, but definitely worth digging into. So we will cover this more in the coming days, but we have our first guest of the show, Dan from Armada. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Dan?

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. I'm doing great. How are you?

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  I'm good.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Can you kick us off with an introduction on Armada and how you're explaining the business these days?

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Armada is building the hyperscaler for the edge. Look at a map of the world. There's about 30% of the world where you have these big hyperscale data centers. And I mean, 70% of the world doesn't have AI infrastructure today. And so we are filling the gaps in infrastructure, building that hyperscaler for the edge.

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  Got it. How much of that is military versus, you know, that we hear about the oil and gas industry, they need a data center on site, they're in some remote location versus just energy price arbitrage, let's go where the energy is cheap, put a data center there. Crusoe was doing that early on in a little bit less of a portable package. But how are you thinking about the market and kind of the most tangible opportunities that you can explain the business through?

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's both. So we're working with critical industries, a lot of energy companies, oil and gas, mining, manufacturing, logistics, and then in the public sector, we're working with the DOD as well as allies, and then also doing a lot with emergency response, anything that requires sort of split second decision making, processing of large amounts of data in more remote locations. That's a real focus for us. And then what we've seen is that now that the kind of blocker for AI is moving from just the chips to energy. And I think Anthropic just came out with a white paper last week, where they're talking about we need to unlock 50 gigawatts

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  of energy by 2028 for AI. And so we actually just launched a new product, which is called Leviathan, which is megawatt scale AI data centers that can rapidly co-locate with areas where there are stranded land of energy. And you can have a sort of a plug-in, a plug-and-play AI factory in weeks versus years with a traditional data center. And that's important because we've got about six gigawatts of stranded energy around the country. China's growing really fast. We need to unlock all that energy in order to win.

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through kind of the shape and scale of the products. I've seen the

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, before I'm curious, what it what does stranded energy actually look like? I have a bunch of guesses, you know, you know, infrastructure was overbuilt in a specific area.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Beached whales. If there's beached whales, you go, you extract whale oil right there.

• 1:44:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  And then you can burn it and generate your power for your data center. No.

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  Just like that. Just like that. No, I mean, there is a ton of stranded energy around the country and then also, you know, an allied parts of the world like the Middle East. If you if you looked at like the top energy sources, what's top of the list? It's it's natural gas, right? So you have a lot of stranded natural gas in places like. You know, North Dakota, Texas, we're already working with developers that have a lot of that land and stranded energy and you know, they're looking to utilize it for AI infrastructure. And if you look at, you know, the, the AI action plan that just came, that came out, I think part of what we're trying to do is say, okay, we have all this stranded energy.

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  We're going to need hyperscale data centers, you know, give sort of gigawatt scale data centers, we need to build those really rapidly, but we're also going to need to build distributed infrastructure, distributed data centers that can be deployed very quickly to, to use that stranded power.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  So when I'm, when I hear stranded natural gas, does that mean like some exploration company has gone and, and done fracking experiments or research to understand that there's natural gas there, but maybe there's just no pipeline to extract it. So you can get it out of the ground, but it's very expensive to move somewhere else that's more valuable. Or is it something else that's going on? Like, how can natural gas be stranded, basically?

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's definitely, you know, some of the scenarios that, you know, other scenarios are like there are major energy companies around the country that have, you know, sort of flare gas that's just being released today in the atmosphere. And so they're, they're, they're under pressure to do something with that gas.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  And so what they're now doing is they're actually using turbines to convert it into electricity so that you can power infrastructure, some for their own internal use, but then also they're looking at this as, hey, I can create a new revenue stream. And so it's a mix of different situations, but, but those are common ones that we see.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Uh, let's go back to the actual product, what it looks like. I've seen shipping container renderings. Uh, what are the different scales and products that you think are most important to push forward right now?

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So again, we're, we're building the hyperscaler for the edge and what's unique about us is we're doing it full stack. So you, the hardware, the software and the AI. And the easiest mental model to have is like, think about. One of the current cloud providers, think about Azure, AWS, GCP, what are they? They're really just full stack infrastructure companies. They focused on building these large hyperscale data centers in areas that had a lot of data, major metro areas. But again, that's only 30% of the world. So basically what we're doing is focusing on the remaining 70%. But otherwise, it's a similar type of approach. We're building full stack.

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  We provide everything to customers as a service in a way that's totally term key. And I'd say that the biggest difference is we see a world where it's going to be distributed compute. So we're building rapidly deployable, mobile infrastructure that can be co-located with not only energy, but data. Because what we've found is that you've got some of these energy companies that have oil rigs that are generating one to five terabytes of data every day. Similar situations with mining companies, similar situations on a battleship, right? Where you might have just huge amounts of data being generated from drones, autonomous technology in the middle of the ocean.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  Now you have connectivity via Starlink or Starshield and other types of connectivity. But you also need to compute there locally to do any sort of real time data processing at the edge.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Are you seeing more demand for tokens as a service managed models? Or just pure infrastructure, bare metal, let me do whatever I want on it?

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  It's all, so again, it kind of comes back to think about like the cloud provider. Like there's a reason why Amazon Web Services is called Amazon Web Services, right? It's the services that the people care about. And so for us, we also sell services or we call them solutions. Where it's like, there's a specific. Thing that the customer is trying to do, whether it is, you know, rapidly standing up an AI factory in some location where they have stranded energy, or it's a scenario where they have lots of unstructured data, let's say from drones, and they want to process all that data in real time versus having hours or sometimes, you know, days of delay so that they can do a specific thing. A good example is we're working with the state of

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Alaska, their Department of Transportation, and they're using our entire platform. They're managing all of their connected assets, meaning like Starlink terminals, Skydio drones, SD-WAN devices. They used to have over a day of latency to process the unstructured data from the drones for response to avalanches in remote areas. Wow. And, you know, we're helping them get to near real time to respond to those types of things. And so that's, that's what we're seeing is there's different specific problems that these customers have at the edge. And then we're unique in that we actually solve them full stack.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, how many, how many sort of like systems do you want to have? Like, what are the sort of like more near term goals in terms of deploying systems? When I think of, when I think of the word Armada, you know, obviously you think of like

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Many ships.

• 1:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Fleet, you know, a fleet that's stretching as far as the eye can see.

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm seeing like the Tesla power battery pack where I can figure like one and it's a couple of grand, or I can spend $192 million or something if I buy a ton of them, but it's really just like a lattice. Yeah, it's super.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And even like how you're managing kind of like how to prioritizing different customers when I'm sure you get calls all day long and somebody's like, hey, I need a data center in Antarctica. And you're like, well, like we're more focused on, you know, the northern hemisphere.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  The IMO is next week. I need a data center next.

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. No, we're exactly right. We're focusing on the, the largest sort of mission aligned entities in the world. And what I mean by that is, We're working with some of the largest energy players in the world. We're working also with, you know, the DOD, it's public, we're working with the US Navy. It's kind of nice that the company's called Armada because it goes hand in hand with that. But the way that we approach it, we really focus on customers that we can see that they will have thousands of what we call connected assets. So, you know, take the Navy, have a galleon, we call our modular data centers galleons sticking with the Armada theme, have one on every ship.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  You know, have one in strategic locations around the world where we have bases or maybe more of a mission scenario, being able to support that. Similar situation, if you think about like a really large energy company, like we were in the news with Aramco and Microsoft, where we've already deployed our technology. We're starting with one site, but they have rigs in refineries all over the world, onshore, offshore. And so the idea is that this is distributed infrastructure for all of their operations. And what's really interesting is if you open up our operating system, we call it, we call our platform the Armada Edge Platform, AEP, you see a fleet map and it shows all of your

• 1:52:24Speaker 03

  galleons as well as any other connected assets that you have, all in a single place. And so what we want to be is that single partner for the most important organizations in the world, you know, obviously aligned with the US for all of their operations.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Can you talk to me about the, the history and development of Starlink? That feels like a foundational technology that unlocks a lot of what you're doing. How big is Starlink? How useful is it? Where is it going? Where, where do you expect the capability unlock points to be? Should, is there a framework where I should be thinking about Starlink in the same rollout as, you know, 3G, 4G, 5G, something like that? I imagine that we're, we're still in, you know, the exponential rollout phase of that technology.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So Starlink only launched in public beta in November of 2020. So it's a relatively new technology. The first couple of years, they were focused on consumer business. And then they started selling to enterprise and then also working with the government with Starshield. So you're really only talking about a few years and they're now in well over 140 countries all over the world. And what's been really interesting, we've been working with Starlink from the beginning of Armada. So I've been working with them since the inception of the company and we have a great partnership. But the technology is continuing to get better and better and better.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  When we first started working with them, a lot of people were using it in like pockets. Take like a really large energy company, they might use it as a backup form of connectivity. But they wouldn't use it as a primary. What's ended up happening is that everything that Starlink does is getting better, really, really fast. Including, you know, new generations of the birds, the satellites up in space, which are getting better performance. There's, you know, new types of terminals, there's even, you know, a new kind of like priority lane. They call it multi K U where you can get better performance, a little more expensive. So what's happened is a lot of these organizations, they started to use it as backup.

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  And now they're actually starting to use it as a primary source of connectivity. And what we expect is over the next five years, it's going to cover the entire globe. And you're going to have, you know, Leo connectivity that's as good as having fiber in a lot of these locations. And so we're, you're building for that world today and sort of completing the rest of the compute stack for, for that world.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  In, in terms of fiber, I mean, that seems like speed, but is, is there a world where when you're, when you're in the data center space? Like you need the pipe to be extremely big and, and we're, we're hoping that, you know, the rollout of Starlink will enable bigger and bigger pipes? Is that the correct like mental model?

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's, what's interesting is that a lot of times, people will not want to send all the data back. So they, they only want to send the metadata back. So what's very kind of like synergistic between what Armada does and what Starlink does is. We can work with them. The the performance, you know, will continue to get better and better from a latency standpoint. We will handle all of the, you know, local data processing and then we'll use Starlink to send the metadata back, right?

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:55Speaker 03

  And there's really interesting things also as we're continuing to evolve what we do. So we started out with inference. That was the primary focus was like, okay, you take an AI model that's been trained in the cloud, you run it at the edge on our infrastructure. Now with this Leviathan launch that we recently did, we've kind of completed the picture for a AI factory that can be deployed in weeks versus, you know, years with a traditional data center and it's still mobile. So you can relocate it as needed. And what is interesting there is that you could do very cool things with like federated learning. People are going to want to take these models, sort of fine tune them for different scenarios that and run them at the edge, but they're going

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  to want to leverage the improvements in the model across all of their different sites. And so the way that we're evolving, the way that Starlink's evolving, we think we're going to continue to unlock a lot of new high value use cases that way.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you walk me through some of the, some of the like enterprise, like infrastructure that you bring to a customer that's not out of the box with Starlink? Cause I know that SpaceX is a fantastic consumer product, but there's a certain level when you get into the enterprise workloads that you need another partner in the stack to actually deliver capability.

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're, we're seeing that customers want to use multiple connected assets. We call all these things connected assets and it's, you know, LEO and GEO satellite connectivity. So they, they sometimes will use Starlink, but they'll use Starlink plus like a Hughes or a ViaSat a GEO satellite connectivity. They'll use SD-WAN devices like CradlePoint and PepLink. They'll use drones, like we have partnership with Skydio on the drones.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  And so what these customers want is they want Somebody to help bring it all together to solve their problems at the edge. And that's, that's what we do. And so a lot of times when we'll get involved, um, you know, working on, on opportunities with Starlink. They are already working with Starlink, but then there's something else that they want to do in addition to that. Uh, and we help, we help that. And then the other thing, there's, um, you know, different things that customers want just in terms of,

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  optimizing for different scenarios based on not just performance, but for cost. And so we help with a lot of those types of use cases.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what, what's the scale of the business these days?

