Math Wars, GG Navier Stokes, Greg Brockman Joins | Dan Wright, Eric Seufert, Scott Wu, Sahir Jaggi, Andrew Borovsky, Harry Mellsop

(00:57) - Math Wars (14:38) - Astra Reactions (26:47) - Trailer Zone (39:19) - AI Job Boom Beats the Doom (52:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:02:27) - Dan Wright discusses Armada’s mission to bring modular AI infrastructure to underserved regions as the “hyperscaler for the edge.” He highlights the company’s rapid growth, scalable Galleon data centers, use of stranded renewable energy, and focus on speed, scale, data sovereignty, and real-time edge computing. (01:12:07) - Eric Seufert, founder of Mobile Dev Memo and an expert on mobile advertising and digital platforms, discusses the convergence of Netflix and YouTube, Apple’s expanding advertising ambitions, and Meta’s AI strategy. He argues that advertising—particularly conversion-optimized auctions—will remain the most scalable way to monetize streaming, AI agents, and digital commerce. (01:48:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:49:49) - Scott Wu discusses Cognition’s fundraising, the rapid advancement of AI agents, and Devin’s growing role in enterprise software development and cybersecurity. He explains that effective orchestration depends on combining models, tools, and context, while emphasizing AI’s remarkable progress in mathematics and real-world applications. (02:10:49) - Greg Brockman discusses OpenAI’s advances in mathematical reasoning, computer use, image generation, healthcare, and agentic AI. The OpenAI co-founder and president emphasizes how increasingly capable, unified AI tools could generate new knowledge, solve everyday problems, transform healthcare, and empower people while being developed safely. (02:35:42) - Sahir Jaggi discusses Forest, the AI Network for Medicine he founded and leads, and its rapid growth to a $3 billion valuation while serving patients, physicians, and major biopharma companies nationwide. He explains how Forest uses AI and healthcare data to streamline clinical trials, drug launches, distribution, and patient access, ultimately making medicine development faster, cheaper, and more predictable. (02:43:57) - Andrew Borovsky discusses Split, a fintech company that gives consumers flexibility to schedule major bill payments around their income. He explains its cash-flow underwriting model, ACH-based payment technology, rapid growth to nearly $80 million in annualized originations, and recent Series A and B fundraising rounds led by Khosla Ventures. (02:52:14) - Harry Mellsop discusses his work as co-founder and CEO of Antioch, a startup developing simulation technology for physical AI and autonomous systems. He explains Antioch’s hybrid approach to narrowing the simulation-to-reality gap, accelerating robotics development through data flywheels, and serving markets ranging from humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles to Amazon Ring devices. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, September 8th, 2026. Live from the TVP and Ultra Down, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  You know what time it is, John.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Ramp.com time. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  I need my countdown. I need my countdown.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Doing some math?

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  There it is. Road to Christmas, 107 days.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  December 25th minus today.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  It's flying by.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Made only possible with math. 107 days. Time is flying until Christmas.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Start.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Road to Christmas is going strong.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Start scoping out Christmas trees.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Yep, now's the time.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Once we, once we get under 100.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Hopefully you've already planned.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Open season.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Open season. Does math matter? That's the big question. I was debating this with Tyler today. Lots of, lots of, lots of tension on the timeline over Navier-Stokes, the Millennium Prize math problem. There has been a Millennium Prize math problem that was solved before the Poindexter conjecture in the pre-AI era. These are very, very difficult math problems that all PhD mathematicians, all sorts of elite, the upper echelon of math has been grappling with for years, and AI is starting to knock these down. Remember, last year was the year of the IMO gold medals from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  We talked to Scott Wu about this, who's coming on the show later today, huge race for cognition. And Scott made the prediction on TBPN, early in 2025, that he believed that artificial intelligence would be able to achieve gold at the IMO, the International Math Olympiad, in 2025. And he was right. He nailed it. Progress continued, but debate remained around, "Cool calculator, bro," basically is the, is the critique. I mean, people just, they don't feel empowered by a system that's really good at math. They just, people, already a TI83 can do more complex math than most people can do.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  And so, when you say, "Oh, there's another level of math that you don't know about and you don't care about, and computers are good at it," a lot of people, their eyes glaze over. And so, the bigger question here for me is all about the, the public perception. What actually matters here? I think they're cool benchmarks. I think they're interesting stories. Obviously, there's a lot of drama over this race. It feels like it was neck and neck. Now, there's a bunch of debates going back and forth with a mathematician who works at Google and a mathematician who's independent, who worked alongside an anthropic researcher, who were both working on it. And they were apparently texting back and forth and going back and forth on, did they steal the, the data? Did they copy each other's? Do they have different approaches?

• 3:01John Coogan?

  And so, lots of different back and forth. And I think someone summed it up well by saying that these, these math models have discovered the, the hardest problem of advanced mathematics, which is authorship contribution. Who actually did the work? Who gets lead left on the paper? But yeah, there was, there was a drama last year, 2025, during the IMO. OpenAI and Google DeepMind, and I believe Harmonic, the math AI lab that we had on the show last week, were all working on solving the International Math Olympiad. Remember, there's six questions. Question six, no AI model could solve. It was more complex.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  But both teams got a 35 out of 42, even though they only got five questions out of six right. That's good enough for gold. It's the bare minimum, but they did it. But there was a bunch of back and forth because OpenAI validated with former IMO gold medalists, while Google's result was graded by the official rubric that year, which is internal to the organization. We called it at the time. It's like they ran the fastest 100-meter sprint in the parking lot while the, while the actual Olympics is going on in the stadium. And so, a lot of these are just, you know, vibe wars, races, who does what? Does it even matter?

• 4:23John Coogan?

  The interesting thing about Navier-Stokes is, does it matter, Tyler? You think it does? I'll debate you on this a little bit. It seems like it doesn't because the equations themselves are known. They're just not fully proven. Engineers and physicists already solve them numerically all the time for a particular situation. So airflow around a wing, you might have to use some of these equations, weather models, water through a pipe, these are critical things. They are boring, but you can imagine that there would be cause for optimism. You know, better weather models save lives during hurricane season. Increased airflow across a airplane wing, that could lead to more efficiency, longer ranges,

• 5:08John Coogan?

  cheaper flights, lower carbon emissions. There's a bunch of reasons why you could solve all that and be excited. But that's not actually what happens.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  One of the reasons I'm excited, I believe we agreed last week that if anyone solved Navier-Stokes, Tyler would shave his head.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. Didn't we do that? We said something.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no, that was about the.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Oh, that was a tough.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  The details are kind of fun.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  The details don't matter. Get ready to shave your head, buddy.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, this is a big moment.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it was actually, it was if any, if any AI progress happens at all, Tyler shaved his head.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  But do you have a steel man for why this matters?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  So I, I think I agree that like, I don't think that the breakthrough, you know, this new stuff that's going on is like, practically super useful. I don't think you're gonna feel it when you're, when you're on an airplane and you're not gonna feel like less turbulence now because of this. But I think, like, you know, these are like the most important open math problems. I think like, these are more close to like, you know, a beautiful painting or something than like, some like practical engineering breakthrough.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Like, this is like pure math. This is like the, you know, this is the peak of the mountain of like.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Same month.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Math.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Same month that AI solved this incredibly difficult math problem. I saw someone use ChatGPT to book a haircut. So. The equivalent, no, I mean, in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, like practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, it's not just optimizing endless things, that's actually generative and moving things forward, not just defending against cyber attacks, doing something.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Wincem says, "If it gets a Millennium Prize, you all have to get bowl cuts."

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Oh, bowl cuts.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Bowl cuts are interesting.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  That's really, really ridiculous. You do get a million bucks, so, you know, there's that. That's not nothing, but in the AGI race where trillions are being deployed, it is, it is very minimal. But the, it sounds like cause for optimism that Navier-Stokes would improve airflow over a wing, something like that, but that's not really how it will work.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Proving this, this, these equations is unlikely to actually have any measurable, measurable impact. And that's sort of agreed upon, and physicists have sort of chimed in with this take that this doesn't, this won't actually move the discipline of engineering forward at all, but it is a cool demo.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Engineers already solve the equations numerically, as I mentioned. So clearly, it matters for hype and vibes, solving how math problems is good heuristic to show how quickly models are progressing, but.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to me, it just comes down to, humans are able to use machines that humans built to further humanity's general knowledge.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's good.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  And, but I feel like benchmarks, and if you're just trying to measure AI progress, benchmarks and raw inputs and raw metrics of the model sort of do the same thing. Like, the number of people who will be convinced that AI is progressing exponentially because they see this result. And then you look at the number of people that are, that would be equally convinced of AI progress just by hearing, "Oh, there's, you know, 10 gigawatts coming online," or "The new model has 10 trillion parameters," or "It was trained with a billion dollars of computer," something like that.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  Your thing is the average person is probably more impressed by Sora than by this.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. It's way more visceral to actually see something. And that's why the weekend was very much Blender, and people showing 3D renders and remodeling their houses and building small games and web games. And that feels much more like a, okay, breakthrough. People are having fun. They're vibe coding stuff, but they're also doing 3D modeling, which is like a new skill. We've had image generation, video generation. But there's something much more, I don't know, like grounded in watching a, from just a few images, watching a Blender model come to life. You can walk around inside of it, and it can be something that you know the model doesn't exist.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  I saw a few demos that were like a train, and it was like, "Oh, wow, I modeled this amazing train." But there are perfectly modeled trains out there that you can just go grab from the internet. That's not that impressive when you actually see your, your specific house or your car or something that doesn't already exist out there, perfectly modeled. You're like, wow.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt. John Anderson says, "Why are we only seeing the calendar days for Road to Christmas? Can we please get a weekdays and workdays breakdown for Die Hard?" Yeah, we need it. We need a full, full screen graphic. So let's, let's work on that. Thank you. Thank you, John.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Good comment. Good comment.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Let's, yeah, so in terms of field the AGI.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Uh, computer use, definitely one of these. Uh, Astra particularly faster at computer use for like really, really mundane things. Also just, uh, interesting to just have a very different interface to your computer, like configurations, all the things we're used to have to dig through, dig through a bunch of settings, maybe set something on the command line, maybe find a control panel. You can just ask Codex or any AI agent to go and do it and it'll just do it and come back to you.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  One of the use cases that I'm excited about is getting, you know, when you get a parking ticket and then you're like, I got this parking ticket. I want to deal with it. And then it's like, well, the ticket is not in the portal yet.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  Being able to go into chat and say, hey, this, once this ticket is live in the system, please pay it.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Parking.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  And so you can just forget about it.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Parking ticket, super intelligence.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  It is.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  It feels like we're close.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Um, so yeah, I, I think that, uh, the millennium prizes will get solved or proved or, you know, uh, delivered probably this year, if not like this week. It feels like all of the different labs are like, put a million dollars of inference on this, put a million dollars of inference on this. Uh, there is going to be a back and forth and, and the labs are going to very quickly solve basically all of these problems. Uh, and then there'll be a search for new problems, but the, the conversation will move back to curing cancer, almost certainly, uh, because that's the one that's so grounded. That's the one that's, you know, supposed to be, uh, tractable. It's been messaged from various labs for

• 11:44John Coogan?

  so long that people will, will, will want that, but there will be a longer flywheel from actually designing a cure for a specific cancer, running tests, seeing that it was effective. It's not, it, it, you, you can't do it with a million dollars of inference over a weekend, I think. But that's, I, I, my, my prediction is like the conversation will go back to biotech after we basically solve math, which is a crazy thing to say, but it feels like we're there. What do you think?

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, all the conversation.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. People say lately to stop.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So one, the pharmaceutical industry has been curing, curing forms of cancer or, or making progress against various forms of cancer for a very long time.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Get zero credit.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Zero credit, worst reputation of any category of businesses on the planet.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  And so I don't think that that's like this, like, you know, that I don't think that's the solution to, uh, sentiment around, uh, the technology industry.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I know. I, I saw someone.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  And setting up this idea, like, imagine how underwhelming it will be if any AI lab comes out and makes like 20% progress towards one, one specific type of cancer, right? Uh, that doesn't, that's not going to come across as like, oh, wow.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Cured cancer.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay, they sort of advanced understanding and, and maybe the, uh, treatment process. And, and this type of thing is happening all the time. Anybody who's had a family member, uh, that's, that's, um, suffered from cancer has heard about, hey, there's this thing in trials that's showing promising results, trying to get you into it or whatever. Uh, so that's happening all the time.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Right? And it's not going to suddenly change how people feel about the technology industry broadly.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  No, it'll diffuse slowly and people will be back in like the, what have you done for me lately? Uh, I mean, I just saw, I just saw a reel where basically the thrust was like, what has the, the pharmaceutical industry done for us lately? And I was like, GLP-1s like sort of cured obesity. Like it's sort of a big deal. Um, and for a lot of people, GLP-1s have been like a really, really key intervention in helping them fight diabetes, fight obesity, fight a whole bunch of knock on effects that come from that. But it's not so much as like the speeding train was coming towards them and the industry pulled them off the tracks at the last second. It's something where, okay, if you're living

• 14:18John Coogan?

  at a healthier weight over from your 30s to 60s, you will probably be healthier at 60. But, uh, you're, you're not seeing that like it saved a life today. Like a GLP-1 has yet to get that type of credit. So I don't know. Uh, it's going to be, it's going to be back and forth forever. But, uh, anyway, in the meantime, somebody gave Astra a paintbrush, a robot and a camera and asked it to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in real life. It figured out how to control the robot and progressively got better throughout its attempts. The time lapse is sick. Here's a one minute time lapse of, uh, I, I don't know how to pronounce

• 14:58John Coogan?

  this, but, uh, his account, painting the Golden Gate Bridge. How would you rate this, Jordy?

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  It appears better than I could do.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Better than you could do? How long are you giving yourself?

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying at least by the, by the, the later attempts.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Okay. The later attempts, because it gets better.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  The first one was not quite, not quite there in my opinion. Still pretty impressive. Yeah. Somebody was talking about, uh, potential for a 3D printer boom with all the 3D modeling, the idea that you could, you, you, you can design. I saw someone else, uh, designed a, a system where you can, from a prompt, go from prompt to Lego kit, basically in one go. So it, it takes your prompt, whatever you gave it.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, look at this, John.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  That looks solid.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  That's solid.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  That's pretty solid. Uh, I think you could do better with enough time. I don't know how long that took, but it is impressive. It's a fun, fun demo. And again, it like lives in the real world. It's not abstract at all. So you can just watch it work, watch it do the thing. And, uh, uh, it's very, very interesting. A lot of times, uh, what's interesting is that when you're using these models, when they have to do a task like that, they will write a deterministic piece of software to execute it. Like I built a game where you, it was basically Tony Hawk, but, uh, you would play as a pelican on a bike and you'd be able to do tricks and backflips. And the game worked really well. It was fun. It built it in Godot, the open source, uh, framework for game development. And then

• 16:33John Coogan?

  I had it go and try and get the high score. And instead of actually using computer use to go and play it, it wrote a script that would play the game flawlessly. And it looked really mechanical because it wasn't, there was no variation in it at all, like watching a normal person play. Um, but it did get a very high score. So I, I could see it doing the same thing where it generates the image and then maps the X and Y axes and the plan into code and then runs that. Uh, and so there's like this process of what the model can do. The model might also write software to do that same thing. So there's this like iteration process there.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  And of course people are, uh, uh, looking at Bach Bench, which is, uh, the, uh, the skill in writing a piece of music. And it is the actual meme for my robot. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a blank canvas, take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece? And I don't know, people are calling this a masterpiece, but they're pretty, pretty impressed.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty good. I listened to this.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  It was good. You're, you're, you're a fan of this Lily Pond, uh, four part corral in the style of Bach?

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  One of the best reactions to Astra's release last week was Josh, who's over at, uh, Sentry. His company was acquired by Sentry. He said, after Astra's release yesterday, scoring 99% on Arc AGI 3, I think it's become clear that AGI is no longer some distant hypothetical. About 15 minutes after the benchmarks came out, I booked the first flight I could find to Jackson Hole. And he goes on to say, uh, he's also looking into purchasing a horse. At this point, horses remain one of the only major transportation platforms with no API, no OTA updates and no realistic path to MCP support. So glad to see more people.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Getting into horses.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  Getting into the horse game, bull market in the equestrian lifestyle.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Seems like he was, uh, joking, but a lot of people were like this unironically. I want to, you know, touch grass, I suppose.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this, uh, uh, Bojan posted, it's over. Our last line of defense has fallen. Uh, Astra beat all 48 levels of the I'm not a robot game.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  And this was crazy to watch. I, I wasn't sure if this was sped up. It seems like it's maybe sped up a little bit.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  You have to play tic tac toe too. It's pretty good. Yeah. What? Yeah. The, the captured defeat is going to be, um, whole new level of problems. At the same time, it feels, uh, like sort of remarkable that Pangram is as effective as it is, given how advanced text models are. And so, uh, if you, I mean, there's a world where it's, you know, indefensible. Was that Waldo bench? Was that find the where?

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  It was finding Waldo, not creating.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Finding Waldo. How, how are we doing on Waldo bench?

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's a good benchmark for Astra.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. We gotta see, because I, I bet that there's a way to, to have Astra generate like the, the proper tiles, because the problem when we.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You can like iterate on it more.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. When the problem is that when we try and use an AI image generator to generate a where's Waldo, it always gets the scale wrong, I feel like. Or there's like two, there's like bigger characters in the foreground.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Perspective is wrong.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  The isometric display is what's, what makes a Waldo. And, uh, um, but, but there's probably ways to solve that with a little, little sprinkling in of deterministic code generation or Waldo generation. Um, but Waldo bench might be saturated now. I don't know. So it can't really be saturated as a real benchmark, but, um, lots of, lots of back and forth in the benchmark world. It does feel like we're getting to the end of it and the, and the results are either a big challenge, like, uh, like a math problem or, uh, just a cool demo like this.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, another good demo, uh, from some where's the Astra. He says, Astra and I are working on making my contact form as difficult as possible. You actually have to fight a boss battle, uh, in order to, in order to.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  This is hilarious.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Contact them.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  That's amazing. This looks like a, I might try and contact some where's these after this. This is pretty fun. I like this. Um, yeah. The, uh, the.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  The defeat of all of the captchas is somewhat linked to the the Instinct news. Did you see that this weekend, Jordy?

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, the resi bans.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Instinct is a personal assistant AI focused on consumer. You link it with your email, your text messages. And we've seen a lot of investors sharing posts about how they're using.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  For what it's worth, I'd be surprised if anyone in the audience hasn't already heard of Instinct.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and we talked about it before.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for thank you for reintroducing.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  But but I but I think it's worth like explaining like how it works because it does seem like it triggered some bans. There was one report of an individual who got banned from resi because they were absolutely spamming to get reservations to restaurants.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  And there was another example of somebody who was at the US Open was on the fan cam and then wanted the footage. And as the user experience would have been absolutely incredible, right? You're sitting there and you're like, hey, I appeared on the screen for a moment. Can you can you go and find that?

• 22:00John Coogan?

  I've had that idea so many times, like, oh, go find someone on the on the on the fan cam.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  But I think what Instinct was doing in the background was being absolutely relentless. And it seems like it was reaching out to hundreds of people aggressively, you know, following up.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Like emailing the media contact, but they did wind up getting the video.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it worked.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  And it was mutually beneficial. And you could imagine if the other side has agent intermediation and filtering and can process things that are spam like, but there's actually a reasonable action to take, that could make it through a filter and not actually annoy anyone on the other side. So that was a very that was probably a glimpse into the future and like a cause for optimism. I could see I could see that being popular, but people are doing all sorts of stuff. The the classic example is like, go save money, get refunds, do that sort of stuff. But people are are having fun fun with that. People are so many, so many demos.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  This 3D website that pulls apart the male anatomy into 200, 2,234 modeled pieces. I share this with a friend who was trying to like explain in one video what to get like their wheels turning. I think this is a good example. I wonder how much of this was like individually modeled versus pulled from an existing model and then just animated. But certainly works, certainly works well. Yeah, I wonder, oh, a niche made a game. That's fun.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Astro has Opus 4.5 for games, made Contra, but photorealistic this weekend. Link to play below and it's it's up on Versal.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  I wonder if we will get an actual boom in in Steam. It feels like Steam will be going through something similar to the Kindle Direct Publishing Store, where they will be flooded with inbound. Didn't we see this with the App Store too, where there were like a disproportionate like the number of of App Store submissions for Apple, like text?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Totally overwhelm their systems.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  But no real breakout apps, like the top of the App Store is still like ChatGPT and like free money or whatever, or Tmu.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's evolved a little bit. The the company that I'm confused that's been consistently in the top 10 is this company, Vinted.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  What's Vinted?

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  Free loved marketplace by sell and buy secondhand clothes.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  People are buying clothes, it's your shopping app. Everyone needs clothes, so big TAM, you make it to the top of the store. But yeah, like the like you'll be able to vibe code a game, you'll be able to get it on Steam or, you know, in the App Store. How do you get the distribution flywheel going? How do you innovate to actually break through? How do you make something that, you know, goes viral, gets traction? Because the like the the long tail is going to get a lot, lot, lot longer. What do you think?

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  I feel like for a lot of these games, though, you should just put them on, keep like, keep them on web because it's much more accessible. Not everyone has Steam, you have to actually download like.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  I feel like web games are still like not that fun.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  There were some web games I was playing this weekend.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  How long?

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  I've played one.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Over under, did you play more web games this weekend? Or did you play more Oculus VR, Meta Quest VR when you had the VR headset for an unlimited amount of time? But let's call it a weekend.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I was probably playing more VR.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  VR?

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  I was playing Call of Duty.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  You played Call of Duty in VR?

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  How how long, a couple hours?

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, probably a few hours.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  But I was playing, well, I was making a game too this weekend on Astro. I spent a lot of time.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  So does that count as playing the game?

• 25:40John Coogan?

  No.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Can you drop it in the chat?

• 25:42John Coogan?

  No, I think I think, I mean, I I I do think that playing a game that's more you designed yourself or for a small group chat, it's the same thing as the images. Like the AI images I generate are not broadly beautiful. They're not going in the MoMA, but like they will often be funny to me and three other people, right?

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Low TAM.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, low TAM, but that's the beauty is that with lower cost, you can go after lower TAM opportunities. And so, I mean, this happened, what, a couple of months ago, somebody sent us, I mean, Jeremy Gaffon Simulator is the classic example. Someone sent us Jeremy Gaffon Simulator version two, which was very low TAM in the sense that it was just in jokes with me and a couple of friends. And and and the the long tail of these things will will continue to flourish. And then, of course, people will use them in, you know, real businesses built on IP, built with distribution.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  You know what time it is, John.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Time for an ad, console.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  It's trailer time.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Okay, it's trailer time.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  We got two trailers that hit the timeline. Let's start with Nathan Fielder and his new film featuring none other than Elizabeth Holmes.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Elizabeth Holmes filmed before she went to prison.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  I can promise you that.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  A24 is gonna tear.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  I don't have anything to deceive you on, of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Why would I deceive you?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no reason for me to do that.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  The acting is so good.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Okay, good chat.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  How long is this?

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  It's being real right now.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Always being real.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  The team is stoked.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Looks beautiful. Good sound design.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Saw a post, somebody saying it feels like I'm living in a simulation because this media product is like perfectly with.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  You would think that you would you would think that a movie like this wouldn't get made by, I don't know, A24 specifically because it feels like the TAM is just like, like 20,000 people, but but in.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  The Theranos story was really big. She was on the cover of Time Magazine, I believe, and cover of major magazines. It was all over the news when it happened.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a lot bigger than you would.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  The John Kerry book is just a fascinating read. It's a real page turner. And so I think a lot of people read the book. The the the the adaptation of the actual play by play story, not the documentary, but the, what do they call it? Biopic, I guess. That, I think, did not break through in the same way, but it certainly like continued to elevate her persona. And then the the posting has been like kept her relevant, like there's.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was some speculation that maybe it was Nathan that got access to the account.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Completely disagree with that.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think that's likely.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  All I think that would violate some tenet of what it means to do a documentary. I mean, Nathan blurs lines all the time in terms of how he interacts with his subjects. So it's certainly possible, but I just don't, I just don't think that's reasonable at all. I I think they're her.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  How much do we know outside of the trailer, though? Like, we don't know.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Well, this was leaked something like a year ago from a journalist who got the story and it was widely denied that it was happening. And he was very upset that he wasn't getting enough credit for being correct here. He ultimately was, but yeah, all we know is that they filmed the documentary in the lead up to her actually going to prison. After sentencing, there was a pretty large gap between before when she had to report to the prison. She gets out in 2030, so coming up three years, four years away. And so I believe even in a week, you can get a lot of footage if you're spending the full, you know, every day with someone.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  And then there were a number of visits to the facility by Nathan that were recorded, probably talking through glass or talking at a table, something like that. So I think some flexibility there, maybe some phone calls, maybe some correspondence in the aftermath, but we don't know much.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  You thinking what I'm thinking?

• 30:38John Coogan?

  What?

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  SBF Nathan Fielder.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Sequel to this one.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  This just becomes like a.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  The problem is that he's already in jail, so the the question is just what else does Nathan for Nathan Fielder have in the can? Because he's obviously thinking years ahead since he filmed that exact scene in, I believe, 2022 or 2023. And so who knows? There there's a rumor that he's secretly running a like a boy band right now. There's this rumor that that there's a boy band that's popular on Tik. This is real, that's popular on TikTok, that's entirely invented by him.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Boy Rob.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Boy Rob, yeah. Are you familiar with this?

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  Really? I thought you were gonna say he's Nathan Fielder is SD kid.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  The so, yeah, I don't know. I mean, well, we these projects will emerge and obviously they're taking longer and longer because they're bigger, they're bigger films now, but.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, after the rehearsal, it was hard to imagine how he would one up himself.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  And it feels like he may have done it.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yep, he found a new taller mountain.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  We're still, stay with us in the trailer zone. When we come back, we're gonna be talking about artificial.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Why change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Pull up Artificial.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Artificial.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  Trailer dropped just this morning.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  What is the image of the future that you see?

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Wait, pause. Was that a Valkyrie?

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Continue.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  So the visuals are already incredible.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  They really are.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure it's a Valkyrie. It might be a little hollow. Is that not a Zing? Lucas Zinger? No.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  No way. No.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  No, because you can see the, um, the suspension through that, that front section.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, continue.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  What is the image of the future that you see?

• 33:01Speaker 04

  We've created a machine that will solve the world's problems.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  We don't teach you. Gate check, gate check. It teaches itself.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Gate check? Oh, the gate.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  We'll open Pandora's box together. The future's inevitable.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  The voice is still Eduardo Saverin. But the styling and the crazy thing is I have that exact backpack.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Get to be the one.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  I think I got it recommended by MKBHD.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  To shepherd people in to this new world.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Lots of cameos. Not cameos, but.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  I'm so excited to see it.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Dramatic.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Dramatic.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Be interesting. It'll be interesting to see the, the takeaway. People in the chat are, uh, back and forth. Is it too soon? Is it unnecessary? Is it gonna be, uh, something that, like the social network is divisive? But also like it's oddly inspiring to a certain cohort of entrepreneurs. Uh, we'll see. We'll see what the reactions are.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you think that was, uh, do you think Hollywood took away?

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Any lesson from the social network in that they were trying to frame Mark Zuckerberg as this like? Generally, you know, uh, troubled person. And then a lot of people came away feeling like, wow, I want to be like Mark Zuckerberg.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sort of a, yeah, but yeah, uh, unintended consequence of it. I don't know. Um, I don't know. I mean, they're going back for a second, second scoop of the ice cream with the social network, the social reckoning. Is there a trailer out or just images? I think, I think we saw that too. Um, so it'll be interesting to see what, uh, what happens there.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  But get your tuxes ready. Going back to back. Artificial social reckoning and then capping it off with.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  See everything.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  And then also, uh, the, uh, the To Catch Predator movie. That's gonna be a good one.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Outside of tech, tech world.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess you're right.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  But still, uh.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  Triple feature.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. It just feels like it's a, it's a year of like niche movies that I expect to be breakouts, I guess. Like. Along with like Backrooms and Obsession and, and these two movies and then the documentaries. There's a lot of things that are like oddly specific, but, uh, I would expect they do well, but I don't know. We'll see. Uh, the social network did very well at the, the box office.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  And while we're at it, let's stay in the trailer zone and let's pull up the social reckoning.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  The official teaser.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Got it?

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Colbertson is calling it pure cinema.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Pure cinema.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  But I am. I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it. Okay?

• 36:11Speaker 04

  You sent me a message. What would you like to talk about?

• 36:18Speaker 06

  The chairman gavels a session to order.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now. That's a separate session.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  And which, which one is this about? I don't, I don't think this is based on the, the politics. It's not Cambridge Analytica. It's the Francis Haugen. And your occupation? Teenage girl whistleblower thing, which honestly looks a lot different in the backdrop of the addiction trials. I wonder if they were trying to get this out before the trials went through.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  I don't understand what you're saying.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Aren't you a tech reporter?

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Ish.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  Ish?

• 36:53Speaker 07

  These guys are counting on the next round of congressional testimony to make you likable, Mark. I'm happy to lend a hand, but I think you're doomed.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  This company and that guy are playing an unprecedented role in our lives.

• 37:10Speaker 07

  The fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet powered.

• 37:14Eric Seufert?

  I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is.

• 37:21Speaker 06

  Anxiety, depression of teenage girls got worse as a result of time spent on the platform.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  I know there are easier enemies to make. The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  So what would you need? To stand up the story, the internal documents.

• 37:37Speaker 05

  This is a material violation of my NDA.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post-government around here. Please.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Who is that supposed to be?

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Please let me poke that.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  We have a hundred and two hours to get everything.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  She's gonna get sued into small pieces.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources. Heart, I promise you, is imminent.

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So chat is calling it out, but I don't think that, I think this one, I think this one's gonna flop for sure.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Because of the lack of supercars?

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, lack of supercars and this is just not top, this story is no longer top of mind.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. People want to hear about like the talent wars. They don't want to hear about like this kind of stuff.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  They do. The talent wars. If there's no Alex Wang character, I'm not, I'm not paying good money.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Sash Shane says, ooh, technology is so scary.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. They, I mean, they should do more tech movies. Maybe, uh, maybe Sesspocalypse.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  SC says it will fall because no Brazilian jujitsu. Yeah. This was in the pre.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  That's true. A lot of it is in the script. Yeah. UFC.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  If there's the, the social network three and all the scenes where Zuck is talking, he's in the middle of grappling.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  How is it 2026 and we don't have a Salesforce movie?

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  Seriously.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Like the, the comeback, the SaaS apocalypse.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  Or at least a documentary on the relationship that he has with the dolphins.

• 39:05John Coogan?

  That would be great. That would be great.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  And the, and the wildlife generally.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'd like a CrowdStrike movie. I'd like a MongoDB movie. Let's do it. MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  Here's a concept. Dolphin force. How one man tamed.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  It's a good story.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Wild dolphins.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  It's maybe the best origin story of a tech company ever. I don't know if there's a better one. It's the best. It's just pure bliss, you know?

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Pure, pure positivity.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  And for those that don't know.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  It's not a spite company.

• 39:42Jordi Hays?

  Benioff famously conceived the vision for Salesforce in 1999 while swimming with a pod of roughly 100 dolphins off the coast of Hawaii during a sabbatical. Feeling one with the pod, he envisioned cloud-delivered enterprise software, leading him to quit Oracle and secure $2 million in seed funding from his mentor Larry Ellison.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Be great. Be great. Anyway, uh, in other news, uh, lots of craziness in the AI world, lots of new models, but the jobs apocalypse has been officially postponed by The Economist. An AI jobs boom is here. And, uh, people have a wide range of takes on this. Is it just postponed? Is it permanently postponed? Uh, Kevin Bryan summed it up well. He said, I am shocked, shocked. So he's being sarcastic, of course. Shocked to find out that a productivity-enhancing, investment-supporting technology is good for workers. Knowing nothing else, this should be your prior because this is how productivity and competitive markets almost always works.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  A new technology comes out, it supports investment, it enhances productivity. Everyone hires to go after all the, all the different, uh, battles. But The Economist breaks it down in a lot more detail with a bunch of charts and a bunch of data. So they say, perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable, but there's no sign of it yet. On September 4th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate, just 4.1%, lower than almost 90% of months over the past 50 years. Young workers, often cast as AI's first victims, are holding up remarkably well.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  The gap between unemployment among 20 to 24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low. Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring professional and business services is running 10% below the average from 2015 to 2019. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganize their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, which is sort of a crazy mog, smaller firms, but it is smaller than Microsoft and Meta. Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger Gray and Christmas.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Unemployment consultancy. What a funny name for, for consultancy. Um, but AI-related layoffs get lost in the churning job markets where, so you remember that number. So.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Sixteen thousand AI-related job cuts a month. In a typical month, the US workforce just churns 1.7 million jobs. And then they add 1.8 million jobs. So there's net gains, but you're looking at less than 1% of the layoffs that happen in the economy, or job losses, or firings. Less than 1% is AI-related, which is what The Economist is pointing out here. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those as to replace those as it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centers and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  AI startups are hiring like there's no tomorrow. Incumbents are racing to keep up with new AI roles and making some workers more productive. AI may be increasing the demand for their services. Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI so far has created around 1 million new jobs in America that easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and it appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America's AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them. The spending on the kit needed to make AI run from chips and servers to data centers, cooling systems, and power is roughly $500 billion a year above what it was in 2022,

• 43:54John Coogan?

  when the world got to know ChatGPT. Calculates Goldman Sachs, a bank, thank you, The Economist. Data center construction alone is proceeding at an annual rate of more than $75 billion, nearly 60% higher than a year ago, according to Census Bureau data. That building spree requires armors of workers, electricians to wire them, HVAC specialists to stop racks from overheating, grid engineers to hook them up to the power supply, and technicians to install and maintain the machines. The hiring boom is visible in the numbers. The Economist tracked five industries at the heart of the data center build-out, from electrical contracting to equipment manufacturing. Since 2023, employment in them has risen by roughly 320,000 more than broader construction and manufacturing trends would suggest.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  The BLS expects utilities to be the fastest-growing big sector between now and 2035. Not all those jobs owe their existence to AI. Grid upgrades and other factory building matters, too, but lots of them do indeed. A jobs website finds that data center vacancies have more than doubled in two years, as job postings overall have fallen. LinkedIn, a social network for strivers. These are so funny.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Just firing shots.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Goldman Sachs, a bank. LinkedIn, a jobs website, a social network for strivers, estimates that nearly half a million data center jobs were created between 2023 and 2025 in America. The scramble for workers is showing up in paychecks, too. Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centers advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere. Official wage data tell a similar story. In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors. Even with the pay gains, workers are still not easy to find. On a recent visit to a transformer factory, Donald Livens of the National Electric Manufacturers

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Association asked the company's chief executive what help she needed most. "Can you come in here and help run one of our lines for me?" she replied. It's not just hard hats that are proliferating. AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models, data annotators. Tyler's clapping for the white label, for the white-collar job creation. Data annotators label their inputs and judges and judge their answers. Forward-deployed engineers adapt them for customers. Newly-minted heads of AI decide what companies should do with the technology. And there's some interesting reporting in the Journal about Google and Accenture teaming up to do more forward-deployed engineering.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  They're deploying some, I think there's a thousand people on this one team. This is an example of, like, new roles for AI diffusion. Some of these roles barely existed until recently, says The Economist. Many are quickly growing in number. Postings for heads of AI, AI engineers, and directors of AI have roughly doubled since 2023, 2024. The numbers are starting to add up. Preliminary research by economist Gad Levinon at the Burning Glass Institute uses the research outfit's career history database to identify jobs that would not exist without AI, whether at AI-native firms or because they are AI-specific roles at other companies.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  He reckons roughly 1% of professional jobs are now AI jobs, on the order of 1 million positions in America. In computer occupations and life sciences, including researchers using AI to discover new drugs, the share is 4% to 5%. LinkedIn's own analysis points to roughly 640,000 new AI-specific jobs between 2023 and 2024. So, Jevon's paradox. The Economist tracked employment in professional occupations closest to the AI boom, engineers, software developers, mathematicians, and data scientists, and compared their growth since 2022 with professional employment overall. These roles have added roughly 730,000 jobs above the trend in recent years.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  AI will not have created every single one of them, but it almost certainly created quite a few. Third source of job comes from productivity gains. AI allows lawyers to draft contracts faster and analysts to comb through financial filings in minutes. If higher productivity lowers the cost of professional services, it is possible that demand for them can rise enough to create more work overall. Nikita Beer was talking about this this weekend. He used Astro to create three different potential deck remodels, redesigns, building expansions to his home. And it was interesting, because it's a lot of work that you could say is like, oh, that's going to displace an architect.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  I don't think the models are at a place where you would trust a deck that's built in Blender from even the best model I was finding in my Blender modeling test. A lot of, you know, misaligned beams and not things that weren't quite right. But in terms of visualization, in terms of getting excited about a project and getting to that next stage of saying, hey, okay, I have a really solid vision here. I can imagine what I want to do. Let me actually go and do that. There's this odd diffusion that happens in the economy. I was talking to Sahir and Jetty about this, the credit card effect, where credit cards had a big effect on the economy in a very, very boring way.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  They just slightly lubricated the machinery of the work.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Global commerce.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  Global commerce, basically. So you're just like, okay, if I, if I send a wire, I'm not going to be able to get the money back. But if I put down my credit card and it doesn't show up, I can probably get a charge back. And so that instilled just a little bit more confidence that what you're buying is accurate, and it enabled more commerce, right? And so the same thing is, is starting to be true here, where people can say, okay, I'm ordering shoes. Let me find the shoes that fit me perfectly, that are the right price, that will come on time, that are from a reliable manufacturer, aren't going to fall apart. And if you get a very solid report back that gives you confidence, you make that purchase just a little bit sooner.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  And if everyone is doing that, it winds up speeding up the machinery of global commerce, which is incredibly boring, but incredibly valuable.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Because you're.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the example, one of my favorite examples is you, you were looking at a number of different houses, all of which were not necessarily in the condition where you're like, great, I want to, you know, move in here. And you just dropped the Zillow links into Kodex, and it made you an entire website that you could walk through with before, before the current state, and then exactly how they would evolve, based on your stylistic preferences.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. So oftentimes, you'll, like, a fully remodeled house will command a 20% premium, but you can get sort of sucked into, okay, well, the newer, the one that's already been through the remodel, it's just visually more striking. So you're like, oh, I want to necessarily pay up, when in fact, you might want to buy the cheaper house, do the remodel, and then wind up with the same end product and maybe capture some of that value yourself. And so there's a lot of different places, you know. And a lot of times, the, the conclusion is very underwhelming. I mean, we were talking to Nick about this, where he was taking a picture of his room, and I saw a lot of people doing this online. Take a picture of the room, make sure I've decorated it properly, that the bed is in the right spot.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  I think the result for you was like, yeah, it's basically as best you could do. Good luck, dude, which is hilarious. But at least it gives you confidence that, okay, yeah, like, I really shouldn't order a bigger bed. The bed I got is the right one. And if you do that on the way in, you, you, you wind up moving things faster. We covered, we covered Navier-Stokes. I don't know if there's more to cover there. The chat's asking about it. We, we covered it at the top of the show. I mean, we also have Greg Brockman joining the show, so we'll ask him about advances in math, what's going on with Navier-Stokes, the back and forth there. He's joining at 1:10 PM Pacific, so stay tuned.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  And we have Scott Wu as well, who is an IMO gold medalist and a fantastic mathematician. He can, of course, comment about this, because he at Cognition is in a unique position of both being incredible at math, but also, like, Cognition's whole business is not in the theoretical math space, it's in AI diffusion, it's in getting work done in the enterprise for real companies. And so I think he's in a unique position to both ground the conversation around what it actually means, how impressed is he by these solutions? And then also, what does it actually mean for, you know, Boeing? Like, will they be able to make more planes more efficiently, more reliably?

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Like, that is a valuable thing that we actually want to see in the real world. So.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  Something happening in the real world. Former F1 CEO Bernie Ecclestone was stopped in Portugal at the airport for bringing in a shotgun from Switzerland. He's 95 years old, and this is actually the second time he's been stopped at an airport. In 2022, he was arrested in Brazil for illegally carrying a gun while boarding a private plane to Switzerland, and was ordered to pay a 1,000 euro fine to local authorities. So, rough weekend for Bernie, but at this point, I, I think he's like, sorry, I'm 95, I'm not going to stop bringing guns.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere I go on on on planet Earth.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  We gotta do it. Well, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Shane says, just let grandpa carry his gun. That's all. In other news, Wimbledon does not plan on providing credentials to influencers next summer in hopes of avoiding the issues that affected this year's US Open.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  What were the issues?

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Players have called for spectators to follow the sports etiquette after matches were interrupted.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Did they specifically call out taking a picture of the court and putting logos all over it using AI and then posting that on X and getting a couple hundred likes?