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  So we've been growing really fast and we've, we've only been around for a little over two and a half years.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:58:32Speaker 03

  We spent the first year in stealth.

• 1:58:35Speaker 03

  Raised now well over $200 million from a bunch of great investors.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  One of the, the really exciting things that happened last year is that Microsoft ended up, uh, in making investment in the company they invested in this round. And then I met with Sachin Adella. He got excited about what we're doing. And so, uh, he ended up talking about us on stage at Ignite, their big annual customer conference. And we're going to market really globally now with, uh, Microsoft and, and, and SpaceX among other partners. And we're working with some of the largest companies in the world. I mentioned a Ramco. There's a bunch of other large oil and gas companies. We're working with some of the largest mining companies. Um, and then, you know, we're working with the Navy, that's public and then with state. So we're kind of just,

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  continuing to focus on ones where like we were talking about, we can see fleets of connected assets, like thousands and tens of thousands of connected assets, being deployed all over the world and then, you know, scaling to become their single partner for the edge.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think, uh, the relationship with Microsoft looks more like, in the future I go to Azure and I need to do a workload and leveraging stranded energy just gets me a better price? Or do you think it's more like a channel partner where a really big enterprise client goes to, uh, Microsoft and, uh, they can, they can, uh, route to you as a specific solution for a very, uh, like, you know, uh, I don't know, like, like off the, off the beaten track use case.

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what we're already seeing is that customers want to optimize more and more workloads between the cloud and the edge. And I think that's going to continue. Like, the cloud is always going to be there, but more workloads are going to also be run at the edge. And so the more those things work hand in hand, the better it is for the customer. And so how it's working today is most of our customers are already working with Microsoft. They have really large, you know, agreements. They have Azure credits. They can actually buy all of our products under their agreements with Microsoft and using those credits.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  That's interesting.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  And then Microsoft sellers also get some credit. So it kind of all works together. But what's nice for the customer is there's different capabilities that they already are using from Microsoft that have never been available in these more remote sites. And we're making them available in these more remote sites. And that can range from, you know, the latest AI model that's been trained in Azure that somebody wants to run locally at the edge. You know, things that are more basic, like an example is in the Galleons, you can have what's called Azure Stack, which is a piece of hardware that Microsoft produces.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  And a lot of applications that these companies like to use are designed to run, and they already run on that, but that's never been available at the edge. So we had a partnership that we announced with Microsoft and also Halliburton, where there's a series of applications for like production automation that these large energy companies are already using in their more connected sites. We're just extending that to the more remote sites.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  So you don't have to completely replatform and go down to, okay, I got to make sure it runs on Linux or runs on CUDA. Like, you can assume that you have access to all the niceties of Azure, but at the edge.

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Congratulations. This is a fascinating business, and I really appreciate you taking the time, hopping on.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Your travel schedule must be absolutely insane.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, next time you're out at some stranded energy, call in from the field, from your phone, presuming you have Starlink or at least cell service. And we'd love to see what it looks like to see some, some natural gas plant flaring for the last time before it becomes tokens.

• 2:02:32Speaker 03

  Well, let's do it. I'll put my Starlink Mini in the backpack and make it happen.

• 2:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Congratulations to you and the team on all the progress.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  Thanks again.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Samir from the Colin and Samir YouTube channel, of course. Second time on the show. We ran into him at the Coinbase Base launch event. Very briefly chatted in the stairwell. We were moving past each other. Very excited to welcome him to the stream. Samir, how you doing?

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Looking professional.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Looking extremely professional.

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if we have your audio yet. It might be on our team's side.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Let's check. We are not getting audio, but...

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't matter because you look fantastic.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Clearly hitting the gym.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Ben, is this on our side or...?

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Okay, I think you're muted. Let's try and throw that on and we'll bring him in and continue the Glazier 3000. The white balance on that camera, phenomenal. The exposure, to die for. The lighting, very soft, very neutral.

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  Let's see. Can you hear Samir? Welcome to the stream. Nothing yet. Let's work on that. We will bring...

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, what a moment, you know? Even creators at the absolute top of their field, the apex content creators, still learning, still grinding.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Yes. Let's do one timeline post and then we will move back into Samir. This interesting data point to calculate the grind score of a company. Have you heard of this metric before? So, Figma is in the top 15 companies in terms of grind score. Grind score is the percentage of employees that have a positive business outlook divided by the work-life balance. So, you're working really, really hard, but you are extremely optimistic about the company. And topping the charts are Applied Intuition, who we talked to, Kesar Yunus. We talked to him at Hill and Valley. The Boring Company, of course, Elon Company.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  You're going to be working very hard, but if you believe that you're going to drill tunnels all over the world, you're probably pretty optimistic.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  I had a roommate...

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  When I first moved to LA that worked, a buddy of mine that worked at the Boring Company and he, I thought I was working hard, but he would, would often leave before I was up and come back after I went to bed.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  It's, it's an extreme, extreme company. I've heard of stories of investors who were trying to get allocation in the company and a prerequisite was basically that you go do a full month of full-time work to, to, you know, advance the company. It's like, oh, you think you're going to value, you think you're going to add value? Yeah, come out here for a month. Just be in the office every single day.

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  I'd love to see Ramp up there and Banta and ideally, you know, we can get all of our, our sponsors into the top 15.

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  Shield AI. Yeah, it's a good crew. Also, Gotea, I'm pronouncing it correctly finally. Six months into reading his posts on the stream, I just vibe coded this. It works flawlessly and it's a picture of a plane with an engine where the plane should be.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  I actually think this plane should exist.

• 2:05:53John Coogan?

  Would this fly? It might actually work. I don't know.

• 2:05:56Samir Chaudry?

  You got me now?

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  Samir, yeah, we got you. How are you doing?

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  We are live. Let's go.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  We're just looking at a random image of a plane.

• 2:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we got the, I mean, the, the other setup, uh, I, we got, we'll have you on again very soon to get the, the full experience, but great, great to see you.

• 2:06:11John Coogan?

  Great to see you. How are you doing?

• 2:06:12Samir Chaudry?

  I'm sorry I'm giving you this, uh, this non-premium experience, but.

• 2:06:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's still better than, than 90.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  This is the nature of streaming, baby. We're live.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Of our guests, so.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic. Uh, yeah. What's new in your world? What's the latest and greatest? Give us the little, little update and then I want to go into, uh, just AI, creator economy, Disney, a bunch of stuff. We'll, we'll turn it up.

• 2:06:31Samir Chaudry?

  Amazing. Uh, new in my world. I mean, dude, there's, there, this has been the craziest year of my life. Uh, I don't know if the viewers know, uh, but both mine and Colin's homes burned down in January, which is a crazy experience. And then 12 days later, I had a baby. Colin, Colin and his wife just had a baby about three weeks ago. So.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  Well, congrats on the baby. And sorry about the house. Very, very tumultuous time for sure.

• 2:06:56Samir Chaudry?

  Actually, it was a conversation with Reid Hoffman.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:59Samir Chaudry?

  That was really interesting. He, uh, on his way out, we were, we were chatting mostly about AI and, and the world of creators and AI. And then on the way out, he turned around and looked at Colin and I, because he knew about what had happened earlier this year. And he just looked at us and he goes, never waste a good crisis. And then walked out and I was like, whoa, that is, uh, that is some amazing advice. So trying to, uh, what's new in my world is trying to understand that statement more and what that means to me. Uh, a bit of what that means is I've, we've always wanted to do in-person events. We're starting to do in-person events now. We have a big one in New York on September 4th. So, um, you know, on one side of the, the spectrum is like content, AI, digital.

• 2:07:42Samir Chaudry?

  The other side of the spectrum is just like getting back out, being in front of people.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:46Samir Chaudry?

  Um, being with the community.

• 2:07:47John Coogan?

  I, I, I know you've done a lot of public speaking. What does a good in-person event look like for you? Because I can imagine like you could just, you have such a dedicated fan base. I remember running into you at, uh, one of those YouTube VidCons or something and you were getting swarmed. I imagine you could just do Q and A for two hours and everyone would be satisfied. At the same time, you could define like a very tight, you know, 45 minute presentation with slides, take people through the history of the creator economy, where things are going. You could also just do interviews and interview top tier people the entire time. How do you think you want to play it?

• 2:08:20Samir Chaudry?

  So, uh, we actually, the, the first thing you do is like you ask, so this is an application only event.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:26Samir Chaudry?

  Um, and in the application, we just asked, what, what is this, what is this event, um, have to do to be successful in your mind? Like, wh- what does it mean to be successful? Um, also like the two questions that Tim Ferriss gave us. One is what are you here to give? Like, what do you feel like you could give at this event? And then what are you here to receive? What, what do you, what like piece of advice? So I would say like overwhelmingly, right? Like there's, there's 380 confirmed applications for this event, represents over 300 million followers.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:08:59Samir Chaudry?

  I would say 90% of people just said that being a creator is lonely and I want to meet other people in, in the industry and like other like-minded individuals.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:09:11Samir Chaudry?

  So I would say most events probably undervalue free time and space and prompted networking or prompted conversation and overvalue what happens on stage. I'll tell you like not one application said, man, I can't wait for a panel.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. All of that is window dressing. It's always window dressing just to like an excuse to get out there and then you're just like hanging out at the cocktail party the entire time. But that's the best, that was actually makes it good.

• 2:09:38Samir Chaudry?

  I feel like for me, even like when I've been on panels, like to have a mediocre panel is probably the easiest thing in the world.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:45Samir Chaudry?

  And so like to make it good, I think exceptionally challenging to make it worth your time. So we're working hard to do that. But mostly like people want to hang out with each other. Like people are lonely. People spend a lot of time at their computer. And like being in a curated group of like minded individuals is fun. So I think we just

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  Do you have a location or philosophy around what makes for a good spot?

• 2:10:10Samir Chaudry?

  I think New York City is like the greatest, right? Like, I just think coming to New York is really fun. 62% of our attendees are traveling in, which is really interesting. And, you know, we, the venue is at the refinery Domino Sugar Factory, which is like this big glass building that has like a views of the city. So I think what was important to me was like, you walk in and you're already like, this is cool. I'm excited to be here.

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. We were debating this earlier. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about how Disney is wrestling with the way they use AI. A lot of companies are going through disruption. Maybe it's sustaining innovation. Like Microsoft's doing great, right? And it's not disrupting their business. They're just printing money all over the place. Everything's growing from Excel all the way to their cloud business to their AI business. But for Disney, it's a lot more complicated. And they were giving this anecdote of The Rock and using a deep fake to essentially create a digital twin using his cousin, apparently. His cousin go to the shoot and they put a deep fake over his cousin. Obviously, they

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  pay his cousin. They pay Dwayne The Rock Johnson. But there's still some backlash from the fans potentially for using AI at all. And I've just been noodling on this question of, you know, will Disney be disrupted by AI? Will they just continue unabated? Will it be really good for them? How like, so maybe we can just kind of noodle on it for a little bit and just kind of get your initial reactions. And then we can kind of take it in a bunch of different directions.

• 2:11:50Samir Chaudry?

  Okay, so I think my first POV on AI right now is that I think we don't talk about AI and prompting as entertainment enough. And what I mean by that is not like its ability to produce entertainment, but the fact that it is entertaining to chat with an LLM. And I think for me as a content creator,

• 2:12:13Samir Chaudry?

  you know, all of us are in the business of attention, like you guys are in the business too, like we're looking to create something meaningful enough to capture someone's attention. And I think Sam Altman has created something that is meaningful enough to capture a lot of attention and I think a lot of creators think about this as like, oh, man, if AI can produce graphics and VFX, then you know, it's people are out of jobs and you know, that is totally true, like that is happening.

• 2:12:41Samir Chaudry?

  But at the same time, us as creators, we might be out of jobs if AI itself is entertaining.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:46Samir Chaudry?

  So I think on the, you know, no matter what, we live in a, in a, in a landscape and a media environment where like creating stuff is really competitive, it's really hard. It's very, it's gotten very expensive, like studios are going to use AI to supplement production. Creators are going to use AI to, I mean, almost every creator probably uses it to supplement production in some way, shape or form.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:13:09Samir Chaudry?

  But I think if we think about it from the consumer side and what's entertaining about learning a new recipe or figuring something out on ChatGPT or writing with ChatGPT or asking questions with ChatGPT. That's where I, I think about like time spent on the internet and is more time going to be spent over here? Are you, are you guys familiar with Showrunner? It's, it's coined as the Netflix of AI.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  I have heard of it. I'm not familiar beyond just seeing like one headline.

• 2:13:37Samir Chaudry?

  So Amazon just backed it and I think it's an interesting one to look at. It's essentially like they give you a show. So there's a show called Exit Valley. It's kind of like this, their version of Family Guy.

• 2:13:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:49Samir Chaudry?

  But you can choose your own adventure within the show and put yourself into the show as well. So you can kind of prompt what happens next. And I think it's an interesting thing to look at of like making content playable, right? Making it interactive. Because if we look at the most culturally relevant stuff from history as well as now, video games are wildly culturally relevant and those are stories that you can put yourself inside of, right? That you can prompt what happens next inside of that story. And you look at live streamers right now, Kai Sina, I show speed as the viewer, you actually have impact over what happens in that story.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:29Samir Chaudry?

  So I've just, you know, rambled quite a bit about this stuff, but I think that we should really evaluate the like consumer and viewer interest in having a say into what happens next and also having interaction with the internet.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that interaction thing is so fascinating. I haven't thought about it in that frame, but when I go to chat GPT and I get it to generate an image, it's definitely a little bit like hitting a slot machine.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:14:57John Coogan?

  Because I prompted and I'm like, I have something in my mind and it's unblurring, like it's in the, like it's, I'm in the dial up era and it's loading. It's like, is this the right image?

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  The previous generation is you, you, you know, talk with the designer and you give them an idea and they're like, okay, I'm gonna, I'll come back to you in a day.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  You're waiting and you're waiting, you're waiting. They send you the files and you're like, send you the Figma link.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  Totally a dopamine hit.

• 2:15:19Jordi Hays?

  But, but compressing that down, uh, that makes like the dopamine.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and you can see in the, in the charts, I think, uh, chat GPT is up at 30 minutes a day for the daily active users and that's getting into TikTok numbers and that's getting into reels numbers. And, and so maybe it's not immediately disruptive, but it's certainly taking time from somewhere. And if you go back to Ted Sarandos at Netflix saying like, our competition is Fortnite. Well, you know, yeah, your competition is chat GPT now. If people are having fun on there, even if they're not watching, you know, movies yet on there, just the interaction, even if it's text based, it's, it's all in the same media. It's all in the same screen time.

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Casey Neistat came on, I think a week and a half ago and was saying that he's just like, feeling like it's like this tidal wave that's going to wash over everyone and nothing will be the same. And it was almost, I wouldn't say it was like super bearish or blackpilled, but it was just like, get ready, it's coming. It's going to disrupt a lot of different verticals. I'm curious what percentage of creators that you talk to are. More excited about the potential of AI than they are scared.

• 2:16:32Samir Chaudry?

  The fear versus greed index.

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:16:34Samir Chaudry?

  What they say in the public markets. So, so that's really interesting. I think like the aspiring creator, the young creator is fearful and angry. And like, we get a lot of anger when we talk about AI. Sure. You know, I think, for me, I don't feel that way. I think it's, there's an inevitability to it. That's like, if you, if you do feel angry, if you are a young creative and you're like, this thing is making logos and people are using it to do their branding instead of hiring designers and you feel angry about it, it's like, it's upsetting, but it's, there's an inevitability to it. Like, it's not gonna stop. It's, it's, this is the worst it'll ever be. So, I think the, from the professional creator perspective.

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  This is the best it'll ever be.

• 2:17:19Samir Chaudry?

  No, the worst it'll ever be. This is the worst it'll ever be. It's just getting better and better.

• 2:17:23Jordi Hays?

  The AI is the best. I was saying it's the best it's ever gonna be for you if you're just angry that AI is doing work.

• 2:17:28Samir Chaudry?

  No, no, like, the AI right now, what you can do with AI, this is, this will seem comical to us in five years. Totally. And so, it's only getting better. And I think every professional creator uses it in some way, shape or form. I think one of, one of the, maybe the nerdiest things that I ask my friends and that I tell my friends is like, if I have a favorite prompt or if I, ask them what their prompts are, but I ask always, if we write something, I ask it to challenge based on being a different persona. Sure. So, you know, I've done this as Casey before. Hey, imagine you're Casey Neistat, give me feedback on this. Sure, sure.

• 2:18:06Samir Chaudry?

  Imagine you're Johnny Harris, give me feedback on this intro. So, that's been a really, like, that's probably the simplest, most effective way, but all the way up to like, we use it to mock up thumbnails now.

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you about the thumbnail, cuz when, when, so, so Mr. Beast had his like AI thumbnail generator and then he got some, some.

• 2:18:27Samir Chaudry?

  Pushback.

• 2:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Extreme backlash, but it seemed like it was from a, a, a bunch of, a bunch of.

• 2:18:33Samir Chaudry?

  Interesting take on this.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  I, my, my point of view was that he should have said, like, I understand that this is disruptive to, like, a small number of people that, that do thumbnail art as a profession. But I care more about democratizing access to great thumbnails by making anybody generate them, and I'm gonna keep this in the product.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  Your point was that putting it out there was pro creator, anti thumbnail artist. And that was like the trade off that he should have taken.

• 2:19:04Jordi Hays?

  And so he, in my view, he, you know, and I'm sure he has a bunch more context, but in my view, he was siding with the 10,000 people in the world that are, that make a living doing thumbnails.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Instead of the million creators.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Instead of the millions of people that want to create.

• 2:19:20Samir Chaudry?

  I think actually the, the core issue with the announcement was the face swap. So what he did was he showed two thumbnails and he said, it's, it's, it's very simple to put your face on this thumbnail. Now, look, that happens on YouTube all the time, right? Like, the reality is that when one creator makes something that's like really successful, another creator just goes, oh, cool. That's almost like public domain, that idea. And I'll just take that and like reinterpret it for my own channel. And sometimes people are so egregious, egregious to just put their own face on someone else's design. We made a video about this called the copy and paste culture of YouTube. Because it is a big culture. And I think what a lot of creators were feeling was that Jimmy was making that process very easy.

• 2:20:05Samir Chaudry?

  Thumbnail designers, as a cottage industry of YouTube, are some of like the most powerful people on the platform. They literally are the gatekeepers between creators and like millions of views.

• 2:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Attention, yeah.

• 2:20:17Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, totally. They are very, very talented. Even for us, like, what happens for us is we just, we're all visual people, so we mock it up with AI, but I don't think anyone, you know, I think Dude Perfect did one thumbnail that was pure play from an AI-generated thumbnail, which was an airplane with a bunch of basketballs coming out of it. That was like an impossible photo to take, or an impossible, you know, thing for them to mock up. And the thing they got from AI, they're like, this represents the video concept. People were upset about that. But I think mostly how creators operate is they go, here's the concept. How we operate is we go, here's the concept. Okay, here's the, here's how it looks visually, and now we hire a designer to bring that to life.

• 2:21:02Samir Chaudry?

  And we still do that. We, I mean, I think thumbnail designers are like. Wildly talented and they operate more as like strategists as well, but it's a fascinating cottage industry that people looking into YouTube probably have no idea exists.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Do you think that there's a role in the future for like thumbnail concepter? Because I've made thumbnails and they like, they live and die. I mean, obviously the last step of the Photoshop work is extremely important, but you have this like 20 minute video where you talk about so many different things. And there's so many different visual elements and then you're trying to distill it down into like the three element rule or just like one thing. And picking that one thing that like the plane, I can imagine what that video is about right now, just based on what you said.

• 2:21:49Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  But that could have been botched so many times on the concept level. And it doesn't matter if you had, you know, the, the best photographer in the world, working with the best Photoshop artist and, you know, the entire AI team from all the different foundation model lab companies working on it. Like the wrong concepts just not going to break through because people are going to be like, this is confusing. Like, I don't want to watch this.

• 2:22:11Samir Chaudry?

  You can't fix, you can't fix a bad idea.

• 2:22:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:22:13Samir Chaudry?

  You just can't, you can't. But I think what makes a good idea is really hard to decipher today.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:22:20Samir Chaudry?

  Because I, I, I think on the internet, we live in a world of two extremes. One is if I'm going to click on something, it has to be something I've never seen before on one extreme, right? So Mr. Beast, let's take that and go, uh, he just raced an F1 car in a cheetah. I've literally never seen a cheetah race an F1 car. So fine, Jimmy, I'll click on that because I've never seen it before. On the other side of this attention spectrum, I think it's show me something that impacts my day to day life. Either with my friends and family or like is interactive. So your guys' show is a great example of something I think lives on that side, which is like, I get to turn this on and it impacts my life because I get to be a part of a water cooler conversation.

• 2:23:02Samir Chaudry?

  I can turn to my friends and I have more things to talk about with my friends. Love Island is massively culturally relevant. I think that is something that, you know, even around my social circles, people talk about and it. They get to connect with it with their wife or with their girlfriend or with their buddies like. So I think we live in in those two extremes. Anything in the middle is really hard.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:23Samir Chaudry?

  Right? Like educational stuff, very hard right now.

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:26Samir Chaudry?

  Um, I think viewership is going to go down in the middle. It doesn't mean it's less impactful. It's still impactful. But I I think.

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting that the the educational content is it it used to be if you wanted to quickly understand a complicated topic. Finding a short YouTube video on it was super effective because you're like, I don't have to Google and I don't have to find this summary and I don't have to piece together this. Reddit thread and that blog post and this news article. And I'm just going to watch this like three minute video and have a good understanding. Now you can just prompt the model and say, how does this work? And then you can ask follow up questions and you can ask follow up questions and you can click in to see the source. And I feel like that that that middle is just getting hollowed out and we're not that far from OpenAI just being like, do you want to generate a ten? You know, uh, ten minute video explaining this? I'll turn this report into a video, right? And that's that kind of like.

• 2:24:18Samir Chaudry?

  I mean, you can already do it with podcasting. Mustafa Suleman from Microsoft, uh, the the CEO of Microsoft AI.

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:25Samir Chaudry?

  On our show prompted a podcast that was really compelling using Copilot. And I I think though, have you guys ever used the like kind of FaceTime feature with ChatGPT?

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the it's the voice mode, right? Yeah.

• 2:24:38Samir Chaudry?

  It's voice mode, but it's video too.

• 2:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, does video?

• 2:24:40Samir Chaudry?

  Video now.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I haven't seen that.

• 2:24:41Samir Chaudry?

  So I I did that in the kitchen, um, like three nights ago, I, uh, made, you know, I saw some. Like everything on Instagram, on my Instagram feed is like cottage cheese, right? It's just like put cottage cheese in something. So it was like these like cottage cheese protein brownies.

• 2:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:24:58Samir Chaudry?

  And I was like, all right, I'll make these. And I, uh, in the middle of it, I like had a question. And so I opened that up and I had like the video. And I was like, all right, wait, I only have one banana. Like, what do I do next?

• 2:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:25:10Samir Chaudry?