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Looking at you, Nick.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  He's locked in.

• 54:30John Coogan?

  He's working. We're just making jokes at your expense. Don't worry about it. You're good. Was there anything specific that was tied to this?

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  I think it was a number of issues. There were also complaints of one of the players was complaining about the smell of marijuana.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  In the stadium, which is interesting. But, but yeah, next year, Tyler will be going to the US Open in disguise.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  Full Hollywood makeup?

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can look forward to that.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder what are they gonna do? Just not give free tickets to influencers? Or actually block people who are influencers?

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  I think what was happening is they were probably giving like media slash trespasses to influencers.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  And then the influencers were really doing too much stuff, like getting in the way of fans, creating scenes, because they're sort of like running around with like gonzo filmmaking equipment as opposed to like something that's a little bit more cordoned off and like polished. It's different when you have a red carpet and you're doing, you know, proper interviews that that that sort of lands a little bit better. Anyway, Shiel Monat is calling for a revisitation of the Satriani piece. Agents become the default demand side interface and transfer economic rents from incumbent intermediaries to whoever controls the agent, which does seem correct. And so with instinct, who should you be long, who

• 55:55John Coogan?

  should you be short? There's an interesting dynamic where anytime something happens in AI, there's a lot of people that go, I think Buco posted, pointed this out, that everyone will go and ask AI, okay, what are the longs, what are the shorts? And so that creates an amplification in the market. So people are, oh, piece together this new trend. I want exposure to this trend. And so things get overheated much more quickly. But yes, this idea that if it's a, if it's a restaurant booking platform and your AI agent can call the restaurant and get a booking just as easily as they can go through a platform. Now, Resy has exclusives, so that creates more of a complex scenario. But by default,

• 56:37John Coogan?

  if you can just write an email or make a phone call or send a text message, an AI agent should be able to disintermediate those platforms. But that's not true for Uber. That's not necessarily true for DoorDash where they're like, it's very difficult to find a person to go and pick your food up or pick you up personally, because they need to be very close if you want the car right then. So Shiel says, how after you and an agent disintermediating world completely depends on how much you control, how much control you have over supply? To answer your question, Buco, you may not have a choice in whether you allow bots. Expedia can book agent, can block agents, but it doesn't control the hotel inventory.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  If Expedia stops letting agents book, they'll go through booking.com, Google, or direct. Resy has more leverage via exclusives. And I'm sure Expedia has some exclusive program, I imagine. But if agents become a major source of diners, restaurants will want to be bookable via agents and reservation systems that support agents will win. Supply slash someone will come along with a cheap direct booking sell. AI can disintermediate discovery and customer ownership, but Resy can survive. But can Resy survive as the restaurant's reservation infrastructure? But that's a much smaller rent pool unless the inventory network remains differentiated. Uber has much hard, is much harder to disintermediate. It actually controls a valuable network of drivers, dispatch, pricing, and payments. Why would they allow

• 58:01John Coogan?

  agents is basically they can afford, they can't afford not to. After an AI agent takes over your consumer interface, how much economically essential stuff are you doing that only you can provide? For Expedia, it seems tough to me. So Shiel is worried about Expedia. Anyway, was there anything in the chat you wanted to run through? Because we have our next guest joining in just a few minutes. We have Dan Wright coming back on the show from Armada, building modular AI, supercomputers in a shipping container, a supercomputer in a shipping container. Apple's coming out with new phones. We're getting a folding phone probably this week. It's gonna be exciting. I think it'll sell well. And it's been a while since there's been a visually differentiated Apple product, so.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's a pretty easy sell. Hey, you use this thing for three to eight hours a day, or if you're Taylor Lorenz, 18 hours a day. Would you like a bigger screen? I think a lot of the answer for a lot of people. And would you like to have some differentiation versus your peers that have just one simple screen? I think a lot of people are gonna opt into that.

• 59:06John Coogan?

  I wonder how it's gonna look. I've seen a lot of like leaked renders.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  It looks, a lot of the renders look square-ish.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, not good.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Just throwing me off.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, not, I feel like they, they're gonna surprise us with something. They've, they've, it feels like the, the news and the facts and things that can go over text message sort of leak out. And Mark Gurman is like, I saw a stat from Eric Newcomer that Mark Gurman has an order of magnitude more scoops than the next biggest journalist on TechMeme or something like that.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  He's like the power law.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  You hear that?

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Go, seriously. But it feels like people might discuss things with Mark and say, oh, yeah, we're not working on our car anymore. Keep that off the record, but I'm letting you know, and he'll report it out. But people will stop short of sending him an image of the new phone. And I think he's been pretty good about that.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was actually Josh over, who says, we don't talk enough about how Mark Gurman is the most cited, most market moving tech journalist by nearly an order of magnitude. The whole industry of Apple reblogs and day traders live off of his scoops. It'd be like if LeBron won 40 championships.

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  That's a, that's a really good post. Well, we love Mark Gurman. Well, there's one more story we gotta cover before we go into our guests. A man drove a Ferrari Purus Sangue from South America to Alaska. This is a crazy, crazy story. This, the trans America race has been talked about a long time. It's really, really difficult with the Darien Gap, the, the gap of like wild forests that exist between North and South America. You usually have to put your car on a boat to get around that part, and I think it still counts. But it's still a very treacherous road, a lot of weather conditions. If you break down, you might be very far from anything. But a man named MJ has taken

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  a Ferrari Purus Sangue far beyond where most owners would ever consider driving one. His goal was to travel the length of the Americas, taking the V12 Ferrari from South America all the way to Alaska. He's now attempted the journey three times, putting roughly 800,000 kilometers on the Purus Sangue in the process. His dog joins him for the journey. The first attempt ended after an accident. He brought the car to a dealership in Santiago. On his second try, they made it all the way to Alaska. For the third, he reversed course with an even bigger goal, attempting to set a record from Alaska to Argentina before a major road closure forced the run to end in just two days. Through dirt, snow, and

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  thousands of miles of pavement, the Purus Sangue has effectively become a long distance expedition car with Rico, his dog, riding alongside him through it all. What a.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Heartwarming.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Heartwarming story.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  And a beautiful ad for this naturally aspirated V12.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Look at that. Look at that shot. So good.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't realize it was a chihuahua. That's funny. That's probably a more convenient dog to have in a, in a car for a really long, you don't want a big dog that needs to stretch his legs. You want the dog to be able to just run around the cabin, I think. If you're, it's, it's a good, good road trip dog, I think. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Dan Wright from Armada in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP on UltraDome. Dan, how you doing?

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:02:32Speaker 09

  I'm doing great. How you guys doing?

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show. Welcome back. What is new in your world?

• 1:02:39Speaker 09

  Good to be back.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  Walk us through the latest and maybe just since it's been a while, sort of reintroduce the, the shape of the company, the mission, and where you guys have gone in the last year.

• 1:02:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, so Armada is the hyperscaler for the edge. We build the infrastructure for the 70% of the world that doesn't have the big hyperscale data centers today. The mission of the company is to bridge the digital divide and make sure that we have AI everywhere, wherever we need it. But first you gotta have the infrastructure there. And so that's what we're doing. We've been very busy. We just raised earlier this year 230 million at a $2 billion pre. We launched Galleon Forge One, which is a factory with our partner Johnson Controls in Gilbert, Arizona, where we're now continuously manufacturing these modular AI data centers called Gallions that we built.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how is power usually solved for when you deploy these?

• 1:03:34Speaker 09

  Yeah. So a lot of times we're deploying them where there's already stranded power.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:39Speaker 09

  A, a good example of this is a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York and we did an event at the New York Stock Exchange where we were sort of fast following on Jensen's announcement that compute is now an asset class. It's a new asset class. And the New York Stock Exchange is actually making that now like something that you can invest in the same way that you can invest in electricity or other types of commodities. And we were there with our customer in Norway called Fossa Fall that has tons of distributed sites all over Norway. I'm actually gonna be in Norway with them next week. But they also have them in Finland and in Sweden. And it is largely renewable energy. So it's 99%

• 1:04:24Speaker 09

  hydroelectricity. They can just plug in our AI factories and then scale up quickly. And one of the things that, you know, makes that easier is that we've recently announced some larger form factors. Last year, we announced Leviathan, which is two megawatts per unit. And when I was in New York, we announced Orion, which is our newest form factor. That's 10 megawatts per unit. When I was, you know, launching Leviathan, everybody said, that's great, but how do we scale up even faster? And so now Armada can credibly say, wherever you have power, we can plug in and we're the fastest from 0 to 200 megawatts anywhere in the world.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Talk about why, for example, you know, one of these companies needs to have that compute actually at the edge and why it matters across different industries.

• 1:05:13Speaker 09

  So one is latency, and this comes up in a lot of conversations. I'll give you another real world example. We work with the state of Alaska and they don't have the big hyperscale data centers there. So the first data centers deployed were ours. We did this last year and we're still working closely with them and kind of scaling up with them. They had 28 hours of latency to process data from drones for emergency response, for avalanches and floods. We also deployed last year with the Navy in the middle of the ocean, very similar types of use cases where if you have a large distance between the source of the data where the data is being generated and then where it's being processed, the data sort of becomes

• 1:05:57Speaker 09

  worthless because avalanches and floods and threats and battlefield scenarios, they don't wait days or even minutes. You have to be able to use the data in real time. Another big driver of this is sovereignty. The shorthand for our value prop is the three S's, speed, scale, and sovereignty. And the sovereignty piece is really important. There's this global trend that's going on around sovereign AI. Everybody wants to be able to take the latest models, but they want to be able to fine tune them to really sensitive data sets that they wouldn't send to the cloud and then, you know, have like a sovereign AI infrastructure that they actually own. And that's what Armada enables.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  So yeah, speed of delivery. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is hydroelectricity under discussed right now? Is there an opportunity there in America or abroad? I mean, we talk a lot about solar where it feels like there aren't as many like big winners yet or big like hot startups. That exists in nuclear. That's very exciting. I've, you know, we've heard about wind, but no one is really talking about like, let's just do another Hoover Dam or something. Is that possible? Are you optimistic about?

• 1:07:09Speaker 09

  I think so. I think, I think it should be talked about more. And I think in general, stranded energy should be talked about more. We're doing these projects all over the world. As an example, you know, the Niners are playing in Australia this week and we're doing an event there with another partner called Windy C that we work with there. And they've got a huge amount of stranded wind and solar energy. Australia is big in wind and solar. Norway is big in hydroelectricity, but this is happening all over the world. There's these stranded pockets of energy. And they last year had to curtail 7.2 terawatt hours of energy in Australia because the grid's completely overloaded, but they have this stranded power

• 1:07:52Speaker 09

  that we're just bringing the infrastructure directly to, and then you can scale up into the hundreds of megawatts. And then ultimately, same with FOSS fall, they'll, they'll scale to over a gigawatt over the next few years and we can scale with them.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. How flexible do you want to be around like the actual chips that go into the systems? Because when I hear latency, I feel like Cerebras, Grok, these like faster systems. There's Talus, which I think AMD just bought, where you're baking the weights on. And you can actually get to a, an inference speed for certain AI workloads that would actually benefit from saving 100 milliseconds. Whereas if you're putting a bunch of NBL 72s in a data center, you're going to be waiting while it's cooking.

• 1:08:38Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  And the last mile is going to be negligible.

• 1:08:41Speaker 09

  Yes. So again, it's all about speed, scale, and sovereignty, and then giving the customer the choice. So we say, okay, well, what workloads are you trying to run?

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Speaker 09

  And then based on that, you can sort of right size the, the infrastructure to the, the actual need and where they expect it to go. And a lot of what our customers want to do is they want to try different things. They want to try, you know, obviously the, the GBs, but now they're looking at the Vera Rubens. They're looking at things from other, you know, chip companies as well. And so the nice thing about our, our Galleons, again, we're manufacturing these. It's not like construction. And so as you want to try different things, we can just make, you know, quick iterations on the design and ship them out. So they can try different things and then what they like, they just order more of them. We scale up with the demand versus with the traditional data center.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 09

  The downside is not just, as we were talking about the power, you got to figure out the power situation. We take advantage of the power that's already there, but what we also allow them to do is scale up with demands that they don't overbuild or build the wrong thing.

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, you know, staying aligned to, I guess, like why and, and how the company started and the focus around this edge compute versus the natural pull from the market where if somebody comes to you and says like, okay, now I want the one gigawatt data center and we think you guys can, can do it, like just running the numbers on that and, and resource allocation. I imagine there's a natural pull to go bigger and bigger when, and anyways, I think that's kind of a

• 1:10:12Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Good problem, good problem to have, but it'll be interesting.

• 1:10:17Speaker 09

  It was actually super simple for us because one of our company values is heal the customer's pain first. We're like obsessed with customers and what their, what their pains are and how do we solve those. And so the, the kind of evolution of our Galleon product line has all come out of conversations with existing customers where they've said, okay, I want to use your edge Galleons, the smaller ones, say sub, sub a megawatt for inference. But then they came to us and said, I also want to do fine tuning of all these models, latest open source models, closed models, my own models, on these proprietary

• 1:10:56Speaker 09

  data sets without sending them to the cloud. And so what we enable is sovereign AI factories where they can do both. They can take the latest models, open source models, probably saw what, you know, Nvidia just did with Hugging Face and with Poolside. They were going to see a lot more around open source. They can take models from the Open AIs and the anthropics of the world. We can help them fine tune those to these sovereign data sets and then push them to all the edge nodes to run. And then you can do what's called federated learning.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 09

  Where you're actually fine tuning that model on that data at the site and then you're using it to improve your core model and then pushing the updated model out to all the sites.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:36Speaker 09

  Which has the benefit of it's more cost effective, it's more secure, and it enables you to take advantage of lots of different models, experiment with different things, and see what works.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Great update.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:11:53Speaker 09

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you Dan. Congrats on the progress.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Who do we have next, Jordy?

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  The Sufanator.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  We got Eric Suford, the founder of Mobile Dev Memo Live with us on TVPN, on YouTube, not on Netflix yet. Should we be considering switching teams?

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  And Eric, just, just, just for, for what it's worth, every time you, you come on the show, I call John afterwards and I'm like, Eric, Eric's in my, Eric's in my top three all time guests on the show. It just fires us up to talk with you every time.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's great to see you.

• 1:12:37Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, good to see you. So I, I told my wife, I'm going back on TVPN and she said, is that the show with the two handsome hosts?

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:12:46Eric Seufert?

  And I said, I said, yeah, but when I'm on, there's, there's three handsome men on the show.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:12:54Eric Seufert?

  And it was like that meme with Natalie Portman where she's looking at the guy and I was having to say, right?

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:13:01Eric Seufert?

  There's like three handsome guys on the show, right? So I, I think you're ready for Netflix. I think Netflix would be happy, would be lucky to have you.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  But what would the, what would the economic dynamic be? Because Netflix and YouTube are both going for exclusives now. What, what's actually playing out? How much are they at each other's throats? How much are they going to converge in the way that like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube are all converging? Is there going to be another convergence or is there, or is there actually a stress point there where YouTube is trying to be both Instagram and Netflix and they maybe can't do both?

• 1:13:33Eric Seufert?

  Well, yeah, I mean, they are converging. So this is a really fascinating dynamic right now in streaming. I've been following it with a series called Netflix's YouTube Opportunity for roughly a year, right? And so what I read about first was they brought Miss Rachel on, right? And so what they did was they brought Miss Rachel on, but they didn't give her, they didn't, they didn't buy new content, right? They just paid her to bring her existing content over. So you've got this proven base of content that has however many billions of views. I know my children probably account for some several billion, but you've got this proven case of, you've got this proven base of content where there's essentially no risk. Like you know, there's an audience, you know, it's popular and you pay some amount of money to bring over this existing content. So what's actually really great for the content creator too, because they don't have to produce anything

• 1:14:16Eric Seufert?

  new. They just have to chop, they chopped up the existing content into like a season. So they packaged it like a season. And they also do that with Danny Go and they also did that with Mark Rober. And so my point was, look, they've, you know, Netflix had been up, they'd been executing tremendously well for the past several years. They had, they had commanded extreme pricing power, right? The, the premium service is going at almost 30 bucks a month in the United States now. They've been, they've been, the, the advertising tier price has been tracking with, I think is the ARPU differential to make it equivalent to the next highest tier. So they've been doing a good job of maintaining that pricing power. My sense is they did too good of a job, right? And so they made it really hard to compete in the space and that pushed everybody to the bottom. That made everyone take the exact opposite approach. It's like, okay, let's go fast. Let's go free ad supported

• 1:15:01Eric Seufert?

  television. Now Netflix has an even bigger problem on its hands, right? Because they may have reached a ceiling with what they can charge, certainly premium. I don't know how much higher you can go than $30. There's not much, they, they probably extracted all of the net additional subs they can from password sharing crackdowns. Now they're faced with, okay, we just have to bring in a lot of live events and sports, things like the Beyonce Bowl that, you know, and, and the, the January NFL games. It's really expensive, right? And so are you going to compete on content or are you going to go the opposite direction, race to the bottom and try to get UGC on there? And I think that's probably what they're, they're, they're trying to sort of thread that needle because if you listen to Netflix's leadership, they say, look, we can never go pure fast because that

• 1:15:43Eric Seufert?

  would have a deleterious effect on the brand. We're seen as a premium service. But how can you maintain that when you see Roku and Tubi joining forces, right? When you see all of the pressure that Amazon is putting on your business, because Amazon is the identity spine for advertising across all of fast. All of fast CTV is Amazon with these data deals, doing all the, providing all the identity for the buying, right? And so I think they're facing like this opposite problem now where they had too much pricing power. They pushed everybody in the opposite direction to go fast. And now I think honestly, if you believe the reporting that the New York Times did, that they're going to be offering up these subscription bundles, how can you not go fast and do that? Are you going to be willing to accept paying $30 a month for a premium Netflix tier, seeing content in your Netflix

• 1:16:28Eric Seufert?

  app on your TV and having it say, and if you want this, you have to pay even more to subscribe to this other channel? I wouldn't. I think the only way they can do the bundling is if they adopt fast.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  That ARPU gap from the premium ad-free tier to ad-supported, it feels like, is there a reason why the gap doesn't make up the full $30? Is there some economic reason? Or did they just get stuck in this weird place? Because it feels like if they got even a little bit more juice out of the ad model, they could just offer a free ad-supported tier. But maybe that would create more churn because mentally you're going from $30 to $10 is different than going from $30 to $0. But do you understand more of like what they're grappling with? Did they get unlucky?

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Or is there something about the the structure of Netflix that would would would really make it difficult for them to do just a fully free and ad-supported tier?

• 1:17:29Eric Seufert?

  No, I think it's just a reservation they have. Maybe it's almost like a superstition, right? I mean, keep in mind, they were saying for the longest time they would never do ads.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Eric Seufert?

  You know, Reed Hastings said like

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  They always do. They always do.

• 1:17:41Eric Seufert?

  And so they don't, right? And so they changed it. But like he, I mean, Reed Hastings said ads were like a blight. I said personalized advertising was a cancer. And so, I mean, you know, then they changed the tune. But I mean, I think he said just that, if I'm remembering the wording correctly. But but the thing is, like, I think, so there's, there's three tiers, right? So there's, there's the, it used to be basic. Now it's standard with ads, standard, and then and then premium, right? And so the standard is what they have to make up the ARPU gap with. Premium includes a lot of stuff. And so maybe you can make the case, right? For a high-income household, it's worth paying for the higher streaming quality and the more, the more devices that you can onboard. My sense is with standard, though, that that revenue, that ARPU gap is just, they just, they just index it to the ads ARPU. But the thing is, like, the question is, like, just internally, what is the resistance to going fast?

• 1:18:25Eric Seufert?

  And my sense is it's that perceived quality that they would lose if they went fast. But, I mean, what can, the market moved in that direction. They pushed the market in that direction. And so I think they're gonna have to capitulate.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  Have you been surprised that that Amazon Prime Video hasn't seen more UGC? Because I was looking up randomly, what does it take to publish a film? And you can, you can submit to Amazon Prime Video, it goes through a review process, but the the cost to submit is de minimis. And you can get a video product up there, but it hasn't actually seen a ground swell. And I'm wondering if that's because Amazon specifically has partnerships that that scratch that edge.