  And it was just live prompting me. And I think. The obvious thing you recognize is that that won't be our phone soon. Right? Like, maybe it'll be glasses, maybe it'll be contact lenses, maybe it'll be like contact lenses and an earpiece. But there will be like an omnipresent nature. And that's very dystopian, but I think. This all connects to that question of education, like educational content will be real time, personalized in my ear and in my eyes, at least I think.

• 2:25:38Jordi Hays?

  What did you think about the launch of Waves, the new glasses built initially for live streamers? It felt like the most polarizing launch where if you were a live streamer that does IRL stuff, you were thinking, this is amazing. I need, I want to get this as fast as possible. And if you were a member of the public that values your privacy, you were, you know, saying like, please, you know, stop this before it launches.

• 2:26:11Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, I think it's, okay, I think on the live streamer side, I mean, my perspective is POV is not that interesting. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think what's interesting is like a filmer filming speed doing something. You know, not necessarily POV. The only guy who nails it is, you know, that guy in New York who like plays the, the keys and like someone raps with him?

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:26:36Samir Chaudry?

  That's like the dopest kind of solo dude. I assume he's solo. Maybe there's a cameraman with him, but.

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's just like one of many niches and there will be creators that are shoot wide angle, shoot drone footage of themselves doing things, shoot, you know, like cinematic stuff. It's just like one of the tools in the tool chest. But I mean, people really like humans and they really like seeing speed or Kaisa Nats and they like that relationship.

• 2:27:02Samir Chaudry?

  Totally, yeah.

• 2:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you like feeling like, like you don't feel like you're somewhere, like you don't, you don't, like, for example, like the idea of an NBA player, like wearing glasses, like that might be cool for a second, where they're dribbling down, like shooting, pulling up. But then you probably want to just go back to like feeling like you're actually there in the stadium, seeing it.

• 2:27:27Samir Chaudry?

  I would get bored quickly with that. I think on the privacy side, like. You know, you guys are in L A, right? Like, you see Waymos all the time. I think I think there's a lot of concern about that, too, of like, OK, now we have more cars on the street that just have, like, tons of cameras on them. And I think just generally, there's, you know, there's a lot of concern about that. But it is like a natural evolution to us just unloading our lives and data on the Internet. Like, people are concerned about that, but they're concerned about their Chat G P T search history or question prompt history. Like, I think Scott Galloway said it, like, if you want real anarchy in the world, just release everyone's Google search history. Like, that would end civilization. And I think.

• 2:28:07John Coogan?

  Do you think it actually would? Or do you think everyone would just be like, OK, we're all equally weird?

• 2:28:11Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, or it would be this, like, cool moment of just, like, the veils lifted, like, we're all just, we're all weirdos.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  John's search history, how much creatine can I take before losing my life?

• 2:28:23Samir Chaudry?

  I don't know. I don't know how this stuff's gonna play out. I just think that, you know, I did, Colin, I did get the opportunity to spend some time with with Sam Altman. And I think, you know, I, I, I, my curiosity with having a lot of the, like, like Mustafa on the show or Reid Hoffman on the show is to understand the incentives and the curiosity of the creators of of these programs. And even with someone like Sam, like, it's actually hard for me to fully tap into. I understand the desire to create and to innovate and to be number one and to to push things into a place you could never imagine. But I think the implications of this are pretty different than anything else.

• 2:29:06Samir Chaudry?

  And I think the implications of advances in in in A I are going to change human society in a way that, like, I think Casey's right, like, it's gonna change things in in ways we can't imagine.

• 2:29:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one thing that's interesting, when I think about creators that that I've watched over the last decade, you think about in music, like Anthony, Anthony Fantano.

• 2:29:30Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:31Jordi Hays?

  There will be an A I creator that just instantly reviews a new Drake album. And it just can, you know, and it and it and it can come up with some analysis of the song, and it'll tell you what this lyric meant, and it'll say, you know, this sounds similar to a song or a unreleased track from this period, and it'll give you this, like, context. But people will still want to hear what Anthony Fantano thinks about the album.

• 2:29:55Samir Chaudry?

  I think we look at it in the terms of like efficiency and inefficiency. There's certain times where you want efficient media. So like, let's say I'm going into a meeting and I'm like, wait, I didn't prep for this. I need something really efficient. Like when I was in high school, that was Spark Notes. Do you remember Spark Notes? You guys are too young for Spark Notes.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  No, no, I use Spark Notes, of course.

• 2:30:12Samir Chaudry?

  Spark Notes was like, if I didn't do the required reading of class, which I rarely did, I would just look at Spark Notes. Yeah, exactly. I would go like, alright, I got the Spark Notes. So I think there's like efficient media. But then if you look at, there's also people who just love reading a book. So there's gonna be both ends of the spectrum, right?

• 2:30:28Jordi Hays?

  I wish, I wish, I wish in college, if you could generate a podcast on any topic, I mean, that is very important.

• 2:30:34Samir Chaudry?

  Totally, that would be amazing.

• 2:30:35Jordi Hays?

  And be like, I'm gonna go to the gym, and when I finish this, I'm gonna know like 90% of what I need to know about this book. I'm gonna go onto the test, I'm gonna write the essay.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  I used to get the audiobooks for every book. I'd buy the book for this, for the course, and then I'd also buy the audiobook because I was an auditory learner.

• 2:30:49Samir Chaudry?

  But we can't assume that just what humans want is efficiency all the time, right? Because I don't want efficiency all the time. Like, you think about going to a concert. Going to a concert is the least efficient way to hear the music from that artist. You go, you have to park, especially in LA, it sucks. You have to figure out parking, there's traffic on the way in. You go in and like, why are you there? You're there for a collective human experience, you're there for the messiness of how John Mayer is gonna play, I'm speaking about a John Mayer concert. So you, you, you wanna hear him play the guitar differently than he would. If I just wanna hear the song "Daughters," I'm just gonna go on Spotify and hear the song "Daughters." So I think, I think you just play with those two worlds of like, we will always kind of crave efficiency and inefficiency. There might be areas where

• 2:31:30Samir Chaudry?

  we want it more. So like, brainstorming is a really interesting example. Hey, I want 100 variations of this idea. Presently, an LLM can do that better than five people in a room, and faster than five people in a room. If you wanna see every variation of an idea. But, you know, you wanna just, uh, uh, watch a movie and see if you can come up with ideas based on that movie? Like, it'd be hard for an LLM to match your case in that way. Or, yeah, I just think there's like efficiency and inefficiency, and they're both gonna play together.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  We really gotta book an hour for this. We could just keep going forever. This is fantastic. We do have another guest joining.

• 2:32:06Jordi Hays?

  No, let's do it in person next time.

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh yeah. You're in LA. Just come by.

• 2:32:10Samir Chaudry?

  Dude, I would love to come see it. Also, I mean, I totally botched my, uh, my good looking setup. So, uh,

• 2:32:17John Coogan?

  It's high stakes with the live stuff.

• 2:32:19Samir Chaudry?

  It's high stakes.

• 2:32:20John Coogan?

  We saw, we, we, we saw the potential. We saw a glimpse of the potential.

• 2:32:24Jordi Hays?

  No, it was a human, it was a humanizing moment for your audience, you know.

• 2:32:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. You should, you should come in, you should come one day and close out the show with us and then we can pick your brain and our production stuff and, and you can help us get an upgrade going.

• 2:32:34Jordi Hays?

  John just said, pick your brain.

• 2:32:36John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, I just asking Samir, I'm sure he gets that message a thousand times a day. I'd love to pick your brain, Samir.

• 2:32:44Samir Chaudry?

  Tim Ferriss, Tim Ferriss gave me a hard and fast rule. He said, if anyone says, pick your brain, don't go to the meeting. Yeah. Don't go to the meeting. So that's my hard and fast rule. I will not be there. Um, if you have another suggestion, then I'll come in for that.

• 2:32:55Jordi Hays?

  We'll hang out. We'll hang out. We'll have lunch. We'll hit the go.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:32:59Samir Chaudry?

  All right, guys.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:33:01Samir Chaudry?

  Thanks for having me on. See you guys.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Talk to you later. Bye. Up next, we have Flo coming into the studio to the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. Uh, we kept him waiting. We'll try and move through these next guests quickly. Been very excited to catch up with him. How are you doing?

• 2:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Welcome. John will be back in a minute. How are you doing Flo?

• 2:33:23Flo Crivello?

  Good, good, good. How's everyone doing?

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Great, great. Uh, you know, it's, uh, it's been a slow summer. Not much news in AI. Everyone's just, uh, clearly taking a breather. Uh, of course not. Um, I know you guys have been busy. What's going on in your world?

• 2:33:39Flo Crivello?

  Yeah. Just announced a 3.0. It's been, uh, an insane last couple of weeks. Uh, been working on this update all year. Uh, yeah. I mean, we're just making it way, way, way easier to create way more powerful AI agents.

• 2:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. When did you decide to adopt the versioning for Linde? Because it feels smart to anchor the team and your customers around these major updates to the product versus historically, people might have a product launch, but they're not necessarily signaling, like, hey, this is a massive advancement. It's an entirely new version.

• 2:34:17Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, no, we've done that from the beginning, like 2.0 was in November last year. Actually, you know, even smarter, and that's what I want to do next time, would have been to name them. I want to, like Linde's, you know how Apple does like Yosimi and stuff? I want to give them good names moving forward.

• 2:34:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to think. We'll come up with the right series of names and the right category. Do something.

• 2:34:39Flo Crivello?

  I'm thinking like sci fi books. What would you think of like a fire up in the deep? You know, or like the metamorphosis of.

• 2:34:46Jordi Hays?

  Or Linde's Snow Crash or something like that.

• 2:34:48Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  That's great. What, how are you guys using the new Linde's internally?

• 2:34:56Flo Crivello?

  Oh, we're using it all day. Like, I think one of the most insane things that it's automated for us is like it's replaced the QA engineer. It's just like, so it's getting very metallic. We are using Linde to QA Linde. And so every hour, we have like a Linde agent that wakes up, that tries the entire like call flow, like literally signs up with a new account, tries to pay, create a new agent, tests the new agents. You have an agent creating an agent and testing it. And then if anything goes wrong along the way, pings the on-call engineer. So we've been using that for weeks and it worked beautifully. It's amazing.

• 2:35:29Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about reducing the time, I guess, like time to value for somebody that's coming in to use Linde? I imagine that's key. People are so used to like signing up for a SaaS product, knowing exactly what they're getting and having there be a lot more kind of controls around what the product does. So it's not a sort of like build your own adventure, whereas I feel like with Linde historically, you do, like the customer needs to really embrace like, hey, I have to figure out how to. When you hire a new employee, very few roles can somebody just come in and without any ramp uptime, just immediately start crushing it. And so I'm curious what that looks like for you guys.

• 2:36:12Flo Crivello?

  Yeah. Can I show my screen? Does that work?

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  It does. Everything's live, so whatever you share will be

• 2:36:18Flo Crivello?

  Okay.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Bring it into the immutable record of the of the internet. Oh, that looks great.

• 2:36:25Flo Crivello?

  Well, yeah, so I mean, this is like an excellent question. Like, that's the problem we've always had from day one is like, it's almost too powerful. You have to do everything yourself.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:32Flo Crivello?