• 1:19:09Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, I think that might, that might be the case. I mean, keep it like, like I said, I mean, Amazon, Amazon has all of these identity partnerships that essentially make it the data spine and the identity spine for fast, like broadly. Right? And so if you think about, I remember people saying, I bet Amazon's gonna buy Roku. And I remember thinking like, why would they? They've already got this identity partnership with Roku where they get access to the best impressions. If they bought it, they'd just be getting everything else they don't already buy. Right? And so my sense was always that, like, well, they, they're already picking over the stuff that they're not buying. Why would they want to own it? And so, like, my sense is, yeah, maybe it competes with the fast channels that they're partnered with, or maybe, maybe they have similarly, like, you know, some sort of perceived quality bar or hurdle. But but I think like the the UGC thing is, is, is a little bit of a distraction because,

• 1:19:51Eric Seufert?

  you know, I don't think Netflix is ever going pure UGC. Like, they are very selectively curating the YouTube creators they bring over. But they brought over a lot, and they went on a shopping spree this summer, too. They bought a lot of stuff this summer, or, and now, now YouTube's pushing back.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  I saw some post about how the results of that, of that shopping spree that Netflix went on with YouTube creators had a significant power law, where there were some creators that were really performing well on Netflix. Is that because of the way the Netflix algorithm works? Is that true? Or do you think that there's, okay, if somebody's getting a billion views on YouTube, we can pull them over and get X views, and there's some multiplier? Or is there something special about the way Netflix is, like, actually rolling out these deals?

• 1:20:37Eric Seufert?

  Well, I think there's, there's a couple of pieces there. I think, like, they've got, then YouTube certainly has, like, more Rexus adjacency. So they have more opportunities to push people into this content than Netflix does. Netflix has less stratified, less deep catalog, right? Than YouTube does. So that's, that's, that's one piece. But then you do, you just, you do just see, like, even with Miss Rachel, like, season two performed substantially worse than season one in terms of view hours per, per minute of, of, of content. And so, you know, it's, maybe it's just consumer preferences, or they had other stuff to prioritize. I mean, Netflix has invested a lot into its own recommendation algorithm. And so it just, it depends on like what they, they feel the need to promote at any given point in time, and they, they have to, you know, they just have to exclude stuff that doesn't fit that purpose.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have to imagine that someone like Miss Rachel, if she's doing a deal with Netflix, she, as part of the deal, it's not just gonna be money. It's gonna say, hey, are you going to actually give us impressions so that we have the chance to be successful here and get real viewers that go into the rest of the funnel, show up to the live shows, buy the merch? Like, it's not enough for you just to pay and stuff us off in a corner. If we do this, we want to do it right.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder if Netflix has an opportunity to just basically take all the best UGC from YouTube? Because I think YouTube has a massive AI. Yeah, that's, that's seemingly what they're doing. But underappreciated, maybe, how big of like an AI, like, AI is probably, like, seemingly a net good for YouTube right now, because there's more

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  You mean slop specifically?

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  There's more content for all the, the long tail. Like, something will happen, and I'll get served a video, and the voice sounds good now, maybe the script sounds okay. And then you realize, like, okay, this channel was just created two months ago, and it's not really, and, and YouTube is, has an incentive just constantly be serving new creators.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  In theory, Netflix and human review.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  But I generally want to consume content from creators that have been, are either new and extremely passionate and dedicated. I even saw a creator over the weekend that, that started years ago using, like, AI voices and just stopped and said

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  that YouTube is so flooded with AI content now. He's just, and he's, he's not American, but he, he makes all of his, English isn't his first language, so he has an accent. But it's appealing because you're like, okay, this guy's actually making this content. It's not just, like, fully generated, right? And so I think YouTube, or Netflix's opportunity is to, like, try to carve out all, like, actually have a filter again, and like, be a curator, and take the, the best content that historically would have just been on YouTube and try to bring it over.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but still big.

• 1:23:10Eric Seufert?

  Well, yeah, but I mean, so YouTube absolutely does not want that to happen, right? So I mean, keep in mind, like, the dominant platform for YouTube in the United States is the TV.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Eric Seufert?

  Right? And so, so they are, I've called it a CTV behemoth. That is their dominant platform by, by view time. And so they, they compete directly with Netflix for engagement. It's actually really problematic if Netflix is able to just poach their best creators, the, the top, like, the, the sort of, like, the, the cream of the crop, and then push them into Netflix, and then to justify the subscription price, right? So like, what they've done is they've, they're now inking deals to keep people exclusive for a period of time. And they're also saying, look, we're gonna punish you if you move. We're gonna deprioritize you in our recommendation systems. We can't promote you if you're on Netflix, because we want to promote stuff that's exclusive to us. And so, you know, and you're not gonna share in brand revenue. So it's actually, what Netflix has done is they've forced YouTube to apply a lot of

• 1:24:00Eric Seufert?

  the curation pressure and incentives that YouTube always didn't want to do. They always wanted to resist being that kind of channel. They said, look, you know, it's just, look, this is just an open market, like, people compete, and you get, you get views if you outperform. But now they're having to sort of put their thumb on the scale in certain ways to keep the best creators.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, mask, very much a mask-off moment for the, for the platform that wants to position itself as like, we're just this friendly platform for creators, and we just want to support creators. And they're like, if you even put one of your videos over here, you're not getting any more money, and you're not getting any more views, and we will end your career. Like, that's basically, that's basically

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Be a shame if anything happened to your audience.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, be a shame if something were to happen to your reach.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  What is going on at Apple around services, ads? That, give me a little bit of the history there. Apple's obviously had some, some sharp words about advertising in the past, wound up building a great ad platform.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  So John sent me a screenshot. It looks like

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  It's from Mobile Dev Memo.

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  It's from Mobile Dev Memo. And the screenshot says, the Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Apple's app marketplace is loved by many consumers but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. But there's a bit more to the story. I'm told Turnus and Services Chief Eddie Q. want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out how to, ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves would only further irk developers and governments. And John said, first piece of good news from Apple under Turnus. Cupertino will finally be focused on App Store margin expansion. I've been pulling my hair about, out about this for years. Feels good to be vindicated better late than never. Obviously joking, but

• 1:25:45Eric Seufert?

  That quote's from German. That was me quoting German.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:25:48Eric Seufert?

  So that was from German's newsletter. But yeah, we got a new, a new era, right? Schiller's out, apparently. I stepped away from the App Store. Eddie Q. is taking over with Turnus. And apparently they want to squeeze more money out of the App Store, which makes sense, because it's under monetized.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  But why not ads?

• 1:26:02Eric Seufert?

  It can't be anything but ads. No, it can't be anything but ads. What else could it be? I asked this question on Twitter yesterday. What else could it be? What could it possibly be besides ads? What other opportunity is? Are they going to increase the commission? Are you nuts? How would they increase the commission?

• 1:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you said it's under monet- You said it's under monetized, but you believe it's under monetized purely on the ad side, the commission side. There's people totally at their limit.

• 1:26:24Eric Seufert?

  Totally. Yeah, yeah, commission can't go anywhere. Certainly, it's not going to go up. They'd be lucky if they could maintain the commission. I mean, they're probably going to have to, you know, so basically, I think, what I think is going to happen. So they replied with their, in the Epic v. Apple drama, which is interminable, apparently. They made their latest proposal, which is that they'll apply a 15% commission on the link out, right? So they're having, so in, if you remember, just go back a little bit, the Epic v. Apple case. Epic essentially lost on every 10 of the 11 points. But what they did went on is that Apple does have to allow link out, right? So you're in the app, the developer can put a link in the app to a website that allows them to monetize there, right? So they have to be able to do that. Now, what Apple responded with was saying, okay, but we're going to apply a commission

• 1:27:09Eric Seufert?

  that when you add in the Stripe fee is essentially just as much as 30%. And also, you have to do all this reporting. And also, if you have someone clicking out and going to a website, they're probably not going to be as likely to convert, right? So you apply all this commission, all these frictions that like, okay, it's never gonna, there's never going to get any traction. Now, what they've proposed is like, okay, well, accept a 15% commission on this, but you still have to go through all the reporting. That makes it interesting. Now, we'll see if the judge accepts that, right? She might not, but like Epic was fighting this. They want zero commission on link out, but Epic wants zero commission on anything. But so like, if that happens and the commission drops even further, you're going to push a lot more revenue outside of the App Store onto the web, which actually, a lot of it's already fled to the web. I mean, like, go to any subscription app, go on the Facebook library, find your favorite subscription app, Strava, whatever.

• 1:27:54Eric Seufert?

  Look up their ads and see where they link to. I guarantee you it's to the website. Almost every subscription app spends the vast majority of its advertising on web destination ads. So they're sending it to the web, you register on the web, and then you download the app, you log in. And so all of the monetization has happened on the web. There was never any monetization in the app in the first place. Games have started adopting that, too. And so they've already lost a lot of this in-app monetization to the web. The commission's already under a tremendous amount of pressure. And it's not, you know, you've got the EU with the DMA. They seem to have come to a resolution there, although, you know, Epic also thinks that's not true. But you've got Japan, you've got Brazil. I mean, you're going to see increasing cases where a government step in and say,

• 1:28:36Eric Seufert?

  you have to offer alternative in-app monetization, and you have to offer alternative app stores. And so if you think about, what does the App Store have that can't really be taken away, that's probably under monetized? It's a lot of engagement. It's, if I remember correctly, the last touch point where they released any data was 600 million, no, it was 900 million weekly active users. So they, ChatGPT reached parity with that at some point a couple, like roughly a year ago. 900 million weekly active users. That's a lot of engagement. And what do you do when you have a lot of engagement, a lot of eyeballs, a lot of attention? You monetize it with ads. I think they have no other option.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  With the App Store, every time I search for something, I'm seeing, seemingly seeing a bunch of ads.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  You can see way more. Like, imagine you go to a website, you go to an app in the App Store, you're browsing, you don't purchase the app. And then the next morning, when your alarm clock goes off, instead of-

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Push notification.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  No, just to replace the alarm clock sound with an ad that says, please download this app, or you're ready to go. Retarget me throughout the day. I open up the iMessage, and before I see a message from you, I see an ad.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Where I was going with this is at what, at what point does Apple, if they actually want to grow their ad business, not start to compete with an app-lovin' and offering, like, bringing their, bringing their ad network into the actual apps?

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Right?

• 1:29:55Eric Seufert?

  Well, I mean, they do, essentially. I mean, they've got ads in the search results, right? They just added the second slot, the second placement in the search results recently, a couple of months ago. You know, they've got like recommended apps where you can buy the placement in an App Store page.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  They could do like, you have to pay to get organic results. Like, you search and then it's 10 ads. And then unlock, unlock, unlock organic results. It's a dollar, 99 cents to see what you're actually searching for. No, but what I was saying is like, like, you know, like, basically, a user comes, they search for a game, let's say. Then they see an ad, but then they end up downloading a game. And then I'm saying, like, all the surface area that's potentially, like, the real opportunity is every time someone opens up that game, they're getting an Apple ad.

• 1:30:41Eric Seufert?

  And, no, I think they, I think they should. I think they will. I think they will. I don't know what else they could do. I mean, I think they're going to do that. I think they're going to have some sort of e-comm ads offering. I mean, I predicted a year ago that they put ads in Maps because it just made sense. They've got a lot of engagement there, and they, they just did that a couple of weeks ago. But keep in mind, I wrote about this when they, so they took their ads service down for a while. Usually, they do that when they're making a change, right? Right before they did that, and that's when they implemented ads in Maps. But they also, they created a whole new campaign optimization API to accommodate Maps now and all the other placements that they have. So this unified campaign optimization API, right? Now, it's also, that's extensible. You could extend that to anything, right?

• 1:31:25Eric Seufert?

  So they're already putting in place a scaffolding to support that, but they're also putting in place the policy scaffolding. So they also made all advertisers, like, sort of recertify their approval of the, of the Apple Ads Service Agreement. And that gives them permission now to serve ads on websites and apps they don't own. And I think that was the big sort of signal here. Now, they've done a lot of other things, too. They rebranded SK Ad Network to the Ads Attribution Kit. They renamed the whole thing from Apple Search Ads to Apple Ads. I mean, all of this sort of points towards a more generalized ads product. But I think opening up that services agreement to say, we can place ads on third-party properties, probably does signal that they intend to do that.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that seems like a huge way to grow services revenue. I don't know if you have the exact size of the pride.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Ads come for everyone.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  What about, what about new Siri? I mean, looking at the ChatGPT ads hitting a billion dollars, you've been very optimistic about the potential of ads in LLMs and that it's a logical end state. Do you think that they'll do Siri? What else are you tracking in the development of AI and ads?

• 1:32:38Eric Seufert?

  Well, I mean, we've talked about chatbot ads. You know, I have a lot of thoughts on that. But I mean, just going back to Siri, Siri's tough because it's only voice, right? And so I think you need-

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  There is an app where you can text, so.

• 1:32:48Eric Seufert?

  That's true. That's true. I think once you have the chatbot interface, and they do have that. I think once you get a lot of usage there, ads become an opportunity. I just do think you need a visual component to make ads work. It's also why I just don't think ads to agents is ever going to take off. First of all, I think there's like a lot of incentive conflict there. I just don't think that you can show ads to agents because you wouldn't know who to trust. And who's getting paid in that case, and who's paying, right? So that's, there's like a lot of incentive conflicts there. But I also just think there's a, there's a, there's a visual component to ads that's necessary, right? Because that's, you know, that's what ad creative is. That's the, that's the principal way that you do messaging, that you do brand positioning, that you create affinity. And so I think if you're just doing voice, it's really tough. I think in a chatbot experience, you can, my sense is how they want to, I think how they want to monetize AI generally on their hardware

• 1:33:33Eric Seufert?

  is, is, is through essentially a deal similar to what they struck with Google Search, right? Like, you have to pay to be the, the model that gets, by default, gets attached to these services. And I think that that could be very, very lucrative to them. And they've already sort of, again, they've already set up, they've already kind of created the, the, the environment for that to happen with this sort of the core AI framework, the access to the models, going through private cloud compute. They've already created the, the conditions for that to happen.

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think, I think Demis at DeepMind was saying that like, there won't be ads in Gemini or like the core Gemini models. But he's out, and over time, you could imagine that the ad gets baked into the actual Gemini response. And then that is monetized on the Google slash DeepMind side, which then justifies the pool of, of capital that gets traded to Apple in exchange for that entry point. Makes a lot of sense. What do you think OpenAI needs to do to get from 1 to 10 billion on the ads product? They have billion users. The technology does not seem that complicated to me. I know it's deeply complicated, but it feels like when you have the machine that can, you know, solve math and write endless code,

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  like, just writing a matching algorithm, serving up the UI, like, that feels tractable. But is it, is it a supply-side thing? They need to get more small businesses, like what Facebook did, where, you know, Ridge Wallet and every small company and medium-sized company is on there. Actually, do they need to go after e-commerce, gaming? Like, where do you see this going?

• 1:35:07Eric Seufert?

  Well, it's first of all, famous last words that it doesn't seem that complicated.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Do we get to build? No, no, you're right, because because you and Ben Thompson were talking about like, oh, they they've said they're gonna do this, and it still took months to actually get out.

• 1:35:19Eric Seufert?

  Well, yeah, but they're doing it, right? I think they just need to keep doing what they're doing. I think the opportunity is vast and immense, and I think they're executing at a blistering pace. I so they just opened up to more countries. Now there are more than forty that they're available, and they just opened up to thirty one more countries. This was like two weeks ago.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:34Eric Seufert?

  A week ago. So I mean, this is like, they're expanding. I mean, it's just, it takes time. Look, I think what they will be, I think you start, you start to see the growth inflect. Um, when they integrate true conversion optimization. That means you're bidding a specific amount for a specific outcome, like you're still doing CPC optimized conversions. Once you are bidding against a specific outcome, then the growth inflects. And I think, you know, they'll be off to the races. That's the gap from one to ten. And then ten to a hundred is just continuing to onboard, you know, every SMB possible.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, where do you sit on instinct and the personalized agents?

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some breaking news. So Meta just released an instinct clone.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Muse, and it's a new standalone app. It's not the Meta AI app. It's a new, uh, personal agent app that's in the App Store. Muse from Meta, it says your personal agent that takes things off your plate, approve what gets sent or spent, track ticket prices and book reservations, connect all your apps. Get ideas for what your agent can take on, which I think is is smart, because a lot of people just don't really fully understand what agents can can do yet. But yeah, let's talk about Meta's current AI strategy in the moment. They're they're, you know, have started a pricing war.

• 1:36:55Jordi Hays?

  It's unclear what, how much the Meta AI app matters to the whole strategy. It's they're doing Muse now, they're doing coding. They're throwing a lot at the wall, but what's your view?

• 1:37:10Eric Seufert?

  I think, so I like to sort of just, I think, I just, I'll hone on, I'll hone in on things. They're, they're, yeah, they are throwing a ton of stuff at the wall. I'll hone in on the things that I think are like, where there's, there's, there's like a, a, a, a true, like, thematic strategy. So a couple of things, right? Uh, Muse Agent, interesting, open claw kind of thing, like, we'll see, instinct kind of thing. We'll see where that goes. I think there's gonna be a lot of those, and I think those get more and more domain specific over time. But, you know, we'll see. That's interesting. It could get more consumer adoption on desktop. So we'll see. It's gonna be the standalone app. I was just reading Boz's tweet about it before we hopped on.

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting to me that they own WhatsApp, which has billions of users, and they wouldn't just try to clone instinct in WhatsApp and just like try to get like actual crazy adoption there versus launching a standalone app.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, should it be a button inside of WhatsApp as opposed to a separate app? This is always the trade.

• 1:38:04Eric Seufert?

  You can interact with it that way. You can interact with it from WhatsApp.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. But the friction of getting people to download a new app and set it up.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  It was always different when it was just like, if you open Instagram, you get stories now.

• 1:38:16Eric Seufert?

  Right.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Like, there's no separate, there's no step. It's coming to you whether you like it or not, because we believe in stories, and we are going to get that to a billion Mao very quickly, and they did.

• 1:38:27Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to keep in mind that there's still a lot of reluctance to this on the consumer side, and there's still a lot of mistrust from Meta on the consumer side. And so I think, you know, if you just, if you just integrated this as a forced download in WhatsApp, you might get a lot of churn. You might get a lot of Telegram adopters. Um, my sense of it is like, if you look at a couple of different things, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a thread that you can sort of parse. Like, one is Meta AI, right? So, okay, here's, here's an interesting enterprise use case. What if you had the go-to AI for managing all ad campaigns within your company?

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:38:56Eric Seufert?

  Go-to AI app for managing all campaigns within your company. Because I'll tell you how people do it now. They use Codex. Codex is not purpose-built for that. They use Claude. Claude's not purpose-built for that.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:05Eric Seufert?

  Meta AI now does that. They've added that as a, as a, as a whole feature set. I think that gives you a strong indication of where they want to go with this. Who knows ad campaign optimization better than Meta? Why do they not have the right to win that? So even if you just said, this only applies, the enterprise use case here only applies to opt, to, to optimizing Meta ads. That's still a massive opportunity for revenue. Not, and that's just on a, on a, on a, on a first order perspective, not even considering like, well, that actually might result in more ad spend.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  That's why I was, I was somewhat excited about Manus, because I was like, okay, they're buying this enterprise agent. They can point it, they can point it at Meta ads, and if the agent is only good, and it's actually not getting, like, if Meta's saying, yes, we want you to spend, we want you to optimize ads with this product, and we're fully endorsing this, we're supporting it, it's not computer use or any of these other things.

• 1:39:57Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, but I mean, like, I mean, yeah, that was exciting, you know, got rolled back. But, but I mean, Meta AI now does it. They've introduced that functionality to Meta AI. So now if you're, if you're a performance marketing team, you're saying, well, I need a tool to optimize my meta campaigns. Which one am I going to use? Am I going to continue to use Codex? Again, it's not built for that.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Eric Seufert?

  Like, I don't think that they've devoted resources to making that a primary use case for it. And so Meta AI has done that. And if I, even if it was just for Meta, now, now imagine that it's the go-to for all ads optimization. Okay, well, now it's an even bigger commercial opportunity for them, an even bigger enterprise opportunity, right? Now, keep in mind, Meta launched the Robin Media Mix Model as an open source framework. So it's basically a measurement apparatus that helps you do like probabilistic measurement across all of your campaigns that you're running, like online, offline, whatever, out of home. Um, the reason they did that, I think, was because they felt they were being under attributed, right? Now, if you, if you thought, if you had this, if you had this sort of same mindset with the AI enablement layer, the tools that people were using do the optimizations.

• 1:40:53Eric Seufert?

  Then this makes a ton of sense. This might end up with more revenue flowing to them, because the optimization ends up preferencing them, not with the thumb on the scale, but just because it was actually under optimized before. So that might be a reason to do this. If you genuinely thought people were spending less than they should be to be optimizing their ad spend on your platform, then you would do this. And if that's the case, this could have, this could have like dramatic second order effects too. So that's one thing. The other thing is business AI. And business AI, I think, is like underappreciated. I've been following this for like quite a while. Uh, I had their VP of Business on the podcast maybe a year ago, and we talked about this. But they launched a business AI, which basically was a chatbot that you integrate on your website. They said, okay, that's kind of boring, who cares? But what people were doing is they were going, they were clicking an ad, going to someone's website, and then they were, they were using a chatbot to say like, what's the, what's the best selling product, like stuff like that?

• 1:41:38Eric Seufert?

  That has a lot of opportunity there. Like, even if it's just surfacing basic data like that, there was no way for a lot of SMBs to do that. Now, what they've done is they've introduced like an AI-enabled Pixel, which can automatically, uh, you know, sort of tune itself, requires no, like, very little optimization from the advertiser side. Imagine all the other stuff they could do if they have access to your landing page. Imagine landing page optimization. Imagine personalization is all driven by Meta's own systems, and the advertiser could say, look, um, I'm an SMB. I don't have time to A B test. Uh, or I don't have the resources to do like constant A B testing, constant experimentation on my landing page to optimize conversion. I know if my conversion was better, I'd be able to spend more money on Meta and get more sales.

• 1:42:18Eric Seufert?

  So if Meta can offer that to me, I'm okay to surrender that capability to them. Imagine they penetrate even deeper into the customer experience on the website. Certain brands will say, no way. But a lot of SMBs, which is that big bulk of their advertiser base, will say, yes, please, do anything you can do to optimize conversion for me, because that's going to result in more revenue for me, which I'm then going to reinvest in more ad spend. So I think like business AI is really, really valuable to them, and they've integrated that deeply into WhatsApp. So that is going into the WhatsApp experience where people are able to communicate with business directly, get a chatbot, you know, understand these things about the, the catalog, understand these things about the business and the, the core product offering.

• 1:42:54Eric Seufert?

  I think that stuff has a ton of potential, and I think that's probably undervalued if you look at, um, if you look at Meta's AI initiatives. I think people focus too much, um, probably on like the output of, you know, TBD. Uh, but, but like, I think, uh, and that's important too. I mean, look, the, the, the model that they just released is competitive, like no one, the people left them for dead six months ago, but now they're actually producing competitive models. I think that's important too. But if you think about the integrations in the surface area, they could just apply even commodity AI to, it's, there's a lot of value left to gain.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. We never book enough time.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Yeah. And what you're saying, to me, it's like, it would be, I think it would be thrilling for shareholders if they saw MSL actually focused on applying AI in the business and not like, oh, coding's a hot category. We should, we should introduce a coding tool, or, or, oh, let's, let's try to ramp Muse API revenue to, to a hundred billion dollars, right? Or whatever these things are that they're trying to do. Um, and so, yeah, it's like, it's products, it's like net new products that are consumer products like Muse that I think are interesting, and it makes sense that they'll take a crack at this category, because it will probably be. You know, multi-trillion dollar category, it's aligned to their existing business.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then some of these other things of like actually applying.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, instead of personal superintelligence, it's small business, superintelligence, that would be a huge opportunity.

• 1:44:19Jordi Hays?

  And small business owners, like small business owners, I feel like are people that generally, they may have a little bit of a love hate relationship with, with Meta. And that they're, they're like, I, I'm dependent on Meta. If I turn off Meta ads, my business, you know, revenue drops 50%. But at least they're like, I need Meta. Like they're dependent on it. Whereas average consumers, you look at the comments and people are like, okay, Meta is talking about privacy. With their new agent. It's like, no, nobody's like buying the, the Meta and suddenly is privacy focused narrative, right?

• 1:44:49Eric Seufert?

  Yeah. I mean, like a lot of the SMBs, they understand that they wouldn't exist but for Meta. I mean, there's not, there's not a lot of animosity towards the company that provides your right to exist. It's like the oxygen that they rely on. I don't think there's a whole lot of hostility to that. I mean, it's, it's, what always bothers me about, you know, um, these discussions is like just not recognize that D to C would not exist. Absent Meta. If, if, if Meta's ads platform hadn't like evolved in the way it did, there would be no D to C category. Right? And so it's like, it's, it's ridiculous to say, first of all, I think one, one, I mean, let me know if you're, we're up on time here, but like. Like a lot of people look at the index, like, so if you look at like the, the advertising a share of GDP, it's basically, it sits within like a narrow band, like over time, historically, going back a really hundreds of years.

• 1:45:31Eric Seufert?

  And people say, well, look, that proves that, that advertising is, is not driving the economy. It's, it's, it's almost like a drag, you could say, because it's just this cost base. But like, the thing is, when, when, when an advertising format, when advertising enables new business, the fact that I'm still maintaining a share of my revenue as, as my ad spend, doesn't mean that that ad spend would exist, or that my revenue would exist without the ad spend. Right? And so if you create these new opportunities for commerce, like it doesn't matter that the share that you reinvest back in advertising stays the same. That's not an indication of the value to the economy. It's creating that chunk of the economy. And so I think that you, you get, that gets missed in these discussions. Like if you, it, it actually impacts economic growth. It's, it's endogenous there.

• 1:46:13Eric Seufert?

  And so it's an input to the economic growth. And so you can't say that the fact that it remains within this narrow band as a percentage has, is some way to evaluate its importance to the economy. And when you are creating new opportunities to transact that are entirely derived from advertising, then you are creating that section, that segment of the economy.

• 1:46:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Do you think that, what is the, what is the state of affiliate marketing? Because when I think about a product like Instinct or this new Meta product, an agent that will go and buy things. It feels like that would be easier to bootstrap in theory than an advertising platform that you need. You need scale and a, and a demand side or supply side for. And so you could, in theory, when even on day one of Instinct, I asked to go order a pair of shoes and it uses an Amazon affiliate link and they're making money. Is, is that going to persist? Or is that like a dying, a dying monetization path? Or is it just small?

• 1:47:09Eric Seufert?

  No, I mean, I think there's some upper limit now, but I think it's something that'll persist, you know, indefinitely. I mean, you look at, there's big companies that do essentially affiliate, Rakuten is one of them. It's a successful company. I think the thing though is like, is that subscale? Yeah, affiliate makes sense. But this was the argument I made when, when ChatGPT introduced instant checkout. Like that's not going to, that's not the optimal way to monetize that attention. The optimal way is to do conversion based, conversion optimized advertising, because that introduces the auction mechanic, you actually deliver the value that a person's bidding. And then so the more value you give to people, the more they bid and the more revenue you make, right? You don't get that with affiliate. Affiliate tends to do the opposite. It tends to preference the lowest cost, but highest converting goods.

• 1:47:50Eric Seufert?

  And so it's kind of, you're promoting like the worst stuff, the cheapest stuff, right? The Shane stuff, the Tamu stuff. And the thing is, when you unlock, it's sort of like the, the latent value with the auction mechanism and bidding, especially second price bidding. Then you get, uh, you get growth with, uh, with, uh, performance. And so that's how you scale the platform you onboard long tail SMB advertisers.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  Well, uh, thank you so much, George. Do you have anything else?

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  No, always a pleasure.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  Always a good time. Always, always a great time hanging out. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:48:21Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Have a great week.

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  The third technology brother.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  And we'll see you soon.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Eric.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. You got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. We ran long there, so we're shifting Harry Mellsop from Antioch to the end of the show. We're going to be joined by Scott Wu from cognition in just a minute or two. Huge.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  While we were, yeah, so while we were live with Eric, Meta came out with Muse Agent. So Tyler, download it.

• 1:48:54Scott Wu?

  Got it.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  You got it?

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  Already got it. Look at that. Look at that. Uh, excited to, uh, see what you think.

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  Build me an equestrian simulator. Uh, I don't know.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that's, I don't think it's focused on vibe coding. It's like, it's the whole book me, uh, reservation, book me a flight.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  I tried to say. It's so, can you, can you imagine?

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Table in the Beverly Hills Hotel, please.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine being like resi or open table and, and having, you know, trillions of dollars, watching trillions of dollars of CapEx? And people are like, one day you're going to be able to just tell your agent, you know, book me, book me this reservation. And they're sitting there being like, it's two clicks, sir. It's two clicks. Cause you go, go into resi. I mean, it's, it's, uh, it really is, uh, it really is quite quick.

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  Apparently we have to ask Scott about the number 46. Do you get this reference? I don't know. Okay. We're going to ask him because he's here in the waiting room and let's bring in Scott Wu, founder, CEO cognition. Welcome to TVCN, Scott. How are you doing?

• 1:50:01Scott Wu?

  Great to see you, man. Thank you for having me. Slow, slow news day. I was going to say.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  Huge news day.

• 1:50:06Scott Wu?

  You guys to talk about.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Yeah, you crazy, crazy news day. We're going to talk about math. We're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about fundraising business. But first, the number 46. I was, I was told to ask you about this. Why?

• 1:50:17Scott Wu?

  That's funny. That's funny. Well, I saw that my Twitter handle is Scott with 46.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:21Scott Wu?

  The, the reason my, uh, my handle, my, my, I'm like Scott with 46 on basically all these platforms. Is, um, because when I was in like elementary school, I, uh, the, the biggest thing I knew of was this middle school competition math counts, which is now made a bit more famous because people have seen these videos of math counts and stuff. And in the math counts, there's like a written proportion, and then when you do well enough on that, you go to the actual like head to head. But a perfect score in the written portion is 46.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  46.

• 1:50:47Scott Wu?

  And so then what ended up happening is with this particular round, we actually ended up pricing it at 46 pretty, partially for the meme, partially because, you know, ended up being the right.

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  You did the meme.

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, you, you have to imagine that certain VCs are like, okay, we've agreed to this number, but are there any insider meme references that would save us even 3% here? Let's do a deep dive to see if we can get the founder to give us a little hair.

• 1:51:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, no. Uh, but congratulations. Tell us about the fundraising round. You got every investor in the world on the cap table at this point. Is that right?

• 1:51:21Scott Wu?

  Yeah, look, you know, it's, it's an exciting time for cognition, obviously. And I mean, I think that the, the biggest thing I would just call out is like agents are just getting really, really good, you know? And I think two years ago, uh, but we're not, not that old, like two and a half years ago. So, so two years ago, you know, was when we kind of did the Devon launch and back then, as you remember, it was like, you know, it went pretty viral and so on. But, but it was really just like a prototype, I would not say.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  There was so much skepticism. People were like, they are coining a buzzword that will never exist. Agents, they're just hyping this up. And now it's like everything is agents.

• 1:51:54Scott Wu?

  I remember thinking about this because I just think, man, it's, it's great that Devon actually works because if it didn't, we would just look so dumb right now.

• 1:52:02Scott Wu?

  But so, so that was two years ago. Uh, and like, we didn't have customers, you know, it was very much just like a prototype and like, here's what we're building towards and so on. Right? One year ago, I would say it was very, um, you know, the, the, the product existed, it worked, it was, it was for very specific use cases. You know, that, that you would kind of have it work and have it do it end to end. But I think most people in the world hadn't really gotten across to the idea of using a background agent. Now I would say it's, it's, um, I mean, especially in our circles, it's like, you know, it's becoming a more and more commonplace thing. And a lot of it is just that the capabilities are just so good that obviously you should go and delegate to something that just does the task entirely, right? And be able to manage these and so on. So, so that's been the biggest thing.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  We, yeah, I mean, the, the agentic era arrived, the importance of harnesses like Devon arrived. How, how do you think about orchestration? It feels like we saw a glimpse of that with, with gas town that went viral now. Whenever you fire off a prompt in any modern AI system, you can see the harness and the lead agent sort of talking to subagents and delegating things. Is there, is, is, uh, is orchestration a meaningful leg up? Is it another exponential in the sense that we went from LLMs to reasoning? That was an order of magnitude. Then we went to the agentic era.

• 1:53:26John Coogan?

  Have we always been in the orchestration era? Or is this a new era? Is this a new meaningful change? Are there new disciplines that need to be, be explored in the world of orchestration?

• 1:53:35Scott Wu?

  Yeah, no. So, so it's a, it's a really important question. I think there's, there's definitely a lot of like, uh, what's the word? There's, there's definitely a lot of kind of like, um. Uh, you know, misconceptions, I think, out there about it. I will say that there's a sense that people get of like, oh, like, if you just say the magic words to the model, it will suddenly become 15% smarter, something like that. That's much less of a thing, especially now because the models are all RL'd on very specific capabilities and these kinds of tasks and so on. I think what is much more the case is if you, um, number one, if you go and bring in all of the context and the information and the systems that you need. For example, you know, encoding, a very simple example is like a model and an agent that can go and test its own code and click through its website by itself.

• 1:54:18Scott Wu?

  And then go and look and say, okay, that was right. That part was wrong. Let me go fix that. Is obviously going to be way more capable than something that can one-shot it on its own, right? A model that can go, you know, an agent that can go look up in the data dog, what went wrong in the logs is like much more powerful than something I can't. So that's one is just like being able to bring in all the tooling, the context and so on. You know, all this kind of like messy real world stuff. How do you navigate a big code base? How do you get through, you know, all the, the secure systems that are, you know, that a company will have on its software? And then number two, I would say is combining the strengths of the different models and the things that they're good at, right? And so, you know, I, I mean, everybody's talking about price performance of models. Everybody's, you know, showing the charts of the Pareto curve and so on. And this model is like really cheap, but is good enough for this percent of tasks.

• 1:55:00Scott Wu?

  And this model is like the way expensive one and it's, you know, this much percent better and whatever, right? But obviously what that means is that by combining the, the different models, as long as you know what use cases to route to each model, then, then you can do a lot better than, than anyone alone.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  How permanent is that task, that job of picking the right model at the right price point? Because we see there's a lot of attention from the, from the big labs and it's very clear that they're, that every big lab is going after building beautiful slides, front end, back end, cyber security, bio, like math, they're, they're all working on these. And there's this trade-off between a certain model might be really good at something else. And then the new big model comes out and it's better than everything at everything, at every price point. But how, and, and I, I think the risk is that you can, you can wind up in a situation where you're like, oh, well, if I just wait two weeks, I'll just be able to use the, the, the major hammer because everything will look like a nail.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  But it feels like there's also always going to be this cost optimization, speed optimization. So that optimization problem, is that sticking around forever? Is that what you want to build the core of cognition around, nailing that?

• 1:56:11Scott Wu?

  I think it's sticking around. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, if anything, it's going to be a bigger thing as time goes on. Because for a lot of these use cases, the intelligence is, is really not the bottleneck anymore, right? And so, uh, obviously it's been, been, been another hot thing for the last few months. But, but I would, I would say it's like, you know, chat GPT, for example, new, bigger, smarter comes out, you know, smarter model comes out. It doesn't necessarily change their retention metrics all of a sudden, because most of the things people ask chat GPT, you know, it turns out the model is good. You know, they, they already go and get them right, right? And like now what you care about is, is, is not just pure IQ for, for any task, you know, whether it's coding or, or legal or customer service or whatever. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's not just, okay, what is the raw logical intelligence of the model that I'm working with? It's like, okay, well, does it, does it know all of the details of what I'm dealing with?

• 1:56:56Scott Wu?

  Does it do things in the style of how I want it to do? Is it fast? Is it cheap? Is it effective? Is it, is it trained specifically on my subset of use cases or, you know, all, all of these things like that? And basically what that means is I think that there should be this, this frontier where people start to much more aggressively use all these different models rather than, you know, relying on the single biggest one, right? Like, I think a year ago, that, that was more of a phenomenon of a, of a year, year and a half ago, because there were a lot of use cases that were just on the cusp of possible, you know? And when that was the case, of course, you want to go use, you know, the very smartest model that you have up there, like Sonnet 3.7 or whatever it was, you know, a year and a half ago. But now because all the models are really good, you know, what that means is you can be a lot more judicious.

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Kind of a question going around, I think on different people's minds. Coding agents are now incredibly capable, but is the quality of software around the world actually increasing? And so I wanted to get your view on, uh, you know, you guys are working with a lot of the biggest companies in the world. Do you feel like they're, the quality of their software is increasing or are they just doing more? Are they doing backend migrations that consumers don't even experience? Cause you've had this, I, I, I guess, question for a while, which is like, okay, when I, when I download an app for like a big airline.

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was chirping at Rune about this. I was like, oh, if the AI models are so good, why is it annoying to use the United Airlines app? And he was like, have you tried to use it recently? It's actually pretty good. And then I did try it and I was like, yeah, actually maybe it is better, but I don't know. Where do you sit on this?

• 1:58:30Scott Wu?

  Yeah, I think short answer is definitely yes, it is better. I think to the extent that, that there's more to do, a lot of that is, is much more like, it's much more a function of these practical problems, like going out and getting distribution, going and doing that. And I mean, I think, I think people, you know, people in our ecosystem understand this intuitively, but it's worth kind of calling out aloud that, you know, a, a 50, 30, 50, 50,000 person software org is not going to figure out how to use coding agents overnight the same way that like a three-person YC company is going to, right? And so, so there are steps in the process that need to go happen. There's like a lot of kind of like, you know, onboarding and education that has to be done. There's figuring out the right systems. There's of course getting through people, folks like, you know,

• 1:59:10Scott Wu?

  the, the, the security guardrails and the, and the reviews and the walls that people have to make sure all of that is tight and, and something that they want to have operating in their ecosystem. But, uh, but you know, once that's there, we, we very much see that that's, that's clearly the case across all these industries. And I mean, I think, you know, it's like, uh, so, so like, yeah, go ahead.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  But so, so I can imagine if I'm, if I'm selling cognition, there's a few different pitches I could give. One is, uh, I go to a company and say, look, you don't have an ER pieces or you don't have a, um, an, an e-commerce system. We're going to come in and, and build that and it's going to be done by the time we're complete. And you're going to have this, it's going to live forever, but it's a new capability. Others, we're going to give every person in your organization a co-pilot, uh, and we will help transform the organization. And then third might just be like, look, we're just giving you access to Devon. It does good stuff. Like, you know, go and, and, and you couldn't, you couldn't get it at this scale, but now you can because we're working together. What's resonating the most these days?

• 2:00:13Scott Wu?

  Yeah. No, I mean, I think folks are rightly, by the way, are, are very focused on, at, at this point, on, on just like, what are the actual use cases that it, that it's going to drive and what is it going to mean? You know, I think there was a, there was a period where it's very much, all right, we're in the token maxing world. How many, how many tokens are my engineers using? How, that was, you know, that lasted for all of like four months or so, uh, you know, great times.

• 2:00:35Scott Wu?

  But, but, but now, you know, I, I think there's much more kind of like, there's much more clarity of thought, I would say, from, from folks in the industry about, okay, well, look, AI is great. Let's talk about what use cases that we actually care about. Like what, what are the top three, four priorities we care about as a company? Like you said, maybe it's this, this killer new feature that we want to put out. It's this app that we want to make way better or it's whatever. And let's talk about how we actually go and measure that and improve on that, you know? And I think the, the biggest thing, if anything, I think is, is kind of like, yeah, like how, how can you show it in the concrete results, right? Like the, the value should be there, obviously, because AI is so good, you know, and it's so smart. But, but like, unless you're tracking that, you're making sure you're using it for the things that are effective versus aren't effective. You know, you're, you're looking at the, the productivity on a case by case basis.

• 2:01:17Scott Wu?

  Obviously it's like, you, you'll never actually know which things you're doing are working versus not, right? And I think that's been a big, big theme for folks.

• 2:01:24Jordi Hays?

  How do you predict that the router market is going to evolve? We've seen a lot of moves recently. Ramp has a router, Stripe, you know, bought Open Router. There's a bunch of other players. Everyone wants to be in that token stream, uh, but how do you see this sort of like category evolving?

• 2:01:41Scott Wu?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, I think it kind of makes sense. I mean, it's, it's, uh, you know, a lot of these companies that you're mentioning, for example, are, they think of themselves as like the center for finance on the internet, right? And, you know, what are people going to be spending money on in the internet in five or 10 years? I think a lot of it is going to be tokens and models and agents and whatever you call it. So, so I, I think from that perspective, I think it's super reasonable. And I, I think the, the routing part is a big piece, but, but to your point, I think the entire kind of like, infrastructure around how you do payments and around how you do spend management, all these things I think are still going to exist and basically need to be redone in the world of agents. And so I, I frankly think that there are a lot of products to go and build in that space.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  What has your reaction been to the recent progress in math? When you, I think the very first time you came on the show, you predicted correctly that the IMO gold medal would fall. Google and OpenAI both scored just barely gold, not 46. I think it was 38 or something. It was like, they missed the sixth question, but they, but they did achieve gold.