  That's why the vision from day one has been like, it's just like an employee. Like, it's very easy to set up. You can just talk to it and tell it what you want to do. And so now the new app is just text field. It's like this thing and you tell it what you want to do. It's like, hey, I want an agent that will monitor my support inbox. Then you can like iterate with it like very interactively. And we have a bunch of templates here for like sales, customer support, personal productivity, engineering, right here, like the QA assistant is one of them. Or, you know, like, like a software engineer agent, like human resources, like a recruiting agent, or like a company knowledge base. So we give you a bunch of templates and then you can just create your agent in like a minute and a half.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Are you running into any problems, uh, just linking up private data sources? I mean, I'm just thinking from like a consumer's perspective. You have a bunch of, uh, you know, news subscriptions. You want to to log into those news websites and kind of collate a digest for you. That's something it would need a password for. It would get run. It would run into, uh, a number of, uh, paywalls. Uh, are you seeing a lot of luck with like jumping through login flows? Or are you getting hit with captchas constantly that are intractable?

• 2:37:43Flo Crivello?

  Oh, no. I mean, like, so that is a big part of what we're announcing today is like autopilot. So basically your agents now have their own computer. And if you need to give it a login, you can literally take control of the computer and login for them. So let me just pause the screen here because I don't want to show anything crazy.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  But is that is that something that you do like once? Or because I, when I think of the benefit here, I think of like a really long running, like cron job based, uh, uh, agent, essentially something that feels more like

• 2:38:14Flo Crivello?

  You're still screen sharing, by the way.

• 2:38:15John Coogan?

  Screen sharing. Uh, yeah, your list of passwords is up now. Just kidding. API keys are leaked, uh, and it's

• 2:38:22Flo Crivello?

  Oh, wow. You did a billion in revenue yesterday?

• 2:38:27Flo Crivello?

  No, I mean, yeah, you you login only once. So it's like this is I I am screen sharing on purpose. So this is an agent that set up. This is actually a little bit of a dirty secret like I don't like LinkedIn. I'm more of a Twitter guy.

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:37Flo Crivello?

  And so I post on Twitter. I don't want to post on LinkedIn, but I have an agent that uh so it it is a crank jack wakes up every day at nine AM.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Crossbows.

• 2:38:44Flo Crivello?

  Morning. And you can see it's logged in from my Twitter account like this is authenticated as me. And so it goes on my Twitter. It's also authenticated as me on my LinkedIn. And it basically looks at the posts on my Twitter and it's like, hey, this is what I think you should post on on LinkedIn.

• 2:39:00John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:39:01Flo Crivello?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  And and it can obviously like hydrate things and add extra context and really like transform the post properly as opposed to just like a default binding.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Flow posts on on X. Very excited to announce Lindy three point O. It's our most powerful Lindy. And then it converts it to the the Lindy then converts it to LinkedIn. It's like, what's up?

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  What I learned about B two B SaaS.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Today we're transforming the power of agents to unlock productivity for everyone in your organization.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  No, the real the the real clickbait for LinkedIn would be like, uh, you know, three weeks ago, three weeks ago, I hired a software engineer who was working at twenty five different companies. Here's what it taught me about building three point O, something like that. Anyway, uh, well, congrats on the launch. Anything else we should know? Where can people sign up?

• 2:39:50Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, Lindy dot AI. It's it's available today. Like, I don't know about y'all. I find it frustrating when like there's a lot of like vaporware in AI. It's like this coming Monday is like, no, this is available right now. It works. It's incredible.

• 2:40:01John Coogan?

  Very, very impressive. What's the pricing model right now?

• 2:40:03Flo Crivello?

  Don't worry about it.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  But consumption or subscription?

• 2:40:08Flo Crivello?

  It's consumption.

• 2:40:09John Coogan?

  It's consumption, okay.

• 2:40:10Flo Crivello?

  It starts at fifty dollars a month and it's it's a tenth of the price of a human.

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Okay, this is gonna be one of those things. Am I gonna hear horror stories about people that like forgot to, you know, turn off their Lindy and they ran up a ten thousand dollar bill?

• 2:40:22Flo Crivello?

  Don't worry about it.

• 2:40:24Jordi Hays?

  The cost of inference is declining rapidly. It's all gonna, everybody's gonna make it. We're all gonna be fine.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're gonna distill the models.

• 2:40:30Flo Crivello?

  I mean, look, you know, this has happened before and we're very generous with credits. People reach out to us, they're like, can I get a refund? This happened and we're like, yeah.

• 2:40:38John Coogan?

  Of course, that, yeah, that makes sense. Um, cool. Any other, any other tools or, or custom models or like RL environments that you're tracking or excited for progress to be made? You mentioned computer use, but what, what else do you want the foundation labs to solve to kind of, so that you're like a beneficiary riding the wave?

• 2:41:00Flo Crivello?

  Memory.

• 2:41:01John Coogan?

  Memory?

• 2:41:02Flo Crivello?

  Definitely. Memory, I think, is, is the big gap. And I, I think like, there's a lot of attempts to solve this problem across the industry, but I'm noticing this pattern where it's like, people and companies like ours that are stuck and cannot change the weights of the models. They think of all of those like convoluted schemes to like hack the model to do something it doesn't, when really it belongs to, to the model.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:22Flo Crivello?

  And when you talk to the researchers at the labs and you ask them, it's like, ah, like we're working on memory. This is what we're doing. They tell you, it's like, don't, don't do it. Like, let us, let us do this.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  We'll do it, yeah.

• 2:41:31Flo Crivello?

  Like, we'll do it. This belongs to the model and the model is going to do it a thousand x better than you do. And I expect a, a much more advanced memory schemes where it's like, basically the model is going to be retrained.

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:42Flo Crivello?

  To come out in like a year or something, like six or 12 months.

• 2:41:45Jordi Hays?

  What are you expecting from GPT-5?

• 2:41:50Flo Crivello?

  Just, I, I'm expecting it to be smarter. Um, it, look, we feel sparks of AGI daily at this point. Like, we had this moment last week, like, we basically accidentally built lovable. Like, because we gave a computer to Lindy, like, someone who was like 10:00 PM at the office, like, Flo, like, hey, if you ask me to, to build a website, she builds it and she deploys it, it works. And so like, to me, that was like a huge holy shit, like, like AGI, spark of AGI moment. But like, look, it's still not as good as a human. Like, sometimes it's just, it just makes dumb mistakes, still today, you know? And so I'm expecting GPT-5 to be like a step change and, and to be a big step towards AGI. But I still, people don't realize what's happening. And I, I get it, people are tired of like all the AI hype and the noise.

• 2:42:33Flo Crivello?

  And I tell them, like, if you're tired, man, like, this is only the beginning. It's gonna get a lot more noisy out there. Like it's gonna get pretty crazy.

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I'm just, it should be exciting for everyone because Lindy today feels like the promise is automate these tasks that are boring that a human does. The first 10 times they do it, it's interesting. The next 10,000 times they do it is very boring. And so you just free people up to do these more like higher leverage, zero to one type, type activities that can then be automated and systemized over time. So very, very cool. Congrats on the launch.

• 2:43:08John Coogan?

  Congrats on the launch.

• 2:43:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, you know, people are going to be, you know, making bets on Lindy 4.0. Is Lindy 4.0 going to be able to get a college degree for me? You know, all that good stuff.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:43:21Flo Crivello?

  The irony is that, is that these models are all actually today able to get college degrees. As an intern, right?

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:28Flo Crivello?

  The top to the bottom. So, yeah.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Awesome. Well, congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:43:33Flo Crivello?

  Thank you.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Bye. Up next, we have Dave from Rune Technologies coming in to the studio. Get that gong ready, Jordy Hayes, and welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:43:49Speaker 06

  Hey, how are you?

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:43:53Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Give us a brief intro, give us an update and tell us the news.

• 2:43:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. So Dave Tull, co-founder, CEO of Rune Technologies, founded the company last year with my co-founder, Peter, who I know was on a little while. We just raised our Series A, just announced it about two weeks ago. So excited to have closed.

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  Didn't even give you the number. Sorry.

• 2:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Sorry.

• 2:44:18Speaker 06

  Didn't even get to the number.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Didn't even get to the number, but congratulations on the Series A. Give us the number, give us who led, and then we'll go into more about what the company's building.

• 2:44:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we closed $24 million led by Human Capital. All of our current investors from Andreessen 1.72 and XYZ reinvested. And then, you know, new investor is Human and, you know, Washington Harbor Partners as well, a new investor here. And we won't announce it yet. There's going to be another one, but we'll save that in a few weeks as a little surprise.

• 2:44:48John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Give us, give us the brief history on, on logistics and supply chains in the US military. What, I mean, what were we using in World War II? What are we using today? And then what does the future look like?

• 2:45:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I mean, in many ways, the insane part is some of it hasn't changed, right? Like, we're tracking things in analog systems, you know, the the means of a whiteboard has changed, obviously, from from scratch paper back in the day. And, you know, sometimes it's even Excel documents, but great, like, the basic nature of it is still an analog, human-centric tracking of things, whether that's supply inventory levels, vehicle maintenance levels, vehicle locations, and those sorts of things. You know, and especially of the last, you know, I came out of uniform, I'm still serving part-time even in the Army National Guard. And when I think about, like, how do we track what we need and where we need it and when we need it, that is still a human-centric analog process that has remained generally unchanged, at least in the last 20 years, with the advent of, you know, computers at some level and connectivity at some level.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  So, yeah, what's the path to actually getting this this in the hands of the warfighter? Obviously, it's a newer company, you've made a lot of progress, but it's never easy getting a program record, it's never easy getting, you know, full deployment. We've we've talked about the history of Palantir, took a long time to get that out into the world. What's the plan? What's the update?

• 2:46:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, you said it, I mean, it is a long path, we know that, we all of us have come from this industry, we've lived in the defense space for years at Roan, you know, from many other companies. I'm excited to say right now, like, there's a team down at an Army base as we speak, deploying Tiros at an exercise with an Army Corps, so pretty excited about that. That'll be our second deployment within the Army. We haven't announced it yet, but we also have worked within the Marine Corps as well. So we know we got to spin the flywheel with these types of things, and core to our DNA is how do we get out to these exercises in real-world scenarios with warfighters, with our sustainer, you know, our sustainment customers and do this. And that, you know, build closely with the warfighters in many ways, what Palantir pioneered and what Androl pioneered, right?

• 2:46:51Speaker 06

  How do we do this with them to then build momentum, get those, get ahead of the requirements, do things very quickly and iteratively to then get to that goal of writing enterprise, you know, our production deployment in those types of situations. So, you know, you guys well know that, you know, seed round is about, hey, do we have product-market fit? Is the thing that we're building needed, right? We have proven that, and what we thought was going to take 12 to 18 months, we did it in eight months with initial pilot contracts in the military. And now, Series A is about how do we scale the team? And how do we ruthlessly execute on the things we need to do, right? To meet the milestones, we have to actually deploy this across the, not just the joint force, but even potentially our allies as well.

• 2:47:29Jordi Hays?

  How much, you know, in the recent conflict in the Middle East, how much are you trying to learn and how much are you guys paying attention to the challenges they're facing there versus, hey, we already know our systems and processes are so broken that we just need to bring them and so, you know, ancient, I'm sure, you know, we just need to bring them into the present and then worry about kind of more specific deployments and problems.

• 2:48:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I mean, everything's a learning opportunity, right? So whether we're talking about the Russia-Ukraine war and how the speed and the scale of sustainment that has to happen in a peer or near-peer adversary, or we're even looking at the recent events in the Middle East, right? There was a not insignificant consumption or expenditure of US surface-to-air missiles, even in the 12 days of conflict in CENTCOM, right? So how do we think through knowing those expenditures in real time or near-real time, being able to even predict those now with those expenditures into future needs and be able to position things and reposition things, inventories, right? In this case, munitions in the right place. To me, those are all important lessons learned, right? We have to be able to do it at the scale that is going to be required and at machine speed.