• 2:02:46Scott Wu?

  42, by the way, 42 is a gold i- i- i- in, in the, in the math Olympiad, which is slightly different. You have to remember it's, it's different numbers for every competition. Yeah. So I'll tell you what my, my honest thoughts on it, uh, which are, um, look, first of all, I think it's, it's, it's actually insane. There's a lot of controversy and there's discussions, arguments, whatever. But I feel like the most important thing to call is like, guys, we just solved Navier-Stokes with AI. Like that is, it's absurd. And, and I don't think it's going to stop, obviously. I mean, I think the like, uh, you know, it's funny, I actually have money. And this is my, this would be my only AI bear view that I ever expressed to you guys. I actually had money, uh, on a bet that the rebound hypothesis will not be solved by the end of 2026.

• 2:03:30Scott Wu?

  We'll see, you know, three and a half more months, but I'm pretty sure if not 26, it will be solved in 27. I think it might get done in 26, uh, but, but I think it's less than 50%, we'll see. But, but no, I mean, I, I think all of this stuff is, is just going to get done. And I mean, I think it's like, um, it's, it's kind of insane. It's, it's hard to put into words. I think if you're, if you're not familiar with the, the kind of scale of this, but like, you know, Navier-Stokes, for example, is like a very fundamental problem about like fluid dynamics and such, and it's been around for. Forever, basically, and lots of people have sunk lots and lots of time into it. And, you know, the fact that this can even just be done in like a week.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Scott Wu?

  Eighty-eight hours. Models just going and working around in a system and orchestrating. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's insane. Yeah.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:14Scott Wu?

  I, I think on, on the point of the controversy, I mean, it's kind of funny, but, but similarly, I think a lot of people who aren't as familiar with the, the math academia world might not know that. You know, this is actually just always what happens in, in, in math academia. Like literally Newton versus Leibniz on the founding of Calligraphy.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:30Scott Wu?

  Was the, is, is still, by the way, is one of the biggest arguments that people have. You know, this is back in like the 1600s or so. And, and so in, in practice, I think like, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm sure, I look, I, I, I, I, I believe that both sides meant well. I think the accomplishment itself is going to be the biggest thing that we all remember from this. We could debate, you know, what, what exactly shapes up and, and what, what it means for folks. But, but, but, but it's, it's, you know, the, the rest, I, I would say it's kind of the, the AI, the AI accomplishment itself is the biggest thing by far. The rest kind of feels par for the course, to be a hundred percent honest.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, it, it seems exciting for the, the world of math. It's certainly exciting as sort of like a, a researcher recruitment. This is where progress is happening. It's also sort of a useful benchmark. Like I could imagine in the future, uh, like two weeks in the future, but just a few weeks in the future. If you're training, you know, uh, Muse Spark 1.5, you want to just throw Navier-Stokes at it and say, don't search the internet. Don't look at the result. Can you solve it? Because that's a good benchmark, right? But, but I want to know about your philosophy because you went viral with the Devon launch. Like what matters to your customers, your recruitment?

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Because, uh, there's a world where you're like, oh, I, I, I want to put my, throw my hat in the ring and duke it out for different math, uh, challenges. But that doesn't seem critical path to the growth of your business. Certainly hasn't been because you're growing very quickly. But, um, how do you, how do you think about the value of when you're talking to your actual customers? What is important to get across?

• 2:06:04Scott Wu?

  Yeah, for sure. It's kind of, by the way, it's, it's kind of a hilarious thought also that, you know, we're just going to be like, I, I actually still think that one of the things that's, that, that I've never gotten over is like, one of the token benchmarks that people do when they're going and training models and doing runs and stuff is AIME.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:19Scott Wu?

  A, A, AME. And, uh, I, I think people don't necessarily know what it is, but basically the AIME was, uh, it's a high school math competition. It's one of the, the hardest math competitions and it basically selects like the top few hundred kids in the U.S. To go qualify for the next level to actually compete for the U.S. team and everything. Like I took those, you know, every year as, as a kid. And it's kind of funny because it's like, yeah, dude, your model can't even get a 15 on the AME. It's, it's out of 15, you know, it's like, what are you even doing? But like, no human can do that, you know? And we're already, and then some day it'll just be like, wow, you can't, you can't even solve the Remont hypothesis. It's like, what did your model even do? You must have totally messed up your pre-training run or something.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  I get it. You're trying to save money, so you're using a model that can't solve Remon. Like, look, not everyone has token budgets right now, so you gotta pinch pennies. It's cool. It's probably good in Photoshop.

• 2:07:08Scott Wu?

  But yeah, no, so for, for us, what I would say is, uh, uh, uh, obviously like a, a lot of what matters is show, show the, the, the real benchmark. Don't get me wrong, be sick if Devon went and solved the Remont hypothesis. I don't currently expect that that's what's going to happen because it's much less, you know, this, this kind of like fundamental, you know, basic science research is much lesser focus as opposed to, to kind of going and doing real world use cases. And so we see, you know, it's like, when we show benchmarks, it's like, okay, here's a benchmark on how it does at finding security vulnerabilities in real world code bases. Here's a benchmark on how it does, yeah, right. And, and a lot of it is basically just like making sure we're speaking to the thing that, that, that folks care about and folks need.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, related to that last question, uh, how big is the cybersecurity side of the business? How much demand is that driving? Obviously that's been a huge story this year.

• 2:07:54Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, no, I mean, it's been, it's been a massive thing for us. Obviously everyone I think is, is, is really thinking about this and thinking about, I mean, everyone's kind of freaking out, I guess, is, is like the honest way to put it, um, which is probably correct. I, I think cybersecurity is going to, uh, you know, it's, I, I, I think there's going to be real threats that happen. I mean, I mean, again, you know, when we say it's like these big orgs take time to adapt and to, to use new technologies and so on. Obviously these hackers out there, like small teams that are going and using the best of the models or doing their own, who knows what they're doing? Like they're not waiting, you know? And, and, and a lot of these capabilities keep getting way better. And so, no, it, it, it's a small but meaningful part of, of our business.

• 2:08:33Scott Wu?

  It's probably in the neighborhood of like, um, um, you know, around 10% of, of the Devon sessions and or the Devon ACs that get spent today are on security. But, but we see it growing pretty quickly. I mean, our security products are only like two months old, so.

• 2:08:45John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, congratulations on the fundraiser. I gotta ring the gong.

• 2:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Amazing update.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Scott. Please go, please go take out some open problems just for fun. Don't, don't distract the team, like, don't, don't rope them into it, but just spin up a.

• 2:09:03Scott Wu?

  We'll factor the next prime.

• 2:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Spin up a swarm, just you and the swarm. Great to see you.

• 2:09:09John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 2:09:10Scott Wu?

  Cool. Thanks for having me.

• 2:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:09:12John Coogan?

  Well, we were talking about security. No better time to tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We will be joined by Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI in just a minute. In the meantime, uh, the Descartes, uh, the Descartes acquisition, there were talks that Anthropic was buying Descartes. And it seems like they have walked away. This is an exclusive in Bloomberg, but.

• 2:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Say it.

• 2:09:45John Coogan?

  They put Descartes before de-horse. That's the funniest quote tweet by Shashanth Romano here on the timeline.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, story, uh, stories come out that, that maybe one of the is totally, you know, I, I don't, I don't know how true this is, but it sounds like one of the sticking points was maybe.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Relocation.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Descartes happily building in, in Tel Aviv, not wanting to, um, uh, move over to the U.S. Who knows? Dean at Descartes is incredibly talented.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  It was a very fun demo. He came on the show and used his AI image model, his video model.

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, his willingness to do just a live demo of technology that seemingly was better than anything else.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  That we have seen.

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  I mean, it was, it was, it was low res, but it, it showed you a glimpse into the future. He would, you know, be prompting it while he was on the call with us, talking about what's behind him. Now I'm in a wizard castle. Now I'm in a sci-fi, you know, cyberpunk city. And all of that was, uh, very, very fun to see. So, uh, I'm sure that they will continue cooking and we will have to check in with them soon. But we have Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI with us. Welcome to the show, Greg. How are you doing?

• 2:11:00Speaker 11

  Doing great. Thank you for having me.

• 2:11:02John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Uh, huge day. Can we start with the, with the math advances? What is, what, what is happening? Why is this important? There's a lot of back and forth in the timeline, but I'd love for you to just set the table for us on what actually happened with, uh, Navier-Stokes today.

• 2:11:19Speaker 11

  Well, uh, it's always a huge day, uh, in, uh, AI and modern progress, I would say.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:25Speaker 11

  Today we announced that our model, I had solved the Navier-Stokes, uh, problem. That we found a, a counter example or a sort of proof that you can actually, uh, that these, these, uh, theoretical equations do have a singularity or kind of break down under certain circumstances. And this is a problem that has been open for a very long time. It's one of the seven millennium problems, which are kind of some of the deepest, most important problems in mathematics. And I, I think that the problem itself is important, right? This is new knowledge for humanity, that the proof itself is actually very elegant and beautiful. And I think that there's a lot to learn from it.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:03Speaker 11

  I, the, the equations have lots of application in fluid dynamics and in other areas. But to me, what's even more important is about what this represents about where we are in terms of model capabilities.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Speaker 11

  And the fact that we can actually generate new knowledge, that we can learn from these models to, and have them help us solve problems that are otherwise outside of reach or would take us a very long to solve.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, where should I actually go with this? Is this going to help me book a flight? Is this going to help me cure cancer? Is this just going to help you recruit researchers who are fascinated by this stuff? Because I think that there's, this is, you know, taken over the technology world. But I imagine that this will not be something that gets talked about at backyard barbecues with friends and family that are three clicks removed.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Outside of SF.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:50Speaker 11

  Well, look, I think that there's first of all, the applications of this specific result or the equations themselves, right? Which are things that let us better understand phenomena from ocean currents to airflow around aircraft.

• 2:13:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:01Speaker 11

  Uh, around, you know, turbulence and things like that. But it's really about the broader insights and methods that can help scientists and mathematicians further accelerate their research. And I think that, again, representative of if we have models that can help solve this kind of problem, then I, what happens from here? Like what other problems that are immediately applicable? And I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines, we're going to be able to develop. All of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability. And I do think that there are going to be real changes to, uh, to think about in terms of we can have so much more ambition with the kinds of, of challenges that we can hope to tackle now.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I mean, I think, uh, even, even if this doesn't break through to the broader, uh, the broader world, uh, the weekend definitely will. Because it seemed like everyone was talking about Blender, talking about Astra, building stuff. Take us through the launch of Astra, what the feedback has been, what you've learned. It seemed like there were a couple of resets, the model scaled very well. How was this launch different than previous launches?

• 2:14:14Speaker 11

  Well, first of all, I've just been blown away by the community reaction to Astra. It's been really amazing and very humbling, honestly, to see all the creativity and the different ways that people have been applying the model. And I think that it's very clear that we've reached a new threshold of computer use. So this model is able to really work with different kinds of applications in a way that was not previously possible. And people are taking full advantage of that fact and really thinking about how to create. Lots of people showing off 3D creations and mapping out physical locations and turning them into these 3D models and thinking about, can you use this for design of physical parts? Someone talked about how they were designing some mechanic for catching hair in a shower

• 2:14:58Speaker 11

  drain and that they were able to. It's super cool, right? They're now able to actually manufacture that.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Shower hair, super intelligence.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  No, that stuff's so mundane, but it's so important. I feel like a lot of this stuff gets lost.

• 2:15:12Speaker 11

  Exactly. And I think there's a core there that's very important, which is that we are talking about these grand challenges sometimes or very esoteric applications. But really, the everyday, the number of problems that you have in your life that you would love to solve, it's now possible, right? That we're really trying to empower the individual to make it so that you can be, you can have superpowers, that you can accomplish more. And I think that that, you know, really trying to benefit people, empower people, build tools that can really help you and help you in your daily life. That's all part of what we're working on.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, it seems like a huge number of people in tech effectively rebuilt their entire house in Blender and plan to remodel this weekend. Thanks, Astra. But I am wondering about the merge and how you bring together Codex, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT on Desktop. I have a gaming PC now with Nvidia card in it. I have a Mac Mini. Like, I have all these things and I can imagine that I'm just, I'm doing that unnecessary or like, it's fun for me, but that early adopter work of going and un-hobbling it a little bit here and there. But in the future, this will all just be tucked in one, you know, prompt box and it

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  might build a 3D Blender model for, to answer my question of, should I remodel my house or not? But how do you see the capabilities that we saw on display from sort of light power users over the weekend actually making their way into consumers who might not even know what Blender is?

• 2:16:44Speaker 11

  Well, I think you're exactly right, that we really want to shift these tools from requiring kind of a low level sort of

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Speaker 11

  access or guidance to really having the human be able to fly, right? To really be empowered, for you to be able to set the goals and the objectives and that you still should feel like you can get into those details and you can understand them. You can provide that oversight because ultimately you should feel accountable for the outcomes. But you have this, this absolute amplifier, right? Like a trampoline or like a rocket ship for the mind, like however you want to analogize it. And I think what that means at a practical level. So first of all, this year, we've been really seeing this shift from just pure chat use cases to agentic use cases. But I would also keep in mind that chat is alive and well. I mean, we're now well over a billion users every week that you can see that the market

• 2:17:35Speaker 11

  share of ChatGPT is starting to climb once again because we've been investing so hard in, in so many use cases that are important for people in education and health and a variety of other areas. And then at the same time, these productivity, deep knowledge work use cases, those are really taking off. We've had this like almost a vertical wall of agentic adoption since we launched ChatGPT Work. And I think that the fact that these are two distinct modes, that that is actually a point in time. That is something that we're continuing to unify and merge and that we're starting to see that there's a new emerging form factor for how people want to consume AI. And I think that it's almost like that the promise of AI has always been that you have something that you can talk to and really delegate work to that's proactive and persistent.

• 2:18:18Speaker 11

  And that I, what we were promised, if you were to rewind five, 10 years ago, was never a low level language model, that you have to think about context windows, you have to select thinking strength and you have to select different models. Like, none of that, none of that is the future. And so I think that we're moving towards real amplification, real giving you time back, real having computers that are able to operate according to your goals, to your desires. And I think that that is the core of it. We're developing this safely. That's, that's one of the core commitments that we make and how we think about this. But, but we really see the power of these tools starting to really, really start to increase in terms of what people are capable of and that under the hood, utilizing tools

• 2:19:03Speaker 11

  like Blender, so that that is almost a detail that fades into the background is absolutely the direction of travel.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  It feels like in AI particularly, there's been a, almost like a first mover disadvantage in that billions of people have tried ChatGPT and, and some percentage of them tried it for the first time and have a certain impression of the product and what it can do. And then, you know, even in the last few weeks, there's been new agents and products that come online and people try it and their mind is just completely blown. And I think it's funny because I'm like, well, as somebody who's like, you know, trying to get the absolute max out of ChatGPT, I'm like, well, I've been running like, you know, I've had like an agent running that, for example, will tell me every time a SpaceX launch is going to happen and if it gets delayed, right? These sort of like persistent agents that are running the background.

• 2:19:50Jordi Hays?

  And, but, but strategically, I feel like it's a, it's a new kind of challenge because you have this, the, as capability has been, been scaling, first movers need to be almost like constantly reminding the, the market of all these just like new ways.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Ability overhang.

• 2:20:09Speaker 11

  Yeah, we, we think about this a lot and I think that there's this discovery problem that we as a field need to really encounter in a first-class way. And we haven't done it fully yet, but I think we have a real shot at solving it better than any product before. Because the, the thing that, that right now we kind of rely on, you think about ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, these are both text boxes, right? And it's like, well, this new text box is way more powerful than the old text box. And, but, oh, there are some reasons that you still want to use the old text box. It's not, you know, it's like far too confusing. People just want something that can help them solve their problem. The whole point is to get your time back, not for you to have to go and become an expert in all these, these internal details. But at the same time, we also have a model that understands what you're trying to accomplish, right?

• 2:20:54Speaker 11

  That you're explaining to it, here's what I want, it has a lot of context on you. And so it should also be able to proactively say to you, hey, actually, if you ask me this other way, or if you added, added this connector, or if you authorize me to do this, or if you, you know, hook up your credentials in this, in this way, I can go and do this other thing for you. And so we're thinking a lot about that self-knowledge, that onboarding process. And I think that is a huge, huge opportunity. And I think that there is both the, the disadvantage that you cite of people tried it, they form an impression and it's changed, that it's something new. But there's also an advantage. I mean, ChatGPT, like over a billion users every week, like that is unique. No one has that kind of use on, on these, on these models. And I think that the number of people who have tried ChatGPT before, I think it's, it's

• 2:21:39Speaker 11

  another, you know, billion, billion and a half, something like that. And so that's a huge opportunity as well for us to go back to those users and say, hey, we can now solve the problem for you. We can now help you in ways that you didn't see before. And I think that it's, it's true, it's real. If you look at how many people use chat for health, 300 million people every single week with health queries, right? And that that's really making a difference in people's lives and that of their loved ones. And so we have such opportunity.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Can you stay there with, with health and, and explain where this goes?

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  One note before that, something that I think is really interesting and I think something that OpenAI can, can do a lot better is like, when people talk about, like everyone in AI wants to be like the Apple of AI from a marketing standpoint. And when they, when you think like Apple marketing, you're thinking like Mac versus PC or you're thinking 1984, these big branding campaigns. But the actual thing that Apple does really, really well with marketing is they just hammer really, really specific details about their products, right? They're like, they're advertising the new camera, they're advertising Memoji, right? They're advertising like

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  One

• 2:22:40Jordi Hays?

  Certain features in Safari, right? And so it's like with AI, the surface area of like things that you need to communicate is actually like an order of magnitude greater because it can do so many different things. And so I think that it's such an opportunity for the company to focus advertising. The brand campaigns are awesome and like the, the launch video for Astra was amazing. But it's like, there should be billboards running of like very specific things that ChatGPT can do to give you back your time.

• 2:23:07Speaker 11

  Yes. This, this has actually been a real sort of realization or just like something that I have really come to over the course of, of, of this year. And if you look at even for example, the, you know, we just announced ChatGPT Images 2.5. And if you look at the launch video there, the thing that I love about it is it shows, here's someone creating an image and here's like a bunch of different variations of it. And then here's them taking their favorite one and having it in the world. Like someone said, here's a cool, like old sketch of a candle holder, you see an awesome visualization of it. And then you see the physical candle holder and you're just like, that's what you want, right? It's like, it speaks to you immediately. And I think that, that really showing people, here's a use case. And the thing that was also a little surprising to me is that we've sometimes highlighted

• 2:23:51Speaker 11

  esoteric use cases, something that appeals to someone in particular and it's amazing for that person. But people don't then say, oh, because it's this powerful, I can also do this other powerful thing I've been waiting on. Like that connection is, is, is something that is less sort of easy to make than I, than I'd realized and it makes sense. What you want is for there to be use cases where people say, I actually want that particular thing. Now let me go try it myself. And then from there you start exploring and you start to find, I actually do have this powerful use case that I didn't even realize was tip at the top.

• 2:24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. The studio development was probably like the best example of that working really, really well.

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is, is reminding people to ask the AI what it's capable of.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Like I was, I was having lunch with a buddy who's a real estate developer and he is using chat all day long for different like deal memos and to understand like projects that he's working on, all this stuff. And he'll ask me, he'll ask me all the time, can, can ChatGPT do this or that? And I'm like, I'm happy to, I'm happy to answer you, but like you have the thing that will just explain exactly how to do the thing that you want to do or, or maybe not, but it probably can't.

• 2:24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I did the same thing. I was kicking off this Blender thing and I was like, should I run this as a local Codex thread or in the cloud? Let me know which one's better based on my system. And it gave me a good answer and I was able to go for it.

• 2:25:07Jordi Hays?

  On, on Images, when, when Images 2 came out, I had some moments where I thought, okay, Images is solved.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Like where do you, where do you think Images actually go as a category? Cause it felt Uh, like this has been something that has maybe one shot me more than anything else. Specifically with like when it, when it released, I was, I was, um, uh, spending hours like, does like on a Saturday, trying to design furniture, right? And just going through like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of prompts. But how, how far can image models go and where are they going? And what are the ways in which you think they can, um, they can be applied? We were talking earlier too, about the downstream impact of, of image models. If you can take, you know, a, a physical space somewhere and take a picture of it and imagine it as all these other variations, there's so much like real world activity that will be driven

• 2:25:58Jordi Hays?

  from that because people can see this thing visually and say like, now I want to go make that reality, which I think is really cool.

• 2:26:06Speaker 11

  Well, I think that's exactly the right way to think about it is as you hit new thresholds of capability, my experience has always been that fundamentally new applications become unlocked in ways that you almost wouldn't have thought about ahead of time. And so I think that within, for example, knowledge work, professional work, marketing, all those areas, you just need to be above a quality threshold. If you're below it, it's a cool concept, but you can't actually use the final material, right? That that then means that you, you haven't really solved the problem and that having precise edit control, being fast and really being creative and having diversity of different results and also being able to have this, this good interplay back and forth with a person. I think that that really unlocks whole new use cases.

• 2:26:48Speaker 11

  And I think there's a huge market there. And even for example, the kinds of things you may not think of naively, but actually start to be really important applications we're seeing happening is slide creation or making awesome websites, right? Being able to have that image generation capability in the middle is something that's very unique to OpenAI relative to, to some of our competitors. And I think that you're able to then produce much better artifacts downstream. And so we really view images, we view voice, we view coding, all of these capabilities as one package that are going to come together to create an AI that empowers you, that means you can create anything that you imagine. And I think it's going to be something that's just unlike anything out there.

• 2:27:30John Coogan?

  Let's go back to health. I think most people already are aware that you can synthesize some lab data with some sleep scores, but your vision that you laid out recently for where that product goes is much more complex, much deeper. So, uh, tell me where, uh, chat GPT health is going in the future.

• 2:27:52Speaker 11

  Well, I would think of it as there are three sides to what we do on health. There's the consumer side, again, 300 million people every week with health queries. There's the clinician side, which is bottoms up. And that's really about, think of it as chat GPT that's really tuned for clinicians, that gives them direct citations to medical literature, things like that. There's a third pillar, which is the enterprise side of selling directly to hospitals and them enabling it. And you can see things like we have an integration within Epic and really trying to bring each of these three pillars, the best possible service independently. But you think about as those really build momentum, that you actually are able to get synergies across them, right? That there's something that actually makes the health

• 2:28:37Speaker 11

  experience and the ability to really transform healthcare in America and the world on the table. Because there's so many, the thing about how much work you as a patient have to do, if you're talking to different specialists, you have to carry your medical record from one to the other, you have to explain again, here's the issue, and that ultimately you're on the hook, you're the doctor who has to make the decision whether you like it or not. And actually being able to have just good sharing of, of that information across different providers, that becomes possible if everyone's on one platform. Or think about clinical trial enrollment. That's a huge bottleneck to drug development and finding people who are eligible and will benefit from being enrolled in a particular trial. And if you have that kind of, of data, if people are willing to sort of, you know, entrust you with that information, that that's something that actually really benefit them and benefit the world at the same time.

• 2:29:21Speaker 11

  And so what I view us as building is really trying to build the world's best healthcare platform to really be able to bring healthcare into the AI age. And I think that it's something that is going to be absolutely transformative to many people's quality of life, really uplift so many people. And we're seeing it already in such concrete ways. Some of my favorite stories about chat GPT are people who say, hey, information I got from chat helped me save my own life, helped me save that of a loved one, that there was this medical issue that someone had and that I, if, you know, the doctor told me one thing, I was able to, to double check that and understand what they were saying and be able to, to push back on it and got to a good outcome. And that happens every single day. So I think that health with these AIs is something that it, we're sort of scratching the surface of what's possible.

• 2:30:05Speaker 11

  And I think it's one of the most positive applications of AI that you can, you can think of.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm very interested to see how, uh, the advancements in memory intersect with health, because I expect that, uh, chat GPT with where memory has gone, where I'll be in a new thread and it will bring up just the right information or tie back to a thread that maybe happened three weeks ago. When you actually apply that to like health related queries, it may be able to like pick up patterns that sometimes would take a human years to figure out like a certain ailment or something like that, where it's like, hey, you're asking about all these different things and maybe you thought they were not connected. Turns out they, they actually are and you should go down this sort of like rabbit hole.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Last question. I'm sorry.

• 2:30:51Speaker 11

  I was, I was gonna say, I think that's absolutely right. We're seeing that very concretely. And we've seen, you know, some of my own personal life, my, my wife, you know, we talked about some of her medical conditions publicly, but I, it was really this five-year journey of talking to many specialists, each one who was kind of touching one part of the elephant and would try to address that one part. And it was only finally her allergist who said, hey, I think all these symptoms you're seeing are connected and you have this genetic condition that affects all of your subsystems. And that's the kind of thing where it's really hard to say how many people have similar kinds of conditions and just never find out. How many people have these areas where it's like, if you're just sort of functionally specialized, that you're never going to bring

• 2:31:33Speaker 11

  together the whole diagnosis. And I think that is one of the powers and potentials of an AI that really deeply is able to help you across all parts of your life and also is a deep domain expert in all areas of medicine.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I have one last question. Uh, what, how do you tell the story of operator? It feels like it was a failure or a side quest, but it feels incredibly important now, given the advances in computer use. Is there a clear lineage there? What was operator? Does that still exist somewhere within chat GPT? How does, how did, how did computer use get solved?

• 2:32:11Speaker 11

  Yeah. Well, I would look at all these things as timing and all about iterative deployment, right? That, that there's a moment where you need to, where the capabilities aren't quite there, but actually learning from real world deployment is very helpful, right? And the, I think operator was just kind of below threshold in terms of the model capabilities. Uh, it was a code base system that operated with computer use, it was slow, it wasn't fully accurate, it was like pretty painful to, to use. Some people got value, but it really wasn't above threshold. And if you look at what's happened, that the team, like one thing OpenAI does very well is we make long-term investments on things that really matter and we do the grind. And that the team this year, I think, really started to build momentum that we put in a lot of effort to go and sort of burn down a long list of

• 2:32:56Speaker 11

  issues, were able to really focus on solving computer use. And I think that they delivered in a significant way. And there's more to do, never done all those things, but it's a true milestone. I think people are really appreciating what's possible because we've been in a world with these agents using computers through connectors, right? Through these very painstakingly coded systems that are so different from how humans use computers, whereas humans can already use everything on a computer, right? Everything's designed for people. So if you have an AI that can operate that way, and even from the very beginning of OpenAI, we had a dream that one day we could create such an AI, it becomes able to help you across everything that you would be able to do with a computer yourself. And so I think we're there with Astra.

• 2:33:38Speaker 11

  I think that there's just so much more that people are going to uncover in terms of application, where this can go. But it's an example of long-term focus, doing the work and not giving up, uh, even when the going gets tough.

• 2:33:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it feels like Astra, my view is it really felt like all these different bets coming together, you know, at the right, at the right time, right? The, the advancements in, in the model itself, the, the computer use, voice, all these things. And it, uh, it's all, it's all making sense. So.

• 2:34:07Speaker 11

  It's together, it's focus. It's, uh, it's something that I think this company does extremely well when we really put a challenge in front of us and think about how to accomplish it safely, well, and I, to, to really deliver the value we're doing.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Put different, differently, it felt like, when you look at last year, it felt like OpenAI was, uh, operating like a big company and it, and it was a big company, but, but the way in which like product experimentation was happening was, you know, when you think of like a hyperscaler, they'll launch a new product thinking, okay, if there's a 20% hit rate, or even a 10% or a 5% chance, that's okay. And then this year it feels like actually the entire company switched back into actual startup mode, which is like, no, focus, focus, focus. All these things need to come together. The whole team needs to be rowing in the same direction. And then the difference in momentum and growth and all these things, uh, coming from that and, uh, actually taking the company

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  from like operating and shipping more like a big company to shipping again and focusing like a startup has been, uh, feels like an impossible task and it's been, uh, incredible to watch. So.

• 2:35:14Speaker 11

  Thank you. No, it's been a real, real effort from many, many people at OpenAI to really bring together and something that, that I really value, that I think we really value as a company. And I think that we're just so laser focused on our mission and really thinking about every piece of what we do should add up to helping us accomplish it.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:35:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Greg.

• 2:35:33Speaker 11

  Thank you.

• 2:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  Rest of your day.

• 2:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And we have our next guest already here. We're running behind, but we'll bring in Sauri from Forus, the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:35:53Speaker 12

  Hey, good to see you guys.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:35:56John Coogan?

  Sorry, we ran.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Tough act to follow.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Introduce the company, tell us the news.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  You're headlining for Greg Brockman right now.

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No pressure.

• 2:36:05Speaker 12

  Great opener.

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, opener.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  It's a lot of news.

• 2:36:09Speaker 12

  Yeah. I mean, last time I was here in May, we had just introduced Forus publicly as the AI network for medicine.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:14Speaker 12

  And announced, you know, $1 billion valuation. I'm back here now four months later and we're announcing our $150 million CAC at a $3 billion valuation.

• 2:36:27Speaker 12

  And the biggest change for us is scale, right? We're now supporting millions of people across all 50 states, forces already used by Dr. Street patients in 85% of US residential zip codes, and now working with nine of the top 15 global biopharma companies to help them advance medicines.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  What is the most helpful thing you can do for global biopharma companies? We were just talking about trial, patient recruitment, but then there's also like the much more fundamental research. There's even just general, having a coding agent around can be useful to a biotech company. But what are you seeing move the needle for them?

• 2:37:02Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, so there's an enormous amount of capital and talent going into using AI to discover new molecules, right? And that is going to work. We're going to generate more potential medicines for more diseases faster than we ever have before. But discovery is really that, only the beginning piece, right? So it takes more than a decade and billions of dollars to turn a new molecule into an approved medicine. And you have to develop it, you have to launch, you have to get the right doctors, secure coverage and distribution, and ultimately get it to patients. The network that we are building is really intended to help provide both the insight and visibility and the connectivity to kind of support all those steps, right? So, once a new molecule is ready to test in people, you identify the right clinical trial sites and recruit the right patients. As you prepare to launch, you understand which physicians have patients who look like the patients

• 2:37:47Speaker 12

  at best in the phase three trials. How should the medicine reach them? What coverage and distribution need to look like? Once it's on market, you need to understand, you know, who's receiving it, where adoption or access is breaking, whether people are staying on it, what side effects or positive results are appearing. The way that our platform works, it gives us increasing visibility into how medicines are performing nationwide, as well as kind of the clinical and practice behavior of patient physicians across the country. So, for example, a new drug that came out early this year, back in March, for an autoimmune disease, 40% of all people who have ever taken that drug came through our platform.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:38:21Speaker 12

  And you can imagine, like, that level of visibility is unprecedented, right? The FDA doesn't have that, the company that made the drug doesn't have that, the HR companies don't have that. And so we have more clarity on what's happening on that medicine, how impactful is it, where is it getting stuck than anybody has before? And that can help these pharma companies not just drive the process more quickly and efficiently, but actually make it more predictable, right? And I think kind of the bigger picture in our minds is that as you kind of get this process faster, cheaper, but more predictable, you can actually change the economics of creating medicine. You can actually make it so these companies can afford to invest in more drugs for more diseases, because you have this huge bottleneck between the number of medicines that are theoretically

• 2:39:02Speaker 12

  being discovered as molecules, and the total number that are actually coming out to market, right? It's kind of like the movie industry, where there's thousands and thousands and thousands of screenplays, but the number of movies actually get produced and become blockbusters at premiere is very small. And so that's really what our goal is, really, how can you increase the number of medicines and make it to market every year by an order of magnitude?

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39:22Jordi Hays?

  People within the tech industry talk about the AI labs just needing to cure cancer, and that will fix the, or help fix the public.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  People will love data centers, then. They'll be like, put one in my backyard.

• 2:39:33Jordi Hays?

  What does the pharma industry think about that sort of like line of thinking? Because they're sitting, you guys are sitting over there actually doing, doing the work, not, not one-shotting a blanket cure for all different forms, but at least making, you know, consistent progress towards a bunch of these different types of cancer. So I'm very curious.

• 2:39:54Speaker 12

  Yeah, I was literally talking to the CEO of a top 10 pharma about this a couple weeks ago at a conference, where I was like, it's kind of crazy that you guys have such a bad rap. And yet, the people who have the worst rap in the game right now are thinking that being more like you is going to...

• 2:40:09John Coogan?

  It's great, too.

• 2:40:10Speaker 12

  And he was like, yeah, it's, it's super hard for them to process, like, what these people are thinking. And at the same time, I think it's a little bit of a wake-up call, like, maybe you need to reclaim the story a little bit, right? Because, I mean, until we become immortal, medicine is going to become this, like, it's a permanent industry to invest in, it's increasingly become the most important thing that's happening, you know, to advance society. And these companies that are at the root of creating all these amazing cures, amazing treatments, are villainized, because people don't understand their position, even the way that people refer to them as like manufacturers, you know, versus like ventures, creators, whatever, is, I think, tough. But, you know, they're also, at the

• 2:40:54Speaker 12

  same time, feeling really eager to invest in AI. I mean, part of the reason we've seen such dramatic uptake is because most of these leaders are like, well, we need to reinvent our businesses, because we are already actually doing so much of the complicated and game-changing R and D. And yet, we're going to benefit from some of the tools that people are going to sell us to help us do some of that molecule research faster. But we need to reclaim the story and accelerate how much we're pushing kind of through the market. I mean, even like GLP-1s, like, how much credit are they getting?

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  I was just saying this, yeah.

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah. It's like, you sort of cured obesity pretty close to it. That was a huge problem for so many people.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but what have you done in the last day?

• 2:41:29John Coogan?

  I'm just imagining, like, it's, you know, amnesia, you wake up and you're the CEO of Pfizer, and you're like, what do I do for a living? It's like, you help sick people. And they're like, I must be loved. Like, actually, quite the opposite. Crazy times.

• 2:41:43Speaker 12

  The story around GLP-1 itself is like, I think, even still underrated. I mean, we've seen influx in applications from bariatric surgeons wanting jobs in technology and trying to kind of move out of medicine, because GLP-1s have basically eliminated that specialty as like something that matters in the country, which is so crazy.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy. Last question. What is the biggest insight that you gained from working at Oscar Health that you carried into today? Like, what is the thing that you're like, okay, I understand the structure of the industry, or I understand this thing, or this?

• 2:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Healthcare is easy.

• 2:42:17John Coogan?

  Is that?

• 2:42:18Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that really clicked for me there is how much discontinuity and heterogeneity there is in the system, which prevents any individual player from really like, even tracking what's happening, let alone having control over the process, right? It's actually what I think makes this problem so interesting and beneficial to focus on with agents, right? There's like, no standard case in this system. Every doctor's office has different systems and processes, every insurance company has different rules, every drug has different clinical and coverage and distribution requirements, and even individual patients have their own financial situations, medical history, eligibility, insurance circumstances.

• 2:43:01Speaker 12

  And so, the level of, you know, difficulty in actually making progress before this technology was kind of hard to under, underwrite. And what we've seen is like, not only can you use the tech to kind of dramatically change how quickly and efficiently these processes occur, but you can actually, because you were the first company to actually see the full process and control the full process, like, create new market power and change things that historically would have only been in the hands of the insurance companies and hospitals to really operate.

• 2:43:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congrats on the progress. Amazing news.

• 2:43:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really wild, wild progress.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Big capital, love them. They needed a win. We love them. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:43:45Speaker 12

  Thanks, Andrew.

• 2:43:46Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest in the waiting room. We have a few other changes to the schedule, but we're moving on to Andrew from Split. Hey, Andrew, how are you doing?

• 2:44:09Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:44:10Speaker 13

  Good. Thanks for having me.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Since it's your first time on the show.

• 2:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally meet you, by the way. I've heard, heard a lot about you from...

• 2:44:17Speaker 13

  We know a lot of people in common.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know. A bunch of people that Andrew used to work with, used to work on Party Around.

• 2:44:24John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. Amazing. Well, good to have you here. Let's, let's start with a little bit of an introduction to the company, and then I want to hear the news.

• 2:44:31Speaker 13

  Sure, yeah. I mean, I think there's, there's two parts to the story. There's sort of the what we do, and then how we do it. And they're, they're very different. I think that what we do is quite simple. We like to say that banks move money and we move time. And the basic premise of the company is essentially to create like a net 90, but for consumers. So, I'm going to start with this idea that, you know, what do wealthy people have, first and foremost? It's time. Time to make, you know, good financial decisions and avoid bad financial decisions. Everyone uses debt, but the wealthy can use it to their advantage. And, you know, people who are less, less well off often get trapped in this spiral. So,

• 2:45:12Speaker 13

  the idea is how do we create sort of, you know, essentially, room float around an average American, whereby, to the extent that they're paying for things, and, you know, the biggest things people pay for is sort of housing and autos and, you know, insurance, student loans, how do we let them sort of pay it on their schedule? And, you know, right now, we're at 30 days. Our goal is to get to 90, 90 days of sort of float, where they can shift all these dates around. And what we found so far, and we now have a million people using us, is that this is actually, all financial anxiety is downstream from this. Once you have a little bit of room, and it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a lot, just a couple of weeks, to kind of move your bill payments around, so that it better sort of cycles with your paychecks and other sources of income, you just breathe better.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does actual customer adoption look like? What is it, where does it come from? Is this direct response advertising? Are you partnered with mortgage lenders and rental buildings to offer this service? Is there some integration that you need on the other side? We've seen, there's been companies that have done like, pay your rent on a credit card, or pay your mortgage on a credit card, and that's always felt like sort of crazy. Like, I can't imagine being like, okay, I have to take a 3% cut now. So how have you solved all of that?

• 2:46:32Speaker 13

  Yes, this is in the sort of the what. There's two pillars to I think what we've built and it's taken us some time to build it. So I think for the first two years of our existence, I think we're more like a lab. But we built our own foundation model first and foremost for underwriting and it's a cash flow based model. It's entirely trained on in-house data and then we apply deep learning to it. So you know, the performance is pretty stunning. I think we're the best cash flow underwriting model in the country today. And I think AI underwriting fundamentally is the future.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  And with that, do you mix in credit card, like credit data, credit reports? Because I imagine that those would at least be helpful a little bit. They're not helpful at all? Or is that a cost savings thing?

• 2:47:10Speaker 13

  We feel we feel very strongly that it's not helpful at all. And we've tried everything. We tried, we started with FICO, we tried every off the shelf model. Yeah, unless you put your own money at risk and you train your own model, it kind of gets into that sort of sovereign model world, right? You really don't get the alpha. FICO, I mean, it's crazy. I, you know, I didn't set out to sort of try and destroy FICO, but just increasingly, you start to realize how ridiculous the whole, I mean, I, you know, it's a sacrifice we might have to make. But, but you know, what it is, if you just think about it, it's a rating, right? It's like you're an Uber driver and you're just like, you're, you're driving people around. In this case, like, you're doing deals with lenders and if a lender likes you, they give you a, you know, five stars. If they don't like you, they give you one star. But because it's the only way that people get access to credit throughout their

• 2:47:53Speaker 13

  entire lifetime, it's really, really impactful. And I think increasingly, what we find and we believe is that it's outdated. And the people that suffer is anyone under 40. So our model is really, is really tuned to what we think is sort of like the core constituency these days, which is probably millennials. By the way, millennials are 36 now, right? On average. So our customers are sort of in the, you know, 35 to 40, their most sort of productive period of our life, where like, you know, they make more money every single year, which you'd think would be amazing for your credit score. But as you guys know, it isn't. Not unless you're, you're doing deals all the time.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  This, this company sounds like a working capital nightmare for you. Where is the money coming from? Is it venture dollars that wind up dealing and creating this float? Or do you have a lender or a bank?

• 2:48:45Speaker 13

  No, it's, we have, we have, we have sort of a layer cake of facilities. In that sense, I think our capital structure is very similar to like of a BNPL, like a firm and Max Letchen's an investor. So, you know, we've learned, we have some great people that have sort of set us on this path. But I actually want to go back to just really quickly. I do realize I didn't address the, the distribution piece. The thing that we created that's really kind of fun. So again, I'll use a firm as an example. You've probably heard of this concept of like a credit backed debit card. Right? Where you use a debit card, but it has actually a little bit of float attached to it. And it's sort of dynamic. You could swipe it, even if you don't have money on it, it'll sort of, sort of stretch to fit whatever you're trying to build. So we built this for ACH and it's really nutty. So, so you ask me, do we partner with any? We don't. You can use split

• 2:49:29Speaker 13

  pay to pay any bill, anywhere that takes ACH. And what it will do is we will in real time, dynamically use in the air.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  Angel Investments, the next ACH you guys had?

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's just like, who is writing all these checks? This is not what we built this company for.

• 2:49:49Jordi Hays?

  I need to smooth out my bigger bets.