• 2:48:43Speaker 06

  And then we have to take a real hard look at like, what are the exquisite things that are very low density that we need to get, like exquisite munitions in systems that are going to be required in a conflict? Should a conflict come? Hopefully not, but should it come? And I think, you know, Peter and I founded this company in many ways because I don't question that we're not going to have the most exquisite munitions, the best weapon systems in the world. What keeps me up at night is like, can we get them in the place we need them, at the scale we need them, at the right time, right? Can we actually do that? Like, that's something that I think is lacking and frankly, has been overlooked by the technology, you know, companies of today, right? And how do we sustain the force and how do we do this with modern technology?

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the entire conversation. Just, yeah, capacity more than capability. So, thank you for everything that you're doing and thanks for joining the stream.

• 2:49:32Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations to the team too. Tremendous progress. Love, love to see you guys making 18 months of progress in eight months.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  Love to see you.

• 2:49:39Jordi Hays?

  That's right. I appreciate that. Yeah, we look forward to the future.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:49:43John Coogan?

  Welcome back on the stream anytime. We'll talk to you soon and have a great day.

• 2:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon. Thanks for having me.

• 2:49:48John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Will Ahmed from Whoop coming in the studio.

• 2:49:52Jordi Hays?

  It's time to Whoop.

• 2:49:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. Second time on the show. We had him on around the last product release and we will invite him back to the stream.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  How you doing, Will? Good to see you.

• 2:50:04Will Ahmed?

  What's up, guys? Good to see you.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  What's up?

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  Uh, where are you right now? What's in the background?

• 2:50:11Will Ahmed?

  This is Whoop HQ. I'm in my office and if you look right here, that's Fenway Park.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:50:16Will Ahmed?

  We're in Boston, yeah.

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Boston, very nice. Oh, we got some claps from the team in the background. Someone's happy about Boston. Anyway, give us the update. What's, what's new in your world?

• 2:50:27Will Ahmed?

  Well, we recently launched the Whoop 5.0 and the Whoop MG. So, two new hardwares, three membership tiers, bunch of new bands and accessories. Uh, the market seems to be loving the product. Business has been, uh, has been really good.

• 2:50:40John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:50:41Will Ahmed?

  And, uh, yeah, we've launched a lot of new features. We just came out with a, with a health span feature that'll tell you your Whoop age. We worked with, uh, the Buck Institute, which is the leading institute in the country for longevity. So, we found that, you know, the top nine biometrics that correlate with all-cause mortality. I'm sure you guys have very low Whoop ages. And, uh, and we came out-

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about when, just sorry to interrupt, but, but a lot of, anybody that, uh, anybody that does any type of like health testing diagnostics, a lot of people are adding an age, uh, or, or this kind of like age score. And it feels like there's incentive to, for some players to just put the age as low as possible so that people share it. That's obviously not great for the user. They're like, "I'm 35, but this score says I'm 25, so I'm gonna share it, you know, on, on social media."

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  I took one of these biological age tests and it said that I had the mind of a four-year-old.

• 2:51:41Jordi Hays?

  The mind specifically. The body of an elderly man, but the mind of a-

• 2:51:47John Coogan?

  It said I was as sharp as a four-year-old.

• 2:51:49Will Ahmed?

  Is that supposed to be a compliment?

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  But it is.

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  You have the mind, people have said I have the mind of a golden retriever.

• 2:51:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it says you're as smart as a four year old. It was impressive. But my question is, yeah, it is kind of like a little bit of an optimistic flip because you could flip this around and just say, your, your life expectancy, like the average life expectancy is, is 75 and you're at 85 based on how you're aging.

• 2:52:14Jordi Hays?

  There is a company that does like the death.

• 2:52:17John Coogan?

  The death, yeah, I remember those apps and those are much darker and spookier and weird and, and macabre. But this feels, this feels much more optimistic, much more tractable, something you can work towards. But what are the pitfalls? What do you, what, what did you make sure?

• 2:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it sounds like you didn't make a.

• 2:52:34John Coogan?

  Competitors like, like what, what did you want to avoid in the, in the, in how you designed your product?

• 2:52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it felt like, it feels like some are just a random number generator.

• 2:52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:45Jordi Hays?

  And you're doing it with the Buck Institute.

• 2:52:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Sounds, sounds.

• 2:52:49Will Ahmed?

  Yeah, look, we, we worked with Dr. Eric Verden, who's literally one of the best doctors when it comes to longevity and the research institute there. We found nine biometrics that most closely correlate with all cause mortality. And, and they were all things that, that we measure. And, and so we're able to show in great detail how whoop members stack up to other people their age. In a bunch of different factors like sleep consistency, hours of sleep, steps, you know, time spent in heart rate zones, your VO2 max, your weight. A number of, you know, kind of obvious metrics that we can, we can qualify. And we also show all the research that we used in developing the feature.

• 2:53:35Will Ahmed?

  And, and look, it's not everyone wins at soccer. This is not a participation trophy type product. You know, I think like. People generally associate Whoop members as being pretty fit and healthy. And I think it's like 55% of people on Whoop are younger.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  I was about to ask.

• 2:53:52Will Ahmed?

  That means like 45%, you know, are seeing that they've got some work to do. And, uh, and that's how we think it should be, you know? It's, it's designed to be really transparent and honest.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's a good balance because if it was like 99% of Whoop customers just happen to be, you know, half their biological age, you'd be raising some eyebrows, but it seems like you dialed it in appropriately. Uh, anyway, uh, is that, is that a health claim? Do you need to get that approved by the FDA? Are there other things that you, that where the technology has progressed, but maybe the, the legislative framework or the, the government regulation framework hasn't advanced as fast as you'd like? And you feel like the consumer might be getting left behind because of some, some, uh, some cruft in DC?

• 2:54:37Will Ahmed?

  It's a good question because we've had some challenges with the FDA recently. I think it's worth just stating that the, the role of the FDA is to regulate products that have a medical diagnosis.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:54:49Will Ahmed?

  And, uh, and the 21st Century Cures Act makes it pretty clear that if a product is intended for wellness, it's not designed to be regulated. And the, you know, the structure of this exists for heart rate, sleep, so on and so forth. Where, let's take heart rate, for example, that's existed. Heart rate monitoring has existed since the eighties with chest straps and other tools. Obviously Whoop does it today, Apple Watch, so on and so forth. And so you can show heart rate in the context of sleep or exercise or whatever, and that is wellness and therefore is not regulated. If you want to tell someone that they have AFib, uh, that all of a sudden is a diagnosis.

• 2:55:33Will Ahmed?

  And so that would need to be regulated by the FDA. Now, just to say, we also spent the last two and a half years getting regulated with the FDA, doing clinical trials. And so now we have a medically cleared product by the FDA to do ECG monitoring from the wrist and also to do AFib detection. So that's just one example of the difference between wellness and medical. You know, with sleep, you can say hours of sleep, you can do staging, that's wellness. If you want to tell someone they have sleep apnea, that's medical. And where the FDA is inconsistent on this is with blood pressure. So Whoop spent the last three years and tens of millions of dollars innovating to develop Blood Pressure Insights.

• 2:56:14Will Ahmed?

  And this is a really cutting-edge feature that allows us to measure blood pressure from your wrist and give you a daily estimate, which just to say it is a pretty big innovation in the wearable space. And we brought this to market in May, and the FDA has come out saying that they think that it should be a regulated product. Now, again, back to this distinction between wellness and medical, we built the feature for wellness-intended use. So it has a lot of disclaimers around it that it's not designed to diagnose hypertension, it's not a medical device. And it shows you how your blood pressure impacts sleep and stress, how it's impacted by nutrition.

• 2:56:54Will Ahmed?

  I had a woman in my office last week, and she was seeing low readings on her Blood Pressure Insights page. Turned out she was dehydrated. She drinks more water, goes back to, you know, a more normal reading. That's like a classic wellness use case. So we built this wellness feature, and now we're in a debate with the FDA over it. But we're fighting to keep this product in market because at the end of the day, it's the right thing to do. Consumers are loving it, it's innovative, and by the way, it's the law because the 21st Century Cures Act says that you can't regulate wellness-intended features.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  What are some of the breakpoints for a amount of money to really have a good relationship with the FDA? Like, I imagine like a seed-funded startup has no chance of getting cleared as a medical device for, you know, $300,000 investment. I imagine Apple should have no problem because they probably have an office in Washington DC, but you know, you're like a pretty big company, I feel like you should be able to afford it. But like, how tricky is it, and how expensive is it to actually just go for the other designation with any of the wellness features and just kind of shift them over into the medical feature?

• 2:58:19John Coogan?

  And would there actually be a product or consumer benefit if you did that?

• 2:58:25Will Ahmed?

  Well, it's a good question. There are a lot of costs associated with being a medical device. You know, you have to go through a clinical trial process. You have to work with the FDA. Depending on the functionality, you might need to hire a lot of consultants to support that. So it's a hard thing for smaller companies to do. The other thing, just to say it, though, is it's time consuming. So, you know, it'll delay your time to market by two, three, four years, depending on the type of FDA approval that you're seeking. And then I think the real main question is, what's the intended use? Is the intended

• 2:59:05Will Ahmed?

  use around describing wellness, or is the intended use around diagnosis? And so, our intended use today is using blood pressure insights to help people understand their wellness. And in the long run, of course, we can imagine having a more diagnostic product, but that's not what we've shipped yet today, nor is it what we're claiming to have.

• 2:59:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I imagine that even if you have unlimited money, you still will be delayed by a couple of years while the FDA reviews these claims. And then the problem is that you're shipping your hardware like every year.

• 2:59:41Jordi Hays?

  You have millions of people that are dehydrated and have bad blood pressure because of it and aren't even able to be aware.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  Very rough. Well, what's next? What is the plan? Is there anything on the horizon that you want to get through or move over? Or is it just kind of like, sort this debate out and then move on?

• 3:00:05Will Ahmed?

  Oh, we're going to keep working with the FDA. I mean, like I said, we've been working with the FDA for years. And I have a lot of respect for the FDA. I think they have an important governing function in this country. I just think they've missed the mark on this particular case. And so, we're going to fight for that, and we're going to fight for health data for Americans. In terms of where Whoop is going right now, we just announced a bunch of new features that are coming out before the end of the year. And one of which I'm very excited about is advanced labs. So Whoop is going to be coming out with our own blood testing. You're going to be able to upload all of your past blood tests. Doesn't matter if it was through a doctor, or another product, or what. That's all going to be able to live inside Whoop. It'll be grafted over time. It'll become

• 3:00:50Will Ahmed?

  part of your Whoop data. And then on a go forwards basis, you'll also be able to take blood tests. And this is a real new capability for the company, but it's going to help bring more and more of this data under one umbrella, one roof, so to speak.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  That's all HIPAA compliant, I assume? Is that, is that the compliance framework that matters here?

• 3:01:14Will Ahmed?

  Yeah, you have to work with the right partners in order to enable it. And obviously the testing is pretty sophisticated.

• 3:01:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:01:19Will Ahmed?

  Uh, we've got, you know, some great partners in the space. But a lot of it's also explaining what the data means.

• 3:01:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:26Will Ahmed?

  And I think that's where Whoop historically has been quite good is, is, you know, presenting information and trying to coach on it.

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:34Will Ahmed?

  And what's powerful about the blood testing is we'll now be able to pair it with your 24/7 physiological data. So, you know, maybe if you're not sleeping well, it has something to do with a biomarker or a blood test, you know? And maybe your exercise is improving, improving something here. You, you want to be able to have all this data under one umbrella so you can understand it.

• 3:01:56John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Uh, well, thank you so much for stopping by. Good luck with everything at the FDA and good luck with the rest of your day.

• 3:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Fun with your friends over there. I'm sure you guys are spending a lot of time together.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Enjoy the frequent flyer miles as you go to Washington DC regularly, or maybe you take the train. Who knows? Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you, dude.