• 2:49:52Speaker 13

  Well, it's funny, ACH, right, is 10 times bigger than a credit card network. It's the biggest payment network in the country. And it is like painfully old school and insecure and very, very slow. But we managed to augment it. So it actually acts like a credit card. So we have a concept essentially like an off and a capture and a settlement over ACH and it just breaks down all walls for us. So we, we're everywhere.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, you have the credit facilities. You're also raising equity. Tell us about the latest round.

• 2:50:24Speaker 13

  Yeah. So we, you know, really unleashed the product in earnest about a year ago. And then, you know, we, we did a million run rate in the first month and we're just about to cross 80, 80 million today. And I think today is actually the teams on it right now. Today is our biggest origination day ever. It's great to be here.

• 2:50:47Speaker 13

  Yeah. So, so what's really interesting is that no one scaled the lending business this quickly before, because it's truly, really, really hard. Because you have this interplay where you have to acquire customers in order to raise venture dollars, in order to close credit facilities. And you have to be doing this basically permanently. You're constantly scaling. And so in our case, that meant that, you know, we, we did, you know, we, we launched the product, we basically have ventured that facility and then grew it really quickly and then closed our series A led by Coastal Ventures. And then, you know, within, within, you know, five months, we were 5X bigger. And so we closed the series B with, with Coastal. And so they've been with us along the way. And, you know, I think I'm like, I've been in permanent fundraising mode for sort of 12 months. I think

• 2:51:32Speaker 13

  I'm starting to feel, you know, I understand what, what Eric at, at Ram sort of feels. But, but I think he's like, he's sort of, he loves the grind. I don't know. For me, it's like, I want to cry sometimes.

• 2:51:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, get ready to do more of it.

• 2:51:48Speaker 13

  Yeah, I'm resigned to it now.

• 2:51:50John Coogan?

  Job's not finished.

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  As Eric would say.

• 2:51:53John Coogan?

  As Eric would say. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:51:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally meet.

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  Congratulations for the progress. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:51:59Speaker 13

  Awesome. Hold me back.

• 2:52:00John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:52:00Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 2:52:01John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And we have our next guest, Harry from Antioch. He was supposed to be on earlier. We brought him to the end of the show, but we're very excited to be joined by Harry, the co-founder and CEO of Antioch. Welcome to the show. Sorry for the switch up on the scheduling. Thank you for being flexible. How are you doing?

• 2:52:29Speaker 14

  What's going on? Doing great. Thank you guys so much for, for having me. I'm excited to close this out with you both.

• 2:52:35John Coogan?

  Yes, excited to have you here. Please, break down, we'll, we'll get to the news, but I want to, I want to understand how you got into the business of training robots in simulation. A bunch of questions about the sim to real gap and all of this stuff, what's going on in the broader ecosystem. But where have you been focused? Where are you focused now?

• 2:52:57Speaker 14

  Yeah, 100%. So our co-founding team at Antioch all met at Stanford, working on physical AI, applied AI. I spent some time at the autopilot team at Tesla as well. And then kind of went into a bit of a company building mode with many of the same team that we have today. And so I think, you know, our observation, really looking at the industries that have kind of moved to the fastest over the last couple of years, is that these are the industries that have sort of unlocked recursive self-improvement, right? Like earlier today, we talked about, exactly, math, Navia Stokes, Scott was on, I think, you know, cognition and Devon have done a fantastic job of this in the world of software. And I think our observation is that, you know, automating the physical world

• 2:53:39Speaker 14

  is really the defining economic opportunity of our time, right? You look at the GDP that's tied up in that opportunity. But we don't have that recursive self-improvement. And so really at Antioch, everything that we do is built around this idea of how we unlock RSI, how we unlock goal mode, you know, for physical autonomous systems.

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  So yeah, how do you do that? I mean, I don't know what the status quo is. We saw a bunch of people using Blender. I know you can make an inverse kinematic model in Blender. We have Unreal Engine. You can do some simulation stuff. I can play a video game and watch a robot walk around. It looks like you could learn from that, but clearly you need to go deeper. So what's missing from just build your robot in Unreal Engine, have it press a bunch of the keys until it learns to walk around?

• 2:54:25Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's a great question. So I think, you know, broadly, the, the market today is a spectrum defined by two ends. One end is kind of exactly what you're describing. So it's these classical, you know, like almost video game like engines with really high fidelity. And on the other end, I think we're seeing a really promising landscape of world models kind of come to the fore, right? And I think our observation at Antioch is that both of those approaches today experience a reasonably substantial sim to real gap, right? There's a fidelity issue that means that if you're relying on one of those approaches in a singular sense, you're going to be missing some of the real stuff about the real world and you're going to experience a, a bit of a rough landing in

• 2:55:06Speaker 14

  reality. So our view is that, you know, the reason why that is in the sort of like classical world of video game style simulation, is it's just really hard to encode everything about the real world and software, right? Like, you go out to the real world, you find out, hey, actually the wind matters now. Now I need to add wind into my simulation. And it's this long tail of whack a mole. Whereas on sort of like end to end learn side, you actually experience a very similar thing, but it's about a data accumulation strategy. And in the world of physical AI, we don't have infinite data, not even close. And so, you know, we believe that these world models are going to be the right approach. But we just need to kind of play the game on the table right now to actually help, you know, real companies building real things in the present day. And so

• 2:55:49Speaker 14

  our approach is a bit of hybrid, where we use that classical simulation where it works and we kind of learn the gaps. We learn where it doesn't. And that's helping us sort of move our customers along, you know, that spectrum essentially, eventually towards these world models. You know, we've seen some incredible launches from World Labs and others. And that's an incredibly exciting future. We think that's where the puck is headed. But we need to kind of like help shift real companies in that direction over time as the technology kind of becomes completely ready.

• 2:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Talk about your various robotic timelines on, on the autonomous driving side. Every time I've asked any automotive technology executive.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  Someone came on the show and said like 2050.

• 2:56:32Jordi Hays?

  No, it's more like 2040. For a major supplier of, of technology for pretty much every car, I'm not going to say too much because people will guess it. But he, he basically wouldn't give an answer. He was like, eh, maybe.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  We've had people on the show that think we're getting Dyson sphere before this guy thinks we're getting full self-driving cars. That's the range of predictions we're dealing with on this show.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so that's a category where like we see close to full self-driving already with, you know, Tesla and Waymo and all those things. So the technology actually exists and you have industry executives saying like, yeah, it's going to give me 15 years minimum. But I'm curious for you, from your lens, I expect a lot of this stuff to come, you know, real advancements to come from, you know, new companies. And I'm curious your view.

• 2:57:21Speaker 14

  Yeah, I mean, I think now it all comes down to the sort of data flywheel, right? And so I think the advantage autonomous driving has, and by the way, I don't think it's 2050, right? I mean, I think we've seen Tesla and Waymo and also companies like Wave actually now doing these deployments that work extremely well. And so the reason why is these companies have built this incredible data accumulation flywheel, right? So Tesla's is particularly brilliant because if you buy one of those cars, you're essentially paying to help them train the system and get kind of more and more data into that engine. And I think now we've kind of got good line of sight on architecturally, what are the models need to look like that sort of unlock that autonomous future? And so bringing that to new industries

• 2:58:02Speaker 14

  is really just a function of, are you able to get the data at the scale and also in the kind of right categories, not only when things work well, but also really importantly, when things are not working well. And so I think that timeline is going to be purely a question of how quickly can you build that flywheel? We've obviously got a bit of a chicken and egg kind of scenario in the world of robotics, in the world of, you know, industrial automation and these types of things where deployments are a little bit nascent. And so that's kind of really one of our key bets at Antioch is like, if you want to bootstrap that incredible opportunity, you need to figure out a way to be much more sample efficient than we are today. And so, again, that's our hybrid simulation approach, right? That's

• 2:58:43Speaker 14

  like, we can take a small amount of data from the real world, use that to train improvements to simulation, that simulation then trains a better version of the robot in the physical world, you can scale your deployments faster and it becomes this kind of virtuous flywheel, effectively.

• 2:58:58Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for robotics companies to be playing the benchmark game, right? Instead of the Pelican, it'll be like Mona Lee.

• 2:59:06John Coogan?

  Juggle five balls, juggle six balls, juggle seven balls, juggle eight balls.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Mona Lisa bench.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  It will be like, it still can't make me a good sandwich.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Put the mustard on the top and I like it on the bottom. It's not here.

• 2:59:21Speaker 14

  Possibilities are endless, right? I think we saw this with Micro Duck in the last couple of weeks too, right? Like, you know, the most ridiculous benchmarks of ducks, you know, balancing balls and things like that. We're going to see a proliferation and explosion of this.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  How many customers are in your TAM? Because we've had a few humanoid robotics companies, there's like a few names. Obviously, there's the self-driving car companies, there's some industrial stuff that's happening. But like, are you, at the absolute top of your CRM, are we talking about like 100 companies? Are there thousands of these companies? Like, I can imagine building a great business selling to 20 robotics winners, right? But like, how, how big is this market and where is it going?

• 3:00:06Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's a great question. So I think a couple of responses to that. So one is like, even present day, it's massive. Like, we're talking tens of thousands of companies. There's all the ones that you'd think about, right? So the humanoid type companies, self-driving, all the same kind of stuff that you described. But for example, today, we announced our partnership with, with Amazon and in particular, the Ring team at Amazon, right? And so this is a smart security device. And so, you know, essentially, it's any system that has this hardware, software, machine learning component, where testing in the real world is really difficult and really expensive and you need to kind of get that recursive self-improvement flywheel. And so I think it's, there are a ton of companies here that you probably wouldn't typically think about as being physical, but really are.

• 3:00:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, everything from robotic vacuum cleaner to like robotic drone, camera drone, sports, like there's, there's just going to be robotic pieces, even if it's not a robot, a humanoid in every category, there will be something that benefits from this. Fascinating.

• 3:01:06Speaker 14

  That's exactly right.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Well, what a great, what a great industry to be in. Very excited. So glad that you have some fresh funding and good luck with the journey. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you, Harry.

• 3:01:16Speaker 14

  Nice to meet you.

• 3:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Come back constantly.

• 3:01:17Speaker 14

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:01:18John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Up next, we have a surprise guest, Rohan, who connected GPT-6 Astra to a wearable he built for back pain. And it's giving him real-time back pain physical therapy. We're going to bring him in. I saw some people in the chat asking, chanting for Rohan.

• 3:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's see if he can handle foot pain because I destroyed my foot surfing this weekend. What's going on, Rohan?

• 3:01:48Speaker 15

  How are you doing? Hey, how are we doing, guys? Nice to meet you, guys. How are you doing?

• 3:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Glad to have you pop on here. Busy, busy day in the, in the world of, of technology, but you managed to break through.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Yes, huge.

• 3:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, a little Sunday ripper.

• 3:02:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, break us down. What was your process? How long did this take? What was your goal? Set the stage for us.

• 3:02:11Speaker 15

  Yeah, for sure. So like, actually goes back to those 13, had back pain for like a decade in and out of care. I didn't do it because of PT, but like, you know, like, PT doesn't have the kind of classic modern like measure, care measure again. It's just like kind of looking at you and they're like, all right, here's some exercises. Yeah, I'll see you next time. Let's see how it goes. Had back pain at uni, decided like this is not it, moved to a child's bedroom, built something, found some like, thread on Twitter saying, who's running, angel checks the hardware, just DM'd everyone. New from Boop Super Sonic, actually got back to me, got on the call. First call I ever kind of talked, he wrote me a check. I was like, oh, wow. Okay, this is something. Moved to China. Basically just took that check to China, just slept in a factory in Shenzhen and smoked.

• 3:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we've met, we've met. I just realized that we met before. Yeah, sorry. I didn't put it together. We had a phone call. We had a phone call. Yeah, Will introduced me and was like, you got to meet this guy. He's crazy. He's living in China. He's solving, solving back pain.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:03:11Speaker 15

  It was a very Chinese time in my life.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Smoking cigarettes, I'm sure.

• 3:03:19Speaker 15

  I highly recommend.

• 3:03:22John Coogan?

  With AI, we'll invent the smart cigarette that tells you exactly.

• 3:03:28Speaker 15

  I saw a LinkedIn cigarette somewhere, which is something hilarious.

• 3:03:36Speaker 15

  So yeah, built this MVP, shared it on Reddit, got like, you know, really, really good reception there. Met our first customer, that's me now. There we go. And yeah, basically took that, came to the valley, put together some money and like, was like, okay, like, let me try to build this thing. And it was like, really kind of, it's just me, one man team. Like, taught myself how to build hardware, moved to China, built it all myself, same with the code. And it's like, it's just honestly nice to see the fruits of my labors. I know people like, people have been coming at like, text me, okay, I've had back pain, I've had angios ponderitis, are they congenital condition? How can that be used like for, for their conditions? And it's just really interesting because I'm like, okay, well, this is great. I'm really just kind of humbled by it and really want to double down and really kind

• 3:04:18Speaker 15

  of like bring this out to the world and hopefully help many, many more people in just about.

• 3:04:22John Coogan?

  Okay, so quick timeline. You spent a long time actually building this wearable, getting it manufactured. So you effectively had a data feed, maybe an API, something spitting out data. And then over the weekend, you visualized it in this particular way and, and wired up a 3D model to the data that you were already collecting. But the plans to sell the device that collects the data that then will be enabled by AI and everything else.

• 3:04:49Speaker 15

  Yeah, yeah. Basically, it's like, yeah, like, very fundamentally, yes, it's like for consumers, it's for people with back pain to understand the work. Yeah. Because like, you said, you have foot pain. Hopefully your PC works out. But it's like, wouldn't it be nice that if you go to one or two or three PTs, you have like a grand group? Like, okay, like, my foot's getting better or was not, but this PC is working for me and these two aren't. That's what I want to give people with back pain care, probably in back pain care. Yeah. And then like a kind of greater take there is really, I think that, you know, with what these models can do now, we can build pretty much whatever we want on the software side. And really, the data, it's the data collection that really rules. Because it's like, okay, what does the AI need to make intelligent decisions about, about my

• 3:05:30Speaker 15

  body? Like, we'll have an AIP CP in our pocket. But it needs to understand like, what's going on with our body right now? And I'm really excited to like, kind of bring out this form factor of patches that you stick to your body, because I think that that can really nicely scale. Like, we've already done wrists and fingers, if you think about it. And like, now heads, heads are kind of coming to get, coming to play. You can cover the rest of the body and like, kind of basically collect every biomarker that we might need for our AIP CP to make great decisions about our health day to day.

• 3:05:57John Coogan?

  What's the plan to sell a lot of these? I could imagine everything from Facebook ads to working to infomercials and late night infomercials or Shark Tank?

• 3:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Rohan infomercial, smoking Chinese cigarettes.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  I know. I mean, like, there's a lot of different ways to, you can get reviewers and sponsor podcasts.

• 3:06:18Speaker 15

  Wonderful ironic sense, infomercials would rip.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  Probably, right? I mean, you're sitting there, your back might be hurting, maybe. And I bet you the inventory is really cheap nowadays.

• 3:06:27Speaker 15

  I mean, yeah. And then also live selling is like infomercials, but for desert.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 3:06:31Speaker 15

  Like candidly, like one of my investors, Justin Mads, wrote a great book, if you know. And I've like, basically over the, this is actually how this came about, this kind of our.

• 3:06:41Jordi Hays?

  It's a broth guy, right?

• 3:06:43Speaker 15

  Hammering, sorry?

• 3:06:44Jordi Hays?

  That's a broth guy?

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  We love Justin.

• 3:06:47Jordi Hays?

  He's a good friend.

• 3:06:48Speaker 15

  If anyone knows anything about selling a lot of like, a product, I'll be miserable for myself, right? And basically just been hammering out like a process of like, hey, let's just see what channel works. Doing, but you can see, and like, just testing out, tried page. I was like, okay, let's not try Twitter. This is actually the results of me trying Twitter, which is lovely, kind of like snowboarding. And like, we'll just see how far it goes and really make sure that we are where our customers want this to be.

• 3:07:12John Coogan?

  So people are joining the waitlist at yourbackhurts.com. Give me a timeline. When can people actually buy this? Are you going to take, are you going to take deposits and then ship? Or do you want to go straight to order and then ship? Is this going to be the Tesla Roadster of back pain?

• 3:07:31Speaker 15

  Good question. I think we're aiming to ship January, at the start of January. We'd like to make it a lot more affordable in terms of the road stuff. And I think we can. We've done like, I spent so long, I've done a lot of engineering in the back to actually just shove that in economics.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:07:47Speaker 15

  To basically, I'm trying, I'm trying everything I can to charge less, basically. And still make it work for people. So yeah, like aiming to ship in January, sign up your, yourbackhurts.com. And basically, and we'll open the waitlist to our first customers.

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to, great to see you face to face.

• 3:08:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:09Jordi Hays?

  And come back on.

• 3:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, come back when you launch. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:08:13Speaker 15

  Yeah, all right. Take it easy.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We have the first results of Waldo bench. Tyler put them together. Let's see. Let's see how chat GPT images 2.5 is doing. What'd you make, Tyler? You made OpenAI Dev Day. Wait, actually, this is sort of hard. I, it looks good, but I can't find Waldo. I need to zoom in. Where is Waldo? Is there only one Waldo here?

• 3:08:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:41John Coogan?

  Okay, I found him. Yeah. It needs to be a little bit more detailed when I zoom way in. If I zoom way in, faces start getting garbled, but man, some of this zoomed in text is really, really good. It's a pretty high fidelity. I think we're getting close. I want to see, I want to see this paired with Astra tiled. A lot more reasoning put into it. Let's finally solve Waldo bench. I think it's possible with modern AI. What do you think?

• 3:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't find Waldo. So that seems like a good.

• 3:09:18John Coogan?

  You gave up?

• 3:09:19Jordi Hays?

  I took a quick look.

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  What about in the second one?

• 3:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, I was getting distracted by the beach one.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  The beach one? Pull up the beach one. Everyone can take a, take a quick gander, try and find Waldo. I think this one's pretty easy.

• 3:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Close it, close it. You only had five seconds.

• 3:09:35John Coogan?

  Okay, you fail. No, I think this one's not dense enough.

• 3:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, too easy.

• 3:09:40John Coogan?

  It's too easy. This one's too easy. This is about one quarter of a real Waldo. For the real Waldo heads out there, they're not, they're not gonna be like, ah, this is not, this is not soda. Actually, I guess it is state of the art, but it's not super intelligence for Waldo generation. It's pretty good, though. Looks pretty good. I like it. And then what is this animation? Explain the animation that you shared.

• 3:10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is like stop motion animation, but this was the new image model.

• 3:10:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:10:08Speaker 02

  And I just had to ask for it to make it into a video.

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 3:10:12Speaker 02

  So it's much more consistent. That's like one of the big.

• 3:10:14John Coogan?

  Consistency.

• 3:10:15Speaker 02

  Big improvements.

• 3:10:16John Coogan?

  Very fun. Well, I look forward to getting Jordy sending me AI images at 3 a.m. when he's up. Vibe designing the next piece of great furniture or something like that. No, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, there are, there are other stories.

• 3:10:32Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna get to them tomorrow.

• 3:10:34John Coogan?

  Tomorrow.

• 3:10:35Jordi Hays?

  But I'm glad we cracked the fourth hour. We're in the fourth hour.

• 3:10:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:10:39Jordi Hays?

  It's been a while. It's been a while. We got through summer. We did it.

• 3:10:44John Coogan?

  Summer's famously a little slow news day, slow news season. We're back. It's September. We're going in the fourth hour. Get ready.

• 3:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and eight days until Christmas.

• 3:10:55John Coogan?

  Fifth hour.

• 3:10:56Jordi Hays?

  I got a text from a buddy.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Who saw, or sorry, 107 days. He said he already got his tree up.

• 3:11:04Jordi Hays?

  I can't tell if he's messing with me, but, but, but I, but I'm just gonna pretend that, that.

• 3:11:09John Coogan?

  If you put up your Christmas tree 107 days early, you, you have some serious botany to do. Like you need to keep that thing alive. You gotta be watering that thing regularly. There's a lot going on. Like, I don't know that a Christmas tree is meant to survive 177 days. It's sort of like a new level of challenge.

• 3:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Just say you haven't cut a hole in your floor and gone down to the dirt.

• 3:11:32John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:11:33Jordi Hays?

  And just you constantly are growing a tree, so you're cutting it and pruning it, whatever, but it's just a living tree and you're, just say you haven't done that.

• 3:11:39John Coogan?

  There are some houses that have little tree areas inside the home. Maybe, maybe this is the future Christmas home. Design your entire house around, around being able to grow, grow a Christmas tree constantly on a never ending cycle. Anyway, thank you for tuning into TBP and we will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp.

• 3:12:01John Coogan?

  Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.