• 3:02:12Will Ahmed?

  Thanks, Jets.

• 3:02:14John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. Up next, we have a niche from NIT coming into the studio. We are talking about them and I think we got some good news. I think we might be hitting the gong again.

• 3:02:24Jordi Hays?

  I'll let you do the honors, Sean.

• 3:02:25John Coogan?

  Ooh, first gong hit for me for the, for the show, for the day.

• 3:02:29Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have to hit the gong for Palantir, but.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Uh, would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and give us the latest news?

• 3:02:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. My name is Nish, one of the co-founders and the CEO of NIT. And, uh, yeah, we're excited. We announced our 16.1 million dollar Series A on Thursday.

• 3:02:49John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Backhand, nice.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  Backhand. Love it. Amazing. Talk to us about the company. How are you pitching it right now? Who are the customers? Break it down for us.

• 3:02:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, for sure. So yeah, Nit, we have built a system of agents that is really building the simplest way for enterprise consumer researchers to go from, hey, I have a business question, to here's a story I can share with my stakeholders. So yeah, what we're solving is this age-old problem of anytime you want to talk to your customers, especially these large enterprise brands, it's taking them four to six weeks. They're spending anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we're helping them do that now in days instead of weeks and at a fraction of the cost. So working with the largest enterprise consumer brands.

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  What is the, is the key differentiator just AI? Are there other differentiations on the go-to-market strategy or the way you build a product? Like, is there counter-positioning against the big, you know, 800-pound gorilla in this category that, you know, we know and might be at a basketball game, but, you know, he's definitely not taking days off recently?

• 3:03:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, great question there. So basically, Nit, you know, what we've really, what we're putting our hat, or hanging our hat on right now is this idea of researcher-driven AI, right? So we were, we're an AI-native company. We started the company, you know, a year or two ago when, when AI was still not, not as prevalent in our industry as it is today. But what we realized is that, you know, you can, you can run this data through the AI, but really what it's missing is the context that the researcher brings, understanding how this shows up in your business, how do you actually sell it into the organization? So throughout our platform, the way that shows up is one, we always have the researcher at the center of how we run research. So the researcher

• 3:04:40Speaker 07

  on our platform will go in and share, this is, you know, more information about my business, here's the context of my business, here are my stakeholders and how they like seeing the data, so that we can get the output as close to that stakeholder ready. And then the second is we've invested pretty heavily into an internal research team. So throughout the process, all of our customers are paired with a dedicated expert researcher. And what we've seen is that that gets the AI to a better spot, a place where our research customers can actually then take this, it's a really good first draft, they clean it up a little bit, and then they can share with their stakeholders pretty quickly.

• 3:05:14Jordi Hays?

  How are you closing? All these logos, you got Amazon, Mars, ESPN, T-Mobile, Paramount, NASCAR, Moet, Hennessy,

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  It's an insane lineup.

• 3:05:24Jordi Hays?

  WNBA.

• 3:05:25John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Crazy stacks for Series A.

• 3:05:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, it started off with some good old hustle, you know, I flew out, met a bunch of our first customers that just kind of figured it out. But really what we've invested, going back to this researcher-driven AI piece is we've really invested in the human aspect of it. So we primarily meet most of our customers through events. We show up, we go to all of the major events in our industry. We show up to their offices, take them out to, you know, take them out to dinner and invest heavily in face meetings. The other aspect is really around our-

• 3:06:02Jordi Hays?

  What about NASCAR? You, you, did you ever crush a beer at a NASCAR event for research purposes? I feel like that's a good, it's a good sign of respect in NASCAR culture.

• 3:06:12Speaker 07

  The NASCAR team was kind enough to invite us out to Daytona when we kicked off our partnership. So yes, they, they know how to have a good time for sure.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  Just why they only drink champagne, it's just the biggest narrative violation of all time. It'd be great. Oh, so where, I mean, you're talking about the customer, the human-centric research. Where, where do humans excel in this, in this problem set, in this domain? And then where does AI thrive? Like where do you not want to delegate a piece of the work to an AI? And where do you want to spend zero minutes of human time focused on something?

• 3:06:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, where we've seen humans really excel is storytelling. And our entire platform is built around, how can we take all the time-intensive kind of grunt work that goes into research? So think, you know, setting up your first draft of the questionnaire, analyzing all this unstructured qualitative data, whether it's video data, open-end text data. And we've built really good AI that can get you that first draft, whether it's a questionnaire or a final report. And really where the human researcher comes, both our internal team as well as, you know, the external kind of partners that we work with is how do we take that, those insights and tell a really powerful story here? Something that will actually drive action from our marketing team or product team or strategy team.

• 3:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How important is it to build a like liquid supply of people that are willing to answer surveys? I, you know, when I think about Amazon, Mars, ESPN, T-Mobile, Paramount, NASCAR, Moet Hennessy, JBL, like a lot of those research projects are probably just, I want to know how Americans feel about my product. It's not this hyper-specific, talk to just my customers, my, my 10 people. I can probably call those people if I'm running that company, but if I want to know, how is my brand perceived nationally or globally?

• 3:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very different. T-Mobile, T-Mobile also can do like, like easily survey active customers, new cohorts, old cohorts, whereas like Moet can't necessarily.

• 3:08:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so how, how important is it over time for you to be able to bring surveillable people to a platform?

• 3:08:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say we're, we're very data agnostic, right? So we work with our partners where they layer us on top of their existing customer list. We work with some of the larger panel companies in our space, but as, you know, making that stance that we're data agnostic, one thing that we've invested a lot of energy in and technology in is how do you make sure the quality of that data is really good? So a big problem in our industry today is data quality challenges. There's fraud, there's bots, there's, there's a lot of not so great stuff happening. And so what we do is we've invested a lot in our AI tech too, especially if you think about video, for example, if you collect video responses, you can actually see the human on the other end. We analyze across seven different plus parameters to make sure that that human is who they say

• 3:09:08Speaker 07

  they are and actually speaking on topic. So the data quality is an area we've really stood out for our partners as well.

• 3:09:15John Coogan?

  Very cool. Anything else?

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great. Congratulations on the progress.

• 3:09:19John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Congratulations on the progress. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's rip some timeline.

• 3:09:28John Coogan?

  I have.

• 3:09:28Jordi Hays?

  I have been waiting for this.

• 3:09:29John Coogan?

  I have some breaking news.

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Sahil Bloom, Five Types of Wealth, over 300,000 copies of that book sold. Incredible.

• 3:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Not surprised.

• 3:09:40John Coogan?

  You know why?

• 3:09:40Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna sell a million.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  Because we reviewed it on the show right as it went live. And remember, interestingly, we tried to guess the five types of wealth.

• 3:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Cars, watches, art, homes.

• 3:09:53John Coogan?

  Horses, yes. And we were wildly wrong. Apparently, it's something about like, living some sort of balanced life that's not that materialistic. Money's only one of them.

• 3:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we put it in the true zone.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  He had a little bit of a contrarian take, yeah, but it's done very well. And congratulations to Sahil. What a run. 300,000 copies of that book sold. Absolutely massive number, so congratulations to him.

• 3:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, Palantir earnings came out after the close. North of a billion dollars in revenue for the last quarter, up 48% year over year.

• 3:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Beat by 7%. Going to be 1.08 billion next quarter.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  Get the gong, guest.

• 3:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Estimate 11%. And then they raised their full year guide 6% from last quarter. And they had raised, already raised it 11% from the start of the year. So they have 57% free cash flow margins.

• 3:10:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:10:56Jordi Hays?

  And 81% gross margins.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  81% gross. Congratulations.

• 3:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't look like a consulting company to me.

• 3:11:03John Coogan?

  It does not. They're beating the allegations.

• 3:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Jammin' at Altimeter, broke it down. Let's see how it's doing after hours.

• 3:11:12John Coogan?

  Benjamin, Jammin'.

• 3:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Up another 3% after hours. This is about to be, I mean.

• 3:11:19John Coogan?

  It's a big company. It's gonna have to be Mag 8. Throw them in there.

• 3:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Mag 8, nice round, nice, nice, nice number.

• 3:11:26John Coogan?

  Chinese number of wealth, right?

• 3:11:26Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right, John. Of course, let's do some timeline because I, I love it so much.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  I love timeline.

• 3:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Doomer says.

• 3:11:36John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 3:11:37Jordi Hays?

  So Dave Asprey posted yesterday, huge news for Jim Bros. A new study reveals that incline walking burns. More fat than running.

• 3:11:45John Coogan?

  We've been getting into this. We've been doing this because of the bodybuilders. When they're on cuts, they do incline walking and it's so much easier to get yourself into the mood of just walking at three miles an hour on a 10% incline.

• 3:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Total bro-science victory.

• 3:12:01John Coogan?

  It's total bro-science victory. This is hilarious.

• 3:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dumer says jog cells absolutely mauling and seething over hike chats.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  It's remarkable. Yeah. I mean, when you're, when you do that incline walk, you throw, throw on a podcast, throw on some TVN, listen to us, watch this, uh, and start burning the fat.

• 3:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Mickey Friedman says it's crazy that an LLM can win IMO gold before making a single funny joke. The only thing.

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  It's not that surprising.

• 3:12:28Jordi Hays?

  They do the, uh, the, that format where it's the be me jokes.

• 3:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're pretty good at that, but, uh, in general, yeah, uh, RL, uh, is, or funny jokes seem to be RL resistant, uh, whereas the IMO is, uh, uh, easily defined by a benchmark.

• 3:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:45John Coogan?

  And therefore hackable. Uh, but still, you know, still valuable and I, I like this. I, I prefer that, uh, that it focuses on IMO gold because I can't do that, but I can make funny jokes.

• 3:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Take Kim, author of the Nvidia Way, says, here's what I would do if I was CEO of Apple. Quadruple the RAM in iPhones to 32 gigabytes and have Macs model at 64 gigabytes. Memory is oxygen for local on-device AI. More equals smarter and more powerful. Take the margin hit. Memory isn't even that expensive. Buy Mistral or Anthropic and invest a hundred billion in AI compute annually. I don't agree with this take.

• 3:13:22John Coogan?

  How much does it cost to buy Anthropic right now? 500 billion or something?

• 3:13:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the, the bigger issue, the bigger issue here is like, one, I just don't see France selling their national AI champion.

• 3:13:32John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 3:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Why would Europe ever allow that?

• 3:13:35John Coogan?

  That's the whole point of the company.

• 3:13:36Jordi Hays?

  And then Anthropic is dominating in code gen and like very clearly could be seeming, I, I, it seems like they could be a trillion dollar business someday, just generating code for the world.

• 3:13:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so I just don't see Apple, um, You know, also, Apple buying a, you know, whatever price it would have to be a pay.

• 3:13:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:13:59Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then like, kind of, I don't know, keep the core code gen business running and then.

• 3:14:05John Coogan?

  Well, regardless, shout out to Take Him. He's sending us some books of his book, The Nvidia Way.

• 3:14:09Jordi Hays?

  But I do agree. He says, Apple has the capital. Apple now knows the AI computing shift is existential. Whereas the bold action and urgency, they are the only big tech company not in the AI race.

• 3:14:20John Coogan?

  Completely agree.

• 3:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Take the short term pain to have long term relevance.

• 3:14:23John Coogan?

  To definitely invest. Might, might tweak my recommendation, but love the thought experiment and very interesting. And we should switch to the Mark Gurman article, Power On. Apple has a new answers team working on a stripped down alternative to ChatGPT for world knowledge as it looks to catch up in AI. So, Apple has a new answers team developing a stripped down rival to ChatGPT. This, of course, is like, distill the model down, focus it, and you're gonna have this, there's this idea that you're gonna have the really smart genius models, the big models, training smaller models for specific things. You're gonna have one that just does code, one that just does, you know, Wikipedia,

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  one that just does weather really well. And so if you can just kind of route between those, you can be very efficient and you can probably run it on iPhone. So.

• 3:15:10Jordi Hays?

  Equally important, Mark Zuckerberg says, without AI glasses, you'll be at a cognitive disadvantage. Hopes Revenge says, good, I'm used to it.

• 3:15:21John Coogan?

  Buy my product or you will be stupid. Hopes Revenge is so good. I have him on the show.

• 3:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Pavel Esparuhav, former guest and friend of the show, says, people will congratulate me on raising money. And it's like, bro, I am poor and stressed out. It should be condolences.

• 3:15:40John Coogan?

  Did you talk to Pavel in New York?

• 3:15:42Jordi Hays?

  And Will says, tell that to your ramp equity. Pavel says, the Patek store doesn't take ramp shares. Well, they should. It's better than cash, better than a, than a, than a store of value.

• 3:15:55John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman says, entering the fast fashion era of SaaS very soon gets. 16K banger here. The thing that's interesting here is my immediate thought was look at the performance of LVMH during the fast fashion era.

• 3:16:16John Coogan?

  True.

• 3:16:17Jordi Hays?

  And if you extrapolate this example, it says that craft driven luxury products will endure. Obviously, fast fashion, fashion is much more about signaling and trends and SaaS can be very utilitarian. Were you gonna hit a gong or something?

• 3:16:42John Coogan?

  No, I was looking for the red flag. We have the red flag somewhere, but I think the fast fashion, we have a red flag in the studio. Ben, you want to come wave that on camera?

• 3:16:54Jordi Hays?

  I'll wave it.

• 3:16:55John Coogan?

  Wave the red flag. But the reason I'm waving the red flag is it's more like maybe red flag is not the right one, but the fast fashion is there's a different term here, which is disposable software. And I like the formulation of the meme generator era of SaaS. The meme generator era of SaaS where everyone got the ability to make memes on their phone. And that's just a lot less controversial because it's like democratizing. It's like the teespring of SaaS. It's like, I want to be able to print my logo on a T-shirt

• 3:17:39John Coogan?

  at the click of a button. I want the Shopify for SaaS soon. I want the ChatGPT for SaaS. The fast fashion feels like very sloppy, but all the value and all the creativity being housed within Shein and Timu. And I don't like that as much. It's way more cooler when you see someone who's wearing a small merch drop from one artist that they like, and you're like, oh, that expresses something that's unique and it's only made possible by the industrial capacity. That is so ramped up to the point that you don't just need to have the Nike shirt and everyone has the same shirt.

• 3:18:19John Coogan?

  Everyone can express themselves differently. Like when the screen printing era, I remember like you used to just be able to take spray paint and just spray paint the logo on a shirt like. Uh, that, that is what I'm looking forward to. We don't know how to do that. But yeah, I mean, you walk around Venice Beach or New York City, Times Square, you'll see like unique shirts that are very weird cringe usually, but. I like, I like that idea of like democratizing the creation of SaaS so that there can be one off websites, but that doesn't feel fast fashion to me. I'm sure there will be fast fashion, but.

• 3:18:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it's more there's, we talked about this, yeah, apps as memes. There's a lot of apps.

• 3:18:54John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 3:18:55Jordi Hays?

  There's apps that should exist that shouldn't, that you shouldn't spend time producing them because they don't have like an obvious business application.

• 3:19:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:19:03Jordi Hays?

  There's also apps that should exist, but shouldn't have 10 engineers working on them. They should just have one person who loves building the product. My dad showed me an app yesterday that you just sat outside. We were having lunch in my backyard and he put his phone down. And it just was using the microphone to pick up which birds were.

• 3:19:26John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Which birds were in our yard. And within like five minutes, it identified like 10 different birds and was listing them out by name.

• 3:19:34John Coogan?

  Yep. That's really cool.

• 3:19:35Jordi Hays?

  He was showing me the profile and he can see all the birds he's been around. It's like insane. And so there's apps like that, that I just think like probably a great small business that, uh, but.

• 3:19:46John Coogan?

  And way cooler if you don't need to go and raise a bunch of money and then have this like cap table prefer pref stack like hanging over your head. It's just like.

• 3:19:54Jordi Hays?

  That might be at its best, a $5 million a year business. You have a small team on it and it's.

• 3:20:00John Coogan?

  And so if the fixed cost of, of developing the first version is $5 million in engineer salaries, it's like you never really clear the pref stack. Whereas if it's just an idea and you can just get it up and, and then run it, it like can actually be a good business. So, uh, I, I like that. I like that world.

• 3:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:20:16John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, we have a funny, we have a funny take in the, in the, uh, chat from Azar, uh, talking about. Apple should buy perplexity, which we've talked about before, and I think that one makes more sense than Mistral or Anthropic. Much more gettable at the current valuation, 18 billion versus what, what's Anthropic at 150 or something?

• 3:20:34Jordi Hays?

  160.

• 3:20:34John Coogan?

  160, that seemed, and then they'd have to pay more, obviously, uh, so that, but I don't know why he said Sony. Sony is an interesting choice.

• 3:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Did he mean Sonos?

• 3:20:42John Coogan?

  Sonos? Sonos would be an interesting one for sure, because then they could, uh, I mean, they already have Apple.

• 3:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Tried to do their speakers thing.

• 3:20:49John Coogan?

  But Sony, I mean, they make great cameras.

• 3:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity is a good example where Apple doesn't need to become a foundation model lab.

• 3:20:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:20:56Jordi Hays?

  They just need to be able to build good products.

• 3:20:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:20:58Jordi Hays?

  And I think perplexity is consistently built.

• 3:21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Pretty solid product.

• 3:21:03John Coogan?

  I think at some point, you know, if you think like, like iCloud is not hosted on AWS. Like they did build their own data centers eventually, even though they're not a true hyperscaler.

• 3:21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:14John Coogan?

  I could see them just being like, we trained our own models so that we know the legal risks. And I think that's a lot of what the hang up is with these partnerships and stuff is like, uh, there's a lot of legal risk, a lot of brand risk, hallucination risk. All the stuff that the foundation model labs are grappling with, whether it's AI psychosis, or, uh, you know, intellectual property infringement, or hallucinations, or just bad recommendations, mediocre products, all the rough stuff. It's great when that lives in the founder mode startup world. Apple's not in that world right now. And so it makes, but, but eventually you will be able to develop these foundation models in a way that, that obviates all that risk. So.

• 3:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Uh, while we're at it, uh, Mark in the chat says, this has quickly become my favorite show.

• 3:21:58John Coogan?

  Oh, thanks, Mark. That's great to hear.

• 3:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Your last message has quickly become my favorite message in the last, uh, I appreciate it, Mark. We have another post here from Matthew Zeitlin. He says, I only trust.

• 3:22:09John Coogan?

  Did you see this one from Frank? Sorry. Todd Graves should lead product at perplexity? That's the CEO of Raisin Canes Chicken Fingers? Someone's, someone's clearly listening to, to Founder's Podcast, 100%.

• 3:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Todd Graves should lead product at Apple.

• 3:22:27John Coogan?

  Founder's Podcast, Todd Graves fan?

• 3:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Apple should.

• 3:22:30John Coogan?

  Hats off to you.

• 3:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Apple should acquire Raisin Canes.

• 3:22:33John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing. Put them right, put them right in the Apple Store. You come in for some chicken, you pick up a new iPad. Do you need the iPad? Maybe not, but you enjoyed the iPad, you enjoyed the chicken. It's great.

• 3:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Matthew Zeitlin says, I only trust reporters that are fully locked in. And this is from a piece on Joe Weisenthal.

• 3:22:52John Coogan?

  In the New York Times.

• 3:22:53Jordi Hays?

  In the New York Times, they have an amazing profile. Yesterday, he says, Mr. Weisenthal, who said he used nicotine probably more than is optimal and was going through a full 15 pouch can in a day.

• 3:23:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know what's better than, than using a nicotine pouch? Developing a new nicotine pouch with your co-host before you launch your podcast.

• 3:23:12Jordi Hays?

  As a way to kind of test if we have, you know, on air.

• 3:23:15John Coogan?

  Exactly. I was, I was reading this and you're like, it's like, how are we the more extreme version of this somehow? It's like extremely odd and rare that we would be. But we actually did build a, a nicotine pouch brand for finance bros called XL. And we, and we launched this product before launching this podcast. And that was kind of where we got this, we, we realized that we were on to something because we sat down to record a promotional video that was supposed to be like three minutes long and we wound up yapping for over an hour.

• 3:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Ben was like, did you guys prep for that? Like, what was that?

• 3:23:45John Coogan?

  Ben was like, what was that?

• 3:23:47Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, we'll, we'll end on this post. Lena says, uh, August 1st, Lena, yeah, we just go by her first name, talk about her a lot.

• 3:23:56John Coogan?

  She is the biggest Lena in tech.

• 3:23:58Jordi Hays?

  She says, a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses rather than be bought up by existing giants can generate enormous value. A win for employees, investors, innovation and the public.

• 3:24:09John Coogan?

  And investment bankers.

• 3:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Talking about, uh, Figma.

• 3:24:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:24:13Jordi Hays?

  And Shaya Levy says, Lena Hand cuts off the right hand of a genius.

• 3:24:18John Coogan?

  Lena Khan cuts off the right hand. He said Lena Hand.

• 3:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Lena Hand.

• 3:24:23John Coogan?

  No, Lena Khan, Khan. Lena Khan cuts off the right hand of a genius pianist who nevertheless perseveres and produces a one-handed masterpiece for which she then takes credit. Yeah. Interesting. I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's a hot take in tech.

• 3:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, Alex at Andreessen, uh, said something which was.

• 3:24:46John Coogan?

  Turned out well.

• 3:24:47Jordi Hays?

  In a, in a, in a free society, we let, you know, we should let people do things if they're not creating immediate harm, right?

• 3:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:57Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, deciding how other people are going to run their business is against, uh...

• 3:25:04John Coogan?

  I still think you had the best, the best post about the Lina Khan news. I'm wondering if I can pull it up, but where was it? It was you replying to Lina Khan. I'll, I'll put it in the chat.

• 3:25:17Jordi Hays?

  You found it?

• 3:25:18John Coogan?

  I found it. It's in the timeline chat now. But if we can pull up this image of Jordy Hayes replying to Lina Khan. Lina Khan says, "A great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses rather than being bought up by existing giants can generate enormous value." And Jordy Hayes shared a picture of a, what is this, a soldier who's fought a war and there's, and there's a dolphin and rainbows in the background.

• 3:25:43Jordi Hays?

  It's just like this guy who just lived through, like, he's clear, you know, he's in paradise, right? There's tropical rainbows and, and it's like, you know, he made it, he made it through a war and he's smiling now, but clearly, you know, been through, been through it. So Lina really made the Figma team.

• 3:26:06Jordi Hays?

  She put, put them in a dark place, but they made it.

• 3:26:09John Coogan?

  They earned it though. And now it's a better story. I don't know. Lots of new ones there.

• 3:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:26:16John Coogan?

  Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening.

• 3:26:18Jordi Hays?

  It is going to be a massive week in technology. There's some, some news dropping later in the week that we will be covering live. We'll be up in San Francisco.

• 3:26:26John Coogan?

  We're excited.

• 3:26:27Jordi Hays?

  And in the meantime, I can't wait for tomorrow.

• 3:26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you later.

• 3:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Leave us a five star review. Apple Podcasts, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, I remember, I recommend switching to a more video native platform.

• 3:26:39John Coogan?

  Spotify.

• 3:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Spotify or YouTube. And we appreciate all your support.

• 3:26:44John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.